Socioeconomic Inequities

Geographically, Brazil is known to be the fifth largest country in the world, with a territory larger than Australia, India, and the continental United States. Its 2022 population of more than 215 million people makes it the seventh most populous country in the world. As noted above, it also has the largest Black population of the African diaspora: in 2019, 56.1% of Brazilians self-declared as Black, 46.7% as White, and 1.1 % as Asian and/or Indigenous (IBGE, 2022). Brazil’s economy is generally among the top ten in the world if measured by gross domestic product,Footnote ¹ though it has also been historically one of the most unequal economies (Reference Garmany and PereiraGarmany & Pereira, 2019). The World Inequality Report of 2018, a study led by Thomas Piketty and other economists, pointed out that Brazil at the time was “the democratic country with the highest concentration of income in the top one percent of the pyramid” (Reference Canzian, Mena and AlmeidaCanzian, Mena, & Almeida, 2019, n.p.). The study also highlighted that “Brazil has consistently been ranked among the most unequal countries in the world since data became widely available in the 1980s” (Reference Alvaredo, Chancel, Picketty, Saez and ZucmanAlvaredo et al., 2018, p. 139). In 2015, for instance, “the richest 10% of Brazilian adults – around 14 million people – received half (55%) of all national income … while the bottom half of the population, a group five times larger, earned between four and five time less, at just 12%” (Reference Alvaredo, Chancel, Picketty, Saez and ZucmanAlvaredo et al., 2018, p. 139). In the first quarter of 2021, Brazil reached its highest Gini coefficient of inequality in history: 0.64.Footnote ² In 2020, amidst the first waves of the COVID-19 pandemic, the poorest sectors of the population saw their income decrease by 33%, while the 10% richest had a decrease of only 3%. Yet in the same year, “The stock market hit record highs, and commodity prices drove up measures of economic growth” (Reference TornaghiTornaghi, 2021, n.p.).

This scenario of economic inequality is hierarchized along the coordinates of race and gender. In a study on the evolution of income metrics vis-à-vis the race of workers between 1986 and 2019, Reference OsorioRafael Osorio (2021) presented some significant data. While there have been changes in people’s racial self-declaration and advances in Black representation in politics and other social sectors – thanks to affirmative action policies in the progressive governments of the Workers’ Party (2003–2016), and especially the activism of the Black movement (Reference GomesGomes, 2017) – “racial income inequality persisted almost untouched in Brazil” (Reference OsorioOsorio, 2021, p. 23) in this period nonetheless. If compared across social classes, the economic disparities between Black and White Brazilians are alarming, as between 1986 and 2019, the average income of the former remained double the average income of the latter. In 2018, only 22% of the richest 10% in Brazil self-identified as Black. Among the poorest 10%, however, Black people constituted almost 80%. Gender also exacerbates the general scenario of inequality we have outlined here. A survey by the Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics, IBGE) on the role of men and women in the country’s labor force indicated that while 73.7% of men over the age of fifteen held a formal job, only 54.5% of women did (Reference RodriguesRodrigues, 2021). Another index measured by IBGE was the difference in wages between men and women: “In 2019, women received, on average, 77.7% of the amount earned by men. The inequality reaches greater proportions in the functions and positions that ensure the highest earnings. Among directors and managers, women received 61.9% of the income of men. The percentage was also high in the group of science professionals and intellectuals: 63.6%” (n.p.).

