Bitches

Anderson sits on the bench in the common room in Alemão when I arrive. He holds his arm around one of his female colleagues but gets up the moment he sees me. “Get yourself a bulletproof vest,” he says. The rest of the patrol unit is waiting for us up by the container base. The base is exactly what its name indicates: A sparsely furnished shipping container that provides shelter and a toilet. It is placed further up the hill, where the officers can keep an eye on the people entering the favela through the forest-covered hills. We are accompanied by two other officers: Breno, and Marcia. Breno is a quiet officer who usually keeps a low profile. Marcia has just been stationed in Alemão. When I greet her, she seems nervous. Her hand shivers as she unholsters her gun. “This is my second shift,” she says. “Have you worked at another UPP before?” I ask her. Most of the officers at Alemão have. “No, I just finished my training. They sent me straight to the war,” she says nervously. I can understand why she is scared: She knows that this is the frontline (Fig. 5.1).

Fig. 5.1
A photograph of three police officers with the back of their vests turned towards the camera. The text on their vests is in a foreign language.

Police officers with hyper-masculine bodies in Santa Marta, April 2015

Full size image

Anderson leads the way through the favela at a quick pace. Marcia pants nervously behind me, clenching so hard at her gun that her knuckles turn white. She seems unprepared, too scared to be patrolling with a loaded gun in her hand. By the time we reach the upper part of the favela she is exhausted. By the container base, a group of officers from the patrol unit are resting in the shade. They have taken off their bulletproof vests and unbuttoned their uniform shirts. Next to the container, there’s an older washing-machine-tumbler-come-grill with burning coal. It’s Sunday and UPP commanders rarely work during weekends. When their bosses are away the officers spend most of the day chatting by the barbeque. The fat dripping from the meat hisses in the fire. Anderson offers me some chicken wings, and orders me to eat. He’s in a good mood, and so are the other officers. Edilson, a sturdy guy with a big smile, pats his beer belly and says he has promised himself he will start exercising so that he can sign up for BOPE’s challenging admission trials. The officers laugh.

Marcia tells us that she lives in Vila Kennedy, a pacified favela in western Rio. “Move out of there,” Anderson says strictly. Now that she works for the police she can’t keep living in the favela. “It’s going to get worse there. The favela is controlled by the Red Command but surrounded by other gangs,” he explains, suggesting that the epicenter of Rio's armed conflicts might shift as the police continues to push traffickers out of the city's central areas. Marcia nervously asks if the container base has ever been attacked. Her hands are shaking as she fiddles with the strap of her gun holster. When Anderson tells her that the container was attacked from the woods just behind us, she looks over her shoulder. I remember the feeling I had the first time I came to Alemão. I want to say something to calm her but Anderson doubles down on his bet: “Here it’s cold, dark, and foggy—and the beginning of all bad things.” The other officers laugh at his poetic skills. I’m not sure if they enjoy seeing Marcia scared or if this is some sort of admission test, in preparation for the harsh realities of Alemão. Either way, she is soon on her way back to the UPP with one of the men. Once they have left Edilson starts complaining. He didn’t like her attitude. She had told him that she didn’t want fixed-point patrol duty—having to stand guard at a specific place during a full shift. Of course, none of the officers do. If she’s afraid and unprepared she’ll be a burden to her colleagues. Her patrol unit will effectively be one man short. I ask Edilson if he's saying it because she is a woman, but he says that he doesn’t. There are many female officers who are good at their job. He names one of them: “She’s tougher than many of the men here.”

A few days ago, I came to Alemão just to discover that the police officers that I was supposed to meet were off duty. The trip from Leme to Alemão took me an hour, so I decided to stay at the base and see if something came up. Nothing did, and so I sat in the hallway of the police station observing the officers. The favela was calm, and the atmosphere at the base was unusually relaxed, even sleepy. The officers were mostly fiddling with their phones. They seemed absorbed with the subject of naked women: Mostly pictures and videos sent to them by their lovers and mistresses, which I imagine were not meant to be openly shared with their friends. One of them showed me the video of one of his girlfriends fingering herself. He had seen her in a soft porn magazine and contacted her online. “She has a fifteen-year-old son!” he laughed. Looking her up on Facebook, he had gone through her images and found one where she was with her son. Imagine the son finding out that his mother was a porn actress! The officer giggled and passed his phone with her pictures around while the other officers shared their conquests.

I felt that I had to provide proof of my own, non-existent heterosexuality, which was easier said than done. The absence of (heterosexual) porn on my phone is uncanny. I suddenly recalled a video sent to me by a friend a while back. It shows clips from different porn videos where the genitalia have been replaced by drawings of tools, groceries, or musical instruments and is meant to make you laugh, not to make you horny. After searching through my gallery, I finally found it and proudly showed it to one of the officers. I immediately realized that I hadn’t understood the game at all. It seemed like the officer almost felt a little sorry for me. He nodded, smiled, and said: “Ah… well, look at that.” A couple of other men gathered around my phone. They looked at the video for exactly three seconds before returning to the competitive comparison of their heterosexual achievements. I felt a little lame and embarrassed that I couldn’t provide anything that compared to the officer who was now showing a video of himself having sex with a voluptuous woman, or one of his colleague sharing a video he had received from a female police officer who used to work at the UPP.

