It's Saturday night. I've been out drinking beer with a group of friends. It’s about an hour past midnight when I walk home through the favela alleys. The guys from the “business” are gathered by the boca. Some of them are sitting in the stairs, others stand in the alley. To get past them I must walk through the group. I lower my gaze in submission, taking care to avoid looking them in the eyes. As I pass, one of the guys points at me. “He’s a Civil Police.” I let out a short laugh and feign calm, as if what he's saying is ridiculous. Shaking my  index finger from side to side, I reply. “No, I'm not.” The guys speak in fast paced slang. Did I misunderstand him? But then I hear one of them mention Alemão. Maybe they have seen me there? A friend once warned me: “If you've been with the police in Alemão the traffickers will definitely have taken your picture.” Was he right? Is there a picture of me circulating on some drug trafficker WhatsApp group? João is there as well. He's standing a few steps further up the stairs and is talking to one of the teenagers. I've rarely been happier to see him and greet him effusively, making it clear to the rest that we are good friends. The next morning, I ask him if he had heard any mention of my relation to the police. Both him and Hugo laugh it off. “I think you're getting paranoid” Hugo says, making me doubt myself even more. I'm certain I heard the words Civil Police and Alemão but maybe they were talking about something else?Footnote 1(Fig. 8.1).

Fig. 8.1
A photograph of a building in shambles in Alemao.

A building in shambles in Alemão, April 2015

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Security Entrepreneurs

For some reason, I have always reckoned that Diogo was older than me, but as it turns out, we are both in our late twenties. He tells me that he used to be a math teacher before signing up for the police. “As a teacher, I could have made 5000 reais, but then I would have had to work double shifts: Sixteen hours a day. As a police officer, I make almost as much.” Prior to being a teacher, he worked at his father's bakery. The pay was good, but they argued a lot. He has saved up enough money to buy a piece of land in Campo Grande in Zona Oeste, Rio’s militia-dominated region. Many police officers live there. The militias form protection rackets, charging residents and local business monthly fees, and monopolize the distribution of basic services, such as the gas bottles people run their kitchens on. Another lucrative business controlled by the militias is illegal real estate development. The sale, development, and rental of property is one of the main income sources for the milicianos (Manso 2020).

Diogo says that he is building two small apartments on his property. He says he will rent them out for 400 reais a month. He tells me that he plans to build a total of nine apartments. He draws a row of small square boxes on a white sheet of paper, some stacked on top of the others. 400 times 9, that's 3600 reais a month. In addition, he wants to buy a popcorn stand. He has talked to a tinsmith in Campo Grande who charges him 800 reais to build the stand, including material costs. Felipe plans to rent out the stand for 30 reais a day. If it turns out to be a good business, he'll expand, and buy 10 popcorn stands! He wants to rent them out to street vendors who will have to equip and manage the stands. If he rents out a stand for 30 days a month, that's 900 reais but he only needs to rent out 10 stands for 20 days a month to make 6000 reais. At this point in his explanation, he tells me he worked all of this out while correcting math assignments at the school where he used to work. I try to imagine him coming up with the assignments: “If Diogo builds 9 flats and 10 popcorn stands, how many reais will he make each month?”

Diogo leans towards me. He says he hasn't told anyone else about this plan but me. He doesn't want anyone to steal his idea. I get the implicit message: Don’t tell anyone about this. His “mother” (at this point I'm having a hard time believing that she is his real source of inspiration) is already renting out 20 flats. The income is sufficient for her to live on, he says. If he can see his plan trough, he will quit his job at the police or make a deal with the commander at the UPP so that he is “freed” from his shifts in exchange for a part of his salary. “Anything is possible with money here,” he says, rubbing his index finger against his thumb. He dreams about studying medicine someday. In Brazil, doctors are well paid, maybe 20–30 000 reais a month. “I view this job as a trampoline towards a better future. I don't want to be in the police tomorrow. It's a tough job. Police officers must deal with all kinds of things. We see people die, children die. The risk that we're taking for the government and the rest of society is in vain. We have colleagues who get wounded in gunfights and the media doesn't say a word about it.”Footnote 2

Spoils of War

“Were you part of the occupation of Alemão?” I’m talking with Gabriel, Celso, and Felipe. We are standing below the balcony of the UPP in Alemão. It's Sunday morning and officers have lit the grill and filled it to the brink with big cuts of juicy meat. The group of twenty-something officers are scattered in smaller groups, chatting, making jokes, enjoying each others company. Here, beneath the balcony, we’re hidden from view. The officers take care to avoid being photographed. Neighbors might share pictures of them online and claim that they're not doing their job. The atmosphere is lively mood. The favela is calm today, probably because the officers are not patrolling but at the base chunking down tender pieces of beef.  The men take extra care to make sure my plate is never empty. I'm their guest, they tell me. And guests are supposed to be looked after.

Celso looks at me with eyes wide open and an expression that reveals how absurd my question is: “Do you think we would be standing here today, if we had been a part of that?” The officers laugh. I don't understand what they find amusing and ask for explanation. They look at each other, as if they're agreeing whether this is something they should share with me or not. Gabriel nods. He's a Sergeant, and Celso’s superior. It's ok. “The men who participated in the occupation of Alemão never had to work another day in their lives!” Celso says that the officers had kept the money, gold, and weapons that the drug traffickers left behind when they escaped. Felipe also wants to chip in on the account: “They say that during the invasion the streets were full of weapons. Everybody who had a gun in their house threw them out on the streets. Many Soldiers, I’m not saying all, but many Soldiers kept the weapons. Some handed them in but some…” I can tell that he’s weighing his words carefully: “I’m not saying it’s right, but what would you do if you found a bag of money on the street?” Felipe measures my reaction. “Well, you’re Norwegian…” “I’m Argentinean as well” I joke so as not to appear judgmental. The officers laugh. “Norwegian, but not stupid, eh?” Celso grins.

