Violent Becomings

Abstract

This chapter explores how violence is reproduced and legitimized through processes of subjective formation that are shaped by the Military Police’s institutional hierarchy as well as the logic of war that characterizes policing in Rio’s favelas. The analysis focuses on how an ethics of individual responsibility and feelings of moral superiority associated with military identity shape the police officers' attribution of poverty to the moral shortcomings of favela residents, precisely because of the sociological proximity between the officers and the people living in the communities that they are set to patrol. It shows how the Christian-conservative moral order that the police officers try to install in the favelas is built around respect for police authority, family values, and religion, and how patriarchal authority in Brazil is exercised through practices of care as well as of force.

Military Hierarchy

The last time I was in Alemão I talked to Caio and Raphael about the relationship between the Commanding Officers (oficiais) and the Patrol Officers (praças) of the Military Police. I wanted to understand where their built-up anger towards the institution comes from. Caio explains: “The Colonels (the highest ranking oficiais) of the Military Police think they're Gods, you see?” I nod. When I visited the Police Academy, I saw how the Colonel in command was treated by the police officers. In the lunchroom everybody had greeted him with a military salute: Before they sat down to eat and as they left the table. It was a strange display of deference, as if the Colonel was an old chief or medieval king (Fig. 6.1).

Fig. 6.1

Police officer in Alemão watching a war movie during his shift, May 2015

“I'm forced to do what I'm told,” Raphael says. “If not, I'll be arrested for breaking the disciplinary code or expelled, thrown out of the police. If the leadership complains, ahhhh, the police officer did this and that, I'll be expelled. What do I do then? Do you know how hard it is for an expelled officer to find work? Nobody will hire you. The only possibility you have, is to become a miliciano (militia; paramilitary)!” For expelled police, the militia-groups are potential employers, a fallback when others fail.¹ Raphael is pointing to a sense of being trapped in a double-bind that many officers experience: They are trained and expected to do irregular and illegal “dirty work” but know that if something goes wrong (e.g. if they kill the “wrong” subject, are exposed by the media, or get caught in institutional power dynamics), they risk punishment. For Raphael, this constant possibility of being sanctioned by his superiors, even as he is doing their bidding, is experienced as hypocrisy: “We're the scapegoats... We are the only group that can never afford to be wrong!”

The Military Police’s disciplinary code of conduct hasn't changed since the dictatorship (Cano and Duarte 2012). The archaic rules are an amusing read if you don't have to follow them yourself: They make the police resemble a nineteenth-century boarding school. Even the minutia of the officer’s private life is regulated in detail. Punishable actions include taking loans beyond their means, frequenting establishments that are not compatible with the status and dignity of their profession, spreading gossip or tendentious news, making immoral gestures or actions, and of course, supporting or participating in collective petitions and protests. “The problem with the military structure in the police is that the orders sometimes come from incompetent people,” Raphael explains. “[The commanding officers] give the order, sometimes because they want it to be followed in a certain way, and they don’t care if you live or die. They call us, the patrol officers, massa de manobra” (lit. “maneuvering mass”)—people who can be used according to the interests of others. “Like we’re a group that they can place wherever they find pertinent, or where it might be necessary. [When] one or two die, they simply grab a new one—two new ones, three more, four more—at the academy as replacement. The commander turns a blank page. To them it means nothing. […] We’re only good for obeying orders.”

Raphael complains about the working conditions at the police: “The way the shifts work give us little time to rest,” he says. “Often, we must cover extra shifts. We get stationed in the worst places, where the risk of dying is constant. If I'm punished for something, or forced to do something just because my commander wants me to do it like that, I can get so angry you wouldn't believe it.” Caio interrupts him. “You can get stationed places where rules are followed to absurd degrees, and you have to be completely within the limits of what they call the standard: Polished boots, spotless uniform. Once, I was arrested for four days because I was caught without my beret in the scorching sun. Forty degrees, and I have to a wear a leather hat! Jesus Christ, come on! Do you get it? I know I'm in the military, but this is the problem with the police: We have no rights, we have no human rights, we have no human worth. The police officers have to act humanely towards people, but the Military Police shows no empathy towards the officers!” Raphael agrees: “The Commanders don't care if the Soldier is having a hard time or if he’s doing okay.”

He mentions a promotion test recently held at the academy: “It was a disgrace. The Colonel wanted to force the officers to complete the tests out in the sun. They were placed in the middle of an open square, with 36–37 degrees [Celsius] and had to sit there from eleven [am] to one [pm] just waiting to start. Then they had to complete the test between one [pm] and five [pm]—all this in the scorching sun!” The test was reported in the news as an example of the inhumane treatment officers are subjected to by their superiors. “Wasn’t there room for them in the shade?” I ask. “Yes! But the Commander didn't want them there. That's exactly what I'm saying: Many officers just don't give a shit.” Caio nods and adds: “At the academy they used to say that quem gosta de praça e pombo (lit. ‘the [only] one who likes a patrol officer, praça means both square and patrol officer, is a pigeon’). I heard the Commanders say it about the patrol officers as a way of making fun of us. Who cares about the Soldiers? Only the pigeons. We're treated like trash” (Fig. 6.2).

Fig. 6.2

The Police Academy in Realengo, July 2015

It’s not just the police officers from Rio who complain about the working conditions at the police. There are regular reports of abuse and psychological torture of recruits across Brazilian police academies. Almost forty percent of the patrol officers in the country’s Military Police forces report having experienced torture during training or in other professional contexts (Lima et al. 2014). An officer from the northwestern province of Ceará recalls how he was treated at the academy: “Sometimes during lunchtime the superiors would scream in my ear that I was a monster, a parasite. It seemed like they were training a dog. The patrol officers are trained to fear their commanding officers, just that. The training was just messing with your emotions, so that the guy would leave the quartel like a pitbull, crazy to bite people. Today, when police officers are trained it seems like they're training a dog for a streetfight” (Barros 2015).

Eduardo Ferreira

March 2015. In the months since I started working here the frequency and intensity of shooting episodes and resistance towards police presence at Alemão and other UPPs have increased ceaselessly. The situation in the pacified favelas makes the front pages every day. Headlines are printed in bold. THE UPPs ARE RETREATING: MILITARY POLICE PRESSURED TO LEAVE BASE IN ALEMÃO; VIOLENCE EXPLODES IN ALEMÃO; AFTER THE RETREAT, A NEW OCCUPATION. A calendar counts the consecutive days with shooting episodes in Alemão: 90, 91, 92, 93. The officers at Alemão tell me that they engage in shooting episodes that evolve into urban battles. At first, these last 3, 4, and 5 hours but soon they extend from the evening through the night and well into the next morning. Battles are concentrated in the area around Canitar where the police have placed containers that are used as “advanced bases in the terrain.” When the traffickers attack the metal containers, the officers are forced to abandon the base and seek refuge in a nearby garage. Gang members torch the containers. The police insist on holding their ground, refusing to retreat: If they give up Canitar, they fear they will be perceived as weak by their enemies. They reason that traffickers will gain self-confidence if they manage to push the police back with violence, making the situation even more challenging. Thus, police leaders decide to establish a curfew in Alemão: After 21.00 there can be no one on the streets.

