The Postcard and the Frontline

Abstract

This chapter focuses on how dynamics of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, or elimination and transformation, underpinned the UPPs by examining the everyday practices of policing at Santa Marta  and Alemão, the two extremes of the pacification project. It discusses the complementarity and tension between militarized repression and attempts to assert a new moral order on the ground in pacified communities, exploring the religious tropes that informed this order. It shows how a militarized worldview contributes to a strict division between good and evil and how racialized policing is legitimized through a rhetoric of cultural difference, as well as the different strategies employed by the police to produce a new and upstanding citizen, respectful of police authority.

We are slowly descending the favela stairways. There are over 700 steps from top to bottom, Marcio says. He is the Corporal in command of one of the Tactical Patrol Units (Grupamento Táctico de Policia de Proximidade, GTPP) of the UPP at Santa Marta and has worked here since its establishment in early 2009. Thiago, Soldier in rank, leads the way. He raises his rifle to tactical position every time we round a corner, ready to shoot if needed, which I find odd, since the officers tell me that there have been no registered shooting episodes in Santa Marta following pacification. The third member of the unit, Igor, is also a Soldier. He is responsible for the rearguard and carries a standard service gun and a Tazer (electric shock gun). As part of the so-called “non-lethal” arsenal, Marcio has brought a shotgun with rubber bullets and four grenades with teargas in addition to his gun. The GTPP is armed for any event.¹ I walk in the middle, feeling like I have three bodyguards escorting me through the favela. After almost two months living in Babilonia, this show of force feels a little pointless from a tactical perspective. A few neighbors greet us as we pass. Marcio is humming a tune: “Livre estou, livre estou…” It takes me a while to recognize the song: It's the one from that Disney movie—Frozen! A young girl, no more than three or four years old, smiles and greets us with a hello. The officers smile back. Marcio gently pats the girl on the head. If it weren’t for the massive display of weapons this could have been the scene of an advertisement for the pacification project (Fig. 4.1).

Fig. 4.1

Weapons used by one of the patrol units at UPP Santa Marta, February 2015

The Postcard

Santa Marta is the UPP postcard.² After the police moved in six years ago there has not been any incidents of gun violence in the small favela nested right below Corcovado. This might seem like an achievement but with about 4000 inhabitants and a total of 219 officers at the UPP, the police-resident ratio is 1:19, making it one of Rio’s most heavily policed areas.³ When the Military Police occupied the favela in a special operation dubbed “shock of order” in November 2008, the pacification had not yet been announced. BOPE officers stormed the favela, arresting several gang-members while the rest fled to other communities. When the special operation ended, the police remained in place to prevent the traffickers’ return. A few months later, at the beginning of 2009, Rio’s State Secretary of Security, Mariano Beltrame, announced that they would establish a permanent police station in Santa Marta and two other favelas: Cidade de Deus in Rio’s western region, next to the area where the Olympic Park was being built, and Batán in northern Rio. The latter was controlled by militias and had been at the center of public attention in 2008 when the paramilitaries killed two journalists who were reporting on the expansion of militia-controlled areas.

With Beltrame’s announcement, the pacification project and the first three UPPs were born. To strengthen the legitimacy of the project and gain trust among favela residents it was sold as a police reform inspired in community policing (see Muñiz and Albernaz 2015; Saborio 2014). The goal was that the police establish close ties to the neighborhood, offering spaces for debate concerning matters of public security. Closeness and trust would be accomplished through reliance on foot patrols (most favelas are impossible to patrol by vehicle), neighborhood councils, and “social projects” organized by the police (see e.g. Saborio 2014). Many of these projects aimed to create a stable environment for children (i.e. to create spaces that kept children away from the gangs), and would typically include activities such as music lessons, martial arts, or after school homework assistance. The hope was that the police—rather than the traffickers—would become new role models for children growing up in the favela. These social projects had thus an important pedagogical component, with a goal of producing a generation of new and upstanding citizens who trusted and looked up to the police, following decades of mutual distrust between officers and favela residents. Furthermore, policing should focus on preventative rather than reactive measures and importantly, they should be lawful and in line with the human rights framework. The Military Police called this new vision proximity policing. While it was not explicitly framed as institutional reform, it must be understood within a larger context of modernization of the police force (Saborio 2014).

The patrol unit is moving down towards an open terrace in the middle of the favela, where Michael Jackson filmed the music video for his hit They don't care about us in the 90s. There’s a mural and a statue of the popstar on the square, next to several kiosks selling souvenirs, chips, sodas, and Brazilian fast-food. Some of the stores feature hand-painted signs listing everything on sale: Cakes, coffee, pasties, fruit, legumes, vegetables, manicures, and haircuts. The view of Botafogo, the Guanabara-bay and the Sugarloaf-mountain from Santa Marta makes it one of the most picturesque favelas in the city. An elevator transports people and goods up the hill and garbage back down. The location, sights, easy access, and peacefulness attract tourism. “10.000 tourists visit Santa Marta every month,” Marcio says. Just like in Babilonia, there are several hostels here and local tour operators offer guided tours of the community. Michael Jackson isn’t the only popstar who has graced Santa Marta with a visit. In 2009, the year Rio won the bid for the Olympics, Madonna came on a highly mediatized visit. At the UPP there is a picture of the queen of pop surrounded by her bodyguards and local police officers. It hangs next to pictures of smiling children and is a reminder of one of the highlights in the history of the UPPs, symbolizing an optimism and hope for the country’s future that was shared by most Brazilians just a few years ago.⁴

We stop to rest in the shade and quell our thirst. “Look at that!” Corporal Marcio nods towards the roofs that cover the slope below us like a shiny blanket of corrugated iron and concrete. The favela looks calm, almost drowsy, in the scorching afternoon sun. “That’s the neglect of os governantes (lit. ‘the rulers’).” Marcio’s voice is firm. He shakes his head. “For years the state has abandoned a huge part of the population. First they let them build their homes on these hills, and then they leave them here to fend for themselves—without any sanitation system, without electricity, without water, and working for meager wages for the rich living in the asfalto!” He gestures with his arms while speaking. “And when the state is absent, others take charge: Generations of criminals, passing the torch from father to son, to grandson. Do you think all that can change in a couple of years?” He looks me in the eyes. “Now, I’m not saying the pacification is a bad project—it’s a good project, but it’s a failed project. The police are working here in vain, and the State has abandoned us as well.” He emphasizes the word us—the police. “They’ve put us here to end drug trafficking, but they are never here for us! Did you know that we must buy our own guns?” Marcio isn’t referring to the weapons they use when they are patrolling but the guns that most officers buy to keep when they’re off duty. “Our own guns!” His voice reaches falsetto, and he shakes his head in contempt. “There is never any money for the police. However, there is plenty of money for corrupt politicians!” He can’t find anything good to say about the country’s leaders. Only a few politicians support the police, Marcio says—Jair and Flavio Bolsonaro. Father and son: They have built their political careers on the unconditional support of military and police officers.⁵

The patrol unit moves in the direction of one of the local bocas de fumo. The officers explain that they try to follow different routes every time, in the hope that they will surprise the traffickers who still sell drugs here, although they now operate in a discrete manner and are normally not armed. Lately, they have heard rumors that weapons are being smuggled into Santa Marta and the police are combing the area searching for leads. During patrol, we break into buildings that look vacant, sneak into backyards, and inspect the narrow spaces in between buildings.⁶ The organic architecture of the favela offers many places where drugs and guns can be hidden.

