The Northern Massacres

Abstract

In January 2017, more than 100 prisoners died during a series of gang orchestrated rebellions in the northern states of Amazonas, Roraima and Rio Grande do Norte. The prisoners involved were directly or indirectly affiliated to Rio de Janeiro’s Comando Vermelho (the CV) or São Paulo’s Primeiro Comando do Capita (the PCC). Liberal commentary on the massacres and the Brazilian government's reaction to them focused on four major issues: the self-defeating, counter-productive war on drugs; the poor state of the prison system; the absence of guards on prison wings; and the failure of the country's non-existent or corrupted securitisation agenda over the past decade to manage prison gangs, let alone deal with the fallout from the more recent breakdown in relations between the PCC and CV over the trade in cocaine. Each of these areas of critique is found wanting. Brazilian prison gangs are involved in a lot more than illicit drug markets, and neither the country's impoverished prisoners nor overstretched prison managers could get by without them. The staff-inmate power dynamics that emerge in these abandoned spaces are complex and in constant flux. Disruptions or shifts in power may be accompanied by violence, some of which may not be intended or foreseen by its organisers. Finally, with no clear gang leadership to target, the government's purported decapitating strategy would make little difference even if it were to exist. To understand self-proclaimed criminal organisations like the CV and PCC, we need to shift attention away from the purported links between drug trafficking and prison gangs towards the historical role played by inmate collectives in providing inmates with alternative systems of governance and prison staff with informal systems of security: to study prison gangs from the bottom up (as emerging from everyday institutional practices, professional, social and interpersonal relations) and from the inside out (gang activity in the country’s poor urban areas, including control of the drug trade, depending on what goes on inside prison more than vice versa). Neither should the country’s prison gang phenomenon necessarily be regarded as a symptom of international organised crime. For the ordinary prisoner gangs operate as ideals as much as physical realities. Even the most advanced of Brazil’s prison gangs (the CV and PCC) should be studied as organisations of criminals rather than as criminal organisations, as loose heterogeneous networks of individuals that are just as vulnerable to being corrupted by police and prison authorities as the opposite. Like any other communities, prisoner communities seek institutions of governance to make their members’ lives more predictable, to protect them and provide for their material and psychological needs. To the extent, prison staff lack the resources to do so, and prison inmates are required to collaborate, organise and self-govern. The northern prison massacres represented a disruption in an increasingly dynamic and institutionalised system of co-produced order, symbolised by the historical figure of the faxina, which while fragile and varied has for decades kept most Brazilian prisons in better order and enabled most Brazilian prisoners to better survive. The immediate cause of the massacres may have been the CV and PCC falling out over their share of the eastern cocaine trail, but for most prisoners that had something to gain from the killings—few of who will ever make serious money from the drug trade—the fight was over territories of informal governance and survival, not territories of commerce.