At the end of the month the offensive starts. On April 1^st the police kill two young men they identify as traffickers and wound a fifteen-year-old boy. A stray bullet kills a woman as officers shoot at a suspect fleeing across the roof of her house. The bullets also wound her fourteen-year-old daughter. On April 2^nd the “Battle for Alemão” (so dubbed by the media) is on its fourth consecutive day. The Special Forces, mainly BOPE and Choque, are contributing with tactical support. Several Tactical Patrol Units comb the favela for enemies. There! Fire! It happens so fast. On the ground lies the lifeless body of Eduardo Jesus Ferreira. The alley floor is tainted red. The scream of a woman cuts through the air: “Eduardo! My son!” She storms towards the police officer who fired at her son. He raises his gun and points it at her. “You can just go ahead and kill me, you have already taken my life!” She shouts at the officer. Neighbors flock around the scene. They witness the police collect the empty shells from the ground.²

In TV news, images of Eduardo and his crying mother are shown repeatedly. Headlines inform us that the police have killed a 10-year-old boy. The officer who fired the shot is arrested while awaiting investigation. According to the papers, he has had a mental breakdown. The case is broadcast internationally. Rio de Janeiro’s Governor promises to “retake” Alemão. Favela activists are in rage: The state’s solution is always more police; more special forces; more BOPE officers. Choque, the riot police, is also summoned. They drive through the streets in armored trucks and build barricades in Canitar. Sandbags and barrels to give cover to the police. The traffickers retreat. They know the rules of the game: This is not the time to fight. Not now, with the whole country watching and the special forces stationed in the favela. There is too much at stake. It’s time for the state’s ritual performance of security through a spectacular show of force, to sustain the illusion that they are addressing the problems in Alemão (see Larkins 2013, 2015) (Fig. 6.3).

Fig. 6.3

Sandbags and barrels at a police post outside a cultural center in Alemão, April 2015

The day after Eduardo is killed, I visit Alemão. I arrive at six in the morning but the gondola doesn't run until eight. At first, the taxi driver agrees to drive me to the UPP, but he changes his mind halfway up the hill and refuses to continue. He suggests that I walk to the top but there’s no way I’m walking through Alemão alone, so I stay in the car until we are back down on the main road, raising my arm against the window to hide my face. There are always police officers at the corner by the road that leads into the favela, and I already know one of the officers stationed there today. He is about to start his shift at the station and is waiting to be picked up by a patrol vehicle that drives us up the hill. Neither one of us feel free to walk through the favela alone. Are we being paranoid, or is the risk real? I realize that I’m starting to think like the officers.

When we get to the station it’s unusually crowded. We have arrived just as one shift gets off, and the other one on. In addition, there are officers from the Special Forces here. They have parked a Caiverão further down the street, and two Choque officers are standing outside the entrance of the UPP. They’re wearing black balaclavas to cover their faces, although by law they must be identifiable. In practice, however, officers frequently hide their identities behind these masks. With some exceptions, I still don't feel like I'm on friendly terms with the officers in Alemão. Most of them ignore me. Right now, I can’t see any familiar faces, which makes me feel uncomfortable and out of place, but I have gotten used to patiently ignoring those feelings. I scan the base for one of the shift leaders to ask for permission to join one of the patrol units. The Sub-Commander is napping after a long night. Meanwhile, the Sergeant in charge offers me a cup of coffee. He’s welcoming and friendly and invites me to his quarters. There’s a group of officers there already. They’re standing in a circle, sipping coffee, and chatting. I don’t know any of them and since I’m tired of being ignored and don’t want to feel that I’m imposing myself, I grab my tiny plastic cup with the black sticky syrup that Latin Americans confuse for coffee and wait in the hallway. After a little while, the Sergeant walks past me again: “Poxa (damn)! Are you standing out here in the hallway alone? Go join the Soldiers!” He introduces me to the group of men. “This is our moment to unwind and relax a little,” he says as he pours me a second cup. The officers are making jokes and laughing. One of them looks at me. “It's a cancer!” He is talking about the traffickers: They keep getting stronger every day. The officers start talking about a colleague who got killed in a shooting episode a few years ago. His family is still waiting for his pension due to the slow bureaucratic process. If you're married your wife gets everything, one of the men says. He knows about a widow who used all the money on herself and left nothing for the officer’s kids, but it is not clear to me if they were her own, or from a different partner. “I'm leaving everything I own to my dad,” he says. He trusts his father more than his wife.

The police officers get ready to leave for patrol and I ask the Sergeant if I can join the patrol unit. He laughs at my request: “What do you want to see? Do you want to see the shootouts?” He tells me to wait for the Lieutenant to wake up.

When he finally wakes, the Lieutenant is less dismissive: “Yes sure,” I'm free to join one of the units. He says that the situation has calmed now that the Special Forces are here. But I need equipment. The police officer at the weaponry greets us with a smile and a handshake. “Find a bulletproof vest for our friend here,” the Lieutenant orders. “Beleza! Are you going out on patrol?” I nod. “Let's see. I'll see if I can find a vest that hasn't been drenched in sweat,” he says while searching for one of the new vests that have just arrived at the base. The vest I get is still wrapped in plastic from the factory. I know that I am getting special treatment: The officers can forget this level of consideration. The Lieutenant asks me if I’m wearing anything underneath my long-sleeved shirt. “A tank-top” I reply. “Wear the vest under your shirt, so that you’re not confused for an officer,” he says.

I receive the keys to an empty room where I can get dressed. A big mirror covers one of the walls, and I can feel my blood rushing with excitement when I look at my reflection. I didn't object to the Lieutenant’s suggestion, but I would rather have kept the vest over my shirt. I notice that I want it to be visible. Despite everything I’ve learned about the Military Police and am well aware that many see them as an extermination squad, wearing a bulletproof vests makes me feel tough and important. It makes me look bigger and bulkier. I feel special, powerful even. It's intoxicating. Is this how the officers feel when they put on their uniform? When they carry their guns?