Black women occupy the lowest income stratum in Brazil. In 2016, for example, a study by the Centro de Pesquisa em Macroeconomia das Desigualdades (Center for Research on Macroeconomics of Inequalities, MADE) found that “60.5 percent of domestic workers were Black women … and 4.5 percent were Black men, while only 2.5 percent were White or Asian men” (Reference Bottega, Bouza, Cardomingo, Pires and PereiraBottega et al., 2021, p. 3). The MADE researchers compared the demographic makeup of this profession to the profession of film director in the same year. Of the 142 feature films released in Brazil that year, “None of them were directed by a Black woman and only three by Black men” (Reference Bottega, Bouza, Cardomingo, Pires and PereiraBottega et al., 2021, p. 3). According to the MADE economists, in the years 2017 and 2018, although Black women made up the largest demographic segment, they “received only 14.3% of the national income” (p. 2). That amount is less than what was earned by White men in the richest 1% – that is, 0.56% of the country’s total population – who claimed 15.3% of the national income (p. 2). These economic inequalities are aggravated by factors that disproportionately affect Black Brazilians: police violence, less access to employment and policies of income generation, and Brazil’s regressive taxation policy. The MADE researchers point out that “the Brazilian tax system serves as an important instrument for perpetuating Brazilian racism, mainly because it focuses in a relevant way on consumption, proportionally taxing more the poor (mostly Blacks), but also exempting, or taxing in a modest way, an array of incomes and assets belonging to the elite (mostly Whites)” (Reference Bottega, Bouza, Cardomingo, Pires and PereiraBottega et al., 2021, p. 11). The researchers conclude that Brazil needs to “incorporate an anti-racist agenda as a fundamental axis of economic policies” (p. 11), and we would add also as a fundamental axis of public security, in view of the data, history, practices, and policies of (in)securitization that we will present below.

(In)securitization, Policing, and Anti-Black Violence

Researchers in sociolinguistics and security studies have drawn attention to the dynamic correlation between communicative practices and (in)securitization, that is, the “practice of making ‘enemy’ and ‘fear’ the integrative, energetic principle of politics by displacing the democratic principles of freedom and justice” (Reference HuysmansHuysmans, 2014, as cited in Reference Rampton and CharalambousRampton & Charalambous, 2019, p. 79; see also Reference McCluskey and CharalambousMcCluskey & Charalambous, 2021; Reference Rampton, Silva and CharalambousRampton, Silva, & Charalambous, 2022). In this section, we present a general background of urban violence to discuss policies and practices of (in)securitization, such as policing and mass incarceration, that disproportionately affect the lives of Black Brazilians and faveladas/os. The levels of violence in Brazil across time have been appalling. Data from the Anuário Brasileiro de Segurança Pública 2022 indicate that homicides in 2021, while having dropped by 6.5% from the previous year, victimized 47,503 people in Brazil (a rate of 22.3 per 100,000 inhabitants) (Fórum Brasileiro de Segurança Pública, 2022, p. 14). This is approximately three times the rate of the United States, another country notorious for its high rate of homicide and gun violence (CDC, 2022). Homicide victims in Brazil are disproportionately Black (77.9%), between 12 and 29 years old (50%), and men (91.3%) (FBSP, 2022, p. 14). Globally, Brazil’s homicide data are also staggering. Brazil has 2.7% of the world’s population but accounts for 20.4% of world homicides. From an economic perspective, data from Brazil’s Instituto de Pesquisa Econômica Aplicada (IPEA) and the Fórum Brasileiro de Segurança show that violence costs 6% of Brazil’s annual GDP, equivalent to the country’s investment in public education (IPEA, 2019).

Opinion polls indicate that fear of violence is one of the country’s worst problems (Reference Mesquita NetoMesquita Neto, 2011). Given the rise of authoritarian populisms worldwide (and especially given the rise of Bolsonaro to the presidency in 2018, with an agenda of arming the population and killing “bandidos” or “bandits”) the Fórum Brasileiro de Segurança and the Datafolha Institute have, since 2017, been conducting the “Violência e Democracia” (Violence and Democracy) opinion poll, interviewing 2,100 people so far – a sample of different demographic groups statistically mirroring Brazil’s socioeconomic diversity. The purpose of the survey is to measure (and intersect) the degree of confidence in democracy, adherence to authoritarianism, and fear of violence (in its different manifestations, from urban violence to gender, domestic, and political violence). In the 2022 edition, the poll indicated that the “fear of being murdered has grown considerably from the first survey in 2017: the number went from 74.9% of respondents to 82.5%” (Reference Sodré and LimaSodré & Lima, 2022, p. 62). And although the 2022 survey pointed to Brazilians’ identification with democracy (the propensity to democracy index was 7.25 on a scale of 0 to 10), “The propensity to support authoritarian positions is higher among people who are greatly afraid [of violence] … while among those with less fear such propensity is [lower]” (Reference Sodré and LimaSodré & Lima, 2022, p. 64). Yet, although this poll showed that fear of violence is something that affects different social classes in Brazil, the rates of actual victimization to violence are unequally distributed.