Every now and then, the officers stop to frisk favela residents. The people who get stopped by the patrol unit are mostly young, mostly black, and mostly men. In addition to this tripartite golden rule for what constitutes “suspicious appearance,” hairstyle, clothes, and posture also determine who gets stopped and who can move freely through the neighborhood with little risk of getting frisked. The “suspects” are thoroughly checked for small amounts of drugs. Today, the officers stop next to three teenage boys who are getting their hair cut at a small porch next to the alley. The officers gaze at the teenagers, surveying them before strictly ordering them to stand up so that they can be frisked. The boys are only wearing Bermudas, and the officers grope their genital areas, allegedly to check for drugs. It seems unfounded and degrading. We move on, and the officers explain that they normally don’t treat people this way but that they know that these kids are involved in the local gang. Marcio has worked here for six years and says that he knows who has “criminal connections”: These people they stop as often as possible.⁷

With so many years spent patrolling the alleys in Santa Marta, Marcio knows the favela like the palm of his hand. He says that he can distinguish between boys who are only under bad influence from those who are truly bad. “How can you tell if someone is bad?” I ask. “Listen now,” he says, pausing to think. “Take you, for example. I can see that you are nicely dressed, probably from the middle class, and highly educated. But maybe a person dresses like you do but still smokes marihuana.” I get tense. Is he insinuating that he’s on to me? “Seeing as I'm an experienced officer, I can still tell if someone is a maconheiro (a marihuana smoker) from their quick gait and the fear in their eyes.” I relax once I understand he’s not insinuating that I am a maconheiro. I look down at my shirtsleeve. Is the tattoo visible? Will he think that I am a marihuana-smoking, peace-loving hippie if he sees it, or will my white skin and calm demeanor act as the protective shield of privilege that it usually is?

Marcio knows the people who live here and their backgrounds. “That guy over there, with the hammer, has a criminal record.” He nods at a young black man who is working on a small construction site a few steps up from where we're standing. “Even if you have a criminal past you can be rehabilitated,” he adds. He knows that the guy with the hammer no longer is a criminal. He now congregates at an Evangelical church: “But that doesn’t mean he accepts the police.” He could still sympathize with the traffickers since he might have family members who are involved in “the business.” A tour-guide walks past us. He is guiding a couple of foreign tourists. “That guy right there used to be a trafficker.” He’s not anymore but Marcio says he’s still involved with the gang: “He pretends to sympathize with the police, but he warns the trafficker when we're on patrol and spreads slander to tarnish our reputation.”

The officers start talking about a woman who made the news a while ago. The police had stopped her on the highway and approached her car with their guns raised and ready to fire. One of the officers had filmed the woman scolding them. The video shows her furiously shouting that she is an architect, that she is on her way home from work, and that she has worked on several architectural projects for the police. I’m aware of the case and think that the video highlights Vinicius George’s (the former civil police officer at the Legislative Assembly, see chapter 2) point rather well: The police can freely point their guns at people in the favela but not at the elites.⁸ Marcio justifies the actions of the officers: The car model the woman was driving is one of the most stolen vehicles in Rio. She had spent an unusual amount of time to stop when she was pulled over. They had only been cautious. I recall another case that has received a lot of attention in the time I’ve been in Rio. A young woman got shot and killed by police officers on her way home from a party. The driver of the car, also the kind of vehicle often used by gang-members, had not slowed down on the police's request and the officers had opened fire at the vehicle, hitting the woman in her abdomen.

Despite the broad public criticism of the police Marcio enjoys his work: “I like being a police officer, fighting for good. The work helps you keep your integrity and earns you admiration.” He says there are many good police officers at the UPPs. Of course, there are corrupt officers in the police as well, but they are a minority and at the UPPs there’s no corruption he says.⁹ The UPP officers come from good families. They are better trained and have higher salaries than regular police officers. That prevents corruption. Marcio is repeating arguments in defense of the UPPs from public officials and police leaders. Others, including Vinicius George, have noted that the inflation in patrol officers that the pacification required (at the time of research the UPPs employed 9500 officers) meant that the criteria of admission to the police academy had been lowered.

Thiago says that the biggest challenges the officers face are political: “The legal system doesn’t allow us to do our job.” I must look confused. “Let me give you an example,” he says. “Let’s say that one of the kids down the street […] wants to play music out loud that vindicates crime and libertinagem (indecency): There is no law that allows me to order him to turn the music off. There is no law that forbids people from playing music about promiscuity and homosexuality. So, I must provoke a desacato (contempt of the law) in order to detain him. In the end society loses. They are talking about sex, but the police are not allowed to do its job. Society is doing what is wrong believing that it’s right.” He nods towards a young couple who are walking up the stairs: “That over there makes me angry. That guy there, with that girl. She is too good for him.” He neither works nor studies, Thiago explains, but he is still dating a beautiful girl. The boy is carrying several bags with groceries and as they walk past us the Corporal orders him to stop so that they can check what he carries in the bags. The young man does as he is told but the woman demonstratively looks at us and shakes her head as the officers scramble through their groceries. A few minutes later another young man walks past us. He carries a backpack, and I ask the officers why they didn’t stop him. They tell me they know him: He’s a trabalhador (worker) and they know that he's gente de bem (good people; decent folk) (Fig. 4.2).

Fig. 4.2

Santa Marta perched beneath Corcovado and Christ the Redeemer

While we are talking, I receive a call from the secretary at the UPP in Alemão. I've reached out to schedule a visit, and the female officer on the phone says that the commander can meet me next week. Thiago tells me that he used to work at Alemão before he came to Santa Marta. “It’s a very good place to gather information for your project,” he adds. The situation in Alemão is very complicated. There are a lot of confrontations between police and traffickers, and residents are not supportive of the police like they are here. That makes it very difficult for the officers to assert control in the favela. I ask them if they think it will be dangerous to do fieldwork there but they tell me not to be concerned. If the bullets start hailing through the air and I get scared I should just throw myself to the ground and stay there until the shooting ends without worrying about whether it will make me look stupid. “Fear is what keeps us alive,” Thiago says. He tells me that he almost lost his life in Alemão. He was caught inside a container during a shootout and had to request fire-cover and crawl through the mud to escape. He raises his elbows to his shoulders drawing small circles in the air to demonstrate how he got away.

When we reach the foot of the favela it is already dark. We greet the officers who are stationed at the open square where the asfalto begins. Two patrol vehicles are parked in the middle of the lively street, where street vendors fight for attention from neighbors returning from work. Or maybe they are on their way out to enjoy the warm summer night now that the blazing sun is gone and it’s possible to stay outside without melting? The curb line is packed with kiosks selling snacks, cold beer, or açaí—a tropical fruit-slush that is supposed to be full of antioxidants and would probably be healthy if it weren’t for the vast amounts of sugar it contains. The taste is good, and the icy slush is cooling so we get a cup each. Marcio laughs when he sees how quickly I finish mine. “É o aço” he says. It's made of steel. He has used this expression several times today. “It's an expression we use in the Evangelical church where I go,” he says. “It means that something is very good, since steel is a strong metal.”