I join two officers, a man and a woman, in one of the patrol vehicles. The male officer is somber, I assume that my presence makes him uncomfortable, but the female officer, she tells me her name is Vanessa, is enthusiastic and chatty. She has bleached her hair, her lipstick is fluorescent pink, and her nails are painted purple. When she smiles, which is often, a set of braces sparkle in the sunlight. While most of her female colleagues work in the administration, she prefers to work out on the streets. Vanessa has only worked at Alemão a few months. “Don’t you get scared?” I ask, but she shakes her head and says she likes it here. She is Evangelical. Whatever happens, happens because God wants it to. When I ask her why she joined the police, she immediately replies: “Blue blood runs in the veins” (Sangue azul corre nas veias). Jokingly, I ask her whether that means that she’s royal. Vanessa tells me that she’s from a family of police officers. Her grandfather, father, brothers, and now her. She has three sons, the oldest is eleven. They know that she works in Alemão and Vanessa says that they love having a mother who works in the police. She loves it too, despite not getting any “respect” here in Alemão: “We have no value but I love my work all the same. I don't know why but I like it.” She's happy they don't have to use the light blue uniform shirt they use at other UPPs. “It looks like a bus-drivers uniform!” With the dark gray uniform that “regular” police officers wear, the difference between the UPPs and the rest of the police is not as visible. People respect them more when they wear the gray uniform: It gives them more authority

We park by a small market at the end of Rua Joquim de Queiroz, the street that runs through the narrow valley that forms between the hills of Serra da Misericordia. The officers point down the street, towards Areal and Canitar, where most of the fighting take place. “That's the entrance to hell” the male officer says.³ It distinctly does not look like hell, but like a humble and lively neighborhood with small fruit and vegetable stands and an incessant stream of people coming and going. Soon, a police officer approaches our vehicle: “You have to move” he says, nodding at a TV crew filming us from a distance. I immediately feel invaded by a sensation of fear and anger: What if someone in Babilonia sees me sitting inside a patrol vehicle? Don’t the reporters understand that they are putting me in danger? Again, I’m struck by how I am starting to see the world through the eyes of the police officers.

In the afternoon, after I have left Alemão, a group of neighbors gather where we had parked a few hours earlier. They are protesting the UPPs, the death of Eduardo, and the recent increase in violence in the favelas. WE DESERVE TO LIVE WITHOUT THE FEAR OF DYING, one banner reads in big, white letters, painted across black cardboard. The protesters are blocking the traffic on the streets, giving the police the perfect excuse to show them who runs Alemão. They push the protesters back with teargas, pepper spray, and shock grenades. More headlines: “Military Police break up peaceful protest in Complexo do Alemão”. One of the leading commanders of the UPPs is interviewed by the press. Watching him on the TV-screen at the base, the officers at Alemão applaud him when he rhetorically asks: “When will the residents organize a protest against the traffickers?”

The next time I'm in Alemão, Anderson approaches me: “You should have been there, Tomas!” he says enthusiastically. “You really missed something!” He is referring to how the police had repressed and dispersed the crowd. He shows me a picture that was printed in the newspapers. In it, he is him seeking cover behind a street corner while firing teargas at the neighbors. He seems proud and laughs when he shows me another picture of one of his colleagues, showering the crowd with pepper spray. It feels vindictive, like he’s letting me in on a prank.

The Last Slaves of Brazil

I try to digest the impressions from Alemão. In Santa Marta, the situation has also been tense after the brawl between Marcio’s patrol unit and the neighbors during Carnival. I visit the UPP a few days after Eduardo's murder. The papers are still reporting on “the crisis at the UPPs.” Sergeant Wagner has just been transferred to Santa Marta after thirteen years in the police and has been assigned patrol duty at the entrance of the favela with Lucio, whom I have met a few times before. The police officers guarding the access road are stationed there to signal police presence and keep check on the people moving in and out of the community. Since hardly anything happens, such fixed-point patrol duties are characterized by boredom. Time stands still when you have to remain in the same place for 12 hours, under the scorching tropical sun. Wagner is frustrated and starts venting his anger. As a Sergeant, he would normally have earned the right to a more comfortable position, perhaps as a middle-manager at the police station. Annoyed with the leadership at Santa Marta, he accuses the commander of charging bribes from the traffickers in the favela.

When I tell him that I’m studying the working conditions at the police he gets excited. He compares the police forces of Brazil with those of other countries. One of his friends have been to London and has told him the police there only fire 10 shots per year. “Now, that's a place where they have proper laws! If you steal, you get 30 years in jail, and if you're caught stealing again, you're in for life!” He is beyond himself with enthusiasm for the imagined draconian legal system of the UK. “Why don't we just copy that model? The only things we copy from the developed countries are gay parades and drug consumption!” I'm tempted to correct him, or at least let him know that the British police force is normally unarmed, but I desist. I’m more interested in letting Wagner express his worldview without my interruptions. He continues with an impressive display of “alternative facts”: “I've heard that more people have died in Alemão than in Iraq.” While this is factually wrong, the homicide numbers in Brazil are often compared to those of Middle Eastern warfare (as we saw in Chapter 1: Introduction), to the effect of situating urban violence in Brazil within a broader framework of global war (see Salem and Larkins, forthcoming). Wagner's remark might just be an exaggeration of a well known comparison.

He gets particularly agitated when talking about a Brazilian citizen who was recently sentenced to death by an Indonesian court for smuggling drugs. The Brazilian government had intervened on his behalf. “And now Dilma wants him to be pardoned!?” While Wagner sees this as an example of how PT politicians side with criminals, I also see some irony in the government pleading for a convicted Brazilian in Indonesia when alleged criminals are being executed by Brazilian security forces every day—but that’s not what bothers Wagner. He is signaling what he perceives as the moral degradation of Brazilian society, especially during the Workers Party governments and has more examples: He tells me about a woman from São Paulo who killed her family. “In jail, she became a lesbian. Sapatão. A woman who is like a man,” he explains, in case I don’t know what “lesbian” means. She was allowed to get married in prison and now she's sharing a cell with her wife. “Things like that can only happen in Brazil. Absurd things like that, you only see it in Brazil. Absurd!” Wagner and I have distinctly different understandings of what is absurd and what is not. For Wagner, it is inconceivable that the state continues to condone practices that he sees as being at the root of the problem: The loss of family values, traditional gender norms, codes of respectability, and an ethics of work (cf. Bobbio 2001; Messenberg 2019). I recall one of the things Francisco, the police officer from Volta Redonda, had told me during our talk in Alemão a few weeks ago. To him, society—i.e. modern society—is characterized by the “inversion of values” where what is right is wrong and what is wrong is right.