Gabriel says that while he wasn't a part of the invasion of Alemão he participated in the siege. After the invasion, he was stationed in Complexo do Alemão: “I had the chance to exchange fire with some traffickers,” he says, as to emphasize the legitimacy of his claim to have been in the war. “We had to run across the streets because they were shooting at us. I even made it into a news report. I was carrying a Maxim machine gun, and the reporters filmed me firing at the bastards.” Gabriel smiles as he recalls the gunfight. Stories like these are trophies that raise your group status within the troop. But then he becomes serious: “Truth be told, the pacification of Alemão was a mess, it was a generalized mess. […] I remember seeing people that were not supposed to be there, I saw police officers from other units that had nothing to do in this region, right? I saw people (officers) that were off duty arrive in their private cars. I heard about Soldiers that entered the homes of residents and traffickers alike and emptied them. They took TV’s, they took electrical appliances, put them in their cars and brought them home, they stole…”.

Gabriel says the planning of the police operation was bad. The Special Forces were supported by the Navy, and the coordination between different forces and police units was poor. “There wasn’t an effective control of that occupation.” Celso nods: “We hear stories of [the police] assisting escaping [drug traffickers], of people that entered in an armored truck, picked up traffickers and left the favela with the traffickers inside the truck. We hear those stories. Now, I can’t say if they are true or not, but that the stories exist… They exist. Of traffickers paying a million, two million, three million [reais] in order to leave this place. And there were people that left here rich, that found bags with money. We ended up finding out all of that.”

Gabriel was also a part of the invasion of Rocinha two years later. “In Rocinha, the planning was better.” He was working with Choque (the riot unit) at the time. “In Rocinha the planning was better. The Choque Battalion was in charge of access roads, and only BOPE entered [the favela]; only them. It was much easier to control. I remember that police officers from the 23rd Battalion were arrested for giving fire cover to the traffickers. […] I remember that there were three police officers on motorbikes that were spotted by one of our commanding officers, Lieutenant Roque at the time, now he’s a Captain.” The Lieutenant had seen three patrol officers from the 23rd battalion coming down the hill. He had stopped them and asked what they were doing there.” Gabriel laughs as he recounts the conversation between the Lieutenant from Choque and the three Soldiers:

  • Pô, what are you doing here?

  • No, pô, This is our patrol sector.

  • Your sector? But who authorized you to enter [the favela]? Don't you know that there’s a closed perimeter?

  • No, pô, it's the sector…

  • Ahh, the sector! Then it’s all right! Wait a little, stay here.

At that point, the lieutenant had contacted the supervisor at the 23rd battalion, asking if he could come to identify the officers. When he arrived, he'd given them a quick glance:

  • What are you doing here? Pô, you’re off duty!

“Pô, what were the police officers doing there off duty?” Gabriel asks rhetorically, making Celso and Felipe laugh. I laugh along. Gabriel gleefully repeats the words of the supervisor while shaking his head: “Pô, you’re off duty, what are you doing here?” “They were screwed, right?” I ask. “Pô, literally,” Gabriel answers, adding: “Another thing that was noted was that that year, specifically that year, at the 23rd Battalion there was no New Year’s party. [...] Every year, every year their party was a blast. The year of the occupation of Rocinha there was no party. Why [do you think that is]?”

I return his question: “Why?” Gabriel smiles. “Noooo,” he says, dragging out the word. “What could it be? Could it be that Santa Claus didn’t send the little present for the guys there at the 23rd [battalion]?” he says, rubbing his index finger and thumb together. The New Year’s parties at the 23rd battalion had always been financed with the money the drug traffickers in Rocinha paid the police so that they could carry on with their business in peace.

According to Gabriel, at Rocinha the Military Police enforced a stricter supervision of the officers to prevent the mistakes from Alemão and the police had even managed to detain Nêm, the dono of Rocinha. Even though he was considered a quiet, business-minded type, known to avoid “unnecessary” violence at all costs, he was one of the most wanted men in Brazil. “[Nêm] believed, at least that’s what I think, that he would be able to escape the same way that the guys were able to here in Alemão, paying and leaving…” Gabriel says. There was an attempt to smuggle Nêm out of Rocinha in the back of a car. On the way down the hairpin turns that meander through the hills in Gávea, a couple of Gabriel’s colleagues—officers from Choque—had stopped the car. “Out of it came Nêm's lawyer. He identified himself as the Congolese consul of Brazil!” Gabriel grins. The police officers had refused to let the car drive on:

  • Oh really, the consul? No, we have to search the car.

  • No, you can't search this car, it belongs to the consulate, and I have diplomatic immunity.

“Ok, fine, but he didn’t show any ID. So, they contacted their supervisor who asked Lieutenant Roque for assistance,” Gabriel explains. The Lieutenant came over at once:

  • Ahh, o senhor is the consul? You won’t allow us to carry out the search? Then let’s go to the [civil] police station.

“I think the lawyer thought that he would be taken to the local police station next to Rocinha, and when he realized that they were heading the other way he began to despair.” The lawyer had stopped the car and offered Lieutenant Roque money. But he dismissed it immediately and ordered the lawyer to drive on. As they came to Lagoa (one of Rio’s wealthiest neighborhoods) they stopped, and were met by policemen from the Civil Police, a Detective and an Inspector, who said they would take care of the situation. Then Roque had replied:

  • No, listen to me, we're headed to the station of the Federal Police.

  • Ahhh, no, but I'll take care of it and whatnot….