The exceedingly higher figures of violence in areas with higher Black populations point to the increased vulnerability of this demographic group, especially Black men, to violence (Reference AlvesAlves, 2018). Black men are also disproportionately more likely to be victimized by police violence and neoliberal policies of criminalization of poverty, such as mass incarceration (Reference BorgesBorges, 2019; Reference PadovaniPadovani, 2019; Reference Wacquant and LópezWacquant, 2017). Importantly, Brazil has the third largest prison population in the world (Reference BorgesBorges, 2019). The prison population in Brazil grew by 575% between 1990 and 2014, and in that final year 75% of prisoners were young Black men, 67% of them having received basic education (Reference Soares Filho and BuenoSoares Filho & Bueno, 2016). Mass incarceration and policing as social control of poverty thus disproportionately target Black Brazilians. Yet understanding why Black men in Brazil tend to be the preferred target of police violence requires a brief historical contextualization of policing as (in)securitization – in other words, as “a practice not of responding to enemies and fear but of creating them” (Reference HuysmansHuysmans, 2014, p. 3). In 1964, Brazil suffered a coup d’état that established a military dictatorship for twenty-one years. In 1985, a process of redemocratization began, with the declaration of a democratic constitution in 1988, also known as “Constituição Cidadã,” or “Citizen’s Constitution,” replacing the authoritarian constitution promulgated in 1967 by the military. Although Brazil in 1988 “drafted one of the most advanced and sophisticated constitutions in the world … declar[ing] fundamental rights – such as the right to not be subjected to torture, as well as the right of women to be equal to men under the law” (Reference GoldsteinGoldstein, 2013, pp. 55–56), it made very few changes to the role of the armed forces and the police in security. This has to do with the force that the military has exerted in Brazilian politics (Reference LeirnerLeirner, 2020). In the past decades, several attempts to reform the police (including demilitarizing police forces and enhancing the accountability of police agents) were blocked by the lobbying of the armed forces and the military police in the national congress (Reference AmbrosioAmbrosio, 2017; Reference Zaverucha and ZaveruchaZaverucha, 1998). Even though the 1988 constitution eliminated articles related to “national security,” it maintained the status of the armed forces as the main actors in the defense of the State and its institutions, thus keeping the main organ for ostensible policing, the Polícia Militar or military police, under the aegis of military rule.Footnote ³

Instead of military notions of national or internal security, the 1988 legal discourse adopted the concept of “public security,” but did so “in an ambiguous and imprecise way” (Reference Mesquita NetoMesquita Neto, 2011, p. 34). As Mesquita Neto aptly observed, it is not clear in the Citizen’s Constitution whether “public security primarily concerns the protection of the State, the government, or the citizens” (p. 35). Legally and practically, it is as if the democratic transition hadn’t been fully accomplished inasmuch as the textual ambiguity is instantiated in the police’s military approach to citizens. Established in 1970 during the authoritarian regime, the military police are considered an auxiliary force to the army, “and have a very centralized organization, similar to the Army’s organization” (p. 249). The military status of the police reflects authoritarian practices widely held in the army and in Brazilian society. Police officers are trained according to strict military codes of hierarchy and rituals of humiliation, with the intention that their practice aims at internal security. The rationale behind internal security is that “the armed forces and the police are organized to protect the State against political enemies and social movements, and to repress social and political conflicts rather than … maintaining the law and public order or protecting the citizens” (p. 250). In pursuing the authoritarian principles of internal defense and protection of the State, the police have historically “resorted to the use or threat of violence, particularly against underprivileged citizens and groups of Afro-Brazilians or mestizos” (p. 253).