Wagner adds me to a WhatsApp group he administrates were the police officers share information, reporting events, sending jokes, images, and memes. He shows me a picture that he says was taken during the “gay parade” in São Paulo. It shows half-naked men re-enacting the crucifixion of Christ. Wagner finds it shameful. Someone has shared videos from ISIS executions in the Middle East. It shows a prisoner getting blown to pieces with a grenade launcher. I’m not sure if it’s supposed to represent the diabolic cruelty of terrorists or if it is an example of what it means to really be tough on crime. Below the video, Wagner has shared a picture of a police officer in chains. The caption reads “The last slaves of Brazil”. To me, this is certainly a bizarre role-inversion but to the officers, it resonates with their experience of the military hierarchy and draconian disciplinary codes that give the Commanding Officers the possibility to always enforce their power.⁴

Wagner is indignant about “the noise” around the death of Eduardo Ferreira: “His parents gave the media a picture where he looks like an innocent six-year-old! Not like a ten-year-old!” Wagner pulls his phone out of his pocket again, to emphasize what he perceives as hypocrisy in the debate about Ferreira’s death: “Look, these pictures are gathered from his Facebook profile,” he says, and shows me pictures sent to him through WhatsApp. Some of them could pass as real pictures of Ferreira but they show him looking older and with darker skin than the pictures published by the media. Under one of the images, the letters CV are written (short for Commando Vermelho). “This is something else, huh?” the Sergeant says with satisfaction, as if the older-looking ten-year-old with possible ties to the gangs in Rio deserved to die. He scrolls down the screen and shows me more “proof” that Eduardo was not an innocent victim. It's a picture of a young, black boy who does not resemble Eduardo in any other way than the color of his skin and age. He has a joint in his mouth. The caption says: Here in CV, we enjoy the best weed. “Look at this!” Wagner says enthusiastically. “Ten years old, and he already smokes marihuana. Huh?” He is determined to convince me that the media coverage of his death has been farcical and shows me one last image, allegedly also from Facebook. It shows a boy with a cap pulled down over his face. He is holding a rifle in one hand and a revolver in the other. “Well, you can't see his face in this picture but look at the profile picture on Facebook. It's the same in all the images,” Wagner says, pointing to the tiny square in the corner of what looks like a screenshot. For Wagner, this proves that Eduardo Ferreira was probably a trafficker and thus deserved to be killed. While he is unwilling to admit that the police killed an innocent boy, he has a last argument that while it does not exonerate the police, shifts the blame through a racialized logic: “Eduardo's family came from the Northeast” he says: “What are they even doing here [in Rio]?”⁵

The conversation with Wagner makes me feel uncomfortable. My first impulse is to see his reasoning as flawed, cruel, and lacking in empathy. Some of the officers in Alemão have also suggested that Eduardo was a trafficker. But not all of them agree. When I ask Anderson whether he thinks that these claims are justified, he is categorical: “No, that's not true. As far as we know, he was just a ten-year-old boy.” As the days and weeks pass, and new information makes claims about the deservedness of his death untenable, the narrative starts to change. Instead of blaming Eduardo, some officers start arguing that he had accidentally been caught in the middle of a gunfight between traffickers and police. Talking to the mother of one of the police officers at Alemão—I meet her when we stop by the family-run store where she sells military equipment—another rationalization is brought to the fore: How was it that Eduardo’s parents had let their son play outside in the alleys of the favela? Didn’t they know that they were living in a war zone? She tells me that they are supporting the officer under investigation with legal counseling and a lawyer. Eventually, the investigation (carried out by the police) concludes that it was not the police who shot him—he was hit by a bullet from a trafficker.

After showing me the pictures, Wagner asks me: “Don't you find it infuriating?” He is referring to the perceived injustice committed against the police. I nod. “Then try imagining what it would feel like if you had been hit by a bullet in the head.” He removes his dark blue beret, revealing a long scar that starts just behind his left ear, runs across his head, and ends just above his right eyebrow. The upper part of his forehead has a sunken cavity where only a few strands of hair are left. It looks like someone has bashed his head with a sledgehammer. “The doings of a boy from the Red Command” he says. He was shot during patrol in Manguinhos and spent three months in a coma, barely surviving. Pieces of his skull are missing and he shows me a small scar at the back of his head, where the surgeon had drained blood from his brain to relieve the pressure. “Guess how many stitches I have.” I take a wild guess. “Fifty?” Wagner looks over at Lucio who has heard the story before. “Three hundred,” Lucio says (Fig. 6.4).

Fig. 6.4

Wagner shows the scars from the wounds he sustained when he was shot, April 2015

Wagner spent nine months at the hospital. “I’ve been shot many times. This was two years earlier.” He points at his left arm and right foot. “And you still work at the police? What does your wife say? Do you have a wife?” “Wife and two children,” he replies. She doesn't like it but after so many years in the force he does not feel like he has many other alternatives: “The police is like a prison.” The working hours make it impossible for him to study. I asked if he could not retire and receive a pension after nearly dying at work. “Ha! While I was at the hospital, they pulled my risk bonus, which is part of my pay. Just when I needed more money to cover the expenses for medicines.” Officers who patrol in “risky areas” earn a monthly extra of 350 reais, around 10% of their salary. Since Wagner was not patrolling but at the hospital, he was not “at risk” and therefore, not entitled to the extra pay.

While we are chatting, a police officer approaches us. Ignoring me, he greets Wagner and Lucio and asks them for directions to the local battalion. Wagner nudges at me with his elbow and points to the seal that is sewn onto the uniform shoulder. “He's from Alemão,” he says, and asks the officer how the situation is there. The police have killed six people there in the last week, he says. He killed a criminal too, and now the leadership has stripped him of his gun. “There you go,” Wagner says to me, he has just complained about the cumbersome bureaucracy surrounding gun use. The officer from Alemão is eager to tell us how he killed the trafficker: “Normally, the traffickers send out neighbors to see if the coast is clear, but that day we were hiding in a narrow side-alley.” They had managed to remain hidden and when two armed traffickers came walking down the street a little later, they killed one of them while the other one got away. From his account, it sounds like an execution rather than “death following resistance” (which was the legal frame of reference that attributes the police the right to kill in 2015).⁶ He explains that while they were at the hospital to get the death certificate the victim’s family had arrived. They wanted to talk to the police officer who had shot their son. “I had no interest in talking to them!” the officer says. “I'm a target for retaliations now!” He says that he was shot in Alemão once, in February. The bullet had hit his finger and then his face, right above the lip. It stopped in the bone of his upper jaw and the doctor had stitched the wound together from the inside of his upper lip so that it didn’t leave a scar. I realize that he’s the officer who was shot on my first visit to Alemão.

In narratives of police victimization, the morale is that experiences with the traficantes as well as the police bureaucracy justify the police officers' rage. In other words, Wagner’s call for harsher sentences, the death penalty, or the legitimation of the police’s killing of Eduardo Ferreira relied on the construction of police officers as a vulnerable subject exposed to multiple injustices—as heroes fighting ruthless (albeit teenage) criminals and a Kafkaesque bureaucratic system. Therefore, the officer who had killed the trafficker in Alemão and the one who killed Eduardo were the real victims: Suffering the sentencing of society; of institutional bureaucracy; and finally, of the courts—after risking their lives in the fight for good. None of these beliefs were warranted, considering the substantial support for hard-handed security policies among the Brazilian public, an institution that generally rewards or protect officers who kill, and a judicial system that hardly ever convicts police officers for misconduct or unlawful executions (see Misse et al. 2015).