“They started discussing, and one of the detectives from the Civil Police grabbed the car-keys and said, Doctor, listen, can we take the car? We are going to take the car! […] Lieutenant Roque took a knife he was carrying and cut the tires of the car. He said: I want to see you take the car now! Try taking it now!” The officers laugh, Gabriel continues: “That same detective said Doctor, we can take it like it is, we don’t have any problems at all, we can do it. Then the Lieutenant went Really? You there, take the patrol vehicle and park it here. He parked the vehicle here,” Gabriel signals with his hand how the vehicle was parked in front of the car so that it would not be possible for the car to leave. He says that they had called some contacts in the press. “We’ve stopped a car here, damn, I think it’s Nêm,” the officers had said. “When we mentioned Nêm, pô, I don’t know where they came from...” he laughs. “The guys from the press seemed like they came out of the manholes; of the bushes. They arrived very fast. When they came with the cameras, when they turned the light on and such, that was when the guys from the Civil Police Station started to disappear. After the press arrived, they vanished. That was when the trunk of the car was opened, and out came Nêm...” Gabriel says that Nêm had offered the group of police officers one million reais each if they let him go, but they had declined. The way he says it makes it sound like a heroic act: The police officers resisting temptation. “The moment we handed Nêm over to the authorities was the proudest moment of my career. I had an incredible sensation of having fulfilled my duty,” Gabriel says. The people that were present had greeted them with standing ovations. I ask him what happened with the men from the Civil Police. “We never heard from them again. I don't know if they were there to help Nêm, or to claim the honor of arresting him.”

It might have been a given that Nêm would be arrested. He probably wouldn't have managed to evade the police after fleeing Rocinha where he had been protected by a small army of drug traffickers. If one reads between the lines in Misha Glenny's book about Nêm, the story of his arrest diverges from the one retold by Gabriel. Glenny gives us the impression that the dono's challenge was to get out of the situation alive. If he gave himself into the police, it would lead to suspicion and the traffickers from the favela could view it as a betrayal. If he chose to oppose the arrest, he would most likely have ended up in a bodybag, like other dono’s before him. The book lets us assume that Nêm was afraid of being executed if he had been found by the Military Police first. When traffickers and police meet, murder or corruption seem to be equally expectable outcomes as an arrest.

Warzones

There are signs of unrest in Babilonia. One night we are awakened by shooting and lately João has walked around the hostel with a worried look. He tells me that one of the mototaxistas was sequestered by the drug traffickers. They took him into the jungle where they tortured and beat him. When they released him 24 hours later, he could not stand on his feet, João says. He is upset. But this was not random violence, it had been the guy who woke us a few nights ago. He had been drunk or high or both and started shooting rounds into the air. The traffickers do not take lightly on that kind of behavior. It attracts unnecessary attention from the police and might provoke an operation, João says.Footnote 3 I've been invited to a dialogue between the commanding officers from all the UPPs and leaders of the Resident Association in the pacified favelas. But they are meeting here in Babilonia and I choose not to go. Right now, the last thing I want is to be seen talking to the police in my own neighborhood. I don't know if it's because of the meeting or due to rising tensions during the last weeks, but the favela is full of police officers (Fig. 8.2).

Fig. 8.2
A photograph of scenes from the everyday war in Mangueira.

Scenes from the everyday war in Mangueira, April 2015

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In the following days, I don’t get to spend much time with the police. The situation at the UPPs is tense again, making it hard to join the officers on patrol. Different gangs have been orchestrating attacks in attempts to gain control of pacified favelas in Santa Teresa and Catumbí, near the city center. There are reports of several deaths and of armed violence in the city's streets. Gang members have torched a bus on one of Rio’s main avenues. Today, I'm going to Mangueira in the morning and Alemão in the afternoon, where Anderson has agreed to meet me. At Mangueira, the Sergeant in charge tells me that the officers are carrying out a “special operation” in the community. It’s not possible for me to join them on patrol but we can still have a chat. The Sergeant says that the wave of violence is due to a power struggle between two gangs. The dono in Mangueira was killed a while back, leaving no successor. In the power vacuum that ensued, rivaling gangs tried to invade Mangueira. First the Pure Third Command, then Friends of Friends. He tells me that the police at the UPP have prevented the other gangs from taking over. The Red Command is still controlling the drug trade in Mangueira. I'm puzzled. Why does the police protect the turf of the Red Command?

On my way to Alemão I get a text from Anderson. He suggests we postpone our interview due to “intense shooting” in the favela. I’ve taken the confrontations for granted—normalized them even, but from the dramatic headlines in the newspapers I understand that recent events escape the norm. Judging from media reports, the increasing unrest seems more like a somber reminder of how things were in the years before the UPPs were installed. In Babilonia I'm accused of being a police officer again. This time, when the guys at the boca signal me out, there is no room for doubt. Luckily, João is there again, and now he hears them as well: “Have you lost it? He's not a police officer! He's a gringo!”

I am lying in the hammock of our living room with Violeta spread across my lap when the calm is broken by thundering gunshots. They're not little “pops” in the distance this time, but ear-shattering explosions that make me fall to the floor and seek cover under the staircase, where the cement walls are at their thickest. From the sound of it, the shooter could be standing right by our window. I call out to Javier. He's at the rooftop terrace. “Get down here!” I yell. He says that he just saw a group of people walking through the forest behind our house. They were armed, so he assumed they were police. Officers from the UPP tend to sneak past our house from time to time. We stay under the stairs until the shooting ends. I’ve lost track of time. Has it been 30 seconds or 30 minutes? When we are certain that the gunfire has ended I rush to the hostel to check on the guests. João is not there and I only find a single guest relaxing in one of the armchairs on the terrace, as if nothing has happened. “Didn't you hear the shooting?” I ask. Yes, he had seen a few red lights shoot across the sky and assumed that it was fireworks.

News start spreading through the favela. One of our neighbors stops by the hostel. She says it's a gang war (guerra de facções) and that a group of fifteen drug traffickers from another favela invaded Babilonia. Soon, police are swarming through the alleys below the hostel. It looks like the entire UPP has been mobilized. From the terrace, we see a long row of officers pass by the boca with their machine guns raised and ready. An eerie silence spreads through the neighborhood. The streets are empty. No music. No shouting. No friendly chit-chat from the windows. After a few hours João arrives. He is shaken. Eyes red and struggling not to break into tears, he tells me that a rivaling gang executed one of the boys from the boca in a bar just down the street, in front of a group of neighbors who were sipping beer when the traffickers arrived. It has never happened here before. João says they were the guys who had tortured the mototaxista. “Why?” João shrugs: “Well, one descends, and another one must rise.”