While we are sitting by the barbeque, waiting for the next round of meat, Anderson wants to know whether I’ve been with a Brazilian woman. Somewhat naively, perhaps, I tell them that the only Brazilian girl I’ve gotten to know is my cachorra—bitch. The men howl with laughter. I try to explain that I’m talking about an actual bitch: Violeta, the dog we adopted from our neighbor. Even more laughter. Maybe I should not explain. They prefer the unintended joke to my boring stories. Anderson tells me I should avoid calling a woman a bitch when she can hear me. He tells me that his girlfriend drugged him with sleeping medicine a couple weeks ago, to keep him home. She thinks he is having an affair, so she mixed the medicine into a juice bottle that he unsuspectingly gulped down. I almost choke on my soda: “Does she have a reason for suspicion?” I ask. “You bet she does!” Anderson laughs. He pulls out a phone from his pocket. “This phone right here, Tomas, I always leave at work! With this one, I keep track of all my mistresses. It’s my one bad habit—this is my security vent.”

Anderson first became a father when he was fifteen. He had five children. “They’re all bastards,” he tells me. We laugh. His eldest daughter is eighteen and already a mother herself. Anderson is a grandfather at 38! More laughter. “I think it’s the curse of the officers. I see it like that. My job is very dangerous. Today I’m here, talking to you, tomorrow I might not be here anymore. I could be killed because of my job, right? So, I try to live my life to the fullest. And in that process of living life to the fullest, I ended up producing all those kids.” Anderson says the most beautiful women in Brazil live in the south of the country. Here in Rio, the sun is so strong even white people turn black, he explains, pointing at his own face and laughing. Then he shifts to the topic of nordestinos: “To be honest, they ought to build a wall to keep them out,” he says, and sends a teasing glance towards Edilson who is black and from the Brazilian northeast. Edilson laughs and I wonder if he thinks the joke is funny. Anderson is on a roll and elaborates on the uselessness and immorality of nordestinos. “But aren’t there many nordestinos in the police?” I ask. “Oh, it’s full of them,” he says, pointing to Edilson again (Fig. 5.2).

Fig. 5.2
A photograph of a person's hand holding a barbecue fork near an open grill with pieces of meat cooking.

Sunday barbecue with the police officers at Alemão, April 2015

Full size image

I’m reminded of a conversation I had a while back with a Sergeant who had been born in Bahía, one of Brazil’s northeastern provinces. His father had served in the Navy and had been transferred to Rio when the Sergeant was still young. They had moved to an apartment complex in a middle-class neighborhood in Rio provided by the military. He was one of the few black kids in his group of friends and told me that they often made racist jokes: “I was always afraid. I shut my mouth or laughed along with the others. Maybe that’s why to this day I can’t be with a black woman.” Then he had smiled: “Ahhh, well, yes, I’ve had a few, dated a few, taken them home, messed around a bit. But I haven’t ever had a serious relationship with a black woman. I’ve been thinking about my kids. Because… I don’t want them to experience what I lived through. So, I try to mix up the color a little bit, to see if they get lighter skin than me. To see if they suffer a little less than I did.” The Sergeant had continued: “My mother always told me that we were living beyond our means, that we were the cuckoo in the nest, you know? I had friends who travelled to Disney World, who went to Europe, who had parents with big cars. And my father had no car, right? We didn’t travel. I went to a public school, they (his friends) went to parties, had nice clothes, the most expensive toys, and I was neither fish nor fowl: I wasn’t poor, but I wasn’t rich. And since we lived in a place that was beyond our economic means, I had to learn to suffer in silence.”Footnote 1

In the afternoon, after licking our fingers clean of fat and salt and emptying the last bottle of Coke, we end up dozing in the shade. It’s quiet, even for a Sunday. A young woman comes cycling past us accompanied by a girl in her teens. Edilson whistles at the girls: “Oi gostozinha”—Hey sexy—“I’ll pay 10 reais!” The women ignore him and continue without looking at us. After a while, Edilson gets up. He walks over to the grove just above the favela. I see him throwing something in between the trees. Immediately, a loud explosion thunders through the forest and favela. “But for heaven’s sake, Edilson!” Anderson is annoyed. “What was the point of firing a shock grenade?” Edilson comes over to me as we’re heading back to the base. He wants to show me a video on his phone. It’s from a security camera and shows a young woman being brutally murdered by a man who was apparently her lover. It is painful to watch. The man bashes the woman’s head against the concrete floor, time after time, until her skull shatters. Then he pulls out a gun and fires a series of shots at the dead woman. I feel lightheaded and nauseous. “That man must be insane,” I say. “I could have done the same to a criminal,” says Edilson, “but not to my girlfriend.”