A small group of people in their twenties cross the street and come towards us. They are holding posters above their heads with ABRAÇOS GRATIS (free hugs) written on them. I look over at Wagner and our eyes meet. In a split second, I get the hunch that what I should be thinking right now is Oh my god, what a bunch of hippies and gays. The group skids around the plaza where we’re standing, handing out hugs and small pieces of chocolate to the people around us. One of the girls looks at us. It seems like she hesitates but then she approaches us with a few of the persons from the group. They give us a piece of chocolate each and two of the girls hug us and wish us a Happy Easter. A third girl is carrying a small basket with paper strips, and we're encouraged to take one each. They have short inspirational quotes written on them. I look at Wagner and Lucio. They're smiling. I think they enjoy this small act of kindness. Lucio wants to know what's on my paper strip. He complains that the quote on his strip was too short, but he likes it anyway. “I'll keep this” he says and puts it in his shirt pocket. The chocolate makes me thirsty. Or maybe it's the heat? “Do you want something to drink?” I ask the officers and buy us a big bottle of cold water from the street vendor on the corner. I've also got some fruit in my backpack that I bought on the way here. Wagner seems pleased: “Look at this guy!” he says to Lucio, and nods at me. “This is a good man. Offering us a drink; some fruit! You know, we're standing here all day, but can you believe it, nobody offers us anything. Not even a glass of water.”

Police Moralism

It's early in the morning. Babilonia is about to come back to life. An elderly, black woman with gray hair tied in a tight knot slowly walks down the main alley. She uses a stick and drags an aluminum shopping cart behind her. By the corner, where the traffickers usually sell drugs, a group of eight police officers who have just started their shift have gathered. As the woman passes them, she greets them: “You're new here, aren't you? Welcome to you all. We want you to be here so that this unease can end soon.” The officers gather around the woman. I can tell that they are flattered.

In the weeks following the death of Eduardo a strange calm settles in Alemão. The State Secretary of Public Security has promised to increase support to the UPPs. The drug traffickers have pulled out and the Special Forces are stationed in the favela, allegedly until the situation is brought under control, whatever that means. The governor has promised that Alemão will be “re-occupied.” The police are building bulletproof checkpoints—small towers with tiny slits, broad enough for the muzzle of a gun, like those found in old castles. The officers at the base are scheduled for a week of “recycling”: Training with the Special Forces. At the three UPPs with the highest conflict levels of Complexo do Alemão more than 900 officers are stationed. They will be trained in groups of 70–80 officers, and it will take a few months to get everyone through the recycling.

The officers blow off these efforts as a show for the gallery. Daví doesn’t leave room for any doubt about his opinon: “Everything will continue as before. People will continue to get killed. If you look at our history… Two hundred years of history, and so much blood spilt. And now we're going to spend millions on the Olympic Games! They should invest the money in healthcare and education. Not waste it on sports.” Daví is a big man. He’s built like a bodybuilder and wears a uniform shirt that seems at least one size too small for him. It's tight in all the right places. His broad jaw and muscular neck, the way he carries his body—nonchalantly, always leaning slightly backwards—reminds me of Sylvester Stallone. His hair is trimmed short in a buzz-cut, like a soccer star. A big tattoo covers his left upper arm. It shows the guardian saint of the military, São Jorge, riding a horse and sticking a spear into a fire-breathing dragon. I've seen Daví prowl around at the base on many occasions but have always thought of him as unapproachable and maybe not that bright. But now that we're talking I find him to be sharp and witty.

Daví is indignant with the incompetence and corruption in politics. “I'm no sociologist. I'm just a police officer, but a country that's led by big landowners can never work!” The other officers nod in agreement. Brazil's biggest problem is the nepotism of those in power. Daví nods in the direction of the container base. “The company that rents us that container is owned by the wife of the State Secretary of Security.” He snorts. The military, on the other hand, are honest! “When there's money left from military construction projects, they transfer it back to the state,” Daví says, as proof of the moral integrity of the Armed Forces.

“Here in Alemão, the politicians built a white elephant: A big building that's unused and half-finished. Millions thrown out the window.” Daví and the officers want to take me there, so that I too can be appalled by the monumental waste of public funds. On our way we pass by an overgrown motocross court. Daví points at an old and decayed concrete table. “This is where Tim Lopes was executed.” The journalist Tim Lopes had been working on a case about the traffickers in Alemão. They executed him when they discovered that he was recording them with a hidden camera. The officers say he only had himself to blame. From the motocross court we continue towards the white elephant. It’s a huge, lifeless concrete structure, surrounded by forest. In a corner of the building, a horse is chewing some hay. We walk past the structure and into the forest. “Think of all the bodies that are buried here,” Daví says, painting a brutal image of the rule of terror imposed by the drug traffickers in Alemão. He shows me a couple of big boulders at a rocky outcrop with views to the surrounding neighborhoods. “This is where the traffickers used to throw their victims in the microwave.” The microwave is the name of one of the most macabre execution methods employed by the factions. The victim's body, dead or alive, is placed inside several car tires and burned. Faint black marks are still visible between the boulders—a testament to the evil that inhabits the geography of Alemão according to the worldview of some officers (Fig. 6.5).

Fig. 6.5

Police officers by the “white elephant” in Alemão. On the light post, the initials of Comando Vermelho in red

Daví knows that the residents of Alemão are skeptical of the police despite the brutality of the traffickers. “Some people hate us, and of course they do: Our job is mainly repressive. Nobody likes being stopped and searched by the police.” Evandro interrupts him: “When I first came here I wanted to help out, I wanted to make a change. But now I have given up. I’m tired of the favela and of the favelado.” He scoffs: “To be honest, I don’t understand why so many tourists come here to see the favela. I swear, when I leave the police, I will never set my foot in a favela again in my life!” Daví agrees: “The favelado has no reason to complain. He chooses to live in a pile of rubbish because it’s cheap. He decides to live in the middle of the shootouts.” He raises his voice. “Afterwards everybody complains when a child is killed. Damn, it’s a war! People are going to get killed!” Evandro interrupts him “I don’t understand what is going through the head of the people that live in this favela. […] The people that live here prefer the sacanada (indecency)!” “People? I don’t know if they can be called people…” Daví rebuts.

“The majority of society sees us as wrongdoers,” Evandro explains. “If the police stop and search a guy on a motorbike, the neighbors will immediately start to yell: He lives here, he lives here—he’s a worker!” Evandro makes a mocking voice when he imitates the neighbors from the favelas. “Worker, worker!” Daví interrupts him: “I am a worker as well! But society doesn’t see me as a worker, but as a prejudicador (wrongdoer; someone harmful who injures or impedes)! I get up early in the morning while most people are still sleeping to protect their families, so that they can walk these streets in peace and quiet. My family is left back at home, while I risk my life to protect the families of others. Do you think I expect their recognition? I don't. Because the policeman has no value in the eyes of society, you see? I don't expect their recognition. The only ones who see my worth are my family. My wife, who wakes up thinking my husband is at work guaranteeing the safety of many families.” Evandro says that his father used to work in the police. “When he was an officer, the police enjoyed more respect. Now, the politicians have given the criminals human rights, but they don't understand that the police officer is also a human being. We are also a part of society. Human rights were promoted to reduce lethality. Now the number of killed criminals have been reduced, while the number of killed policemen have increased!”⁷

Evandro's wife works as a street sweeper. I've been told that they are among the most respected workers in Rio as their job is to keep the public spaces clean, but Evandro disagrees. “The only time people notice the street sweepers is when the streets are dirty.” His wife tells him that she feels insignificant at work. The orange uniform they wear makes her feel invisible. He compares it to the police uniform, which makes you very visible. But even if the police are visible people don't like having them around, apart from when they need them: “People only remember God and the police in times of need.”