Next time I visit Alemão the officers at the base have already heard about the gang war in Babilonia through extensive coverage in the news. “You know what it means, right? It's proof that the pacification has failed.” I’m sitting on the balcony at the UPP next to Daví. He lives in Costa Barros, a neighborhood in northern Rio located between two large favela complexes: Chapadão and Morro da Pedreira. They are not pacified, and the officers tell me that many drug traffickers migrated to Chapadão following the occupation of Alemão, making it the new headquarters of the Red Command. A few days ago, officers from the local police battalion carried out a police operation there. Daví tells me that they killed seven traffickers. I can't remember reading anything about that in the papers. “Well,” Daví says, “when it's just criminals dying, it never reaches the news.” In Rio’s northern neighborhoods the police kill at much higher rates. “Do you think the situation will calm down after the police operation?” Daví isn't optimistic: “You kill seven, but ten new ones appear.”

A few days ago, his unit had been patrolling the area surrounding Areal when they saw a thug wave at them with a gun in his hand. In hindsight he sees that it was stupid of them to think that a trafficker would wave at them like that, but the officers had been looking for action and chased him down the street. Then another trafficker, armed with a machine gun, crossed the street just ahead of them. One of the officers in his unit, Breno, had opened fire, and the trafficker retaliated. At that moment a third gang member had attacked them from a rooftop. “Breno hadn't see him,” Daví says. The two of them were cut off from the rest of their patrol unit, who were seeking cover behind a corner. “I was just behind Breno, providing cover.” He had fired fourteen shots before his gun had jammed. But it had been enough to force the rooftop shooter to pull back, giving Daví and Breno time to seek shelter. They had shot open a door, taking cover inside a home. As they entered all hell broke loose: “The traffickers were peppering the street with bullets! Ratatatatata! We saw the concrete on the street shatter as the bullets hit the ground just outside the doorstep.” The family who lived in the house—a father and his child—fled through one of the windows facing the back yard in panic. “In the heat of the moment Breno wanted us to shoot the family in case they would tell the traffickers where we were hiding. Forget about it, I said. You're crazy!” We laugh at Breno's terrifying idea. Why am I laughing? I wonder. “That just shows how far a man can go when his life is at stake,” Daví says, aware of the absurdity of the situation. Daví wonders how Breno’s suggestion will be interpreted in Norway when I publish my research. It also shows how normalized police killings have become, I think to myself but chose not to say anything—I don’t want Daví to feel that I’m judgmental.

Daví and Breno remained trapped inside the house for three hours. They smashed all the lightbulbs to make it harder to be seen from the street. The traffickers were shooting at them through the windows, bullets sizzling through the rooms. “The walls looked like a Swiss cheese,” Daví says. From time to time, they had fired a few shots to deter the traffickers from entering but they lacked ammunition to retaliate. At one point, they had panicked: The traffickers had thrown a shock grenade into the building and the police officers had thought it was hand-grenade. Eventually, their colleagues came to their aid. They killed one of the traffickers and wounded another, providing cover while they fled the scene in an armored truck, sent by the 16th battalion as “tactical support”. Daví recorded the gunfire on his phone. He plays the audio file. It sounds like an intense battle scene from a war movie (Fig. 8.3).

Fig. 8.3
A photograph of tactical entry in Alemao.

Tactical entry during a routine patrol in Alemão, July 2015

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In the days following the invasion, Babilonia is uncommonly quiet. Many of the hostels and botecos close. They don't want to risk receiving tourists before knowing how the situation will evolve. The neighborhood is suspended in a state of limbo, no longer at peace but neither at war. At the entrance of one of the alleys someone has hung up a big, black piece of cloth. Many neighbors wear T-shirts with saudades eternas—forever missed—written beneath a picture of the kid who was executed. I'm out walking Violeta one evening, around eleven. The streets are empty. The air is cool with a drizzle hanging in the air, so light it that it could be mistaken for fog. As we approach the boca I see the dark contour of a young boy wearing a big raincoat. I don't recognize him as being part of the group that normally hangs out by the boca. I have never seen any of them armed. In the front pocket of his coat there's a crackling walkie-talkie. A black strap crosses his chest. It supports a rifle that is almost as long as the boy is tall. He stands in the middle of the staircase, talking with two other guys. Violeta, impervious to the scene, has already snuck past them and I politely greet the three boys with a short and firm good evening to acknowledge their presence, avoiding eye-contact as a chill runs down my spine.

Monkey Hands

I meet Alef in the hallroom at Alemão. He was recently transferred here from Mangueira, where armed confrontations have become everyday occurrences. His version of the events that led to the ongoing gang war differs from the explanation given to me by the Sergeant who suggested that the police had protected the Red Command at Mangueira. “Mangueira was ‘depacified’ when the command at the UPP changed,” Alef says. The new commander came from a UPP where there was much more violence. He brought with him a team of patrol officers who he knew were loyal to him and who were used to confront the traffickers. They had brought the war to Mangueira. Alef doesn’t like the Commander there. I get the impression that he might hold a grudge—being transferred to Alemão is sometimes used as a form of punishment for unruly officers. “The [old] Major who commanded Mangueira before had monkey hands. That's why the favela was peaceful,” he says. “Monkey hands?” “You know…” Alef gesticulates with his arms, pretending to snatch something out of the pocket of one of the other officers.