Guerilla Warriors

It’s four in the morning. The sun won’t be up for another two hours, but Felipe must leave his home, wife, and two-year-old daughter now, if he is to make it in time for his shift which starts at six. Unless anything unexpected happens, he’ll be back tomorrow morning, as his wife is starting her day. Felipe gently kisses his daughter on the forehead. His satchel and uniform are tucked in a sports bag, which he hides in his car. Volta Redonda is a dirty industrial city built around a huge steel plant. Leaving before the morning rush begins, the 120 km drive to Rio takes about an hour and a half. Being late for work is not an option when you work for the Military Police. He served his first year in the police at the UPP of Cerro-Corá. Then he was transferred to Manguinhos where he stayed for 10 months. There was more conflict and violence there than at Cerro-Corá but it was still better than Alemão, where he is currently working, by a long shot. He’s already tired of the tense atmosphere at the base; of the long drive to work and back; of the strict disciplinary codes of the police. While serving in Manguinhos he was sent to disciplinary detention because the commander had seen him eating his lunch in his car while uniformed.Footnote 2

Felipe signed up for the public tender at the police academy hoping that maybe, after a few years, he would be transferred to a batalhão (lit. “battalion”), a conventional police station, closer to home. Now he’s been working as an officer for almost three years and has little faith that he’ll be transferred any time soon. In the meantime, he’s stuck in Alemão. Felipe doesn’t like it there. Even the name makes people shudders. The atmosphere is always tense, even though the officers do what they can to lighten the mood. When he comes home from work, the beer is waiting in the fridge. He knows that some of his colleagues smoke marihuana to relax and unwind after shifts, but he thinks that’s deplorable. He joined the police to fight against drugs not to get high on them.

By the time Felipe arrives at Alemão the sun is up. When he drives through the favela he’s always on guard. The officers know that the traffickers control who comes and goes, and since he still hasn’t bought a weapon, he worries that they might surprise him unarmed and defenseless. When he reaches the white and blue station building, he relaxes. He says hello to his colleagues at the base, paying particular attention to greet the ones he doesn’t like—keep your friends close, but your enemies closer. In the wardrobe, he fishes the uniform out of his satchel, along with the new bulletproof vest that he bought with some of his savings. The vests they get here are stench with old sweat. He finds them disgusting. Soon, he thinks, he will have enough money to buy a gun as well. The guns they get here aren’t safe: They often jam and sometimes the cocks are so worn out that the weapons fire by accident. He knows of one officer who was shot in the hip when the gun in his belt accidentally fired. It’s almost six, and Felipe is ready for his shift. He fishes the name tag with his “war name” (nome da guerra) out of a pocket and attaches it to the bulletproof vest. Now he is not Felipe anymore, but Soldado Barbosa, a police officer at the Pacifying Police Units of the Military Police in Rio de Janeiro.Footnote 3

I sit with Felipe on the little balcony at the base station facing the favela. From here we see vast parts of Rio’s central and northern areas. Felipe is eating the lunch his wife prepared for him: Rice, beans, and a small piece of thinly sliced meat. He offers me some, but I politely refuse. “The constant violence used to get to me. Not here in Alemão, but when I worked in Manguinhos…” He interrupts himself. “You know, I’ve worked here for a while now. I’ve gone through this for a while, and it gets to a point where you get used to it. You know you’re going to a place where you might die, where there will be gunfire, and you’re not afraid anymore. You just go.” He says it with a plain voice, as if he’s talking about a task like any other. I think I understand what he means. As the weeks have passed, I’ve ceased to be scared by the shooting. I’m getting used to the gunfights, used to think of myself as a potential target for the traffickers occasional attacks on the UPP. Like Felipe, I have normalized the violence in Alemão, becoming desensitized, at least to a certain extent.

“There are others who are more affected by it. The first time I got into a shooting episode, I felt...” Felipe hesitates.Footnote 4 “I froze for 40 seconds and thought, what will happen, what do I do? But that’s when you understand that you must do something, because if you don’t, you’ll die. So, with time, you get used to it. If there’s shooting, you get scared, but you don’t panic. You stay in control, right? That’s at least what it’s been like for me. I’ve become used to it.” As if to justify this, he quickly adds: “I don’t know whether it’s good or bad to get used to it. But I think it’s bad, because who would want to live a life like that, you know?” He pauses. “Getting used to seeing a man getting killed in front of you, without feeling anything at all. If it’s a colleague, you feel despair, and you want to help him, but if it’s a criminal who has been shot, you look at him without mercy. You don’t feel any guilt when you kill a criminal, because the criminal tried to kill you. You take someone’s life, and it means nothing, you see? It’s something you could only understand if you experienced it yourself.”Footnote 5

Felipe says the officers have lost the fear of death. “Maybe it’s just what we are waiting for here in Alemão. We are waiting for our hour to come, doing what is expected of us, and waiting. This is what it all boils down to. You put up a fight so you won’t die, but at any moment the news of your death might arrive at your home. Everybody at home must be prepared, you know?” He talks about death with a pragmatism I’m not used to. “The Commander at the base once told us: You have to prepare your family, you have to leave your debit card with your wife, so that if something happens to you, she won’t have to go through a hard time after your funeral until she’s able to receive the pension that the police must pay her.” He tells me about a colleague who was shot about a year ago. His widowed wife is still waiting for the pension that she is entitled to.

