The War Machine

Abstract

The concluding chapter of this book provides a brief biography of Jair Bolsonaro and examines the political turmoil leading up to his victory in the Presidential elections in 2018, focusing on the parliamentary coup against Dilma Rousseff, the expansion of the militias in Rio’s western region, and the assassination of Marielle Franco. By examining the war machine dynamics of policing in Rio’s favelas, it shows how the political project implemented by the Brazilian far-right during Bolsonaro’s time in office can be understood as the expansion and multiplication of colonial spaces, zones of exception and (dis)order where war became a permanent logic of governance. By tracing the genealogies of colonial and cultural war, we can understand the material and ideational dimensions of competing and seemingly contradictory political projects within the Brazilian state apparatus, and how capitalist expansion in Brazil relies on the continued production of a state at war with a part of its own population.

Fig. 9.1

Police officers patrolling in Mangueira, May 2015

Policing (conceived as the different activities involved in the maintenance and production of order—urban, social, moral, or even cosmological) in Rio is sometimes carried out by drug gangs, paramilitaries, vigilante groups, regular citizens, mobs, private security, and a broad range of state officials (Military, Civil, and Federal Police, Armed Forces, Municipal Guards) that maintain relations of collaboration, complicity, suspicion and animosity towards each other. In this context of multiple groups vying for control, the authority of the Military Police is constantly challenged but also employed in ways that defy different normative orders, including officially sanctioned orders, and produce emergent orders of their own. In this book, I have described situations where the police released suspects due to pressure from neighbors, where they prevented angry mobs from lynching assailants, or where they negotiated complex relations of collusion, conflict, and animosity with competing drug factions. I have also recounted situations where police officers thwart institutional hierarchies, acting according to their own interests, and described dynamics whereby the institutional hierarchy is mobilized in favor of economic, corporate, and political interests that do not respond to official institutional goals. To complicate matters even more, intra-group tensions along and across group hierarchies exist (for example when superiors try to establish or assert authority), and some subjects act across group divisions (for example when Military Police officers moonlight as private security guards, join militias, or act as vigilantes in their home neighborhoods). In all these situations, law, custom, morality, interest, and identity are mobilized to produce certain outcomes, accumulate capital, and assert or negotiate authority. Most officers understand and talk about these situations as urban battles, confrontations, invasions, occupations, sieges, and war. They see themselves as police officers, but also military, combatants, soldiers, warriors, or even guerilla fighters (Fig. 9.1).

I have explored the worldviews and practices that support and cohere around these understandings of policing as warfare through the notion of cosmologies of war. In this final chapter, I will analyze the normative framework that underpins the police’s exercise of authority in Rio’s favelas and show how it produces and is produced by an emergent far-right discourse that prefigured the political agenda of Jair Bolsonaro. While I do not pretend that a police moral order can or should be uncritically mapped onto Brazilian national politics under Bolsonaro, I understand the political project of the far-right as an attempt to transform Brazil into a police state (Durão 2019, 2020), shaped by the emergence of war machine dynamics at the highest levels of government. The intensification of these dynamics and their destructive practices rely on the worldview that coheres around different cosmologies—colonial and cultural—of war. Cultivating close relationships both to the state’s security forces (military and police) as well as criminal paramilitary groups, the Brazilian state, under Bolsonaro, transformed itself into a war machine where practices of elimination and destruction that have been operative throughout Brazilian history were intensified and harnessed to attack the liberal democratic values and institutions of Brazilian modernity, unleash and accelerate predatory forms of accumulation, but also, to attack and resist policies that have sought to expand rights and promote social inclusion, and restore traditional hierarchies centered around the heteropatriarchal family, a militarized national order, and a conservative understanding of religion (see, i.g. Messenberg 2019; Pinheiro-Machado and Freitas 2019; Perry 2019; Ystanes and Salem 2020). In this last chapter I will focus on the events that led up to the election and Presidency of Bolsonaro, to show how the moral universe and national politics of the Brazilian far-right movement mirrors many of the observations I made through my ethnographic encounters with the police.