The gang war in Mangueira started when the new Commander took charge. He had wanted to show his strength: “You know, we are only respected for the damage we're able to inflict.” Alef says that violence is a way of “increasing the value of the players.” I've heard the expression before. It refers to the way violence is used to broker power. For example, by police officers who want to increase the fees they charge from traffickers to let them do their business in peace. I ask him for details and clarifications, but Alef refuses. He has nothing to say that would be “politically correct.” But his comments suggest that the new Major wanted a bigger slice of the pie: “The Tactical Patrol Units are the Commander's pit bulls. The Commander lets them loose when he wants to put pressure on the traffickers.”Footnote 4 But since the traffickers hadn’t given in to the extortion, the Major had arranged a takeover of the drug trade in Mangueira by a gang that was “friendlier” to his demands. That's when things had gotten out of hands, Alef suggests. I’m struggling to accept this explanation—the Major in Mangueira doesn't strike me as the type who would orchestrate a clash between gangs to enrich himself. The few times I’ve met him he has seemed like a reasonable, even progressive Commander. But then again, the practices of policing I have observed in Mangueira have been far from progressive. Is this a peak into the “shadow of policing” or the smear-campaign of a resentful patrol officer (see Nordstrom 2004; Durão and Argentin 2023)? I ask one of the officers who has listened to Alef's account what he thinks. He knows the Major at Mangueira and shakes his head. No, he doesn't think so either. But what if?

Both among police, politicians, and social scientists, there is disagreement about how the violence in Rio can best be described. The officers at Alemão have no doubt. Time after time, I've heard them repeat the same thing. “This is a war! Rio de Janeiro is a city in war.” Sometimes they ask me what I'll write when I return to Norway. One day, one of them corners me: “Will you write good things about us?” I hesitate, trying to think of what to answer. One of his colleagues comes to my aid: “He'll write the truth. He'll write that we are at war!” But what kind of war is it where there is no tangible separation between the different warring factions? Where black men from the favela kill black men from the favela? Where one brother joins the traffickers and the other the police? Where men wage war for the police one day and for the militia the next day? Where the police help traffickers defend some territories and invade others? And were money flows between groups that are allegedly opposed?

Past My Expiration Date

“We should have military rule again. Then things would get settled!” The words are shouted out in the air in passing. Not by a police officer, but by Miriam, a black woman in her twenties who lives in Babilonia and works as a waitress at the boteco where Javier and I eat lunch.

Apart from the people who live near the stations, few residents make use of the gondolas that were built in Alemão when the favelas were occupied. Normally, the carts are empty, and I get to spend the ride looking at the rolling landscape below. Today, for a change, I’m sharing cart with a white middle-aged woman and black young man. For no other reason than his age and skin color, I catch myself thinking that he might be a drug trafficker. We are far above the rooftops and the woman looks nervous. “We're moving pretty slow, aren't we?” She is worried there might be a problem with the gondola. The man is also concerned. He says that he’s afraid of heights and hates taking the gondola when it's windy: “I worry that the wire will break. One time the gondola was moving so much that I vomited” he says. Both fear getting stuck in the cart during shooting episodes. When these are long the gondola closes, and lately this has happened with frequency. “Often, you don't even hear that there is shooting if you're in the cart,” the woman says.

A few weeks ago, she rode the gondola with her three-year-old daughter. When they got off at the station, the cable car employees told her to hurry home. There had just been an intense shootout in the neighborhood. Arriving at her mother's house a young man’s dead body was lying in front of the entrance. “But I like it here,” she says. She grew up in Grota (one of the favelas of Complexo do Alemão) and spent 30 years of her life there. She moved to São Gonçalo (one of Rio’s northern suburbs) a few years ago. “São Gonçalo has become much more dangerous now that this area has been pacified.” The man gives her a surprised look. “Do you think that this area has been pacified?” The question almost sounds like an accusation. The woman lets out a soft hum: “No. No, it hasn't.” She points in the direction of her mother's house. It lies just above one of the areas most affected by urban combat. Her apartment has been hit by bullets twice. I ask them if they feel that something has improved after the UPPs were installed. The woman says that there is more shooting now. Before, they would know in advance when the police were going to invade the favela and had time to prepare. Now, with the permanent police presence, it's impossible to tell when there will be confrontations, and residents often get caught in the crossfire. The boy agrees: “There is no law anymore.” The drug traffickers are a lot more violent now, he adds. There used to one dono, but now the traffickers are constantly fighting for power. They don't respect people from the community the way they used to.

As we reach the station building, we see police officers lying on the rooftop of the police station. They are pointing their machine guns at the rooftops below. “Nossa! How dangerous!” the woman exclaims. I ask her if she thinks the police are abusing their power. “No, they're not abusing their power, they are doing their job. But when somebody shoots at them, they must shoot back: It's not easy to tell where the bullets will end up down there in the favela.” She tells me she’s an evangelical, and that her church has taught her respect for authorities: She is a person who respects the law. Although she supports the police, she does not talk with them. Maybe a short “good morning” or “good evening.” She doesn't want to attract negative attention from the drug traffickers. “Do the traffickers forbid people from talking to the police?” I ask, since I’ve been told by other social scientists that the traffickers in Alemão have imposed a ban on communication with the police. “Forbid? Nobody forbids me anything! I can talk to whomever I want,” she says, adding that she chooses not to talk to the police to protect herself.Footnote 5

When we reach the station, they both get off the gondola. After all the prying I don't want them to see me walk into the police station, so instead of getting off with them I stay in the cart one more stop, before I jump off and head back in the opposite direction. The cart is already occupied by three middle-aged men. They're discussing the massive public spending on the Olympic Games. “They should be using that money for health care, for security,” one of them says, but immediately corrects himself: “No, not security. [When we] get more security the violence increases.” One of the other men agrees: “There’s only one way [to stop the violence]. You must make harsher laws!” The first man continues: “When I came here eighteen years ago, we didn't have this: Eighteen-year-old brats making a mess.” He complains about the violence and brutality of the young men in the favela: “They should kill all of that pest!” (Fig. 8.4).

Fig. 8.4
A photograph of the U P P at Alemao. Vehicles are parked in different directions.