Felipe is disappointed with the police. He has stopped believing that the pacification project will change anything. “When I come to work here, I don’t feel that I’m doing police work, I’m doing guerrilla work. I come here, get my rifle, holster my gun, head for my sector… Do you know where my patrol sector is? It’s at the base by Canitar.” The area lies at the bottom of the valley below us and is constantly under attack from the traffickers: “I stay in a trench, surrounded by sandbags and barrels, waiting for the attack, or attacking. I’m not there to do anything. You tell me: What kind of police officer can I be there? A proximity police? A pacifying police? In a battalion you attend to occurrences, to domestic disturbances. Here nobody is going to call for you if there is a fight between a husband and wife, they are going to call for the guys at the boca, they aren’t going to call for the police. There are even places here we won’t enter. So, my service is practically that of a guerrilla: I grab my rifle and I wait to see if the vagabundos (vagabonds, thugs) attack, you know? They attack us, we attack them, bullet against bullet and that’s it. That’s it, that’s the service I carry out here. I know that that’s my job: Come here to be shot at and shoot back, that’s my service.” Felipe shakes his head. “We are at war, this situation here is an urban war. I am a guerrilheiro (guerrilla soldier) of the State and this is an urban war.”Footnote 6

“They say Rio de Janeiro is the marvelous city. Marvelous for whom? For the gringos in Zona Sul? I’d like to see you in Zona Sul, Copacabana, trying to walk around with a gold-chain around your neck. The pivetes (homeless children who are sometimes involved in robberies and assaults) are turning into a nightmare for the government. Now that the UPPs have been installed they have stopped stealing close to the favela and started stealing in the city center and in Zona Sul. The latest fashion seems to be stabbings. For them, for the pivete, it’s normal to stab a knife in a person. It doesn’t matter to them. In the past, when we had a different police, there was respect. Today there’s not, you know? The respect that we enjoyed in the past was through authority, often with truculence, but it was what had to be done. Today you’ve got the Human Rights that only defend the bandit, you know? They don’t defend the good citizens; they go to jail to defend the rapist, not the family of the person who was raped. The inversion of values in our society is very big, you know? I see it more and more.”

BOPE Light

The stories of individual officers presented in this chapter are composed through accounts given to me by different officers. I have intentionally mixed different accounts to protect the anonymity of patrol officers who work in environments where they are under constant threat not only from armed confrontations, but also disciplinary sanctions and retaliations for breaking what policing scholars refer to as the blue line—the code of silence among police.

Lean and muscular, Sergeant Nazareth is half a head taller than most of his colleagues in Alemão. We’re sitting inside one of the battered container bases in the middle of the favela. Outside the rain is beating on the dense green forest that grows along the outskirts of the neighborhood and up the ridge of Serra da Misericordia, the Hills of Mercy. The name shows the importance of faith to the people that live in the narrow valleys and even narrower streets that wind down towards the asfalto and the rest of the world below us. The heavy rain has silenced the usual sounds that emanate from the neighborhood. All we can hear is the radio static from raindrops hitting the ground and the trickling streams running down the favela staircases. When it rains, people stay inside, the traffickers disappear from the street corners and the police officers retreat to their bases, engaging in locker-room talk or consumed with their phones. Days like these are good for police operations, Nazareth explains. With few people in the streets, chances are smaller that bystanders get caught in the crossfire. But today there are no operations, and we are just going to sit here in the green, battered, and filthy container and talk about life.

Nazareth tells me that he’s from Minas Gerais, a state lying just north of Rio. Large parts of the gold that adorn the old churches in Europe were mined there during the colonial era. His family were agricultural workers of Afro-Brazilian descent. He grew up in poverty: “I remember my first paid job” Nazareth says. His father brought him to the landowner, hoping to get him a job in the fields. “When the day was over, the landowner wanted to pay me.” Nazareth leans back in the rickety chair, making the plastic bend. He tilts his head slightly backward to imitate how the landowner had looked down at him. Then he pretends to put a coin on the table in front of him, and arrogantly pushes the coin forwards with his index finger. “50 cent!” he exclaims. “He paid me 50 cents! I threw the coin back at him,” he says with contempt. That was his first and last day working in the fields. The anger he felt that day had formed him. He was not afraid to work, but he was proud and refused to be humiliated. As a little boy, his mother had often reminded him that they were black and that they had to show to the world that not all black people are thieves: Não todo preto é ladrão.

“My life has always been marked by that, man: Discrimination. Since I was discriminated, I tried, through my actions, to prove to people that they were wrong about me, right?” He takes a moment to think. “My parents taught me what’s right. Maybe that’s how I developed my sense of justice, through always doing what was right.” He was the responsible one among his friends. When they went out at night, he was in charge of the girls in the group. Their mothers trusted him to keep them safe. At eighteen, his father gave him a choice: Either start working in the fields or move out. He chose to move to Rio de Janeiro. But the laidback lifestyle and glossy postcards of Corcovado, Ipanema, and Copacabana were unattainable mirages for people like Nazareth. His first year in the city was tough. Knowing nobody here, he slept on the streets until he found work at a beach kiosk. It earned him the equivalent of 100 dollars a month, not a lot, but enough to rent a small room in a favela. “Now I’m a police officer. I didn’t end up as a criminal. I didn’t end up as a trafficker” he says with badly hidden pride.Footnote 7

As a bachelor in Rio, Nazareth had lived hand-to-mouth. Later, once he was married and his wife got pregnant, he knew that he needed a stable and substantial income to raise his child. With no formal education, few jobs would provide these conditions. However, as a military, he would enjoy the benefits of state employment. After failing the Army's admission test, he passed the public tender of the Military Police. With his new salary, he and his wife were finally able to move out of the favela. They settled in Realengo, a working-class district in Zona Oeste where many police officers live. Even if the neighborhood was far from the beautiful beaches of Rio’s wealthy Zona Sul, this was one of the proudest moments in Nazareth’s life. He was finally able to provide for his own family.

