SÃO PAULO, Brazil — More than two months have passed since the assassination of Marielle Franco, a human rights defender who was a member of Rio’s City Council. But the killing remains unsolved. The most probable hypothesis, according to Brazil’s public security minister, Raul Jungmann, is that local militias were behind her death.
Militias in Brazil are different from paramilitary groups in other countries. Their origins here can be traced back to the 1970s, the days of the military dictatorship, when off-duty police officers formed death squads to execute criminals and political opponents, according to José Cláudio Souza Alves, a sociologist who studies the groups.
In their current form, militias were established in Rio de Janeiro in the late ’90s and early 2000s, under the pretext that they were protecting residents from drug traffickers. Although more civilians are joining, the militias have been dominated by active-duty and retired police officers, who essentially assume control of suburban slums, or favelas, under the guise of defending them.
Once they have a foothold in the community, militia members extort money from residents and shopkeepers (in other words, they demand payments that are partly for protection against themselves). They also control local unlicensed public transportation, since city buses are scarce or nonexistent in remote areas. They offer illegal internet and television connections, charge commissions on real estate deals, and control the supply of gas and water. In the Gardênia Azul favela, for example, militia members collect money from street vendors and even popcorn carts.
One of them is irony. After careful deliberation with their accountants (at least that’s what I imagine), and in the name of business diversification, some militias have entered the field of drug trafficking. Others have decided to work with their former rivals from drug gangs, selling them weapons and recruiting members from their ranks. In 2015, according to the newspaper O Dia, a militia “sold” the area of Morro do Jordão to a drug gang for three million Brazilian reais, or about $800,000. So much for the righteous excuse of vigilante justice.
According to the news website G1, two million people in the Rio metropolitan area live in territories controlled by militias. A 2013 academic report concluded that of the roughly 1,000 favelas in the city, 45 percent are controlled by militia organizations and 37 percent by drug gangs. The main difference is that police brutality is less common in militia-controlled neighborhoods, probably because those groups have strong ties to the official state security apparatus.
Another feature that they share with the Italian mafia is that they have infiltrated political institutions. In 2008, Ms. Franco was an aide on a parliamentary commission that investigated the involvement of politicians in Rio’s militias, whose findings led to the arrest of roughly a dozen members of the City Council and two state congressmen. The commission had found that during election years, militia groups try to field their own candidates for office, and threaten voters and even kill competitors. In 2016, at least six candidates running for City Council were executed by militia members in the area of Baixada Fluminense.
Which bring us back to the militias’ original configuration as extralegal death squads. Their cold-blooded concern for public safety has been converted into a businesslike approach to protecting their criminal assets. According to Rio’s Homicide Division, militia-controlled neighborhoods generally have the highest homicide rates.
@jaherafi pointed me to this which has implications for the upcoming election where Bolsonaro has promised to give the police a free hand.
this is state formation.