One of the outcomes of the failure to reform the police toward democracy is that Brazil today has one of the most lethal police forces in the world (Reference CaldeiraCaldeira, 2000; Reference Mesquita NetoMesquita Neto, 2011), and police violence disproportionately affects favela residents. This scenario has become worse since the 2018 election of Jair Bolsonaro, a retired army captain who appealed to different groups for his conservative Christian agenda but above all for his law-and-order discourse. Bolsonaro retired from the military at the age of thirty-three because he had conspired to harm the image of then-army minister Leonidas Pires Gonçalves via a bombing (see Reference CarvalhoCarvalho, 2019; Reference Silva, Theodoropoulou and TovarSilva, 2020). After retiring, he became a city councilor (1989), and then a federal deputy (1990–2018) with an almost nonexistent record of legislative bills. Yet he gradually consolidated himself as a cartoonish politician for his racist, homophobic, and misogynist stance, and for his public defense of torture, the military dictatorship’s regime of exception, and the milícias, groups of military officers who compete with the drug trade to control favelas, illegally extorting residents in exchange for “security.” In the executive, Bolsonaro reinforced his discourse of exception against “bandidos” (a category that, for Bolsonaro, included Black people and left-wing sympathizers), issued decrees increasing the population’s gun ownership, and pursued reforming laws to reinforce the violent action of the police. An example of the latter was the PL 882/2019 bill, proposing to extend the “excludente de ilicitude,” or “exemption of illegality,” in the penal code (Reference NorbertoNorberto, 2022). The proposal would allow police officers to bypass punishment if they committed murder “em decorrência de escusável medo, surpresa ou violenta emoção,” or “due to excusable fear, surprise or violent emotion” (as cited in Reference NorbertoNorberto, 2022, n.p.). Interpreted as a broad license to kill, the bill was rejected by the parliament. In the first two years of his administration, however, the number of homicides caused by police reached historical records. In 2019, the police murdered 6,357 people, an increase of 3% compared to 2018 (FBSP, 2019), and in 2020, this number rose again, reaching 6,416 deaths, the highest number since this data was first recorded in 2013 (FBSP, 2020).

The spatiality of violence is all the more crucial as homicide rates may drastically vary depending on where one lived. The State of Rio de Janeiro’s police force is one of the most violent in Brazil. In 2019 and 2020, Rio’s police were responsible for 1,810 and 1,239 killings, respectively. These numbers are excessively high, especially when compared to other countries that are not in a declared civil war. The police in the United States, whose population is twenty times larger than that of Rio de Janeiro, in 2019 and 2020, respectively, killed 999 and 1,020 people (Washington Post, 2020, 2022). In the city of Rio de Janeiro, in 2016, catchment area of the 15th Police District, which covers upper-middle class neighborhoods such as Gávea, Jardim Botânico and Lagoa, recorded four homicides (1.64/100,000 inhabitants); in the 21st Police District, which serves the Complexo da Maré favelas, this figure rose to seventy-six homicides in the same year (27.75/100,000 inhabitants) (Reference GloboO Globo, 2022). Brazil’s Public Security Forum (Fórum Brasileiro de Segurança Pública), which systematizes such data, concluded that in Brazil, social rights are “regulated by social markers of difference (race, class, gender, sexuality, age, disability)” (Rede Brasil Atual, 2021, n.p.). The higher impact of urban and police violence on Black Brazilians and residents of favelas indicates that, in practical terms, violence against these minorities is socially legitimate, “As if Black youths and the poor did not have the right to non-discrimination, to life and to physical integrity … While civil, social, and political rights are formally recognized in the letter of the law, there is an immense abyss between legal formality and the effectivity of rights in practice” (Rede Brasil Atual, 2021, n.p.).