“I wanted action,” he explains. “My idea of the military was the officer that goes to war (distorts his voice), right? I wanted to be in the Air Force or the Army because, pô, I was always watching war movies and such, thinking damn, that is cool, if it was me I would do it differently!” He laughs, looking over at the machine gun leaned against the wall. “And I wanted to join BOPE since I thought that BOPE was the real police, pô.” Nazareth distorts his voice again, recalling his thoughts on the special forces as a fresh recruit: “Ah, the guys from BOPE are good, when you get in its ‘tiro, porrada, e bomba’ [shooting, beating and bombs], right?” But even though Nazareth had been determined to join BOPE, he never made it through the challenging admission tests. Instead, he started working at a regular battalion, and with time he was transferred to Choque (the riot police).

The years in Choque were full of excitement. Around the turn of the millennium, Rio was experiencing a wave of violence. The traffickers stole vehicles that they used to form bondes—convoys with armed men. The convoys transported drugs and weapons, attacked the police, and terrorized the city’s population. The Military Police answered by establishing their own papa bondes—police convoys that hunted trafficker convoys and other criminals across the city. Due to his high level of commitment, Nazareth was hand-picked to join one of these. One particular event from that period has stuck with him to this day. To his memory, it happened a night about thirteen or fourteen years ago, around 2001.

The row of patrol cars—four cars and sixteen men—is slowly driving down one of the roads that separate the favela from the asfalto. The first stars have just appeared on the darkening sky and the police officers are moving through an area where traffickers have recently orchestrated a series of attacks. The young men in the patrol vehicles are focused. They have circled in on this area for a few days now and are thirsty for some action and a story to tell their colleagues at the base. “Where do you think this way leads?” The officer driving the lead vehicle takes a turn to the left, up a road that leads them to the top of a small hill. The other cars follow. As they reach the top and start to drive down the other side of the hill they realize that they are in the middle of the favela. A group of traffickers have gathered in the street. They scatter when they see the police. Meanwhile, the convoy has stopped, and the officers exited the cars to seek cover behind the vehicles. One of them sees a trafficker fleeing. He opens fire. The instant he pulls the trigger the patrol vehicles are showered by a rain of bullets. Some of the men panic. The bullets are whistling through the air right above their heads, and the cars offer poor protection from the powerful weapons wielded by the traffickers: They are trapped. One of the vehicles is parked behind a building and the officers are able to give the rest of the group cover. “Get the hell out of there!” one of them yells. The shooting from the traffickers ceases just long enough to allow the convoy to make a U-turn and escape. The policemen are euphoric. This night will be talked about for years.

The story Nazareth tells is typical of the modus operandi of Rio’s Military Police in the decades following the end of dictatorship. A few weeks after our conversation in Alemão, I assisted a public hearing in Rio de Janeiro’s Legislative Assembly. Organized by the Human Rights Commission, it addressed the working conditions of the police. Former Chief in Command at the Military Police, Coronal Íbis Pereira, one of the police leaders advocating the need for a broad police reform, spoke at the hearing: “We ended up where we are for a reason. […] The Military Police was thrown into the war! We came from one war—during the military dictatorship—a war that had an enemy, the subversive: The young kids who wanted a different and more just society, who wanted a society based on different, more humane principles. So, the police, the judiciary, got thrown into that war in the fifties. We swallowed [the American] National Security doctrine […] and the state’s security apparatus became involved in that political war […]. The moment we left the dictatorship, we entered another war, we adopted this cursed war on drugs. […] So, the enemy changed, the enemy isn’t […] the subversive [anymore], now the enemy is the trafficker, and we have been waging war for thirty years now.”

Historians have noted how in Latin America, the Cold War manifested through US-supported military dictatorships that fought against political activists on the left and national guerrilla groups. Military strategists across the country saw cultural changes such as gender equality (the “feminization” of Western culture) and technological advances leading to a mechanization of warfare as a source of concern. They feared that these changes would weaken the military power of the West. New forms of warfare, (nuclear warfare, technological warfare, psychological warfare, and guerrilla war) were seen as a threat to the traditional masculinity of the military (Cowan 2014). What would happen to the manliness of soldiers now that the times of close combat on the battlefields seemed to be over? What would happen to the traditional art of war when physically strong and hardened soldiers were replaced by technicians and bureaucrats running the war by pushing buttons behind a screen?

The fearmongering in military circles took bizarre forms, including rumors of the development of a death ray, radar guns, death by ultra-sound, and psycho-chemical weapons that would “instantaneously turn an entire army’s soldiers timid or cowardly” (Cowan 2014: 696). Guerrilla warriors were demonized like terrorists are today. They were imagined as lawless communists with no masculinity or honor. Ironically, it turned out to be among guerrilla warriors and their uncompromising focus on the goal rather than the means, that the military found a solution to their concerns. To win the fight against the guerrillas, they would cultivate the same rawness and lust for combat in their own soldiers.