I ask the officers what they think it would take for the resident’s attitude towards the police to change. Daví answers without hesitation: “The [social] projects, you know? Just that it’s very complicated, you know? The terrain doesn’t help, and then you have the decades of repression by drug trafficking and the culture where the trafficker is the hero.⁸ You see that the music in Brazil is permissive with what we call the MC’s [funk rappers], the funkeros, letting them sing funk vindicating drug trafficking, vindicating crime, vindicating violence, presenting the traffickers as heroes. Within the communities many of them are considered heroes. So as long as they, the residents here and the MC’s, as long as all of them keep spreading the idea that the trafficker is the hero I will be the villain in the eyes of everybody here, and nobody will help me catch those guys. Nobody. That’s it.”

I remember something I read in the papers. The leaders of the police have said they'll allow the inhabitants of the favela to organize funk parties again. The parties are forbidden in pacified favelas—they're seen as celebrations of the culture of trafficking. Prior to pacification the funk parties were important arenas where traffickers asserted their power and status. They would often appear heavily armed at the parties, selling drugs and offering free alcohol. But the parties weren't just arenas for drug use and the display of weapons, they were also expressions of the rich cultural and musical life of the favelas. “Are you going to allow funk parties in Alemão?” I ask Davi. “They say that in the newspapers, but we are the ones who decide here. Not even Jesus can go against us.” Evandro is even more explicit: “The new dono do morro (owner of the hill) is the UPP!”⁹

The sun has gone down, and we're drinking warm Coke from thin plastic cups. A couple of neighbors walk by. They greet Evandro as they pass. “That is nice! Saying good evening to people.” Davi disagrees. “I think it’s dangerous. You get too mixed up with the residents.” He nods in the direction of the soccer field further down the hill. “That over there is the limit between those who support the police and those who support the gansos [thugs].” Then he points to the other side. “Over here people are sausage water.” I ask him what he means. Daví laughs. “Sausage water? That they’re useless. We throw the sausage water out. It means that they can’t be used for a damn shit!”

On our way back to the base, Leonardo, one of the soldiers who had remained silent during the conversation with Daví and Evandro approaches me: “To be honest with you, not all people here are bad, there are a lot of people that don’t support the traffickers.” Leonardo is black and tells me he grew up in a favela. He has lost many friends to drug trafficking. Seventeen, to be precise. Some of them were killed by the police, many were killed by other gang members. But he assures me that most of the people who live here are cidadãos de bem—good citizens. “They want the police to succeed, and the reason they don’t talk to us is because they don’t trust us and are afraid that they will be punished by the traffickers. Sometimes people whisper to me when I pass: For heaven's sake, don't leave us alone!” I ask him how he relates to the residents here. “There are good people and bad people. The good people I treat well” he says and adds: “Favela residents don’t want to live with young kids firing their guns around, imposing their will! They don’t want to have bullets flying through the air. They want to invite their friends and family home without them being scared [to come] because they live in a favela.”

Like Leonardo, many police officers have a nuanced image of the people living in the favelas but might still adhere to a conservative worldview concerned with a perceived loss of family values and gender norms: “The problem is not the favelas. The problem is the moral decay of society,” Leonardo says. He uses laws against discrimination based on sexual identity as an example: “The law must treat everyone equally! I don't demand special treatment for being straight. Neither should homosexuals!” He finds it deplorable that the government wants to teach little children that men sleeping with men are just as normal as men sleeping with women. In this context, Leonardo and many of his colleagues see it as their responsibility to reaffirm an ethics of gender and sexual decency. These moralizing pretensions on behalf of the police must be understood in relation to the historical role of the militaries of Latin America, who have traditionally seen themselves as the repositories of a Christian-conservative moral order of their nations (see Chapter 5: Police Masculinities).

The police officers have gathered around the little kitchenette in the common room—that is, if you could call the run-down refrigerator and microwave a kitchenette. The news are on and the officer’s attention is focused on a short clip of two policemen sitting in a patrol car. They are filming each other while caressing their machine guns, making jokes about how they will soon get a chance to kill criminals. The reporter is harsh in his critique of the police, and the officers start jeering at the screen. I feel like observed and try to look as appalled as the rest. Daví shouts at me from the other side of the room: “Don't believe a word they're saying!” He is laughing, and I laugh along. Then I turn away from the TV, pretending that I’m already bored by the lies and public battering of the police. The next segment is also about the police, but this time, they are portrayed as victims: A police officer in civilian clothes has been shot at a bar in Rio’s suburbs when a gang member identified him as an officer. The room turns quiet when the reporter explains that the he was a regular at the bar and had left his gun in the car at the time of the attack. “He forgot that he's a police officer!” Daví exclaims, shaking his head. “Fuck! You must always carry your gun with you!”

Emotions

There's a Brazilian TV show on at the police station in Alemão. Two neatly groomed hosts interview a group of teenagers. The boys and girls are part of a dance company from one of the favelas in Rio. They are performing a choreographed dance and are excellent dancers. I don’t want to show too much interest, and try to remain expressionless, maybe even a bit contemptuous of the sensual movements of the young girls and effeminate boys performing on the screen. It's challenging to keep up the angry and disgusted look for a long time.

The peace in Alemão gradually ends and a new wave of violence begins. It starts quietly. We hear a few shots fired in the distance. Pop pop pop. Days pass without much more happening. Then somebody fires at the UPP. Just two, maybe three shots—likely from a handheld gun, seeing as the bullets apparently don't pierce the walls like the bullets from the machine guns do, but ricochet off the aluminum blinds that cover the facade. The sound is loud, sharp, close—like that of a shattering window or metal slamming against metal. We put our bulletproof vests on even though we are indoors.

One morning I arrive to find three Civil Police vehicles parked outside the base. It's the first time I’ve seen police detectives from Rio’s investigative police in Alemão. Something out of the ordinary must have happened. I sneak past the cars blocking the main entrance. Inside the common room things are quiet. I greet a few officers and find Felipe and Anderson sitting out on the balcony. “Has something happened?” I ask. “Yes.” Anderson looks somber. Then Felipe turns towards me and explains that one of the officers at the UPP was shot a few days ago. He had worn his bulletproof vest, but the bullet entered from the side. It destroyed his organs, from the hip to the chest. For the last couple of days, he has been in intensive care at the hospital. The officers have just been told that he has passed. I feel out of place and don’t want to be intrusive, so I ask the officers if I should return another day. But Anderson tells me to stay. It's the second Soldier who has been killed on patrol in Alemão since he came here but other colleagues have been killed off duty. “Just in the group that took the diploma with me five people have died. It's a terrible feeling,” Anderson says. “Where do you see something like that? Only in a war!”