The UPP at Alemão, July 2015

Full size image

I’m sitting outside the UPP in Alemão talking to one of the officers. The sun is shining but the shade is cool. It’s winter in Rio and my fieldwork is coming to an end. My notepad lies open in my lap: While we speak, I jot down keywords so that I’ll be able to write out our conversation once I’m home. Like many of his colleagues, the officer has lost faith that anything will ever change in Rio. He's disappointed with the police, sick and tired of all the corruption. He just wants to get out: “To be honest, the police here are extremely corrupt.” He used to work at a battalion before being transferred to Alemão. There, the Colonel in command charged 20.000 reais a month to keep two patrol vehicles stationed by a large shopping mall. “The real problem of the police is the corruption among commanding officers,” he says. Patrol officers only follow orders: They have few opportunities to act on their own initiative; they collect the money and pass it on to the Colonels.

Usually, there is less corruption at the UPPs, he says. There are few opportunities for that here, but he has heard rumors of UPPs near the city center striking deals with the traffickers. They're allowed to sell drugs if the police get their share of the profits. He has talked to a Soldier at one UPP who told him that they are paid a fixed amount every month besides their regular pay to look the other way. This is, of course, old news. This is the way things used to be in Rio. The novelty, in any case, is that the UPPs were meant to change all that.Footnote 6

The officer asks me whether our talk is confidential. I nod and explain that I'm ethically bound to anonymize the material I collect. “Ah, I like anthropology,” he says. Police officers are not allowed to criticize the institution. They can get punished with disciplinary detention if they do. He asks me to close my notepad. “Don't write what I'm about to tell you.” I put the notepad away. “Do you know that police officers from Alemão shot at the Commander's car?” “No,” I say, “but I've heard of other instances of friendly fire.” “This was something else,” he says. “It wasn't a misunderstanding. It was on purpose.” He lowers his voice, looking around to make sure that there is no one around to hear us. “Most of the Soldiers at the base dislike the Commander. He has made many strategic mistakes.” He says that the situation in Alemão had gradually deteriorated when the commander took charge, but that he was disliked from day one. Just after he assumed, two Soldiers had dressed up as drug traffickers and shot at his car to scare him away from the base. It didn't work—he didn’t quit, but neither did he know that it was his own officers who had attacked him.

While the logics of violence in Rio de Janeiro are complex, some ground principles are quite easy to grasp. There is a distinction between persons that can be killed without generating much public attention (generally young, socioeconomically marginalized black men) and persons who can only be harmed or killed at the cost of generating a lot of attention (see i.g. Willis 2018; Alves 2018). If you are a white foreigner, you are fairly safe, independently of whether you are in a favela or in the asfalto. If you get hurt, murdered, or disappear, it will lead to a lot of attention. This is usually bad for business and might force a reaction by the state and the police, who will be expected to investigate and punish the perpetrators, and is therefore usually avoided. Vinicius George referred to Brazil as Belindia, because this logic is seen in the form of enormous geographical contrasts in the relationship between crime rates and the numbers of solved cases. Inhabiting a white, Norwegian body in Alemão is (probably) still safer than inhabiting a poor, black body in Copacabana. My body is not one that can be preyed upon with no consequence. My whiteness and status as a foreigner have acted as a door-opener to spaces of power, and as a shield that protected me during fieldwork—both from perceived and hidden threats. When I first got to Brazil, it was the fear of the drug traffickers that made me look over my shoulder. It's not anymore. The stories I've heard, make me reason that it's okay that I'll soon be leaving. This is another privilege I have as a foreign ethnographer—being able to leave when I find it suitable. But still, I have worried that the police might perceive me as a threat if I know too much. Therefore, I have not asked police officers about corruption in the police or pried into “the shadow” of policing. I trust the police officers that have participated in my research not to hurt me, but there are 300 patrol officers at Alemão, and many of them I do not trust. The officers I’ve spoken with also feel that way, and for good reason: They do have killable bodies.

I recall the public hearing at the Legislative Assembly. It had been chaired by Marcelo Freixo from the Human Rights Commission. Several leaders from Rio’s police institutions were seated at Freixo’s table, on a scene at the front of the auditorium. A group of veterans from the Military Police were seated at the back of the room. One of them had lost a leg, another was in a wheelchair. They claimed that they hadn't been paid the pensions they were due, and that their medicinal expenses were not being covered. They were attending in the hope that they would be heard. But they hadn't written their names on the list of speakers and were denied speaking time.

One of the persons who had written her name on the list was the mother of an officer who had been killed during a police operation. She claimed that her son had been murdered by his colleagues after refusing to be part of a corruption scheme and accused one of the police leaders that were present of silencing the case. While she talked, she had waved the obduction and investigation reports furiously above her head. The accusations she was putting forth were serious. They were directed towards the leaders that were in the room. Marcelo Freixo had interrupted her, taking the police in defense. They were there at his invitation, and he said that he knew her and her son’s case well. According to the police, the investigation was thorough. The case was closed.

The situation at the hearing has made me reflect on my own privilege and the ease and taken-for-grantedness with which I move from spaces of power to Rio’s marginalized suburbs. How I, as a foreigner and academic (and of course, as a white man), am used to be taken seriously and to be heard. It's unusual to think about the police as subjects that are not allowed in spaces of power, that do not manage the cultural grammars of power, and therefore, are not heard. But clearly, social hierarchies are contextual, dynamic, and relational: The police officers are powerful in some spaces and less so in others. This feeling of not being heard by those in power, of not being able to voice their grievances, fuels resentment towards democratic institutions within the police. 

