The Social Accumulation of Violence in Brazil: Some Remarks

Sociology International Journal Review Article Open Access The social accumulation of violence in brazil: some remarks Abstract Volume 1 Issue 2 - 2017 Since the 1980s, a long historic and social process has transformed Rio de Janeiro, Michel Misse the so-called “Marvelous City”that enchanted the world in the 1940s, ‘50s and’60s, Department of Sociology, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, into a city presented in the international media as one of the world’s most violent. Brazil How was this possible? What took place for this transformation to occur and produce effects that remain until today, more than thirty years later? The objective of this Correspondence: Michel Misse, Department of Sociology, article is to examine some hypotheses for the advance of violence based on the use Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, of firearms in Rio de Janeiro. These hypotheses are combined in the conception of Email [email protected] a “social accumulationof violence,”which the author has been developing in his work.1–5 This process began in Rio de Janeiro and has spread to all large or medium Received: July 24, 2017 | Published: August 24, 2017 Brazilian cities from the Brazilian South to Northeast, although recently there are important inflections in some Southeastern states. In the past twenty years, nearly one million people have been murdered in Brazil, most of them young. A diffuse violence accompanies these deaths, migrating from city to city, from one region of the country to another, with no significant decline in the national statistics. Keywords: violence, police, thefts, illegal gambling, fraud, judicial system The origins ran headlines comparing Rio de Janeiro to Chicago of the 1920s and demanded an immediate response from the police to the sense To better situate what we will present in this article, it is necessary of insecurity that the press itself helped to disseminateinthe city. to consider some preliminary data. Until the mid 1950s, the city of The reports in the daily newspapers, magazines and radio stations Rio de Janeiro, then capital of Brazil (known as the federal district) concentrated on the faits divers that began to show a city in which did not have a rate of more than 8 homicides per 100 thousand people, crime modernized along with urban life. But compared to what a rate lower than New York City at the same time. Rio de Janeiro had began to happen thirty years later, the city could be characterized 2.5millionresidents and since the 1940s had been receiving a growing as a peaceful metropolis. This was the social representation that its number of immigrants from other Brazilian states, who came to find population still had of their city, but which began to be lost. work in the capital or in its urban periphery. The majority of the daily crimein the city and surrounding region involved small thefts, illegal The police,as was customary,was led by an army general who gambling, fights with wounds and fraud. There were also a small but given the clamor in the press decided to create a special squad to deal generally under reported number of rapes and violence against women, with new problems. This group, through their arbitrary and violent as well as attempted homicides and violent conflicts in bars and public actions, came to be known popularly as the “death squad,”a name places. Illegal drug sales were insignificant, far overshadowed by that became popular internationally. Throughout the 1960s it was held smuggling – the main illegal market at the time along with the “jogo responsible for the death or imprisonmentof various criminals. Its fame do bicho”, (animal game), a popular lottery that has existed for more increased with the death of its leader, detective Le Cocq,in 1964 and than a century and that has always been illegal.6 Police corruption is the creation by his followers of the “Escuderie Le Cocq”, which was one of the main legacies of the jogo do bicho. However,mostof the driven according to the press of the time by violent, vindictive andat crimes against life at the time were crimes of passion, which were times illegal action. In various cities of the metropolitan region groups nearly all crimes linked to honor and to “machismo,” since this was a began to appear of “justiceiros” [vigilantes], which were known as traditional society just beginning to modernize. The literature of the “exterminator groups” who offered private security to shop owners period presents an expressive narrative of these issues, while more and local small businesses with the promise of eliminating”(by death) contemporary literature is characterized by the irruption of violence in the muggers or small thieves who worked there. the characters of these narratives. There is a sharp rupture between the A large rebellion in 1960 in Rio de Janeiro’s main prison, the first passionate anguish of Nelson Rodrigues’ charactersof the 1940sand in a series that was repeated in the following decades, was crushed by ‘50s,who killed and were killed out of jealousy and other emotional police forces, but would serve as a reference for the changing standard obsessions, and the nearly ethnographic characters of Paulo Lins in of urban crime that followed the 1950s, with the gradual disappearance the 1960s and 1970s, whose book became the film “Cidade de Deus” of the figure of the “malandro1.” With his departure from the scene, [City of God]. 1Malandro is an attribute used to designate a person or a lifestyle Since the second half of the 1950s, an increase has been perceived (malandragem). Its origin is Italian (malandrino) and its more universal content in urban criminality, with the rise of gangs that rob gas stations, is that of the Iberian picaro. In 19th century Rio de Janeiro the term malandro taxi drivers and shops. There is a higher record of violent crimes, came to represent a social type between a black slave and a free worker who and homicides reached a rate of 10 per 100,000 residents. The press avoided regular work, substituting it for a hedonistic life based on advantages obtained from gambling, at times exploitation of women. Submit Manuscript | http://medcraveonline.com Sociol Int J. 2017;1(2):71‒77 71 © 2017 Misse. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and build upon your work non-commercially. Copyright: The social accumulation of violence in brazil: some remarks ©2017 Misse 72 the malandro would gain a slightly positive and nostalgic social of the left) and demanded “peace, justice and liberty.”The first, and representation in samba and literature in following years, and was at the time the most important and violent criminal organization in substituted, by contrast, by the figure of the “marginal,”whose referent Brazil was created, the CV “Comando Vermelho” [Red Command]. was a fusionof the sociological notion of the individual placed at the Others followed in the 1980s, such as the “Terceiro Comando” [Third marginof the socio-economic system with the notion of the individual Command] (TC) and the ADA (Amigos dos Amigos) [Friends of at the marginof the law. In contrast to the malandro, the marginal Friends]. All of these organizations arose within the penitentiary was depicted as a violent, rough, stupid and homicidal social type. system, they invested in drug trafficking whenthe price of cocaine fell Both, however, were interpreted as coming from the same poor social in the market and its offer in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo increased milieu, the favelas of the capital and the sub-divisionsof immigrants extraordinarily, after the entrance of Colombia in the production.1 from the Brazilian Northeast, in the periphery of the city formed by In the late 1970s they began to control, through the formation of the metropolitan region. Thus, social types of criminal subjects were networks of owners of points of retail sale of cocaine and marijuana formed. in many favelas of Rio de Janeiro and the metropolitan region, with groups of men armed to the teeth.8 Each network was supported by In the 1970s, the homicide rate in Rio reached 20 per 100 thousand one or another of the penitentiary“commands,” which were the press and the sense of insecurity increased considerably in the years called the “trafficking factions,” the CV and the TC and later the following the military coup that imposed a dictatorship on Brazil in ADA. The arms race between these gangs led to a homicide rate that the mid 1960s. Torture, whichwas tolerated for common criminals as was already 30 per 100 thousand in the mid 1980s and reached 60 per a means to attain confessions for crimes since the colonial period, 100 thousand in 1994. also came to be used by the political police and by the military to repress civil political resistance to the dictatorship. The situation as a An examination of the profile of the main armed actors in Rio de whole deteriorated even more with the entrance of the Military Police, Janeiro from the mid 1990s until today can help us to understand the a state-level force based on a military model, used for policing the main dimensions of the social accumulation of violence. streets of the city, to substitute the “guarda civil”or municipal guard, which no longer existed. With an increasing force each year, the The main collective actors of violence in rio Military Police became responsible for street policing and repression A ponderable portion of homicides and other violent crimes in Rio of crime in the streets, which had been the responsibility of the civil de Janeiro do not involve criminal groups or collectives.

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