The doctrine of counterinsurgency gathered inspiration from irregular warfare and guerrilla tactics to reaffirm the soldier at the center of modern warfare. It was predicated on a new masculine ideal—that of the elite soldier unbound by physical or moral boundaries. This new form of military masculinity was characterized by resilience, rawness, the willingness to get your hands dirty and the recourse to unrestricted violence. It departed with traditional ideas of civilized warfare and meanings of honor, discipline, and moral integrity. This shift produced a dilemma: How could “western” (i.e. Christian) values be defended through the adoption of the ruthless methods of the enemy—the subversives trying to destroy these values? The solution for this paradox was the creation of an unconventional warrior—an anti-communist New Man—an efficient, physically strong, and hyper-masculine elite soldier with special training in the use of weapons and survival techniques. This New Man should have healthy social activities and be married, in order to secure sexual and emotional stability, avoid sexually transmitted diseases and protect the soldiers against the communist’s sexual propaganda (Cowan 2014: 705). The model was the Spartan warrior: A physically, mentally, and morally perfectioned killing machine who would rather sacrifice his life than let his fellow soldiers down—the kind of soldier embodied in movies such as Rambo.

The cultivation of this new type of soldier emerged from the tension between two ideas about gender: on the one hand, American militaries feared that the feminist fight for equality, sexual freedom, and comfort in modern society would lead to mental and physical decadence among warriors. In the American magazine Military Review, the fear of soldiers becoming too intellectual, turning into pale, powerless “book nerds” was discussed. Western men were becoming too sensitive, intellectual, and refined to defend themselves against the communists’ brutality. In Brazil, this fear was strengthened by conspiracy theories and propaganda spread by military leaders who claimed that communists were distributing medicines that made men sexually impotent. Meanwhile, fetishized ideas about tough and masculine guerrilla warriors flourished among the military in the United States and Brazil. To win the war against communism, Western soldiers had to surpass the guerrilla warriors in every field, including brutality and mercilessness (Cowan 2014).

In Brazil, the ideal of a new anti-communist male materialized in the establishment of the Military Police’s Special Forces. The best known are ROTA in São Paulo and BOPE in Rio de Janeiro. They drew inspiration from the American SWAT teams and are examples of how military doctrine moves across national borders. When dictatorship ended in 1985, BOPE became the spearhead of the state’s war on drugs in Rio’s favelas. They became infamous for their brutal efficiency and ruthlessness; for killing first and asking later; and for being incorruptible. Their warrior status was surrounded by myth. They spread terror in the favelas, but soon achieved a peculiar heroic status among many Brazilians as uncompromising warriors in the fight against drugs and criminality. Among “regular” police officers like Nazareth, BOPE officers were godlike figures who were revered and emulated. They admired their rough, hardened, and lethal manliness: One officer in Alemão once told me about a BOPE officer who had killed “more than a hundred thugs” before proudly adding that he had killed a few thugs as well.

At the Legislative Assembly, Íbis Pereira notes that the 90s was the worst decade for the Military Police when it comes to warfare.Footnote 8 “That was when we got the infamous Wild West-bonus (gratificação faroeste). That madness was the state’s public security policy!” The reward that the Coronel refers to was established by Marcello Alencar, State Governor of Rio de Janeiro from 1995 to 1999. He had been elected on a promise to be tough on crime. Accumulative and given to police officers who engaged in “acts of bravery”, the Wild West-bonus rewarded officers who killed alleged criminals (see also Chapter 4: The Postcard and the Frontline). For every person they killed they received a modest raise on top of their normal salary. The officers at Alemão tell stories of police killing in the dozens. Those still in service have kept their accumulated pay-rise until this day. The most obvious result of this so-called “security policy” was, logically, a dramatic increase in the number of people killed by the police. But another, maybe more unexpected consequence of the arrangement was that it made it less attractive for police officers to accept bribes. As deals between police and criminals collapsed and older crime leaders were killed or arrested, they were replaced by younger traffickers who would recur to violence as a way of asserting their authority to larger extent. The result was an overall increase in violence and unrest across the city (Penglase 2014).

Íbis Pereira’s critique of the system is harsh: “You reap what you sow! What we’re reaping now, is the chaos from the madness we called security politics. It’s necessary to mend this. It’s necessary to modernize the police, to do what we should have done in the 90s, when the democratic institutions were developing and adapting to the new constitution from 1988. But then we started handing out machine guns to 25-year-old kids, throwing them into the favelas to kill and to die. All this time, we have been pushing men and women—government employees—into the favelas to kill and die in vain! Because this is not a war you can win with guns. Since the 30s, when the United States declared the war on drugs, they haven’t succeeded in defeating drugs with bullets, and it will not be here in Brazil that we will make that happen!”