The square is dimly lit and the emergency lights from the patrol vehicles cast long shadows across the street and buildings, painting the surroundings in red. Marcio, Thiago, and Igor take the elevator back up to the base, and I decide to chat with the officers that are stationed at the square. They look skeptical when I introduce myself. “You have already seen what our work is like, haven’t you?” one of them says defensively. “You should visit another UPP. Have you heard about Babilonia and Chapeu-Mangueira? I think those would be good places for your project. It’s quiet there.” I get a strong sense that he would rather have me gone for good. The female officer next to him doesn’t seem interested in talking to me either and I am about to give up when one of the officers, a Corporal gives me a friendly nod. “Well, I can tell you this,” he says with some frustration in his voice. “The system doesn’t work. If I told you the truth about the police… But I can’t tell you the truth.” He seems friendly and my courage returns: “Ah, come on! Tell me the truth, I want to hear it, it’s the truth I came here for!” I say it jokingly and he smiles and lets out a short laugh. “No, I can’t tell you the truth, but I can tell you this: The system does work for the politicians!”

I’m about to leave when I hear loud shouting coming from one of the alleys. The cheerful atmosphere of the square is suddenly interrupted by the scene playing out before us: A police officer has grabbed hold of a young, black man. He seems to be around 20 years old. The officer drags him forcefully towards the patrol vehicle while he keeps the guy’s arm locked behind his back. The officer looks stressed. Drops of sweat cover his forehead. He is followed by another officer and a group of maybe ten neighbors, most of whom seem to be in their teens. They shout for the police to release the young man. Several of them are filming the officers with their phones. The man—he looks more like a boy—looks confused, as if he’s still processing what's happening. Judging by his clothes he’s a mailman or delivery boy. A crying woman howls in despair, tears running down her cheek. She barely seems able to stand upright and a couple of people from the group try to pull her away from the chaos surrounding the officers who are moving in our direction.

The Corporal I was just talking to runs to their aid. The situation appears to be on the verge of escalating into a mass brawl. The police officers in the square run into the crowd and start pushing people away. There is a lot of shouting back and forth. One officer grabs one of the guys from the crowd and tries to drag him towards the patrol vehicles. The guy manages to wrest his arms out of the officer’s grip and both men start shouting at each other at an arm’s length. The woman begs the police to let the boy go. “He hasn’t done anything! He was just doing his work! Leave him alone!” The officers seem overwhelmed by the situation: The shouting from the crowd is deafening. They stay at just the right distance from the police, so that they are able to pull away in case the officers try to grab a hold of them. A female officer shouts at one of the boys that she will arrest him for contempt of the law, while she tries to push him down onto the hood of one of the patrol vehicles. It seems like an empty threat and show of force. She doesn’t seem very invested in arresting him and lets go of him a second later, after pushing him a bit around.

The police are outnumbered by the neighbors who are lighting up the officer’s faces with the flashlight of their phones. “We’re filming everything you do! Everyone will see this!” They keep shouting: “Why are you always repressing us?!” A group of officers have managed to corner the guy they detained between the two patrol vehicles where they are sheltered from the onlookers. They are in a loud argument about what to do next. The detained teenager looks small and scared. He is surrounded by officers who are all bigger than him. The group of neighbors, the men and women drinking beer by the kiosks, the people on their way home from work, and the kids who were just running across the square a little while ago all have their eyes fixed on the police. Some of them are shouting along with the crowd. A teenage boy approaches me and points at the notebook I am clutching in my hand. I stopped writing and closed it as soon as the brawl started. He says something in Portuguese but I’m not sure if he is telling me to write down what’s going on or to sod off. In either case, his tone of voice is not friendly. I realize that probably nobody wants me to be here right now. Not the crowd—they probably think I sympathize with the police, and certainly not the police. To avoid calling attention to myself I put the notebook back in my bag.

The crying woman has fallen to the ground. A group has gathered to assist her. A couple of kids and an older woman call for the police to help them. The woman has fainted and needs attention. The officers ignore them. They are busy keeping the crowd at bay. But eventually, the kids manage to capture the attention of one of the officers. “Do I look like a fire-fighter? It’s not my job to assist her!” The officer yells and turns his back to them. The situation is out of control. A couple of officers tear off the shirt of the detained and take his backpack. Then, to my surprise, they let him go. The crowd starts cheering. They are mocking the police and celebrating the release of the young man. Now that he's free, he regains some of his courage and it seems like he wants to pick a fight with the officers, but two older women drag him away from the crowd, the patrol vehicles, and the police. He yells at them as he leaves: “I want my things back! Stop punishing me! Why are you punishing me?” But the two women are determined to remove him from the scene. “Go now, my boy, go! Don’t be stupid. Get away.” I guess they want him gone before the officers change their mind.

Still standing between the two patrol cars, I can see the officer who had made the arrest. He looks confused and frustrated, almost enraged: “Who let him go?” “I was the one who let him go,” the Corporal says. The two officers start a loud argument. Finally the Soldier, lower in rank, yields. His face is red with anger as he shouts at one of his colleagues: “He let him go! He just let the guy go!” His authority has just been challenged in the presence of half of the neighborhood. The crowd dissolves, and soon things are back to normal. Then, out of nowhere, two patrol vehicles packed with eight officers, rifles pointing out of the window frames, comes skidding to the square. They park in the middle of the street, and the onlookers who have observed the whole scene ironically cheer them on as they step out of the vehicles (Fig. 4.3).

Fig. 4.3

The favelas of Alemão with the cable car running across the hills, January 2015

The Frontline

The first time I visit Complexo do Alemão I’ve been in Rio for almost two months. In this time, without realizing it, I’ve incorporated one of the most important male codes in the favelas: Don’t show fear. Though I might not yet be able to formulate this imperative explicitly, I know it intuitively—fear is a sign of weakness, and in the Darwinian world of the police, weakness leads to the loss of status and respect. The imperative to appear tough and strong is of course not limited to the favelas but takes on a different meaning in the context of armed conflict. Acting tough when you are surrounded by macho men with machine guns is not easy. A few weeks earlier our neighbor Luca had warned me: “Don’t go to Alemão! It’s a warzone!” When I tell him that I’m visiting the UPP there, he gets angry. “Damn it, Tomas! I told you not to go there! There are gunfights there every day!” He raises his voice. But I have heard so much about Alemão that I feel impelled to go there. Alemão is not a postcard like Santa Marta, this much I know. But also, I’m taking Luca’s warning with a pinch of salt. I reason that he is being prejudiced, just like the people from the asfalto who are scared to visit Babilonia.

The favelas of Complexo de Alemão spread across the lush hillsides of Serra da Misericordia like a thick brick carpet. To Brazilians, Alemão is known as the headquarters of the Red Command and has been a symbol and frontline of the state’s war on drugs and crime. In 2010, state forces occupied Alemão and the neighboring area of Penha following a series of gang-related violent attacks in central Rio. The occupation was broadcast live on national TV in a media spectacle showing the Special Units and Brazilian Armed Forces storming the massive favela complex. Reporters wearing bulletproof vests contributed to the war aesthetics, along images of military tanks driving up the narrow streets of the favelas, and aerial footage of armed traffickers fleeing the favela in a pick-up truck and by foot. Precarious walls of brick and cement, referred to as the “fortresses” of the traffickers were demolished with explosives by the police in front of the cameras. Since the police alone did not have the human resources they needed to assert territorial control in Alemão, the Armed Forces stayed in the favelas almost two years until eight new UPPs were established: Four in Complexo de Alemão and four in Complexo da Penha (Savell 2014).