I’m standing with a group of officers by the container base at Alemão. Following the rearrangement of shifts at the UPP, the patrol units have also been reorganized, and several of the police officers present I have never met before. But Diogo is here. He is one of the officers who has worked here the longest and is trying to impress me with his detailed knowledge of the inner world of policing. “There is no corruption at the base now, he says. But with the previous Commander…” Diogo tells me about a senior police officer who was transferred to Mangueira after getting caught extorting money from residents in Alemão. “He wanted a piece of the pie,” Diogo laughs. The Commander was furious when he found out, but the officer knew too much and could neither be fired nor arrested. “In the end, they transferred him to a different police station,” he says. I see that some of the officers are getting restless. I feel uncomfortable too. Are you telling me this NOW, with your colleagues watching, I think, and pretend that I don’t understand what he's saying. One of the men interrupts Diogo. “Don't listen to him! He's a miliciano!” It turns out to be a embarrassing reminder for Diogo, whose face turns red. He has crossed a line that all police officers know: You don't sell out colleagues to outsiders! Diogo tries to excuse himself by saying that they should know all the things Wesley has told me. I get even more nervous. “You're not a journalist, are you?” one of them says teasingly. It’s a tense joke, meant to laugh off the potentially dangerous situation. I use the same tactic later, as I'm leaving. I ask if one of the officers can escort me back to the base. “No, you can just go on your own,” they laugh. I laugh more. “Please!” I beg, ironically distorting my voice, pretending to be scared. More laughter. As I put on the bulletproof vest, one of the men asks if I got anything out of the day. “Oh, yes, absolutely,” I reply. “Now I'm going home to write an article for the papers!”.

In a documentary about the police violence in Rio, a former police informant shares his experiences. It's dangerous to be an informant, he says. You soon end up knowing so many of the police’s secrets that you become a liability. Suddenly, you're past the expiry date and getting rid of you is worth the potential cost. I've started feeling that way lately. Past my expiry date. Like the officers, I have started chugging down beer when I get home from to ease the tension I’ve accumulated through the day. The excitement I felt when I came to Rio is gone. I tell a friend that I feel like I have climbed Mount Everest. I’m tired. The alertness that is always there, right beneath the surface, when you live in a neighborhood where you might walk into the mussel of a gun when you round a corner, or where a wrong move can cause you trouble with the traffickers is affecting my mood and energy. So are the hundreds of staircases that I must climb following a long day of work, or just a trip to the supermarket, or beach, or anywhere. I recall Maria’s words when I first came here: “We’re constantly walking on eggshells.”Footnote 7

Javier, Violeta, and I are at Ipanema. It's a late afternoon of the Brazilian winter, and the beach is almost empty of people. The sun is hiding behind big clouds. Soon, the sky will turn scarlet, but there is still some daylight left. We watch the waves crashing on the beach, tall and frothy. The red flag is raised as a warning: It’s not safe to swim. But I like big waves. I like floating in the moving water, getting low enough to touch on the sandy seabed in the trough, and then carried up by the water when the crest passes. I put my beer down in the sand and turn around to give Javier a teasing glance. Come on, let’s go for a swim! He shakes his head. He’ll stay here with Violeta. I guess I'll have to go alone, I say, and walk onto the wet sand.

My legs are embraced by froth. I run into the ocean and dive into a wall of water moving towards me. Fresh saltwater envelopes my body. I take a couple of strokes, far enough out to get between the breaking waves. I get into a vertical position, wanting to use my feet to push myself up above a wave but I’m in too deep, and the sand is out of reach. The waves are bigger than I thought, far too big to just float atop. The only way I can cross them is diving through. As the next wave engulfs me, I’m pulled down and then up, back and forth and around. I've underestimated the force of the ocean.

It's dark beneath the surface and for a second, I get disoriented. Small bubbles of air, pulled into the depths by the wave render the water opaque and make it impossible to see underwater. Maybe I should swim back to the shore? I take a few powerful strokes towards the surface and take a deep breath, filling my lungs with fresh air. I look around. There's the beach, and there's the next wave. With quick strokes I swim towards the shore before the next wave crashes, but to no avail. The sea is pulling me away from the beach with a force I've never felt before. It feels like swimming in a powerful stream. And now the next wave is breaking above me, sucking me underwater. Down and up, back and forth and around.

Once more, I push my head through the surface and gasp for air. I breathe again, telling myself that I will be okay. I must just put more determination in each stroke. Yes! The beach is getting closer. But there it is again: The surge that won't let go. I swim as fast as I can, applying more power in every movement, but the effort demands oxygen as my pulse rises. Another wave. Down and up, back and forth and around.

When I get to the surface this time, I'm heaving for air. I am short of breath and can already see the next crest breaking above me. I throw myself towards land with all the force I can muster but barely move at all. Is Javier seeing me struggle? Should I call for help? I can't make myself shout. That would mean accepting that I'm drowning. And I can't possibly be drowning. The wave crashes over me. I’m getting dizzy. Down and up, back and forth and around.

But suddenly I feel something. The bottom! When I stretch my legs downwards, in a straight line, my toes touch the sand. I feel the current pull me sideways along the beach, but feeling the sandy bottom against my feet gives me hope. I know I'm getting close to the shore now. Just a few more strokes. Another wave hits me. But instead of pushing me down and up and back and forth, it hurls me towards the beach, as if the ocean has decided to spit me back onto land. Now my feet are firmly planted in the sand. My legs are shaky, my body tumbles to the shore. I collapse, I have no force left but drag myself up with my hands. I'm lightheaded, so dizzy I can barely stand up. A feeling of nausea runs through my body as I crawl up on the dry sand and collapse on the beach blanket. I made it.

Conclusion: Entrepreneurialism and Predation

Philippe Bourgois (2018: 385) draws on the notion of predation to account for contemporary accumulation processes whereby “the trafficking of industrially produced euphoric substances across the globe have wreaked havoc among vulnerable populations while extracting profit for the powerful.” He describes it as a pattern of destructive profiteering that “highlights contradictory, nonlinear relationships between the artificially high profits of illegal drug sales, repressive governmentality and corporate greed.” Although scholars like Luiz Antonio Machado da Silva (2004: 76) are weary of referring to the illicit economies of Rio’s urban formations as “counter-powers” or forms of “adventure capitalism” since this assumes the existence of a “sober bourgeoise capitalism,” I find it useful to distinguish between the forms of accumulation that rely on the production of certain spaces as colonial, necropolitical, smooth or “ungoverened” and those forms that, while they can be equally (or more) destructive, operate within the rule of law, even when we acknowledge that these practices coexist as mutually dependent forms, also within the Brazilian state apparatus. Specifically, I am interested in how the notion of predation allows us to analyze the colonial dynamics of the war on drugs and the economic opportunities it produces (see Nordstrom 2004). As the ethnographic descriptions of this chapter shows, warfare produces zones where the blurring of legal and illegal practices creates opportunities for a violent entrepreneurialism that cuts across group and class divides.