The Coup

The light-green Fiat follows the even stream of traffic along Avenida Brasil. Cars, trucks, buses and trailers whip up a light layer of dust that hovers in the thick air. The traffic flows past the favelas, the suburbs, and the satellite towns of northern Rio. Here, the different parts of the city bleed into each other. It’s not easy to separate favela from asfalto. The entire region is characterized by a similar collection of worn and terracotta-red brick houses. They seem to stretch endlessly to the west, past Complexo da Maré, the favela complex that was occupied by the military before the World Cup in 2014; past the low ridges where the gondola that leads to Complexo do Alemão is barely visible in the distance; past Vigario Geral, where officers from the Military Police murdered nineteen arbitrary victims in an act of collective punishment in 1993; past the massive favela complex of Chapadão, the new headquarters of the Red Command; the new Olympic venues in Deodoro; the military bases and Police Academy in Realengo; and then through Bangú, generally thought of as Rio’s hottest region, where the city’s infamous high-security prison is located. The command central and recruiting grounds for new generations of drug traffickers.

The Fiat continues westward. Soon, the valley landscape opens as the freeway cuts through surrounding neighborhoods and towards Campo Grande, part of the expanding territory of the militias. Luís drives into the parking lot of the school where he works as a history teacher. It’s in an area controlled by paramilitaries. Smoking marihuana, skipping school, hanging around the school entrance after school hours, and talking back to teachers is forbidden. If the students show attitude or bad behavior the teacher can report them to the militias who willingly punish anyone they see fit. If you are caught smoking weed, you are lucky if you get a “warning”: A solid beating. The less lucky or repeating offenders are simply executed. When the schoolyear starts following the summer holidays, there’s always a handful of pupils who never show up. Nobody says it out loud, but everybody knows that they have become victims of the strict code of justice of the militias. In the back window of his car, Luís has placed a big sticker with Marcelo Freixo’s name and the symbol of the socialist party. Freixo’s 2008 Parliamentary Commission Report on the expansion of the militias (see Chapter 3) turned him into their enemy number one. Police and militia alike despise him. As Luís exits his car another teacher passes by. He glances at the sticker: “I’d remove that if I were you,” he says. It takes a while before Luís gets the message. Coming home that evening, the risk he took dawns on him. He shudders: As if his long cornrows and dark skin weren’t enough of a call for attention. The next day, when he arrives at the school, the sticker is gone.

Javier and I leave Babilona, Rio, and Brazil at the end of July 2015. In the following months, the country is thrown into a deep economic crisis. Rio de Janeiro is especially affected. The local government is bankrupt, a year before the Olympic flame is lit. The city’s finances crumble under the weight of monumental, half-finished infrastructural projects. The nation and city have invested its prestige in the games. Public funds are diverted from the payment of government employees—nurses, teachers, police officers—and into the costly projects. Salaries for public employees are frozen.¹ My friends in Babilonia tell me that the police officers at the UPP have struck a deal with the drug traffickers. Violence increases as the rivaling gangs in Babilonia and Chapeu-Mangueira enter into a war against each other. The Military Police sends its Special Forces to invade the favela. Young neighbors disappear. Dead bodies wash up on a nearby beach.

After the presidential elections in 2014 the right-wing mobilizes against Dilma Rousseff. They are terrified by the Workers Party fourth consecutive electoral victory. The party seems unbeatable. Meanwhile, the biggest corruption scandal in Brazil, Lava Jato, gathers momentum. It incriminates politicians from across the political spectrum in the diversion of funds from the national oil company Petrobras. The judiciary is processing an increasing number of federal deputies as the lions share of Brazil’s elected officials are mired in what seems like an existential crisis. A small number of federal judges lead the moral crusade against the political class in a judicial process that is shaped by political interests and power schemes. In Congress and in the streets, the opposition against Dilma grows as the economy tumbles and the scope and scale of Lava Jato becomes clear. The protesters support a conservative political agenda and many call for a military intervention. Among a growing number of congressional deputies the impeachment of Dilma is openly discussed, but they need a reason, a majority, and the support of the parliamentary president. In December 2015, the leader of Congress Eduardo Cunha initiates the process of impeachment. He approves the trial within days after being dragged into the maelstrom, accused of embezzling public funds. Dilma is relieved of her presidency in May 2016 with her Vice President Michel Temer taking office. He forms a cabinet consisting exclusively of older, white men, and slashes public budgets. Among the first policy proposals of Temer’s government is a law that impedes the increase of public expenses in the next twenty-five years. The rights to exploit many of Brazil’s natural resources are sold to foreign companies.

