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Favela War - 2017

On 1 January, 56 prisoners were killed after a rebellion at the Anísio Jobim Penitentiary Complex (Compaj) in Manaus, Amazonas. Members of two rival drug trafficking gangs, the Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC) and the Família do Norte (FDN) – allied to the Comando Vermelho (CV) – clashed in what was considered the most violent massacre in the history of the Brazilian prison system since the Carandiru massacre, in 1992.

"The manner in which the country opts to address public security generates many victims," said sociologist Renato Sergio de Lima, president of the forum. "When you elect confrontation, the results were devastating. The numbers show we had a serious problem with lethal violence." The overwhelming majority of victims were young Black men, de Lima said, attributing the rise in murders to organized crime.

More militarization and policing forms the bulwark of the right-wing's strategy for dealing with Brazil's security issues, but such a strategy flies in the face of evidence from the six-month military intervention in the state of Rio de Janeiro. The 'Aimlessly: No Program, No Results, No Direction' report, published by the Intervention Observatory at Candido Mendes University, revealed that massacres in Rio de Janeiro state doubled and the number of shootouts significantly increased since the military intervention was launched on February 16. Silvia Ramos, coordinator at the Intervention Observatory, said the intervention was a political decision "that spawned new problems with the presence of soldiers in the political life of Brazilians, who were hurled into the center of a scenery without solving the problem of insecurity in Rio."

By 2017, Rio de Janeiro found itself engulfed in a security crisis of unprecedented proportions, marking the catastrophic failure of nearly a decade of attempts to pacify the city's favelas. The Pacifying Police Units program, launched in 2008 with great fanfare ahead of the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics, lay in ruins. The ambitious initiative, which had once stationed nearly ten thousand officers across thirty-eight favelas serving almost eight hundred thousand residents, had proven to be nothing more than a temporary reprieve from the city's endemic violence. The program that had briefly reduced homicides and won international acclaim had expanded too quickly, spread too thin across increasingly larger and more complex favela complexes without adequate resources, training, or long-term planning. By 2017, the gangs had returned, often more heavily armed and emboldened than before, while police morale collapsed and corruption flourished amid unpaid salaries and budget cuts resulting from Rio's severe fiscal crisis.

The violence statistics from 2017 painted a grim picture of a city spiraling out of control. Rio de Janeiro recorded over six thousand homicides that year, the highest rate in nearly a decade, with violent deaths occurring at a rate equivalent to countries engulfed in civil war.

The number of murders in Brazil had broken records: a total of 63,880 people were killed in 2017, a three percent increase from the previous year. Averaging 175 homicides per day, or 7.2 every hour, the murder rate is equivalent to that of a country engulfed in war, according to the Brazilian Forum of Public Security. The 2017 murder rate had also reached new heights, up from 29.9 to 30.8 deaths per 100,000 per people.

The Fogo Cruzado research institute documented an astounding fifty-eight hundred shootings throughout the year, averaging sixteen gun battles daily across the metropolitan area. At least one hundred and twenty police officers were killed in 2017, many in the favelas where the pacification program had ostensibly established government control. In communities like Rocinha, Brazil's largest favela with nearly two hundred thousand residents, gang warfare had become so intense that the army was called in for emergency intervention in September. Schools closed or shortened their hours because of constant gunfire. Residents trapped in their homes by shootouts missed crucial exams. The optimism that had briefly flourished during the Olympics had been replaced by a sense of siege, as if the city had returned to the dark days of the 1990s when drug trafficking violence propelled murder rates to deadly highs.

The three major criminal organizations controlling Rio's drug trade had emerged from the pacification period stronger and more sophisticated. Comando Vermelho, the oldest and most powerful faction, had roots dating back to the late 1970s when it formed in the Cândido Mendes prison during Brazil's military dictatorship. By 2017, Comando Vermelho had become a transnational criminal organization deeply embedded in the global cocaine trade, maintaining connections with Colombian cartels and Amazonian traffickers. Amigos dos Amigos, which split from Comando Vermelho in the late 1990s after internal disputes, controlled significant territory including Rocinha. Terceiro Comando Puro represented the third major faction in the complex landscape of Rio's organized crime. These organizations had transformed from simple drug-dealing operations into sophisticated criminal enterprises with hierarchical structures, accounting practices, territorial control mechanisms, and the capacity to provide social services in areas where the state was absent. They employed thousands in direct trafficking operations while providing informal income to many more through peripheral activities.

Parallel to the drug factions, a more sinister force had been growing in power throughout the 2000s and accelerated dramatically during the chaos of the UPP decline. The militias, paramilitary groups composed of current and retired police officers, prison guards, firefighters, and military members, had rapidly expanded their territorial control, particularly in Rio's vast West Zone. Unlike the drug gangs, the militias initially positioned themselves as community protectors fighting against drug trafficking, a narrative that won them support from some favela residents who saw them as the lesser of two evils. However, the militias soon revealed themselves as equally predatory, imposing security fees on residents, controlling the sale of cooking gas, dominating transportation, extorting businesses, and engaging in territorial expansion through extreme violence. By 2017, militias controlled substantial portions of western Rio de Janeiro, and they continued to expand through turf wars with both drug factions and rival militia groups. The relationship between militias, politicians, and state security forces was deep and complex, with evidence of militia members receiving political honors and protection, creating a shadow government in many communities.

President Temer urged lawmakers to carry on with business as usual on 12 April 2017, a day after a Supreme Court justice ordered corruption probes into nearly 100 politicians, including leading lawmakers and a third of his cabinet. Temer avoided commenting directly on the unprecedented wave of investigations triggered by plea bargain testimony from executives at engineering group Odebrecht.