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Favela War - Military Intervention : 2018

On 16 February 2018 []not 2017 Brazil’s president Michel Temer ordered the army to take over command of police forces in Rio de Janeiro. The emergency measure, the first of its kind since Brazil returned to democracy after the end of a military dictatorship in the mid-1980s, comes amid rising violence and a spike in crime. It took effect immediately and will last until the end of 2018.

President Temer signed an unprecedented federal decree implementing military intervention in the state of Rio de Janeiro. For the first time since Brazil's return to democracy after the end of military dictatorship in the mid-1980s, the federal government assumed direct control of a state's public security apparatus, placing it under the command of Army General Walter Souza Braga Netto. The intervention, which would last through the end of 2018, represented an extraordinary constitutional measure that effectively removed the elected governor's authority over the Military Police, Civil Police, firefighters, and the entire criminal justice administration related to public safety. General Braga Netto, who had commanded security operations during the 2016 Olympics, answered directly to the president rather than to state authorities. The decree cited the serious endangerment of public order caused by drug wars between armed gangs and paramilitary militias as justification for this dramatic federal takeover of state functions.

The military intervention deployed massive resources into Rio's favelas. Operations mobilized up to four thousand military personnel at a time, supported by armored vehicles, helicopters, and specialized tactical units. Vila Kennedy, a favela controlled by Comando Vermelho, was chosen as a kind of laboratory for the intervention, with continuous military presence during daylight hours for approximately three months. Soldiers patrolled alongside military police, broke down barricades erected by traffickers, and officially supported the Civil Police in executing warrants. However, the military's role was officially limited to providing a secure environment for civilian law enforcement rather than conducting sustained occupations or engaging in community policing. Each operation required advance approval from multiple federal authorities including the Minister of Justice and Public Security, the Minister of Defense, and the head of the Institutional Security Office of the Presidency.

Rather than reducing violence, the intervention appeared to exacerbate it. Data from the Intervention Observatory at Candido Mendes University revealed that shootings actually increased during the intervention period. From February through April 2018, fifteen hundred and two shootings were reported resulting in two hundred and eighty-four deaths and one hundred and ninety-three wounded, compared to twelve hundred and ninety-nine such events in the preceding two-month period. The number of massacres and crossfire casualties also increased dramatically. The intervention documented an average of twenty-two shootings per day in 2018, up from sixteen per day in 2017. Police killings rose sharply, with the intervention period characterized by excessive and increasing lethality of police action. Complaints of human rights violations multiplied, including reports of residents being called racial slurs, destruction of property, searches of children's backpacks on their way to school, and arbitrary detentions. The military's rules of engagement, while more restrictive than those that would apply in an actual armed conflict, went beyond standard law enforcement protocols and fell into a gray zone between police action and warfare.

The intervention's limited successes came at tremendous cost. Official statistics claimed modest reductions in certain categories of crime: cargo theft fell by approximately twenty percent, auto theft declined by eight percent, and street robberies and homicides each decreased by roughly six percent over the ten-month period. However, critics noted that these gains were marginal compared to the intervention's expense and the surge in police lethality. The structural problems that generated violence remained entirely unaddressed. There was no investment in removing the circumstances that drove young people into criminal organizations, no meaningful police reform, no improvement in intelligence capabilities, and no implementation of social programs despite promises of integrated approaches combining security with development. The intervention demonstrated a pattern seen repeatedly in Rio's security policy: heavy-handed military-style operations that produced temporary tactical results while failing to achieve lasting strategic change. When the intervention officially ended on December thirty-first, 2018, with General Braga Netto declaring that the mission had been fulfilled, Rio's fundamental security problems remained unsolved.