Rio hosts the Olympics as planned but by that time many of the city’s residents have lost their enthusiasm for the games. The Olympic dream has become a nightmare. As Temer opens the games he is booed off the stadium. The security during the games is a mess. Half of the metal detectors used at the entrance to the Olympic Park don’t work. The security guards make the alarms beep from time to time to create the illusion of control (Larkins 2023). In the favelas the blood keeps flowing. Between the 5th and 21st of August 2016, during the two weeks of the games, 31 people are killed and 51 are wounded in shooting episodes in Complexo do Alemão and other favelas in Zona Norte.² But to the international spectators, Rio manages to pull it off. The Olympic belly flop comes a few weeks after the flame has been extinguished. Dilma is impeached and irrevocably removed from power. Allegedly in response to soaring violence, Michel Temer orders the military intervention of Rio’s security apparatuses in February 2018. Military officers from the Armed Forces are put in charge of the State Secretary of Security. Tanks roll through the city while the Armed Forces are set to patrol the streets. The state’s war apparatus is fully deployed and operational in Rio de Janeiro.

March 14th, 2018. A group of young, black women are gathered to discuss strategies for political activism in Rio’s city center, a stone’s throw away from Lapa’s bustling nightlife and landmark viaduct. One of the women is easily distinguished from the rest: She has bright purple lips, big earrings in matching color, bleached curls, and a broad smile that seems on the verge of bursting into laughter. She is young, but her eyes have small smile wrinkles around a focused gaze. When she talks to the people who have gathered, her voice is strong and clear. Marielle Franco has used it to fight for justice and against police violence in a country where many members of the rich white elite are upset by black women from the favela who lift their gaze and raise their voices. Tonight, Marielle leads the conversation. As a black, bisexual woman from one of Rio’s largest favela complexes and member of Rio’s City Council, she represents hope and change for many people who have been marginalized and excluded from spaces and positions of power and symbolizes the challenges to traditional hierarchies in Brazil (see Perry 2019). She has used her political position to criticize the military intervention in Rio and the pacification project as a militarization of the favelas (Cardoso and Ystanes 2018; Franco 2018).

The discussion lasts for an hour and a half. At nine p.m., Marielle gets into the backseat of a white Chevrolet that will take her home. In addition to the driver, she is accompanied by one of her assistants. The car leaves the venue and heads west, towards Maré. Later, witnesses confirm that another vehicle had left the place at the same time. Half an hour later, a car drives up next to the Chevrolet, firing thirteen shots at Marielle and her driver, Anderson Gomes. The aim is precise, these shots are fired by professionals. Three of them hit Marielle in the head. One hits her throat. At least three shots hit Anderson’s back. Both die immediately. Marielle’s assistant manages to evade the shots and only receives minor injuries. The assassinations of Marielle and Anderson lead to a public uproar, sending shockwaves internationally. Among politicians and activists in Brazil people demand answers: Who killed Marielle Franco?

In the aftermath of the murder, the country prepares to elect a new president. Michel Temer, tarnished by several corruption scandals and a symbol of Brazil’s traditional elites, is one of the least popular Presidents in the country’s history. Under Temer’s government, the economy has gone from bad to worse. In Rio, violence keeps increasing as the pacification policy derails. 1530 people are killed by Rio’s police forces in 2018 alone, dethroning 2007 as the year with the highest police lethality (when 1330 persons were killed by the police). Many Brazilians look to Lula for hope. The assumption is that despite the Workers Party implication in Lava Jato, the successes of his former Presidency will secure him the ballot if he runs for office. However, months prior to the election, Lula is put on trial and sentenced to twelve years in prison. The federal judge Sergio Moro bases the sentence on his conviction that Lula must be guilty despite the lack of conclusive evidence.³ Bolsonaro capitalizes on the sense of chaos and moral bankruptcy of the political class that has ruled Brazil since the return of democracy. Allied with the evangelical groups in Congress, he manages to garner 20% support in early polls, emerging as the only candidate positioned to challenge the Workers Party candidate, Fernando Haddad.