As a result of the police's war on drugs and the war between the drug gangs, violence in Rio increased dramatically through the 90s. In 1995, murder rates reached 62 murders per 100.000 inhabitants—among the world’s highest registered murder rates (Rodrigues 2014). Between 1987 and 2001, the number of youth murdered by guns was nine times higher in Rio than in the conflict between Israel and Palestine (Dowdney 2003: 116). The police contributed to the high death tolls and were increasingly also the target of the traffickers, with a large number of police officers dying both on and off duty. BOPE’s violent operations in the favelas became normalized. During these, suspects were often killed, many of them in ways indicating they had been tortured and executed by the police. This was not the doings of individual police officers, but an institutional practice: Torture techniques were on the curriculum of BOPE’s training courses as late as 2006 (Barros 2015). But whereas BOPE’s practices de-legitimized the police among favela residents, they were broadly supported by people from the asfalto, a result of widespread prejudice towards the favelas and a growing feeling of insecurity. Conservative media outlets roused fear among the Brazilian middle classes (Caldeira 2001). Expressions like “human rights for righteous people” and “a good criminal is a dead criminal” circulated broadly. Surveys carried out by the polling institute Datafolha have found that more than half of the Brazilian population agree with these expressions, showing the pervasiveness of ideologies that see violence as central to the production of social order in Brazil.

But to a lot of people, this rhetoric is seen as dangerous. It is criticized for not being in line with the principles of the democratic rule of law, for reproducing violence, or both. “Security politics can’t be built around confrontations, around warfare,” says Íbis Pereira. “It only produces people who have had their dignity violated. How can you wage war without brutalizing? Do you think it’s easy to place a thirty-year-old boy in an armored truck, open the doors, and throw him into battle? That’s what we do in a war. What can come from that? How could those who emerge out of that not have their sense of humanity violated, mutilated, beaten? We must stop this insane war on drugs! There must be a more rational way to address this problem. Why aren’t we working on prevention? Why aren’t we fighting to save the kids that we lose to drug trafficking instead of reducing the age of criminal responsibility? Instead of giving them up?”

Some leaders in the military police saw a new public security policy as urgent. To them, the UPPs and their emphasis on proximity policing offered a possible solution; an alternative to security policies built around warfare. But they were a minority, and Nazareth and many of his fellow officers across the institutional hierarchy saw the project as their chance to finally confront the traffickers: “Knowing that the dealers were up there in the hillsides and not being able to get them has always bothered the police. So, when the project of occupation begun, we started to enjoy [our job] more.” Nazareth recalls the expectations he held at the onset of the project: “We were motivated because we always wanted that, quote, ‘direct combat’ with those marginais (lit. ‘marginals’; criminals), to really show them the force of the police.” He is searching for the right words: “At the beginning it was very cool. We saw the change in the faces of the residents, right? The calm within the community, the children out on the streets until the early hours of the morning–they started feeling the [pleasures of the good life]. Up until then they were living with the uncertainty, with the lack of security [that came from living with] the drug gangs. Suddenly another [drug] faction would invade; you’d have shootouts and such. Not to mention that they lived under the rules of the drug traffickers, the laws of the drug traffickers.”

Nazareth and the other policemen who worked at the UPPs gradually lost fate in the project. The focus on dialogue, preventive work, and cooperation with local communities bore little resemblance to their vision of police work: “You know, because of the human rights, we aren’t able to do our jobs anymore. Criminals have lost respect for the police, and so have the favela residents.” He tells me about a time when a neighbor had asked him to call the real police. The UPPs, he argues, have no authority. Anderson, who has been listening to Nazareth, joins in: “If we had respect, do you think the bastards would dare turning their back to us and run when they see us?” He snorts. Anderson compares it to the situation in the poor suburbs of Rio, where the UPP project hasn’t been implemented: “The thugs there don’t turn their back to the police! They know that if they do, they’ll get two bullets in their back. Bang bang!” He holds his hand up like it’s a gun and points at me while pretending to fire. Before being transferred to Alemão, Anderson worked in Rocinha under the command of Major Edson, incarcerated following Amarildo’s disappearance. Among police officers, Major Edson has earned a reputation as a brutal and “professional” commander: A trained BOPE officer, Anderson describes him as a man with a strong sense of justice. Edson grew up in a favela and speaks a language that is understood by residents and criminals alike: The language of brute force.Footnote 9 “BOPE is good.” Anderson says. “They have excellent training and do real police work.” I hesitate: “What’s real police work? What’s the job of the police?” Anderson answers without hesitation. “The job of the police is to kill, steal, and destroy.” I must look abashed, because he quickly corrects himself: “To kill the vagabundo (lit. ‘vagrant’; criminal) who steals and destroys.”Footnote 10

“In Rocinha [Major Edson] was fearless,” Anderson says. “He made it clear to everyone there who was the new boss and didn’t hesitate to hand out beatings in front of an audience, in broad daylight. He did it to establish authority. He had fucking morals!” Among the residents, opinions diverged. After a while, it became clear that Edson ran the police like a mob. Under the Major’s leadership, the police extorted money from local businesses, following patterns of the milicias. But Anderson is full of admiration for Edson: “The Major used to go jogging through the favela in the shorts and T-shirt of the military police, unarmed! Imagine that! A commander of the Military Police, jogging through Rio’s biggest favela!”

The Amarildo case became the nail in the coffin for the Major. It was soon clear that he had pressured witnesses from the favela into silence. Nobody believed that Amarildo was still alive, but the question of what had happened to him and his body remained unanswered. The investigation pointed to the involvement of police officers beyond the local UPP. Video files recorded by surveillance cameras in Rocinha on the evening of Amarildo’s disappearance were deleted but then reappeared. They revealed that a group of police officers from BOPE had been at the UPP that night. It had been a calm evening in the favela, and there was no apparent reason for them to be there, but the recordings give the impression that when the officers left, they were transporting something the size of a body in the back of their truck. The GPS tracker of the patrol vehicle they used was turned off that evening.