Although proposals for more democratic security and policing exist in Brazil – such as the Latin American movements for segurança cidadã (citizen security) that, in resisting dictatorial rule in the 1970s, advanced an understanding of security in democratic rather than authoritarian terms – their effective implementation has encountered difficulties due to the aforementioned power of the military and conservative lobbies.Footnote ⁴ Further, ethnographies such as Reference CaldeiraCaldeira’s (2000) study of urban violence and segregation in São Paulo have pointed out that part of the difficulties in reforming the police have to do with the support of part of the population, “Who have been passionately opposed … to controlling police abuses … and reform[ing] the justice system” (p. 209). In Rio de Janeiro, the Pacifying Police Units (UPPs), a proposal that at first seemed to resemble community policing, initiated in 2008 (Reference MenezesMenezes, 2015; Reference Menezes and CorrêaMenezes & Corrêa, 2018). Before pacificação, or pacification, most favelas did not have permanent policing, and police raids conducted in order to confront the drug trade tended to victimize many people. One of our interlocutors in the field, while critical of the idea of pacifying the territory through policing rather than investment in education, culture, work, and income, told us that “it’s better to have some form of police than the usual violent raids that leave behind a violent trail of dead black men.” When Daniel arrived in Complexo do Alemão to start fieldwork in 2012, the first UPPs were being deployed in the neighborhood. The public aim of pacification was to promote permanent policing in favelas and to remove weapons from the retail drug trade. New police officers were hired, with the alleged expectation that policing would be moved away from authoritarian practices and toward a model of “proximity policing” (Reference Muniz and MelloMuniz & Melo, 2015; Reference Menezes and CorrêaMenezes & Corrêa, 2018; Reference Rodrigues and SiqueiraRodrigues & Siqueira, 2012). Although community policing was at least laterally reflective of the initial design of this experiment, the connections of pacification to real estate, media, military, and government investments prior to the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympic and Paralympic Games (Reference Gaffney, Gruneau and HorneGaffney, 2015; Reference Grassiani and MüllerGrassiani & Muller, 2019; Reference Silva, Facina and LopesSilva, Facina, & Lopes, 2015), in addition to the historical anti-Black police violence that we described above, soon signaled the distance between this policing model and the citizen security that progressives in Latin America aspired for (Reference BatistaBatista, 2011; Reference Facina and PalombiniFacina & Palombini, 2017). In practice, the new police officers worked in the same military institution as the former ones. Further, alongside an often conspicuously aggressive treatment of Black folks and faveladas/os, during pacification the police had to accommodate their relations – which have not only been confrontational, but also featuring “agreements and political exchanges” (Reference Machado da Silva and MenezesMachado da Silva & Menezes, 2019, p. 531; Reference Telles and HirataTelles & Hirata, 2007) – to the retail drug traffic in favelas. The case studies that we will discuss in Chapters 4 and 5 document metadiscourses of favela activists in response to police pacification prior to and during the mega-events in Rio de Janeiro. These metadiscourses, associated with sociolinguistic and digital strategies of denouncing police abuses and human rights violations, point to the potent “counter-securitization” in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas (Reference Fridolfson and ElanderFridolfson & Elander, 2021; Reference Rampton, Silva and CharalambousRampton, Silva, & Charalambous, 2022) – that is, resistance to securitization as the exceptional use of force against an enemy through tactics that may ultimately move security to a more democratic ground.

After the Olympic games and the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff, both in 2016, Rio de Janeiro and Brazil experienced a serious political and economic crisis. Since then, police pacification has been underfunded and nearing its end. Alongside Bolsonaro’s election to the federal executive in 2018, Wilson Witzel, a former judge, was voted in as the governor of the state of Rio de Janeiro with a strong agenda of “penal populism” (Reference PrattPratt, 2007). When elected, Witzel notoriously announced that during police raids in favelas, the police would kill anyone carrying a rifle. In his words: “O correto é matar o bandido que está de fuzil. A polícia vai fazer o correto: vai mirar na cabecinha e … fogo! Para não ter erro,” or “The correct thing to do is to kill the criminal who is carrying a rifle. The police will do the right thing: they will aim at the little head and … fire! So there is no chance of error” (as cited in Reference WitzelWitzel, 2018). In his first year in office, Witzel became popular for mediatized performances of penal populism. For example, in May 2019, he was filmed inside a civil police helicopter during an operation, in his words, “para dar fim à bandidagem,” or “to put an end to criminality” (Reference MacielMaciel, 2019, n.p.). From there, police officers fired ten shots at a tent in a peripheral hillside that they imagined harbored drug dealers, but was actually a (luckily empty) pilgrimage stand for evangelicals. After Witzel’s impeachment over corruption charges in 2020, Claudio Castro, his vice president, took over as Rio de Janeiro’s governor and was reelected in 2022 for a four-year tenure. Like Witzel, Castro has reinforced violent police action. In just under a year leading the Rio de Janeiro executive and its police, Castro has been at the forefront of three of the five largest police massacres in Rio de Janeiro’s entire history. In May 2021, the police killed at least twenty-eight people in a raid in the Favela of Jacarezinho. One police officer was killed at the beginning of the raid, which possibly explains the high number of killings by the police, potentially as revenge for the deceased officer (Reference FishmanFishman, 2021). In May 2022 in Complexo da Penha, a favela contiguous to Complexo do Alemão, the police killed twenty-four people in a single operation. Finally, a raid in July 2022 in Complexo do Alemão left seventeen people dead, including one police officer. Ignoring principles of police intelligence (Reference Proença Júnior and MunizProença Júnior & Muniz, 2017), these raids function as a message to (digital) audiences who in Bolsonarismo are constituted as committed to the tropes of penal populism (Reference PrattPratt, 2007) and attacks on an “enemy” (Reference HuysmansHuysmans, 2014) as a means to security.