Nonetheless, the consensus among liberal political analysts is that his views are too extreme, his political discourse too nonsensical, and his values too anachronic to secure the 50% of votes that he needs to win a second round against Haddad. The dismissal of Bolsonaro as a war-mongering buffoon proves to be a high-risk gamble. A few weeks prior to the election, an apparently lone perpetrator stabs Jair Bolsonaro with a knife during a campaign rally. The attack galvanizes support for his candidacy and contributes to a remarkable victory with 55% of the votes in the second round (in the first round, he receives 46% against Haddad’s 29%). Brazil has chosen a new President: One who has promised to dismantle Congress and reinstate military rule. How is it that Brazilians across racial, class, and gendered divisions have united behind an openly authoritarian leader? (Fig. 9.2).

Fig. 9.2

Flyers demanding justice for Marielle on the two-year anniversary of her assassination, February 2023

The Chief of the Warrior Clan

With the election of Bolsonaro, I became attuned to how my fieldwork exposed me to the moral universe and worldview that he maneuvers. His name appeared again and again in conversations with the police, and so did many of the values that he defended. Importantly, Jair Bolsonaro and his sons had built their political careers around the unconditional support of police officers and the military (see Manso 2020). Once elected, most officers felt that they had their guy in the Presidential Palace. Increasingly, opinions that had previously been voiced in private set the tone of the public debate. The police’s contribution to the Brazilian far-right is significant, and while not all police officers are far-right supporters, the relation between the police and Bolsonarismo is one of mutual constitution: Bolsonaro is shaped by the values and worldview that circulate among Brazilian police and military forces and has also been one of the main ideological influences of many of the officers that I met. Understanding the police, the far-right, and Bolsonaro are interrelated projects.⁴

Jair Bolsonaro grew up in São Paulo’s rural countryside. His father was a dentist without formal education. His mother raised a family of six siblings. During Jair’s childhood, the family moved from place to place until they ended up in Eldorado. The small, sleepy town in the State of São Paulo’s rural interior now has around four to five thousand inhabitants and lies by the banks of the river Ribeira da Iguapé, in the middle of a sloping farmland with forest-clad hills. In 1970, when Jair is fifteen, Eldorado becomes the scene of a drama that makes a deep impression on him. In May that year, Carlos Lamarca, a guerrilla warrior and one of the most sought-after men by the Military dictatorship is stopped at a checkpoint. A shooting episode where two police officers and a civilian are wounded ensues, and while Lamarca manages to evade the authorities, the military establishes control posts at the access roads and ransack the town and its residents in search for the guerrilla warrior. After witnessing these events, Jair decides that he will join the Army.

Jair starts his education at the Military Academy Agulhas Negras in the State of Rio de Janeiro in the middle of the seventies, at the height of the dictatorship. He fails to impress his superiors, earning descriptions as a man with overblown economic and financial ambitions in military documents. One of the officers he served under later says that Bolsonaro had ambitions to lead. This was constantly rejected by the higher ranks, both because of the aggressive attitude he showed towards his colleagues, and due to a “lack of logical thinking, rationality, and balance in his lines of argument” (Leira 2022). However, in 1986, just after the end of the dictatorship, Bolsonaro wrote a piece in the national magazine Veja that earned him broad support among military officers across the country. There, he decries the low wages of the army, ignoring the ban on public critique of the institution stipulated in the disciplinary code of conduct. Bolsonaro spends fifteen days in detainment but the support he receives from his colleagues lays the groundwork for the next step in his career. The following year, in 1987, his fight for higher military wages continues through “Operation Blind Alley”: Bolsonaro and a group of officers plan to set off grenades in military academies across Brazil. But the operation ends where the name suggests it would and is never put into action. The case is discretely handled by a military court in 1988 who exonerates Bolsonaro of the charges of disloyalty and disciplinary offenses. While he denies having anything to do with the case it marks the end of his military career and distances him from the Army’s commanding officers. He withdraws from his position as Army Captain and devotes himself to politics.