Getting from Copacabana to Alemão takes time. I have to cross the city center where skyscrapers stretch towards the sky and continue north along the congested Avenida Brasil, one of Rio’s main thoroughfares. As the bus drives past the battered, working-class neighborhoods of northern Rio, once symbols of industrial expansion and progress, I can’t help but notice how the statue of Christ the Redeemer seems to turn its back on those residing here: The workers who keep the city running. Following the military occupation of Alemão, the government built a gondola that stretches from the asphalt in Bonsucesso and up to the highest points of the hills in the favela. The UPPs were erected next to the towering gondola stations. The concrete buildings are giant monuments to the state’s claim to control and power in Alemão. They are visible from miles away, like old European cathedrals that were also built to impress. From up close, the gondola is less imposing: The stations are empty as most residents rely on other means of transportation. However, for an outsider like me, the gondola is the most convenient, or at least the most spectacular way to reach the heart of Alemão, but on my first visit it is closed, and I end up hailing a taxi. When I tell the driver where I’m going, he refuses to drive me up the hill. “To the top? I won’t take you there. You know there is a war going on?” I brush off the warning, aware that taxi drivers also refuse to drive passengers to Babilonia since it’s a “risky area,” which makes no sense to me.

The driver drops me off at the foot of the hill. With neither a gondola nor a taxi at my disposal, I start walking up the winding road. The heat from the sun is relentless and the humidity suffocating, much worse than by the beaches of Zona Sul. It feels like being inside a sauna. The air is thick and I am still dressed like a Mormon, so I keep a slow pace to avoid being drenched in sweat when I meet the commander. But I am still grateful to have dressed this way. It makes me look less like a tourist although I clearly don’t “blend in.” As I take in my surroundings, I’m struck by the eerie silence on the streets. In stark contrast with the vibrant street life I’ve witnessed in other favelas there are hardly any people here, shops are closed, steel curtains drawn down to the floor, and no noisy mototaxis transporting people up the hill, no vans, no one sipping cold beer by the sidewalk. Maybe people are busy at work?

But once I reach the police station the scene changes. The atmosphere at the station is frantic. The main hall is full of police officers barking at each other, hurrying up and down the stairs, slamming doors and looking busy. In the middle of the room, amidst the chaos, an officer is cleaning the floor: Looking down I see specks of blood dissolving under the mop. “I don’t think the commander has time for you now.” A police officer sitting behind an office desk at the back of the room looks at me dismissively. “He has to accompany the Soldier who was just shot to the hospital.” He explains that there has been intense gunfire in the favela and that one of the officers was shot in the face. The bullet hit him while he was resting on the white plastic bench placed against the wall of the room I am standing in right now. I connect the dots: The closed gondola, the empty streets, the reluctant taxi driver, Luca’s warnings. I should have known better. Suddenly, the commander comes rushing down the stairs. He skips the cordialities: “You’ll have to come back tomorrow!” (Fig. 4.4).

Fig. 4.4

The hallroom at Alemão, July 2015

The next day the gondola is running, and the base is calm. When I arrive, the commander is in a meeting, and I am told to take a seat and wait. There aren’t many places to sit. The room is full of officers, and the only place to sit is at the broken end of the white plastic bench. Although it is long and easily fits three persons, the two police officers sprawling out across most of the bench make no effort to make room for me and I end up balancing my left buttock at the edge of the seat. In contrast with Santa Marta, there are no pictures on the information board hanging on the wall: No smiling officers, pop stars, or laughing children. None of the officers seem remotely interested in me, no one welcomes me or asks me who I am. Instead, they pretend I’m not there and give me the silent treatment. A few of them are chatting but most just stare at a Brazilian talk show that is running on the old TV placed on top of a shaky cabinet.

An hour passes, and I am still waiting for the Commander. My buttocks are sweaty and sore following my balancing act on the edge of the bench, so I stand up to stretch my legs. I am apparently still invisible. What if I had stripped naked in the middle of the room? Would they have seen me then? I'm not sure. A female officer is sitting behind the office desk now and she appears to be the only person in the room who is actually working. “Is there water here?” I ask. In Santa Marta the officers had immediately offered a glass when I arrived. She looks up from her papers and says that there is water in the cooler just around the corner. I walk over to the cooler. There is water but no clean cups, only a few left-behind disposable plastic cups. I have a glass, leave the cup where I found it, and return to the bench. Another officer sits down next to me. I feel a bit nervous and wonder whether I should try to start a conversation. I finally summon the courage to ask if there is anything special going on at the station today. He looks at me with disdain and makes a small grunt, which I assume is supposed to mean that he didn’t get a word of what I just said. “Eh?” Okay, at least I am visible! I repeat the question and add that I have seen a lot of offices come and go. The officer cannot pretend that he didn’t get me this time, and I finally get an answer: “No.” Attention is back at the TV. It is almost as if I can hear him scold me: “There is nothing special going on today.” Another half hour passes and there are still no signs of the commander. I tell the woman at the desk that I’m leaving for lunch and will be back shortly. She shrugs.

When I return to the base after lunch, the commander is still in his meeting, but soon a group of officers exit the meeting room. A few of them are smiling and poking fun at each other. The air is brimming with testosterone. One officer pinches a colleague in the butt. Then they all flock to the information board to examine a paper that must have been put up while they were away. It’s a list of their shift assignments. Finally, the commander leaves the room. He is tall and robust, I guess in his forties or early fifties. He’s a serious-looking man who greets me with a handshake before telling me to follow him to his office. It's not big—perhaps 3 or 4 square meters—but there is enough room for a desk and a few chairs. The desktop is overflowing with paper and office supplies. In between all the bureaucratic forms and formal letters there are some flyers from a shop that sells military equipment. The commander seems tired and asks me to have a seat. I step on something as I sit down. Rifle ammunition. I pick up the bullet and place it on the desk. “This was on the floor,” I say. The commander ignores my comment. Instead, he shuffles around some stacks of documents. More bullets roll out from in between the papers. He turns toward me. “So, you said you were from the Netherlands?”

After our meeting, where we discuss the details of my research (I get the impression that the Commander assumes I will be gone as soon as I have gotten a guided tour of the station and done a couple of interviews) I am shown around the base by Francisco, a white, young, and slender Soldier who says that he has worked here since the UPP was inaugurated. The building is three stories tall and features a modern, slick facade that stands out against the organic favela architecture. Inside, though, it still feels cramped. There are 300 officers working at the base and around 80 of them are on guard at any given time.¹⁰ Although the station is barely two years old it has already fallen into disrepair. The toilets are messy with several of them out of order. The bathroom walls have yellow stains and are full of stains, as if they’ve been showered with a corrosive liquid. In one bathroom the mirror has been shattered and someone has “fixed” it by haphazardly taping it to the wall with packaging tape. The doors look like they’re about to fall off the hinges—or maybe it's the hinges that are about to fall off the walls (Fig. 4.5).

