The Armed Forces occupy the Complejo del Alemán, in Rio de Janeiro, to ensure security during the municipal elections in 2008. Image: Wilson Dias/ABr, CC BY-3.0 BR.
Soldiers are back in Rio de Janeiro, but they had not been
gone for long. In the last 12 months, the military was called 4 times to
intervene. Over the last decade, the
state of Rio has appealed to the Armed Forces 12 times. Those who circulate
the streets of the city have become accustomed to the presence of men in
camouflaged uniforms, snipers, armored cars and various other characters
usually associated with war scenes.
The subject has
gained an even more dramatic shape in recent days. The governor of the
state of Rio de Janeiro, Luiz Fernando Pezão, said on September 22 he could no
longer deal with the situation in Rocinha, one of Rio’s largest favelas. The dispute
between two high-ranking members of the criminal faction that dominates the
territory has raised levels of violence there. Once again, faced with
heightened tension, the Government of Rio de Janeiro requested
assistance from the Army. Approximately 950 heavily-armed soldiers arrived
in the favela on foot, in armor vehicles and helicopters hours later. So far,
official sources have reported 3 deaths since the military's entry; informal
sources claim the number is higher. Residents of the community live in fear,
schools are closed and health posts have intermittent care.
The participation of the armed forces in public security in
Rio de Janeiro can be told from two different perspectives. The first is the
"local" narrative, most common among public security experts or for
activists in the area. The versions constructed within this perspective
highlight extreme urban violence in Rio de Janeiro, aggravated by the administrative
crisis in the state. This violence is carried out by factions and by organized
crime groups, but it is closely linked to the violent action of the state in
the favelas and peripheries, a dynamic that results in a genocide of black
populations. This process is linked to the option to treat drug policies as
security issues, which encourages armed confrontation and produces enormous
violence and lethality, in addition to the brutal policy of incarceration.
The Rocinha favela in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Image: chensiyuan/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
It is also possible to cite the "official"
argument, which justifies a military operation by formulating a supposed
emergency situation of public safety in the city and the state, which would
also require emergency actions. All of these narratives are true and help us
understand what is happening on our streets. It is one face of the tragedy unfolding
in the city of Rio de Janeiro and helps articulate the activism that seeks to
combat violence.
But this story can also be told as part of a transnational
or global repertoire of militarized management of spaces and populations. The
use of the Armed Forces as a tool of public security is not exclusive to Rio de
Janeiro or even Brazil. Colombia offers a prominent case for understanding the
war-police nexus, where the government has worked with international forces on
the most explicit version of the "war on drugs". For decades, the
country's security has been managed by a complex of local and global public and
private actors, including the police, the national army, the United States
Armed Forces, private security companies and local militias.
Mexico follows, in several respects, the same path, with a
scenario of extreme violence managed and instigated by the participation of
military and police in public security. The country has adopted a recipe for
repressive, confrontational, and incarcerating public safety, largely
formulated in global power centers, notably in the United States. This
repertoire was developed through tests carried out in peripheral countries that
served as laboratories. Colombia is a great example.
Cecurity forces occupy the Complexo do Alemão (a complex of favelas) in 2010. Image: Agência Brasil / ABr, CC BY 3.0 br.
A "problem-solving" perspective generally
addresses the cases of Colombia and Mexico as failures of a public policy
option. In this view, it is surprising that the same militarized option is
repeatedly applied, despite our enormous database that would confirm its
failure in the fight against crime and drugs. This type of reading is necessary
for the articulation of activists who intend to bring some improvement to the
living conditions of huge portions of the population. But it needs to be
complemented by a critical perspective that analyzes the violent management of
populations as a functional project of government alongside the repression of sectors of
society, and the planning and management of certain peripheral spaces.
The streets of big cities are policed by Armed Forces in
several of the global peripheries. The Brazilian military is present in the
outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, but also in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. The United
States National Guard was present in Baghdad, but was also called upon to
intervene in New Orleans and Baltimore. Several of the same Colombian
ex-military personnel trained by the US military provide services to private
military companies in conflict settings or international interventions in
Liberia, Sierra Leone or Afghanistan.
To conceive the presence of the army in our cities as a
dysfunctional manifestation is to interpret the army merely as an instrument of
war. This means being limited to its legal or conceptual dimension, and losing
sight of the function it has actually exercised throughout these locations’
history. In these places, the army is jointly responsible, along with other
organizations such as the police and militias, for the violent governing of
certain populations and territories. This is the case in Latin America, in
Africa, or in the outskirts of large American cities.
The Army supports the occupation of the Complexo do Alemão (a complex of favelas) in 2010. Image: Agência Brasil / ABr, CC BY 3.0 br.
The interpretation of the military as a governing force and
of guarantee of order was generally concealed by the mainstream literature of
International Relations. By conceptually separating international security from
public security, we have created an obstacle that prevents us from perceiving
ways of responding to the challenges of security and insecurity in contemporary
times with punitivism and repression. We react to an escalation of violence,
especially – as is customary and is the praxis of the system in which we live –
in the peripheries.
Data
from the Brazilian Forum of Public Security attest that a person dies every
8 minutes in Brazil. There are almost 60,000 homicides a year. Of every 100
people murdered in Brazil, 71 are black. In Northern and Northeastern states,
the link between race and violence is even more evident. In Sergipe, for
example, the homicide rate among blacks is 73 per 100,000 inhabitants, while
that of whites is 13 per 100,000. This is the Brazilian situation. The spirals
of violence gain distinct concreteness in each country. And they are seldom perceived
as they should be: as fuel for questioning the essence of a hard-hued global
repertoire that materializes in a unique way in each context. The
multidisciplinary approach necessary to understand this continues to be
delegitimized by academic circles as an unfeasible issue for the discipline of
International Relations.
The issue of violence and recurrent mano dura (“firm hand” or “iron fist”) responses and undeniably
similar responses implemented around the world continues to be rejected by the
epistemic communities who study global flows and could make a decisive
contribution to the understanding of such issues. They also block the ability
to fully understand the regional and
global articulations of organized civil society, which undoubtedly
represent our best shot at facing this cruel reality.
Disciplinary boundaries work along political boundaries to
fragment us, prune understanding and critical perceptions, and hide the global
dynamics that oppress, repress, imprison, and kill.