His fight for increased salaries secures him the support of the rank and file in the Armed Forces and Military Police. In 1988 he is elected Deputy of Rio’s Legislative Assembly and two years later he is elected for Congress, stepping into the national political arena where he remains a relatively peripheral figure for decades. During this time, he and his sons build a family dynasty and a small fortune (Leira 2022). First and foremost, they become known for a string of “politically incorrect” or illiberal statements at a moment of broad democratic consensus. In the 90s, Bolsonaro gives a TV interview that has later been widely quoted. There, he defends the dictatorship in front of a perplexed interviewer. “If you were the President of Brazil today, would you have shut down Congress?” the reporter asks. “Without any doubt. I’d shut it down on the first day.” Then he launches a tirade of the kind that has become one of his hallmarks: “I’m sorry to say it, but we won’t be able to change anything in this country through elections—nothing at all. When it all comes down to it: Nothing! Brazil will sadly only change when we see a civil war here. We must do the job that the military dictatorship didn’t do: Kill 30 000 people, starting with FHC” (Fernando Henrique Cardoso, the President at the time).

This isn’t the only controversial statement Bolsonaro has made in his time as a member of Congress. He has also been an outspoken defender of the capital punishment, of lowering the age of criminal responsability, and of the use of torture. These positions all point in the direction of strengthening the necropolitical dynamics of the Brazilian State. In the impeachment case against Dilma in 2016, he votes “against communism, for freedom, and for the memory of Coronel Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra, Dilma Rousseff’s worst nightmare!” Ustra has been convicted for overseeing the torture of political prisoners, including Dilma, during the dictatorship. The gay and queer movement is also targeted by Bolsonaro’s incendiary rhetoric: “If your son starts becoming a little gayzinho, give him a round of beating, and he’ll change his behavior” he says during a TV-debate. “Listen, on my way here, someone said to me: It’s a good thing I was beaten a little, my father taught me to be a man.” In these comments, which must be understood as a continuation of the military dictators’ war on communism, the notion of cultural war, of a fight against “cultural marxism” and “gender ideology” is crucial. The idea that the left has gained cultural hegemony among intellectual and political elites was central during Bolsonaro’s campaign and has been pushed by Olavo de Carvalho, Bolsonaro’s far-right ideologue following his victory in the Presidential elections (Castro Rocha 2021; Leira 2022).

One of the key features of Bolsonaro’s political career has been his capacity to present himself as a family man. He has built a political dynasty around his sons, whom he refers to as his pit bulls—like the Military Police Commanders do with their most aggressive and loyal officers. His three eldest sons have all been elected for office and if anything, as a father he has managed to induce in them a fierce loyalty: There is no opposition to their father’s worldview, statements, or politics to be traced in their political careers. Rather, father and sons have built their project as a family enterprise.⁵ Like their father, Bolsonaro’s sons have made several controversial statements that draw on the notion of cultural war against so-called gender ideology.⁶ Consider for example his son Eduardo, who has declared a war against the LGBTQI + community; stated that feminism is a disease; and been sued for harassment after calling his ex-girlfriend a “whore” and “bitch” who should have “fucked more to learn how to shut up.” In the well-known style of his father, he has also claimed that homosexuals are conspiring to turn themselves into a super-race and are seeking privileges disguised as rights. While such statements would send shivers down the spine of most liberal democratic subjects, many of those who support Bolsonaro see Eduardo’s ideological proximity to his father as proof of a tightly knit family and a strong bond between father and son (see Leira 2022).