Fig. 4.5

A bullet hole in one of the cabinets at the police officers’ resting quarters

In the wardrobe, there are metal lockers lined up along the walls and windows. The remaining floorspace accommodates more rows of lockers. A couple of worn-out, filthy mattresses lie on the floor between the lockers. This is where the officers rest when they are on their 24-hour duty, Francisco explains. He prefers to sleep on the roof of the building as the rooftop rails are made of brick and mortar. “It’s safer up there,” he explains, pointing to the bullet holes in the lockers. He shows me more bullet holes on the locker room walls. In fact, they are peppered with them. On one wall the light switch is dangling from its thin wires. A bullet has smashed the plastic that used to keep the switch in place, and even though it seems like someone has attempted to push the switch back into the hole where it belongs, it has not remained in place. Other bullet holes have small pieces of Styrofoam bubbling out from behind thin aluminum panels. Except for the armory, the building is built on a steel frame. The walls are dressed in thin aluminum plates and isolated with Styrofoam. They keep the heat out. The bullets, on the other hand, cut through them like butter.

A young officer wearing sweatpants and a t-shirt has just scrubbed the wardrobe floor. He rests on a pile of old mattresses when we enter the room. “You wanted to learn about our working conditions?” Francisco points at the Soldier. “This police officer was shot a couple of weeks ago and yet here he is, mopping the floors.” I greet the officer who lifts his t-shirt to show me the scar from the wound where the bullet punctured his stomach. “Do you think he gets to stay at home and rest with his family until he recovers?” Francisco smiles ironically, his voice is full of sarcasm. “Maybe in Norway, but not here. Here, he must work like the rest of us…”¹¹

Sub-lieutenant Santos is second in command at Alemão. Just 22 years old, he is the youngest officer with command responsibilities at any of the UPPs. He is calm and composed, and the officers seem to respect him, even if he is several years younger than most of them. He politely introduces himself and tells me that he is at my disposal. I explain that my project examines the everyday life of police officers at the UPPs and their view on the State. He likes it: “We are the pawns in a bigger game,” he says, asking me to wait while he gathers a group of officers whom I can interview. The Sub-lieutenant suggests I use the meeting room. It is spacious with daylight entering through a large, frosted glass window. When the air conditioner is on it almost feels as cold as a fridge.

I assume the role of the self-assured, “experienced” anthropologist, deepen the tone of my voice, and introduce myself to the six police officers seated around the table in the middle of the room. They are uniformed and wearing bulletproof vests. All carry guns in their belt and two of them are armed with machine guns placed casually between their legs. I pick up my notebook with the questions I scribbled down the day before. Just a few minutes have passed when Fransisco, a slender, white man in his early thirties, points his index finger up into the air. “Hear that?” It sounds like someone is popping popcorn. “What is that? Is that gunfire?” I ask. “Yes, its gunfire. It’s close,” he says. Despite the chilling temperature in the room, a rush of blood makes me feel warm. Don’t show fear, I tell myself. “It must be the Tactical Patrol Unit that just left the base. “They said they were heading to Areal,” another officer notes. They tell me that the unit in question is particularly “tactical” or “fond of war” (gostam da guerra).

I try to remain as casual and unaffected by the shooting as the rest of the group and focus on our conversation. Working in Alemão is hard, they tell me: “Here we are with the enemy all the time. We are surrounded in all directions. We are on the enemy’s home turf.” The people living here are hostile towards the police, Francisco says. After forty, or fifty years of state absence and drug rule, the police took control and started to ban parties and keep drug trafficking in check but without accompanying social policies, he explains. The men say that the situation in Alemão is dire: The police has not been able to force out the traffickers like they did in Santa Marta, although they recognize that the first year of pacification was a lot “calmer” than the present moment. There was some occasional shooting, but lately, it has been impossible for them to do their patrol rounds without ending up in shootouts and gunfights. In the six to seven weeks since Christmas, there has been shooting every day. Many shootouts escalate into urban combats—like the one taking place as we are speaking. The gunfire continues in the valley below the UPP. In fact, the sound has been getting louder, suggesting that the conflict is moving closer to the police station. I have the bullet holes in the walls fresh in my mind. I’m tense, and suddenly become aware of a sharp back pain. Have I been hit by a bullet? Of course, I have not. But I cannot help wonder if I am the only one who is worried. The officers keep talking but suddenly one of them gets up and leaves the room. “It's a reflex” Francisco explains. “He has been shot before and gets nervous, but that's alright. He's still a good police officer.” The men assure me that nobody thinks less of him for reacting to the shooting. Don’t show fear.

The remaining officers start discussing media portrayals of the police. There's nobody writing about their experience, about their point of view—they are always criticized. “The media claims that the police officers are not doing their jobs, but they don’t report on the constant attacks on the police.” The officers are talking quickly, and I have a hard time jotting down all of their comments. “Can I tape-record our conversation?” The room goes quiet. Francisco looks uncomfortable. “Forget it,” I say, so that he won’t have to. He looks at me and says: “Look, sometimes the Military Police is criticized by people who quote them on things that have been said…” He was 30 years old when he entered the force and used to have a different opinion about the police. “If anybody wants to listen to us, we’ll happily talk, even if they’re from Norway,” Francisco continues. Contrary to what I have assumed, the officers here want to talk to me: They want to share their version of what's happening in Alemão. “We are the best police force in the country,” one of the men chimes in. “We are the police who kill the most, die the most, and get paid the least.” I get the feeling that they are quite proud of being the force that “kills the most”—as if it’s a sign of their brutal efficiency in the war on crime.

The officers stop talking. Outside the shooting has intensified. “They are right by the base now,” Francisco says. I stare down at the questions I have written in my notebook and read them out mechanically without paying attention to what I’m saying, and when the officers speak, I jot down their answers without really understanding what I'm writing. My mind is focused on the rhythmic sounds from the gunfight in the favela. From the meeting room, I can neither see nor judge the severity of the situation. Should I be throwing myself to the floor now, like the police officers in Santa Marta suggested? I decide to address the subject—I no longer care to hide my fear. “I think I would have felt safer in the houses in the favela than here,” I say. “Are we safe?” They laugh. “Of course we’re not. We’re the target!” Francisco tries to reassure me: “It’s normal” he says. Even if all the shooting can make them nervous too, he says that most of them enjoy the shootouts. “If you stay here until the tactical patrol unit returns, you will see them laughing and joking about what just happened. Everybody laughs because we still enjoy our work!” This morning, his unit had encountered a “problem” during the morning patrol and when they returned to the base they were already planning how to retaliate. They tell me that they are always eager to catch the criminals: “We like getting rid of them. After confrontations we end up talking about the excitement. We know we are going back out again because we want to get them, we want to rid (tirar) society of criminals.” The other officers agree. I ask them who they think they are working for. “That we don’t know,” one of them says. They are not doing it for the corrupt politicians in government. And the favela residents? “The residents (moradores) deserve to die,” one of them says so quickly that I'm confused as to whether he intended me to hear him. Francisco is more careful with his choice of words: “Well, the residents prefer the thugs (vagabundos) to the police. They support the criminals. The dream of the traffickers and residents in Alemão is for the traffickers to return [to power].”