Conclusion: Militant Masculinity

In this chapter, I have explored the violent dynamics of masculinity in the police. I have described how it is expressed in a devaluing of women as well as in the homosocial relations between men and the hierarchies that emerge in the context of macho bravado. The notions of manhood that emerge from the war in the neighborhoods and streets of Rio de Janeiro are sometimes described as rooted in a violently virile “warrior ethos” (Zaluar 2010; Cano and Duarte 2012; Mourão 2013; Gripp and Zaluar 2017; Sørbøe 2020), other times as expressions of Machado da Silva’s violent sociability. Focusing on the pacification policy as an attempt to direct and control disruptive and transgressive forms of male aggression in accordance with a certain bureaucratic state rationality (for example, through the establishment of legal codes and protocols for action), I have previously analyzed the prevalence of this formation as an expression of the war machine and state dynamics of male violence (see Salem and Larkins 2021: 67).

In Felipe’s story, which is an attempt to reflect the police officer’s view of themselves as fighting the little man’s fight against the system, the heroization of the officer is not related to his sexual prowess or displays of aggression, but in his capacity as family father, husband, provider, and protector. In his study of men who have been sentenced for domestic violence, Marco Martínez-Moreno (2023) notes how certain forms of traditional manhood have become objects of judicial intervention and psychological reform. Martínez-Moreno is preoccupied with understanding why institutional attempts to produce “modern” men fail and locates this failure in the powerful othering effects of “expert knowledge” about subjective formations that do not ascribe to a modern understanding of individual agency. Highlighting how processes of modernization are also gendered, Martínez-Moreno is critical of a lack of reflexivity within anthropology concerning how our discipline is part of a civilizing process that imposes a liberal view of the subject in empirical contexts where personhood is understood differently—in contexts that from a liberal viewpoint are described as patriarchal. He suggests that what is at stake are different understandings of the relation between the (traditional) family and a (modern) rights-bearing individual. While liberalism is characterized by the primacy of the individual, the “illiberal” forms that are scrutinized attribute a primordial role to the family, conceived as a whole formed by the complementary forces of masculine protection and feminine care (see Duarte 1995, 2009). Within this universe, men are expected to show emotional strength (i.e. they are only allowed to express their vulnerability under specific circumstances) and adhere to faith as a path to economic success and moral progress.

As I have shown in this and preceding chapters, while many police officers draw on notions of manhood structured around ideals of strength and virility, others expressed vulnerability and frustration with a social hierarchy (racialized and gendered) that produces a “permanent tension and contention, sometimes verging on the absurd, imposed on every man by the duty to assert his manliness in all circumstances” (Bourdieu 2001: 50).Footnote 11 The demand that is placed on men to hide their vulnerabilities, even in conjugal relations, means that many of them rely on romantic relations outside their family as spaces where they can express their emotions more freely, since showing vulnerability is perceived to put them at risk to possible manipulation by their spouses (Martínez-Moreno 2023). In the ethnography I’ve presented in this chapter, this ambiguity is brought to the fore in the way some of the police officers spoke about their wives.

The proximity between understandings of manhood structured around strength and faith, and an evangelical gospel of prosperity is not a coincidence. It connects notions of manhood among the Brazilian police to the militant masculinity that Kristin Kobes du Mez (2023) observes among white evangelicals in the US, where “It is linked to opposition to gay rights and gun control, to support for harsher punishments for criminals, to justifications for the use of excessive force against black Americans in law enforcement situations, and to traditionalist gender ideology.” Similar to the way masculine formations traveled across Americas militaries during the Cold War, today’s religious and conservative notions of manhood are part of a transnational cultural movement connected to the emergence of the far-right.

According to Kobes du Mez, “[white] evangelicals have pieced together this patchwork of issues, and a nostalgic commitment to rugged, aggressive, militant white masculinity serves as the thread binding them together into a coherent whole. A father’s rule in the home is inextricably linked to heroic leadership on the national stage, and the fate of the nation hinges on both.” Militant masculinity, she writes, “resides at the heart of a larger evangelical identity” and is both personal and politic: “In learning how to be Christian men, evangelicals also learned how to think about sex, guns, war, borders, Muslims, immigrants, the military, foreign policy, and the nation itself.” However, caution should be taken in seeing these masculine formations as the purview of the far-right. In Brazil, Rosana Pinheiro-Machado and Lucia Scalco (2021) have noted how “apparently contradictory political view represented a very coherent worldview that perceived the need for a patriarchal national saviour, and this could be either Lula or Bolsonaro.” This observation brings nuance to a debate around gender that tends to polarize and radicalize positions, even producing the sharp divisions between liberal and authoritarian subjectivities that it claims to describe (cf. Bobbio 2001).

In Brazil, the state has on repeated occasions expressed itself as a religiously anchored police state, and as the ethnography I have presented this far is starting to make redundantly clear is that a militant masculinity has been at the center of these transformations. However, pinning this masculine formation down as a fixed and stable identity would necessarily lead to a simplification and in the following chapter I will look at the violent processes through which gender is produced and reformulated, as well as some of its expressions and effects.