As a lawmaker, Bolsonaro has a meager track-record to show for prior to his Presidency. In his three decades in Congress, he only passes two bills: A tax change for industrial products and a law to authorize a pill for cancer treatment. Of the 190 bills that he has proposed, a third pertain to military issues and a fourth to matters of public or national security. This lack of interest in other issues has not affected Bolsonaro’s popularity among his core voters. He has built his political career as an arduous defender of the Armed Forces and Military Police. But his appeal reaches beyond these institutional constraints, and includes violent entrepreneurs who gradually cohere around the identity of the militar (Nobre 2020). A hallmark of his family enterprise is to hand out state honors to hundreds of police and military officers as well as people who have later been tied to the militias (Manso 2020).⁷ Perhaps due to his affinity with the grammars of violent sociability, with the language of brute force, Bolsonaro even gains adepts among some drug traffickers, the subjects whom he has signaled out for extermination.⁸ His capacity to garner support among the groups that he attacks shows the power of the anti-elitist sentiments that right-wing populism mobilizes. Among the police officers I spoke to, there was no doubt: There was only one politician they didn’t despise. His name is Bolsonaro.⁹

Let us, for a moment, return to the political developments that preceded the 2018 elections. The June uprisings in 2013 are broadly thought to signal a turning point in Brazil’s public opinion, with broad implications for the consolidation of an ultra-conservative caucus in the national elections of 2014. Brazilians know this caucus as the BBB-lobby (bullet, beef, and bible), referencing the interests it defends: The weapon’s lobby, the industrial farming sector, and the evangelical churches. The caucus has championed legislation to liberalize gun ownership and lower the age of criminal responsibility. They have started a moral crusade in defense of “traditional” family values and against abortion, same-sex marriage, and anti-discrimination laws that they see as “special rights” for minorities (see i.g. Cowan 2016; Green 2018).

While the weapon lobby has always been close to Bolsonaro’s heart, his alliance with the evangelical churches developed gradually over the years. In 2006, following the passing of anti-discrimination laws aimed to protect LGBTQI + people, he approaches the evangelicals in Congress to discuss the idea of a future presidential candidacy. The slogan is clear from the onset: “Brazil before everything, God before everyone.” Eventually, Bolsonaro converts from Catholicism to Evangelism. He later joins the Social Christian Party (Partido Social Cristiano) and is baptized in the Jordan river in Israel (Shapiro 2021). At the time, the evangelical movement controls one-fifth of the representatives of Congress and makes up the better part of Bolsonaro’s electoral base. With the moral bankruptcy of the traditional political class, Brazil’s conservatives turn to the only candidate who seems able to stop a new Workers Party government. Bolsonaro promises that when he gets to power the “red communists” will have to choose between prison or exile and states that he won’t accept the results if he loses the election. His son Eduardo also hints at the possibility of a military coup: If the federal electoral court does not give them the result they want, all they will need is a Soldier and a Corporal to shut the court down.

During the election, Bolsonaro receives support by leaders from the world of business and finance and the conservative Christian TV channel Record. But he is also helped by Steve Bannon, Trump’s election campaign guru. Like Trump, he bases a lot of his campaign on propaganda and fake news spread through social media, particularly through WhatsApp, the biggest communication platform in Brazil. The social network is so popular that phone companies sell subscriptions with unlimited use of WhatsApp, but without Internet.¹⁰ To many voters, the lack of internet makes it harder to fact check the information that is shared in the platform’s group-chats. Social media becomes an important battleground in the cultural war against “the left”. Bolsonaro’s inner circle of advisors, dubbed “The Cabinet of Hate” (Gabinete do Odio), spread a panoply of deceitful accusations against the Workers Party through false accounts. For example, Bolsonaro claims that his rival Fernando Haddad, Minister of Education during Lula’s first government, had tried to pervert school children with a “gay-kit” allegedly distributed in public schools. These accusations are accompanied by waves of other fake news, like a video that shows a baby feeding bottle shaped like a penis—attributed to be the work of communists (Leira 2022) (Fig. 9.3).

Fig. 9.3

Police officers from Mangueira fiddling with their phones to make time, May 2015

In January 2019, a few weeks after Bolsonaro is sworn in as President, Brazilian media reveals that his son and senator, Flavio Bolsonaro, has employed Adriano Magalhães da Nóbrega, a former BOPE officer and leader of a militia group called the “Office of Crime” (Escritorio do Crime). At the time, the paramilitary group is under investigation for the murder of Marielle Franco. It turns out that Flavio has also given distinctions of honor to two police officers with ties to the group. A picture shows Jair and Flavio smiling next to Nóbrega (Manso 2020). “I’ve taken pictures with thousands of police officers,” the President replies when he is confronted. The same week as the ties between Flavio Bolsonaro and the militia in Rio are revealed, another case is broadly reported: Jean Wyllis, the only openly gay congressional deputy and party colleague of Marielle Franco and Marcelo Freixo resigns. He has decided to move from Brazil after repeated death threats. The decision is made after a year living under police protection.