The shooting has lasted for more than an hour but finally the sound is fading and eventually dies out. I’m eager to seize this opportunity to get away from the base and out of Alemão. Who knows when a new gunfight begins? I'm saved by the shift leader. He rushes into the room. “Caralho! What are you guys doing here?” His voice is severe. “Come on, you have to support your colleagues in Areal!” The officers get up and unholster their guns. Our conversation has ended. Outside it’s getting dark. I head over to the gondola which, to my surprise, is still running. I’m never coming back I think to myself as I enter the station. But I know that I have to: I must understand these men.

Once I’m home I open my laptop. I’ve joined several Facebook groups where favela residents report on what is happening in their neighborhoods. In one post, a woman from Alemão comments on the shootout:

I want to thank God for this immense deliverance. I was on my way to physical therapy. What a day today. Exhausting, painful, emotional. I had already mentioned earlier that I woke up feeling like this. As usual, I was walking down Joaquim de Queiroz (the main street in Alemão). When a huge confrontation broke out at 3:45 in the afternoon. Mind you, it was 3:45, and I was between Sabino and Areal, and thanks to God, there was a charitable soul on the road. Sandra, a friend of my daughter’s, shouted come back auntie, we entered the store and were trapped there for an hour. Along with two young women and three children, two teenagers and a boy. It hurt to see the despair of those children. Lacy went into a trance because her mother was crossing the street at that exact moment. I was there, desperate and calming those people down, as the cellphone signal wasn’t working. Trying to alert my companions... someone who could rescue us. And the gunshots… and more gunshots could be heard... and the despair too. Because the screams echoed through the deserted street. There were times when I felt incapable, felt like nothing. I write this crying. But we are fine…!!! I’m narrating here the daily life of a favelada resident of a supposedly pacified Complex.

Asserting Authority

Residents and Police Officers from the UPP Clash in Santa Marta

Residents and police officers from the Pacifying Police Unit (UPP) of the Santa Marta favela in Botafogo, South Zone of Rio de Janeiro, clashed at around 11:30 pm on Sunday. The conflict reportedly began after an officer aggressively approached two residents. Rejecting this attitude, a group of protesters threw stones and bottles at a UPP patrol. The police officers responded with tear gas and pepper spray. “It was like a scene from a movie. I couldn’t even leave my house. The police officers threw a lot of tear gas and pepper spray. They think everyone is a criminal. Many people, including children, had to leave the favela to be able to breathe,” says a resident who preferred to remain anonymous. According to him, about 13 police cars arrived at the scene at the time of the confrontation. The UPP confirmed that the police presence was reinforced in the area and that the conflict began after two suspicious-looking men were approached by police officers. According to an officer, all of the non-lethal weapons in stock were used in the confrontation. The case was registered at the 10th Police District in Botafogo. (Newspaper report, February 2015)

There are no patrol vehicles parked in the square at Santa Marta when I return in late February, following the Carnival celebrations. The elevator leading to the UPP is out of order and I decide to climb the stairs to the top. I brace myself. It’s 40 degrees and the sun is at its zenith. The jeans I’m wearing are glued to my thighs. I keep a slow pace, like a high-altitude alpinist economizing his energies. The last time I joined the officers at Santa Marta on patrol they were accompanied by two Google executives wanting to test a new body-cam technology that would allow the base commander to use GPS to track them, live-stream video during patrol, or document arrests. This way, they argued, the police would be able to prove they had followed the correct procedures if they should get into legal conflicts with residents. The commander hoped this measure would help reduce police violence and lighten the workload of the officers who were allegedly afraid to act, as neighbors could film them and share the videos online. This, he claimed, often gave a wrong impression of events. If the police had a video recording of their own, it would give them confidence to carry out their work. At least, this was how the commander explained it. The officers of the patrol unit were less enthusiastic. “They are ending our privacy” Marcio dryly commented when I asked him what he thought. Not that what they were doing was illegal, he said, but it was already enough having other people’s cameras disturbing their work. “It’s not easy to keep a good relationship with the inhabitants here while we’re arresting their friends and family members” Marcio reasoned.

I am about halfway up the hill, climbing a narrow, colorful staircase. A little further ahead, a teenage boy wearing nothing but a flower-patterned pair of Bermudas, is sitting in the stairs. He smiles at me as I pass. That’s nice of him I think and smile back. “You're not a gringo,” he says. Huh? I don’t understand why he makes this comment. “Me? Yes, I'm a gringo.” “No, you’re not. Lift your shirt.” A few steps further up I see a second guy, half-hidden in one of the doorways, with a walkie-talkie in his hand—the kind traffickers use. I lift my shirt, exposing the lining of my jeans. “Turn around” he orders in a calm and polite manner. I do as he says. He wants to check that I’m not carrying a gun. I guess he must have seen me patrol with the officers. “Are you with the group of gringos who just walked past here?” I tell him that I’m not. “Are you going to Michael Jackson?” He’s still smiling while he interrogates me. “No, I’m going to the top of the favela,” I say. I don’t want to tell him that I’m going to the police station. “Ah, well, then you'll just have to keep walking upwards.”

At the base, Marcio comes to greet me. We’re not going on patrol today, he says. The patrol unit with Thiago and Igor has been split up. They were involved in the brawl that was reported by the media. Marcio says they spotted two young men near one of the bocas. One was carrying a backpack which Marcio suspected contained drugs. The two men had tried to escape when they saw the police. They had chased them down a blind alley and managed to detain one of them but the one carrying the backpack got away. As they were about to take the suspect to the police station the neighbors had protested, throwing rocks and bottles at them. The patrol unit had retaliated with pepper spray and the arsenal of non-lethal weapons they carry on patrol. The situation had been chaotic. After the event, what Marcio described as “bad elements” from the local community had gathered with the leaders of the local Resident Association demanding that Marcio and Thiago be removed from patrol. They claimed that they had been violent with the detained suspect, which Marcio firmly denies: “He (the suspect) was wounded by the bottles they (the neighbors) threw at us.” But the Commander at Santa Marta gave in to the pressure from the Neighborhood Association, and dissolved the patrol unit, transferring Marcio to an administrative position at the UPP.

Today, Marcio and Thiago are driving to the headquarters of the riot police division (Choque) to tank up one of the patrol vehicles. We take the freeway to the city center. Thiago is driving. He turns on the emergency lights and hits the gas pedal, driving like we’re responding to an urgency or in the middle of a car chase. He speedily slams the car from one lane to the other zig-zagging through the traffic. When we’re about to get off the freeway he steps on the brakes. Tires screaming, he accelerates as we continue through the narrow city streets: Past a red light; up on the curbstone as we cut a corner; into the opposite lane. He seems used to driving like this, or maybe he is just showing off.

As we near the battalion, Thiago hits the brakes again, turning the emergency lights off. The officers say that the commander made a strategic mistake taking them off the street: “When the police give in to pressure like this, it makes our work in the favela harder. The bad elements of society understand that they have power over us. They think they can protest and get it their way! Now we must think twice before we act” Marcio complains. They comment on an operation in Alemão last night: A woman died as she was hit by a stray bullet in her apartment and two officers were wounded. The police had arrested eighteen drug traffickers but to Marcio’s disappointment, most of them were underage. “That means they’ll soon be out on the streets again” he explains. Thiago says the age of criminal responsibility should be lowered to twelve years. At present, it’s eighteen. Many of the traffickers are thirteen, fourteen. He says there are prisons for underaged delinquents as well, but when the kids get out again, they are often more dangerous than before: “The prisons here do nothing to re-educate criminals, and every inmate cost society more than the salary of a police officer” Thiago protests. He tells me that he joined the police to kill traffickers, he sees no other solution: Criminals are ruthless, they have no heart.