The notion of “security blurs” (Diphoorn and Grassiani 2018) draws attention to formations composed by a multiplicity of agents that can be referred to as “violence workers”  (Seigel 2018), as well as the field of security's capacity to blur the distinction between private and public. In Rio, the policing and production of illicit economies is shaped by violent agents that move across such divisions. The testimonies from police officers presented in this and previous chapters highlights the entanglement of police, paramilitaries, drug traffickers, state bureaucracies, and private enterprise within the field of policing. The common thread that runs across the practices of this militarized entrepreneurialism is the recourse to physical violence, not to uphold legally codified rules, but to support practices of profiteering (see also Volkov 2016). While this chapter has not explored the cultural values underpinning militarized entrepreneurialism, it is clear that it resonates with a neoliberal ethos of individual responsibility which dovetails with the evangelical gospel of prosperity (see, i.g. Bartel 2021), indicating an insidious entanglement of notions of colonial and spiritual warfare that, although it is not made explicit in the ethnography, informs the field of policing. Often, the networks that form are structured around kinship relations, or at least, referred to in these terms. Thus, drug trafficking is sometimes understood as a family business; police identity as belonging to the blue family; and politics organized around family dynasties and nepotism.

In the ethnographic accounts of this chapter, the appropriation of a war-chests or bounty during police operations (often referred to as invasions or occupations), i.e. of material recourses such as money, guns, drugs, or other material objects acquired through looting or apprehensions, as well as extortion fees, bribes and the “political merchandise” that is part of everyday policing , composes the gamut of predatory practices that were made possible by the war (Misse 2007; see also Penglase 2014; Larkins 2015).Footnote 8 Attempts to contain these practices were evident in the difference between the “occupation” of Complexo do Alemão and Rocinha, as leaders within the Military Police enforced a much stricter control during the pacification of Rocinha, according to Gabriel. Approaching the shifting practices of policing in the favelas through the lens of colonial war, i.e. understanding how the favelas have been produced as warzones and sites for “resource extraction”, is consistent with research that sees them as territories of exception characterized by a suspension of civil rights and governed through a logic of war (see, i.g. Grillo 2019; Magalhães 2021). It is also consistent with Mbembe’s (2003: 22ff) typification of colonial warfare (characterized by the suspension of the controls and guarantees of the judicial order) and of the colonies as sites “where ‘peace’ is more likely to take on the face of a ‘war without end.’”.Footnote 9

The gang war in Mangueira is a clear example of how, even in pacified favelas, Rio’s multiple sovereignties compete for access to the profits that result from predation. Linking back to Chapter 1: Introduction, the ethnography of this chapter shows that while drug traffickers and militias in principle are defined by a difference in relations to the state and the rule of law, their practices bleed into each other, signaling how money or profit acts as an overarching logic that cuts across normative, ideological, or cosmological divides (see Feltran 2020). There is, indeed, a unified and blurry security universe that spans across group boundaries and shares a basic set of principles as Graham Denyer Willis (2018) suggests, but despite this shared opportunism and practices of collusion the relations between different groups and agents are often characterized by animosity and mutual distrust (see Hirata 2014; Hirata and Grillo 2017; Alves 2018; Feltran 2020). One might paraphrase Diphoorn and Grassiani (2018) and say that “money blurs” and that the glue that binds Rio’s multiple sovereignties together is a militarized and opportunistic entrepreneurialism that makes creative use of a rather plastic understanding of “morals” to build legitimacy and garner support.Footnote 10

Within this context the UPPs imply, on the one hand, a reorganization of illegal markets, “civilizing” the violent sociability of the favelas by suppressing the logic of confrontation through sheer military force and placing the population under a Military Police tutelage that seeks to assert its authority through the implementation of a new set of moral rules “on the ground.” On the other hand, they coincide with the expansion of militias in those areas that were not selected for pacification in such a way as to extend a militarized and authoritarian understanding of the world—a police cosmology—across most of Rio de Janeiro’s favelas (see Manso 2020).

If we look at policing in Rio through the lens of militarized entrepreneurialism, it raises the question of whether part of Bolsonaro’s appeal lies in his promise to de-regulate—to reaffirm a colonial dynamic, a frontier capitalism organized around old and new practices of predation, thought to speed up economic accumulation? Both for the low-income, individual entrepreneur, as well as for big corporations and industries? The production of certain spaces as warzones, frontlines, or (internal) colonies seems to have been at the core of Bolsonaro’s political project, which articulated war machine dynamics at the highest level of the state.

The articulation of the interests of large corporations and individual entrepreneurs in the carving out of new (colonial) spaces for capitalist expansion and predatory accumulation, i.g. through the creation of warzones in Rio’s urban landscape or the dismantling of the institutions for environmental protection in the Amazon, might help us understand the economic logics of the far-right’s alliance with evangelical congregations whose emphasis on the discourse of entrepreneurism dovetails with the call for deregulation. There seems to be much potential in further exploring the material dimensions of this alliance in Brazil and beyond. The war-machine dynamics that I have described here, are fuelled by rage, but also by ambition, excitement, and thirst for money and power. Nested within the Brazilian state throughout its history, the territories where war machines operate have diffuse borders that expand and contract according to the logics of political and economic opportunism and must be understood as productive economic zones that produce and are produced by competing normative orders.