Two months later, in March 2019—a year after the murder of Marielle Franco and Anderson Gomes, Civil Police officers finally arrest two suspects. The investigation has been stalled repeatedly by police detectives who are suspected of accepting bribes from the militias involved in the assassination. It turns out that the shooter, Ronnie Lessa, is a neighbor of Jair Bolsonaro, and that Bolsonaro’s youngest son has dated Lessa’s daughter. The man the police claims was behind the wheel, Élcio Vieira de Queiroz, appears in two different pictures with Jair Bolsonaro. As part of the investigation, the Civil Police search the house of one of Lessa’s childhood friends. They find an arsenal consisting of 117 M16 machine guns. It’s the biggest gun apprehension that Rio’s police forces have ever made. Six years after the murder, the ideational authors behind the murder of Marielle Franco remain unidentified, but the close ties between Bolsonaro and the militias have been thoroughly documented (Manso 2020).

The War Machine and State Dynamics of Right-Wing Populism

The failure of the UPPs came at a moment of political instability on a national level, with the Lava Jato corruption scandal garnering much of the public’s attention. The uncovering of widespread corruption across the political spectrum coincided with economic stagnation and increasing insecurity across Rio’s urban landscape. Calls for hard-handed security politics were accompanied by a moralization of politics. The political debate was increasingly structured around ideas of purity and pollution, of good and bad, corrupt, and clean—rather than political solutions to the country’s grievances. The evangelicals in national politics thrived on this moralization, which drew on interpretations of Brazilian sociopolitical dynamics as a cultural and spiritual war between good and evil forces (see Kramer 2005; Vital da Cunha 2018).¹¹ The polarizing logic of war and its easy ordering of the world along the categories of friends and enemies, good and evil, resonated among the militarized subjectivities and churchgoers who became the founding pillars of the movement that brought Bolsonaro to power.

While Bolsonaro lost his bid for reelection in 2022, the cosmologies of war that he actively drew on and nurtured remain an active force that will continue to shape Brazilian politics and social relations in the foreseeable future. It espouses a worldview where the Brazilian motto of order and progress is achieved through the exercise of “civilizing” violence and where the state is territorialized through the imposition of police authority and moralism in the “savage” spaces of the favelas. The protestant ethos of the evangelical churches bestows this worldview with a strong emphasis on individual autonomy and responsibility which is very much in line with a neoliberal ethos of entrepreneurialism (see i.g. Bartel 2021). Within a Brazilian urban context, the individuating cosmology of the protestant churches can be seen as an emergent phenomenon but has an important antecedent in the historical figure of the bandeirante or sertanista—autonomous frontline of colonizers that penetrated the Brazilian interior in search for gold, precious metals, and indigenous people whom they enslaved or exterminated during the colonization of Brazil (see i.g. Evans and Doutra e Silva 2017).¹²

As idiosyncratic war machines, the militia’s connections to the Bolsonaro-clan are indicative of the configuration of power that Jair Bolsonaro represents. The analysis of Bolsonaro’s presidency by Brazilian political philosopher Marcos Nobre (2020) is instructive. He argues that Bolsonaro has imposed the logic of war at the highest level of the Brazilian state, expressed among other things in the continuing dismantling and destruction of the state’s democratic institutions. This permanent attack on the state apparatus, characteristic of war machines, was connected to the way Bolsonaro built his legitimacy around an anti-system rhetoric: He could not, Nobre writes, govern through the state’s institutional structures because these were the targets of his critique. Another, equally important example of how Bolsonaro unleashed war machine dynamics through his presidency, was his outspoken support of the logics of extermination of the police and militias, creating a general atmosphere of impunity that gave police officers and paramilitaries ample room to maneuver; so was the dismantling of environmental protection in the Amazon, the attack on rights-based movements, and aggressive policies of market liberalization (see i.g. Rojas et al. 2019; Barretto Filho 2020; Manso 2020; Nobre 2020; Perry 2019). In all these instances, war machine dynamics—the destruction of the state’s institutional structures—were at the core of Bolsonaro’s political project (Fig. 9.4).