Inside the battalion, Marcio wants me to photograph the buildings. “But don’t let them see you. You really need permission to take pictures here.” He points at the mural painted across the wall of one of the buildings. Against gray fatigue, Choque’s emblem is painted in yellow. It is the helmet of a spartan warrior (which looks confusingly like that of a medieval knight) and seems like an odd choice for the riot police. The emblem is accompanied by a text that reads:

Verse

Verse  Courage comes from our BLOOD, [A bravura provém do nosso SANGUE,]         Glory from our VICTORIES       [a glória de nossas VITÓRIAS]             BLOOD & VICTORY           [SANGUE & VITÓRIA]

Apart from the obvious reference to policing as warfare, I find the blood and glory symbolism and its religious undertones chilling.¹² If the officer’s courage comes from their blood, do the criminals carry evil in theirs?

We return to the UPP around lunch time. The officers at the base are just about to get lunch and the Commander invites me to eat with them. He is young, around my own age, and strikes me as friendly, educated, and “progressive”—in other words, as a modern man. I notice how it makes it easier for me to sympathize with him and see the pacification as more palatable. Today, he is wearing brand-new sportswear (which makes him even more relatable) and looks more like a fitness coach or personal trainer than a Military Police Commander spearheading a relentless war on drugs. He carefully recites the entire menu to me: Beef, fish, chicken, or deep-fried chicken, with feijão, rice, spaghetti, farofa, and a salad on the side. I can choose between a mayonnaise salad or a tomato salad.

I take a seat at the table and chat with the officers about Carnival as we wait for the food. I ask Marcio if he ever participates in the blocos (street celebrations). He shakes his head. He doesn’t celebrate Carnival. He doesn’t like it. Many “righteous” people attend but there are also thugs and thieves. Often, they are armed, and Marcio stays away from the blocos to be on the safe side. Furthermore, neither married people nor Evangelical Christians celebrate Carnival, and he is both. To Marcio, Carnival means extra work. As an officer, he must work extra shifts during the weeklong celebration, and all the partying makes it harder. “Alcohol consumption creates criminals in potential,” he observes.

One of the female officers at the base is seated amidst with all the men. She has always seemed happy and is smiling whenever I see her. Relatively new to this game, she says that she had to cover a shift at one of the biggest blocos. Some of them have hundreds of thousands of attendants. Marcio has already worked during several Carnival celebrations and gives her suggestions on how to prepare for these events. “You must bring everything: Teargas, pepper spray, shock grenades. And for the love of God, secure your gun to your thigh with a string.” The police officers chat about the different weapons that come in handy in these situations. The female officer chimes in: “It’s always impossible to get hold of the Taser!”

After lunch, Thiago shows me the new gear that he has bought. It’s a telescopic baton that extends when it’s swung into the air. He gives the baton a forceful swing to demonstrate. Now it is my turn to try. The baton is black and made of hard plastic. It feels very light in my hand. The shaft is about twenty centimeters but extends to three times that length when in use. I give it a gentle swing. The telescopic element only emerges halfway from the shaft. Marcio giggles. “No, Tomas, you have to use force when you swing it!” I try one more time and this time I hear a soft click as the two elements are locked into place. I want to give the baton back to Marcio the way I got it and try to shove it back into the shaft, but it’s stuck. “I think I swung it too hard” I say, feeling a little dumb. Marcio laughs again and grabs the baton, pushing it firmly against the concrete wall in front of us (Fig. 4.6).

Fig. 4.6

Police officers in Santa Marta carrying “non-lethal” arms, February 2015

The commander is calm and thoughtful. We are sitting in a corner of the common room to have a chat while the officers are resting. He claims that the relationship between the police and the residents of Santa Marta is good, despite the clashes that may arise when the officers make arrests. When these situations occur, he must show the population that he is willing to listen to them, to dialogue. He says that the Residents Association had complained that Marcio and Thiago were harassing local teenagers, repeatedly subjecting them to frisks with no reason. I think about how they have approached people, especially young men, when I have joined them on patrol.

I tell the commander that the officers in Alemão complain that the population does not support the police. “That attitude is wrong” he says disparagingly. “The population doesn’t have to support the police. It’s the police that must win the population’s trust. Many police officers arrive [at the favelas] thinking that they will be seen as heroes for forcing the traffickers out but that’s not how it works. The police must reach out to the residents continuously. Those who live here are skeptical to the police because of the long history of violence and corruption within the police force. The police have only been in Alemão for three years, while we have been in Santa Marta for six years. When the police are met with resistance, when the residents shout at them or throw rocks, we must work harder to improve our relations with the community. But many officers don’t see it like this.” The commander says that the problem is bad training and bad working conditions. It makes it harder to change the view of the officers and the relations between police and residents. “That whole discourse about the police not being accepted is wrong. The police must understand that they are in the home of the residents now. They must see the population as their clients and not as someone who has to accept them.”

At Alemão, police officers also get into a brawl with the neighbors when they try to break up a Carnival celebration on a late Saturday evening in February. There, the officers don’t use shock grenades and pepper spray. Instead, they shoot live ammunition into the air above the crowd, creating panic as the crowd evacuates the street. The message is clear: The party’s over.

Conclusion: Transformation and Elimination

The analysis in this chapter’s conclusion, and especially the idea that police practices exist in a tension between transformation and elimination (which I understand as an operationalization of war machine and state dynamics), draws on conversations with Marco Martinez-Moreno and Luiz Fernando Dias Duarte in the context of a post-graduate course on far-right subjectivity at the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro.

By comparing the two extremes of the pacification project, the dynamics of policing that underpinned the UPPs are brought to the fore. The police explained variations in the use of repressive and preventative strategies as stages in a process where the priority was to suppress armed resistance by traffickers, followed by a stage where the police would consolidate their authority in the favelas through cultural change: First eliminate, then transform (see Oliveira 2014; Muñiz and Albernaz 2015). Initially, these stages were divided between different police forces: The special operations units (mainly BOPE) would expel armed drug traffickers from the favelas, while UPP officers would consolidate territorial control once armed resistance towards the police was no longer an issue. This division of labor was influenced by a belief that these two strategies of policing—elimination and transformation—were essentially incompatible.

However, in Complexo do Alemão, despite a military intervention that lasted two years (2010–2012), police repression had not successfully “eliminated” the drug traffickers and their “culture”—and police officers who were supposed to carry out preventative work, ended up doing mainly repressive tasks (I will return to this dynamic and its effects in Chapter 7: Modernizing Warriors). As Santa Marta’s opposite, Alemão became an important frontline or “state margin” (Das and Poole 2004) where the dynamics of elimination—war-machine dynamics—of the pacification came to the fore. Like an army invading a foreign country, the police officers in Alemão saw themselves as soldiers at war with traffickers locally anchored through kinship ties to the favela population. Seen as impossible to transform due to Alemão’s history as the stronghold of Comando Vermelho (the culture of trafficking was simply too “rooted” to be transformed), what remained was to apply the logic of elimination. As I will show in the following chapters, the urban landscape of Alemão was perceived as imbued with evil, a cosmovision that fit Pentecostal understandings of the relation between spirit and matter (see, e.g. Shapiro 2021).