All in all, this scenario clearly points to a model of necropolitics – “politics as the work of death” (Reference MbembeMbembe, 2003, p. 16) – that informs policing as a central agent of (in)securitization in Brazil. However, our aim here is not to detail this dystopian scenario for its own sake, but fundamentally for its status as a background against which life is taken by activists and residents as “emergência” (emergency and emergence) in favelas. For this reason, it is important to note that this necropolitical model has been resisted by many agents in Brazil, including the collectives we engage with in the following chapters. Yet before we detail their enregistered and digital action, it is important to summarize another normative armed agent that disproportionately impacts life in favelas – “o mundo do crime,” or “the world of crime.”

The Invention of the Favela

Following the Brazilian monarchy’s reluctant abolition of slavery in 1888, former enslaved people and their descendants were forced to seek their own means to survive. In Rio de Janeiro, the solution found by many of them was to occupy hillsides. The emerging neighborhoods in Rio de Janeiro were then called favelas, in reference to “Morro da Favela,” or Favela Hill, a monarchist settlement in the state of Bahia that resisted the newly proclaimed republic in 1889. Brazil’s military waged a campaign against the camp, resulting in the country’s deadliest civil war, also known as Canudos War (1895–1898). Some of the “soldiers returning from the war settled, with the tolerance of the army, on Morro da Providência,” a hill in downtown Rio de Janeiro that also came to be called, “in allusion to the military campaign in Bahia, Morro da Favella” (Reference GonçalvesGonçalves, 2013, p. 44).

The literary work Os sertões (Rebellion in the Backlands), written by Euclides da Cunha and first published in 1902, was fundamental to the popularization and, consequently, the presupposition of the idea of (Morro da) Favela as an anti-modern territory, located in the midst of a modernizing Brazil. This book crystallized the opposition between the coast as a synonym of development, and the backlands as epitome of a pre-modern past. Newspaper chroniclers in Rio de Janeiro, then the capital of the republic, rapidly invoked Euclides da Cunha’s work to describe the favelas that were emerging in post-slavery Rio de Janeiro. Reference Valladares and AndersonLicia do Prado Valladares (2019) exemplifies this process of textual mediation of stigma by citing a chronicle by João do Rio, published in the newspaper Gazeta de Notícias in 1908. Entitling it “Os livres acampamentos da miséria” (The open camps of misery), João do Rio reports his visit to Morro de Santo Antônio, “Which had become a favela, like Morro da Providência, during the last years of the nineteenth century.” In João do Rio’s own words:

The author continues:

The chronicle “The open camps of misery” is significant because it denounces a historical accumulation, and betrays the textual mediation of this accumulation: João do Rio reported that his visit to Morro Santo Antônio struck him with “the studied impression of the entrance to the village of Canudos.” João do Rio’s scalar activity – in other words, his work making sense of the hilly neighborhood and measuring it in relation to other magnitudes – was thus mediated by communicable discourses (Reference BriggsBriggs, 2005). Drawing from his work on ideologies of language and medicine, Reference BriggsCharles Briggs (2005) puns on the medical concept of communicable diseases (i.e., affections that spread from one person to another) and proposed that discourses, while spreading across social spaces, project and legitimize ideologies of language, social processes, and persons in the world. Thus, João do Rio’s modes of predicating “another world,” the favela, as a location of “indolent misery … a vast, multiform chicken coop” was an early indication of the communicable construction of the favela as a “problem.” Further, João do Rio’s drawing from Euclides da Cunha’s naturalist and modernist account of Canudos provided his narrative with historical and scientific authority. As the medical field is often an important ground for modernist discourses, João do Rio also denounced the “filth” of these social spaces (“vast, multiform chicken coop”), while combining this sanitary comment with faveladas/os’ seeming aversion to the lights of modernity (“The lights had disappeared,” “luminous shadows of the starry night”). “The open camps of misery” is but one example of durable discourses in Brazil that conflate favelas and Blackness with bestiality, misery, and pre-modernity.