Fig. 9.4

A group of young boys from the favela as the police would like to see them: Behind bars

Conclusion: (Dis)order and Progress

The notion of cosmologies of war that I have developed in this book emphasizes how the capitalist expansion in Brazil relies on the continued production of a state at war with a part of its own population. I have suggested that by tracing the genealogies of colonial and cultural war and how they map out in the policing of Rio’s favelas, we can understand the material and ideational dimensions of competing and seemingly contradictory political projects within the Brazilian state apparatus. Order and progress; tradition and modernity; authority and freedom; hierarchy and equality: The competing normative orders that so many scholars have noticed in studies of policing in Brazil are inscribed in the national motto.

Thinking with the notion of cosmologies of war challenges the emic-etic distinction in the study of war since it becomes less important to determine if practices correspond to traditional definitions of warfare and more important to understand the social dynamics that are mobilized when war is evoked (see Grillo 2019). The concept signals the entanglement of cultural and colonial warfare in Rio’s pacification project, highlighting historical trajectories and emergent forces of war machine dynamics that were intensified by Bolsonaro’s war on Brazilian democracy (see Nobre 2020). These cosmologies of war have legitimized continued practices of predation, extractivism, and necropolitical forms of governance, while territorializing a set of moral relations in the spaces that are upended by the destructive dynamics of the war machine. Throughout Brazilian history, governments have relied on these dynamics to facilitate colonial forms of resource extraction: From the installment of the plantation system to the practices of the bandeirantes. In the country’s current democratic period, militarized policing has ensured the conditions for what some scholars refer to as accumulation by dispossession or predatory accumulation (Harvey 2003; Hoffman 2011; Bourgois 2018). This has also been a militarization of everyday practices, social identities, and relations—what Erika Robb Larkins and I refer to as the “militarization of everything everywhere”: Of the spectacular and the mundane, of family life, childhood and religion (Salem and Larkins, forthcoming). This process is what is implied in the notion of cosmologies of war.

What does it mean when war is mobilized in popular or political discourses? What enemy-images are evoked? Who or what needs to be deterritorialized, eliminated, or transformed? What characterizes the new social orders that emerge from the rubble? What worldviews and values are these orders structured around? How are relations of power re-configured? What kind of alliances or assemblages are formed—what machines connect? How is power legitimized and exercised? In this book, I have drawn on the notion of cultural war to highlight the ideational dimensions of an emergent social order at the UPPs, organized as a patriarchal police state which fused anti-communism, entrepreneurialism, conservative family values, an ethics of sex and gender, and religious motifs of a spiritual battle between good and evil (see i.g. Birman 2019; Pinheiro-Machado and Freitas 2019; Shapiro 2021; Perry 2019). I have also drawn on the notion of colonial war to highlight the material dimensions and racialized dynamics of police practices organized around elimination and transformation, as well as extractivism and predation as modes of producing profit within colonial spaces (see Nordstrom 2004; Misse 2007; Hirata 2014; Albernaz 2015; Salem 2016a; Grillo 2019; Salem and Bertelsen 2020).

The Brazilian far-right’s political project and its manifestation in the figure of Bolsonaro, seems to exist in the tension between an idea of national unity and national fragmentation: On the one hand, the invocation of the “Brazilian People”; of homeland; of God. On the other, the attack on institutional structures that ensure national sovereignty and the stimulation of multiple sovereignties territorially nested within the nation (Bertelsen 2016). Like many scholars have noted before me, in this fragmented national landscape, some spaces work according to authoritarian values and principles, others are governed according to liberal democratic values, and yet others, it seems, act as frontiers where the destructive dynamics of war machines are given free reign. Throughout Brazilian history differentiated spaces have coexisted in a symbiotic relationship. However, during Bolsonaro’s government the frontiers—colonial spaces where war becomes a permanent logic of governance—expanded and multiplied. We have yet to see what will emerge from the rubble.