The harsh realities of armed combat were fertile ground for narratives of police victimization (which Jair Bolsonaro has both tapped into and incentivized). Rather than discussing whether these narratives represent a lived reality or not, I am interested in how they legitimized violent retributions by the police. In Alemão, the logic of war was intimately linked to the logic of extermination to the extent that one officer ambiguously described his job as doing the devil’s work: kill, steal, and destroy (see Chapter 5: Police Masculinities). This was, ironically, justified with reference to the favelas as places of evil. Whereas Albernaz (2015) in her study of evangelical police officers observed that they adopted different strategies to avoid combat situations (mainly avoiding street patrol), which they saw as brutalizing, I was not able to observe a similar pattern in Alemão as I did not systematically register the religious views of the officers I spoke with. I did, however, observe tropes and imaginaries that coincide with Catholic but particularly Pentecostal cosmology, and police officers addressing the cognitive dissonance it might produce to carry out the work of the devil in the name of God, so to speak, by appealing narratives of police victimization (see Alves 2021)—which were, at least to a certain degree, made plausible due to the high levels of armed violence in Alemão and were strengthened by their understanding of policing-as-warfare (and thus interpreted as a symmetrical relation between warring parties).¹³

Importantly, narratives of police victimization often produced feelings of resentment and fueled a desire for vengeance that has been associated with the far-right movements (Duarte and Martinez-Moreno 2023), and which dovetail with an emergent form of militant Pentecostalism which has “replaced the Jesus of the Gospels with a vengeful warrior Christ” (Kobes du Mez 2023).¹⁴ It is possible to speculate that as this militarization of faith takes hold, there might simply not be a cognitive dissonance to speak for many officers, even religious ones (c.f. Albernaz 2015). Rather, the violence they deliver in the favelas could be a sign of virtue—of righteous officers delivering just retribution. Such an interpretation seems to be supported by the “writing on the wall” at Choque’s headquarters: Courage and glory; blood and victory. This jargon is telling of a police self-perception as warriors at war with a part of the population, their blood infused with courage, where violence can be seen as purifying as it offers a way to redemption through suffering and through the cleansing of the favelas by eliminating the evil that resides there (see Birman 2019).

In Santa Marta, where armed trafficking was successfully repressed, the logic of elimination had been supplanted by one of transformation through the inscription of a new set of rules, of a new moral code, imposed and policed by the officers at the UPPs (see Albernaz 2020). However, also here there were different models in tension: On the one hand a “modern” or globalist approach to militarized policing that emphasized dialogue and trust building, and on the other, a “regional” approach that continued to draw on the grammars of violent sociability (as “the only language criminals understand”)—as my lunch with the officers of Santa Marta suggested. At Santa Marta, the unapologetic observations of the officers in Alemão that the job of the police was to kill, was replaced by more insidious forms of militarization, for example through recourse to technologies that lower the threshold for the use of force and through the exercise of what Vinicius Esperança (2022) identifies as an expression of pastoral power: A power associated with self-sacrifice and the capacity of leading the people living in the favelas on the path to salvation (see Foucault 2007). While pastoral power is different from sovereign power in that it is centered around the sacrifice of the pastor to protect his flock, the way it was expressed in the police signals an overlap with a sovereign logic: If “society” kept “doing what was wrong thinking it was right” it was the police’s task to intervene, if necessary, by recourse to force.

According to the worldview of many police officers, people could generally be put in one of two opposing categories: Either they were good Christian workers or promiscuous and evil criminals. While confrontations tended to crystallize positions at the extremes (producing a strict division between absolute good and absolute evil), among the officers in Santa Marta I observed more room for nuance, for separating different degrees of good and evil. Their point of view included the possibility of moral and spiritual reform, for example through conversion to Pentecostal Christianity or by adopting the protestant ethos of work (see also Albernaz 2018; Birman 2019). The disapproval of carnival celebration by some officers on the grounds that it promoted promiscuity and created potential criminals reflects how the idea of a spiritual battle could collapse distinctions between immoral acts and crime since both expressed the operation of evil forces within the subject, a weakness of character, and moral degradation. When police officers repressed the carnival celebrations in Alemão, they were asserting a moral order where the excesses of carnival were perceived as dangerous and not in line with the kind of “civilized” and ordered spaces that the favelas had to be transformed into under the tutelage of the police.

Likewise, the officers in Santa Marta understood their role in the community to go beyond the war on drugs, as well as the mere upholding of law and order. The pastoral dynamics of policing had them assume a paternalistic position as role models for the children and educators having to keep the youth in check, for example by deciding what music could be played or by enforcing an ethics of work. This moral policing was part of the attempt to transform favela subjectivities from what they perceived as conditions of vagrancy, indecency, and immorality, to civilized and hard-working subjects that showed deference and admiration for police authority—a transformation that often required the religious conversion on behalf of the subject (see Misse 2008: 308). The presence of patrol officers in pacified communities was meant to prevent the return of armed traffickers so that the “culture” could be gradually transformed through “social projects” that would sway a future generation of favela dwellers. However, the police officer’s effort to guide children down the “right path” had a clear limit, which was expressed in their desire to reduce the age of criminal responsibility. One officer told me that they believed that unless the respect for police authority had been impressed in children by the age of 8–9 years, they were usually lost.

The assumption that the neighbors from the favelas did not support the police was shaped by experiences such as the brawls I have described. They signal how police authority was constantly negotiated or provisional (Jauregui 2016). However, as the discussion in Chapter 2: Favela/Asfalto showed, it did not mean that favela residents “supported traffickers” as the police would often suggest. Rather, this belief was the result of the friend-enemy distinctions that war tends to produce, and an “either you are with us or against us” way of thinking.

In this chapter, I have examined how the pacification policy relied on a logic of elimination and transformation—practices that built on notions of both colonial and cultural warfare. I have also shown how assertions of police authority that enforced religious ideas of good and evil, an ethics of work, patriarchal family values, traditional gender hierarchies, and sexual moralism, took different forms: From an insistence on not losing face and the harassment of persons considered “undeserving” to the policing of masculinity. But I have also shown that there were divergent understandings within the institution on how policing should be carried out, and how favela residents should be approached, a point I will return to in Chapter 7: Modernizing Warriors.

Esperança (2022: 25–26) observes that the new cidadão de bem—the ideal citizen according to what I have thus far referred to as “police regionalism” should not circulate without carrying its ID papers nor during the night, unless it’s on the way to or from work; young people should study or work, not idle around in the favela alleys, as this was assumed to indicate connivance with crime; not consume drugs since these lead to moral degradation; take care of their health and appearances; preferably be married, forming a stable, heteronormative family that inculcate in its children respect and admiration towards the police; and above all, it should be law-abiding and respectful of police authority, avoiding public expressions of resistance towards the order imposed through military power. In the next chapter, I will examine the dynamics of male authority and how they link with the figure of the warrior as well as that of the father and family provider.