The feeling of being constantly under siege—from criminals, neighbors, media, and higher-ranking officers makes the police feel a strong sense of community and belonging. They describe themselves as a family—the blue family. “What happens to your colleagues, affects you a lot” Anderson says. “It's like it's happening to you.” Felipe nods: “When a colleague dies, it's like a family member has died. When a colleague is treated unfairly, you feel like it's happening to you as well. You end up with a lot of anger.” “Being a police officer in Brazil is hard. Nobody likes us. The Military Police has a violent and corrupt history,” Anderson explains. When you work in the police force, people will see you in that light, even if you are different: “I've never stolen, I've never taken money from anyone, ever… What do I know, I've never done anything bad to anyone, I've never been involved with drug traffickers. Nada—nothing,” he adds. But the people who see you on the street might think you're a crook, that you're corrupt. The police can't do wonders when the rest of society won't contribute.” The officers say that it's not just the Military Police that has to change for things to get better in Brazil: “The politicians must change our legal system.” “How?” I ask. “We should have lifetime [sentences], we should have the death penalty,” Felipe ventures. “And castration of rapists, and lowering the criminal age,” Anderson adds. “Right now, minors can do as they please.” The men have a long list of suggestions: Stricter punishments, more money to the police, better guns, and better training of recruits. The officers mention Bolsonaro. Again, I’m told that he’s the only politician who supports them. “And racial equality! Today, there is no race equality” Felipe exclaims. I nod. Finally, something I can agree with. But racial equality means something else to Felipe: “As things are now, there are people who get special treatment for being black or homosexual” (Fig. 6.6).

Fig. 6.6

Pictures of colleagues that have been killed hang on the wall at the UPP in Mangueira

In Babilonia, the atmosphere is tense. Some nights we are awakened by gunshots, or maybe firecrackers—it's hard to tell which is which. During the day, police officers are increasingly patrolling the alleys in tactical formation. It’s strange to experience the patrols from “the other side” for a change. I thought I had rid myself of the fear of guns—I've seen so many of them and I have normalized the presence of heavily armed police officers in the neighborhood. But one evening when I’m walking Violeta I suddenly find myself facing the barrel of a machine gun as I round a corner. The officer is pointing his gun directly at my chest. I get an adrenaline rush and gasp for air but keep my cool, act like nothing, and continue down the street at a firm pace, eyes on the ground. I’m still shaky when I get home to Javier. He told me that the police had walked across the small square at the entrance of the favela with their weapons pointing everywhere. He had seen them aim a machine guns at a woman standing in the window of her apartment: “I'm a citizen!” she had shouted at the police. “I pay my taxes like everyone else!”

Conclusion: The Slave–Soldier

There is both a deterritorialization and a becoming proper to the war machine; the special body, in particular the slave-infidel-foreigner, is the one who becomes a soldier and believer while remaining deterritorialized in relation to the lineages and the State. You have to be born an infidel to become a believer; you have to be born a slave to become a soldier. Specific schools or institutions are needed for this purpose: The special body is an invention proper to the war machine, which States always utilize, adapting it so totally to their own ends that it becomes unrecognizable, or restituting it in bureaucratic staff form, or in the technocratic form of very special bodies, or in “esprit de corps” that serve the State as much as they resist it, or among the commissars who double the State as much as they serve it. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987 [1980]: 393)

In this chapter, I have explored how violence is reproduced and legitimized through processes of subjective formation within the Military Police’s institutional hierarchy as well as the logic of war that characterize policing in Rio’s favelas. Elsewhere, I have described these processes through the Deleuzian notion of becoming, a notion that troubles the victim-victimizer category by highlighting the open-endedness and indeterminacy of subjective formations, including police identities (see Salem 2016). Deleuze and Guattari argue that a process of violent becoming is characteristic of both war machines and the state’s tentative appropriations. War machines require a special body, they write, namely the body of the slave-infidel-foreigner, which is a body that has been violated, is external to the state order and deterritorialized. Violent deterritorializations and reterritorializations, exercised upon these bodies, forcibly codes and transforms them into subjects of the state.¹⁰ This understanding of military identity as a subjective formation both external and integral to the state, might also explain the shared logics across group boundaries (i.e. traffickers, paramilitaries, and police). As we saw in the conversation between Caio and Raphael at the beginning of the chapter, the boundaries between police and militias are characterized by a porous boundary, and so are those between the police and the traffickers, who albeit their relation of animosity are shaped by the logics of violent sociability.

It has been puzzling to me how the police officer’s disdain for elites seldom translates to solidarity with the poor, who are often described with similar contempt. Most of the officers I have talked to reject social and economic explanations for crime and poverty in favor of moralizing narratives that stress the personal responsibility of the poor for their predicaments. Crime and poverty are almost without exception understood as a product of the lack of ethics and self-discipline among the black and poor, even when the legacy of Brazil's racial history is acknowledged. Often, the officers at the UPPs describe themselves as lixeiros sociais (social garbage collectors). They claim that they must deal with everything bad and rotten in society (see Albernaz 2015): Drug dealing, theft, assault, domestic problems, child abuse—often in contexts marked by poverty and violence. One of the psychologists of the police explained their line of thinking: “The police officers see citizens as rotten and violent. When they can, they try to bribe the police, but when the police make a mistake, they want the officers to be punished and they don't want to understand the context the policemen are operating within. But the policeman sees himself as separate from all that, right? He sees the entire social structure as a terrible thing, and himself as the guy who is forced to live in the middle of it, without being responsible for any of it. He doesn't take much responsibility for the social structure he is part of.”

In psychological terms, the police’s contempt of favela residents could also be seen as a “narcissism of small differences” whereby groups that are sociologically proximate develop strong sentiments of antipathy towards each other (see Freud 2014 [1921]). If we take the officers' worldview into account, we find that the fact that many of the officers themselves share a similar socioeconomic background as the people living in the communities they patrol is often used to support understandings of poverty and crime as the result of a weakness of character; as a moral flaw. There are clear religious undertones to these interpretations, which draw on an ethos of individual responsibility advocated by the evangelical churches (Birman 2019).

