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Favela War - Context

The homicide rate in Brazil increased nearly 600 percent between 1980 and 2014. The situation in many Rio favelas is, for all practical purposes, a full-blown internal armed conflict, and not simply an urban crime problem. In its main features -- i.e., organized factions holding the monopoly on violence in their areas while in an open conflict with rival factions or/and state forces, the humanitarian impacts on innocent civilians trapped by violence in favelas dominated by gangs, and the need for the International Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC) to operate as though in a war zone to create "humanitarian spaces" -- the gang warfare in Rio's favelas resembles other situations worldwide that were formally recognized by governments and international organizations as internal armed conflicts.

Favelas can be seen as small states unto themselves, able to exercise some degree of autonomy and sovereignty. The globalized and post-colonial international relationships of the 21st centuries extend beyond traditional national boundaries to include subnational areas that do not claim independent state sovereignty in the traditional sense. While traditionally “you either are sovereign or you are not” had been the standard for statehood, this rule of thumb is increasingly found wanting in the 21st century. Favelas may be seen as semi-autonomous micro-states exercising degrees of de facto sovereignty.

With a population of over 200,000,000 people, Brazil as a society faces human rights challenges which find their expression in an incredibly high level of violence. The Human Rights Watch Report of December 2009, Lethal Force, police violence and public security in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, confirm the highest level of violence fueled by drug gangs which prominently target police in police posts as well as rival gang members. What both the U.N. Special Rapporteur and Human Rights Watch noted with grave concern, was the high level of lethal force employed by Brazilian police departments.

Human Rights Watch reported that the police departments of Rio and Sao Paulo alone had collectively killed more than 11,000 people between 2003 and 2009. What is deeply troubling about this is the fact that all too often the use of lethal force is explained by police officers as so-called resistence killings, meaning that an officer reported the use of lethal force as an act of self-defense, as an individual either opened fire on them, or in another threatening way resisted arrest. Nobody in their right mind can either downplay or minimize the fact that those Brazilian police officers who enforce the law in these high crime and drug gang controlled areas, do not face death on a daily basis with the beginnings of their shifts and even thereafter.

The Rio combatants are, of course, rival criminal gangs, militia groups, and the police, as opposed to political or ethnic factions. But in the gangs, complete control of geographic areas (Rio Governor Sergio Cabral referred to gang-dominated favelas as "occupied territories"), their relatively elaborate command and control structures, their powerful military weaponry, and in the horrendous body count they leave behind, Rio's gangs do resemble combatants in recognized internal armed conflicts worldwide. A signal distinction is that Rio's internal armed conflict is not generalized throughout a national or even regional theater. Instead, it is occurring within relatively discreet urban pockets (though violence can spill outside favelas), spread throughout a celebrated and highly developed megacity, one of two (with Sao Paulo) in a democratic country with one of the world's largest economies.

The dichotomy of extensive armed conflict raging in a celebrated and highly developed megacity in an economically powerful democracy may be becoming more than Brazilians can absorb, and frustration and the focusing effect of the 2016 Olympics in Rio seem to be galvanizing the public and state and federal governments to seek decisive action.