We have seen how the militarised hierarchy and approach to policing, i.e. the understanding of policing as warfare, produces a polarized worldview where social differences between military police and civilians are exaggerated—what Bateson 2006 refers to as schismogenesis—categorizing people as either friends or enemies. There is a constructed divide between military and civilian, and within this military universe, civilians are “the others” against which the police officers’ structure their identity (Castro and Leirener 2009; Cano and Duarte 2012).¹¹ This is the “us and them” of nationalism, political opposition, and xenophobia—characterized by the gratifying euphoria of belonging to a “superior” group and the disdain towards “the others” as a fundamental relational dynamic (Elias and Scotson 1994 [1965]). Among police officers, feelings of anger and resentment for not being recognized as heroes translate into hate towards a broadly defined public, nurturing and nurtured by far-right political opportunists—like Bolsonaro and his sons (see Shoshan 2014). Throughout the chapter, I have also highlighted some of the feelings and emotions that structure the police officers’ everyday experiences of war: Fear, paranoia, anger, and frustration, but also intoxicating feelings of excitement, power, and belonging—often referred to as esprit du corps, and of a sense of moral superiority in relation to the civilian population (see Castro and Leirener 2009; Cano and Duarte 2012). These are common characteristics of military identity and show the generative dimension of the simultaneously de-subjectifying and identity-producing effect of the institutional hierarchy (see Salem 2016: 50–51). On a cognitive level, this militarization of the mind prepares the police officer to exercise state violence on a massive scale—as just, necessary, or acceptable.

The salience of war machine dynamics at the UPPs was brought to the fore in the murder of Eduardo Ferreira. The changing narrative around his death can, on the one hand, be understood as attempts to address the cognitive dissonance that results when world-shattering events, like the death of a 10-year-old boy, occur—especially within the institution. In these cases, where the narrative of a professional and brutally efficient police fighting a heroic battle against evil becomes impossible to sustain, blaming the victim (i.e. he shouldn’t be playing on the streets of a warzone) is a way to evade the crisis that can follow when the world can no longer be organized around the dichotomy of absolute good and absolute evil. On the other hand, on a larger scale it is an attempt to protect the institutional image and a corporate identity, where the mistakes of one officer reflect poorly on the police, and importantly, where events like Eduardo’s death or Amarildo’s disappearance challenge the state’s legitimacy in the eyes of the population, and especially the favela population. The protest against the UPPs in Alemão and the police’s violent response is also indicative of this dynamic, which is reproduced through a series of institutionalized practices of the police and judiciary that have made the conviction of police officers who kill an extremely rare event (see Misse et al. 2015).

While many officers, like Evandro, claim that attempts to reduce police lethality will expose them to more violence, hard-handed policing practices, and especially those organized around the logics of warfare and elimination (Deleuzian deterritorializations), also tend to increase the rate of police deaths and victimization (cf. Cano et al. 2012). Nonetheless, and as I will show in Chapters 6 and 7, in contexts characterized by the prevalence of armed confrontation, aggression is understood as imperative. The relation between the use of violence, the assertion of authority, and the demand for respect characteristic of Machado da Silva’s violent sociability, or the warrior ethos (Zaluar 2010), was expressed in a saying among police officers that the police is only respected for the harm it can do. They claimed that with the UPPs, gang members and residents alike had lost their former respect for the police—an understanding reflected in the rejection of the blue “bus-driver’s” uniform (see Chapter 5: Police Masculinities). Most police officers claimed that the only way to fight crime was with “pau no lombo, sem masagem” (physical violence; lit. “rod to the back, with no massage”): Only through the sovereign logic of pure force could the police achieve respect from criminals and residents.

As both gay and intellectual I have, for obvious reasons, been particularly sensitive to the deep contempt officers express towards homosexuals, intellectual elites, politicians, businessmen, and journalists, whom they claim oppose the police and defend criminals every time they problematize police violence and corruption, which is often. I have wondered why they have such strong feelings of anger, disgust, and fear towards the so-called “gender ideology.” One explanation would be to signal how queer subjectivities trouble traditional gender hierarchies, de-naturalizing heteropatriarchy. This would not be entirely wrong. However, the police officers do not seem to feel that their manhood is threatened by the existence of queer subjectivities. Rather, they argue that “gender ideology” is being imposed on them by a patronizing elite of intellectuals and see it as an attack on a “natural and harmonic social order” structured around the nuclear family and “guaranteed by virile family fathers responsible for the sustenance of obedient wives and children” (Lynch and Cassimiro 2022: 155).¹² Their articulation of the critique around the notion of family values should lead us to ask why the potential dissolution of the nuclear family is seen as such a threat.

Without the family, what is left is just an atomized, individual subject. Such a subject is at a greater risk of being influenced by forces of evil. Thus, the family is seen as stabilizing and anchoring the subject in Christian morality. If the family is dissolved, the subjects that rely on the guidance that family fathers provide might get lost: They might become drug traffickers or give in to excesses in various forms (drugs, sex, alcohol) that corrupt the soul and creates addictions. Likewise, Brazilian hedonism (which comes into full fruition during Carnival celebrations), articulated in the notion of sacanagem is also perceived as a threat and potential corruption of the soul. The family, and particularly the family father as an example of the Foucauldian pastoral power, is responsible for instilling the right values in their children. Nothing less than the Nation’s moral order is at stake in the proper disciplining and education of children within stable and hierarchical nuclear families (see Duarte 1995). Children who lack proper guidance are referred to as “seeds of evil” (semente do mal) by the police. These are subjects without discipline and morals and a threat to the social order and must therefore be guided down the right path from an early age. In the eyes of the police, the presence of police officers in marginalized communities will give the children growing up there healthy role models to follow.

Through the conversations that the police officers had about the people who lived in the favelas, we see the contours of an emergent moral order—a police order—centered around respect for police authority, family values, and religion (see Albernaz 2020). The social projects at the UPPs were perceived as key to the implementation of this order. They should be seen as territorializations that sought to transform favela subjectivities through practices of care that sometimes included sports and leisure activities such as jiu-jitsu lessons, gymnastics, excursions and debutant balls; handing out food baskets to community members; the provision of services such as free dental treatments or student tuitions; conflict mediation to settle minor disputes between residents; and community events like block parties and Christmas and Easter celebrations organized by the police. These were effective ways of enrolling people within a state order where the police's role is not just repressive, but where they also act as benefactors, and reflects how patriarchal authority in Brazil is exercised around practices of care as well as force (I will return to the ways in which the social projects were also insidious forms of militarization that sought to gather intelligence and gain allies in the war on drugs in the next chapter) (Pinheiro-Machado and Scalco 2021). The continuity or complementarity between force and care is also brought together in popular notions of the traditional family and expresses a notion of personhood that diverges from that of the individualized rights-bearing subject of Western modernity (see Duarte 1995, 2009; Martínez-Moreno 2023). At the UPPs (which I have described as a modernization of the police), it produced an ambiguity, dilemma, or contradiction that is at the center of Bruce Kapferer and Bjørn Enge Bertelsen’s (2009) analysis of state violence and of what they refer to as the enduring crisis of the modern state: How can modern states exercise violent power without challenging their own legitimacy? In the following chapter, I will explore the micro dynamics through which the reformists within the institution tried to address this dilemma through the transformation of officers into a modern police force respectful of human rights, and the resistance to these attempts.