The favela became a problem in the discourses of doctors, engineers, and politicians following its invention in literary and journalistic rhetoric greatly influenced by Euclides da Cunha’s rendition of Canudos as a community without state rule whose members have a “[m]oral behavior that the observer finds revolting” (Reference Valladares and AndersonValladares, 2019, p. 100). In the 1920s, “The first major campaign against [what came to be termed as] ‘aesthetic leprosy’” was launched (Reference Valladares and AndersonValladares, 2019, p. 104), and French urban planner Alfred Agache would take up this notion in the 1930s in his plan for “renewal and beautification of the city of Rio de Janeiro” (Reference Valladares and AndersonValladares, 2019, p. 104). Reference ValladaresValladares (2000) also documented favelas’ first appearance in a legal document in 1937, with the publication of the Building Code, which “prohibits the creation of new favelas, but for the first time recognizes their existence, making itself available to manage and control their growth” (p. 12). In the following decades, favelas gradually became cemented in hegemonic discourses as a problem of public health and urban aesthetics. In 1949, the first census of favelas was conducted, consistent with Reference FoucaultFoucault’s (2007) notion of governmentality as the nexus of knowledge and power. The 1960s saw the beginning of Brazilian social science research on favelas; around the same time, researchers from abroad began traveling to Brazil to study favelas (e.g., Reference BonillaBonilla, 1961; Reference LeedsLeeds, 1969), and political initiatives such as the Peace Corps, an organization that aimed to consolidate an anti-communist agenda in poverty-stricken territories (Reference SigaudSigaud, 1995), began providing so-called assistance to favelas (Reference Valladares and AndersonValladares, 2019, p. 41).

From the “Language of Rights” to the “Language of Violence”

Until Brazil became a node for transnational drug trafficking in the early 1980s, the favela problem was treated either through segregation – several favelas were removed from the hills in central Rio and moved to the urban periphery (Reference DuncanDuncan, 2021, p. 20) – or ostensible inclusion through rights and citizenship – something strongly influenced by the struggle of social movements and Catholic grassroots work in these territories during the military dictatorship (1964–1984) and the redemocratization that followed. But as transnational drug trafficking established its retail branch in favelas, these spaces came to be seen as the source of the urban violence that increased in the 1980s. Reference Machado da SilvaMachado da Silva (2010) explains that this is the point of inflection whereby favelas would no longer be narrated through the “language of rights” but instead through the “language of urban violence”:

If social movements had been able to advance rights for faveladas/os at the end of the dictatorship and the beginning of the democratic opening, in the 1980s, favelas began to be stigmatized in hegemonic discourses as responsible for the violent criminality that increasingly occupied the agenda of news media and everyday talk. Reference Machado da SilvaMachado da Silva (2010) adds:

Machado da Silva thus raised an important correlation: namely, favela residents are not only excluded from the moral construction of the “cidadão de bem” or “good citizen,” but also treated as a “problem” of “security.”

Ethnographically, we have found evidence of the historical force of these stigmatizing discourses at the core of the idea that favelas are a problem to be securitized. For example, in 2013, Daniel participated in a focus group with young residents from Vila Cruzeiro, a favela contiguous to Complexo do Alemão. The group was gathered by Verissimo Júnior, a high school teacher and founder of Teatro da Laje (Rooftop Theater), a theater collective that aimed at projecting an positive view of favelas. The following excerpt illustrates a moment in the debate when participants were talking about police duras, a slang term that designates harsh approaches to policing, both communicatively and physically. Luan, a young Black man from a middle-class neighborhood, had asked participants to comment on duras they had experienced or heard about. The conversation seems to summarize the description above of the stigma against faveladas/os and some of its effects:

Excerpt 2.1 Focus Group, Grupo de Estudos Culturais, Vila Cruzeiro, 2013

The youths, Verissimo, and Daniel collectively described stereotypical comments on signs of identity and language of faveladas/os. After Luan solicited further responses to his question about duras in favelas, Daniel jokes about the police not wanting people enjoying themselves in favelas (lines 2–3), and Luiza comments that in the favela, especially if one is male, one is likely “a suspect,” or if one is a female, she may be framed as “a sex object,” identifying potential victims of police or gender violence, respectively. In her examples, Luiza was very likely iterating the essentialist moral opposition between “cidadãos de bem” and “bandidos,” at the core of securitizing discourses. As Reference FeltranFeltran (2011) comments, “bandidos” does not name only “those practicing acts considered illicit, but, in many situations, also those who look like bandidos in the social stigma … that is, young people, residents of peripheries and favelas, who dress in such a way, who carry such objects, who speak in such a way, in addition to their families and networks of close relationships” (p. 316). The young focus group participants demonstrate the referential flexibility of the term bandidos: Mateus says that “if a guy a long shirt, he’s a crack addict” (lines 15–18), and Luiza declares that “if it’s a young person, it’s going to be a dealer, or a drug user … or a vagrant” (lines 19–20).

In line 12, Fabiana addresses “the code of silence” more prominently: in the midst of the collaborative depiction of stigmatization and duras, she says that “you’ve got to bear it all quietly, you’ve got to listen quietly.” Yet, as we are concerned with the practical method of hope whereby activists and residents reorient knowledge (Reference MiyazakiMiyazaki, 2004), this focus group itself, promoted by Verissimo Júnior, a teacher with a clear progressivist agenda, may be seen as a participant framework where the code of silence and the denial of political participation for faveladas/os is reoriented. Collectively, the youth in the focus group unpack the stigma while participating in an event advancing more affirmative views of the favela. As participant frameworks are not isolated events but nodes of discourse chains (Reference AghaAgha, 2007), the critical semiotic constructions in the above conversation could, through further semiotic work, travel to other events (Reference Bauman and BriggsBauman & Briggs, 1990) and contribute to the construction of alternative ideological perspectives (Reference Gal and IrvineGal & Irvine, 2019) to the criminalizing discourses we have discussed. This kind of semiotic work is foundational to the collectives we focus on in this book, which we present below.

Instituto Raízes em Movimento

The Instituto Raízes em Movimento (Roots in Movement Institute) is an NGO formed by Complexo do Alemão residents in 2001. The activists in this collective work on two fronts: “knowledge production” and “communication and culture” (Instituto Raízes em Movimento, 2016). On the former front, Raízes has created the Centro de Estudos, Pesquisa, Documentação e Memória do Complexo do Alemão (Complexo do Alemão Research, Documentation and Memory Center, CEPEDOCA), responsible for fostering research about Complexo do Alemão (necessarily involving researchers from favelas), documenting the existing knowledge about Complexo do Alemão and other favelas, and developing courses and events that facilitate the construction of knowledge about favelas. On the communication and culture front, the collective has promoted various courses, events, and cultural strategies to stimulate cultural production in the favela and more expansive forms of dialogue between faveladas/os. Raízes has also partnered with universities, NGOs, and various institutions to promote courses on history and memory of favelas and documentary production. Faveladoc, for example, is a workshop on documentary filmmaking for young faveladas/os that culminates in the making of a documentary on a topic of interest to the favela, such as the impact of the megavents, as seen in “Copa pra Alemão ver,” or “World Cup for the Gaze of Germans” (see Instituto Raízes em Movimento, 2014), and AfroBrazilian religions in “Quando você chegou, meu santo já estava,” or “When you arrived, my saint had already been here” (see Faveladoc, 2019).

Raízes has also been our main collaborator in the field. Since 2012, Daniel’s field visits have been mediated by Raízes activists, who enthusiastically welcomed the research project “Cultural mapping of cultural production and literacy practices in 3 favelas of Complexo do Alemão, RJ.” Written by Adriana Facina (Museu Nacional, UFRJ), Adriana Lopes (Instituto de Educação, UFRRJ), and Daniel, the research project lasted from 2012 to 2015, and enabled his participation in various activities hosted by Raízes in Complexo do Alemão. Daniel has continued his interaction with activists, residents, and other researchers in Complexo do Alemão, and since 2021, Raízes activists have collaborated with Daniel and Jerry’s current project, including through transcription and discussion of data and theory with us. Much of the data analyzed in this book was generated in activities promoted by Raízes, including Circulando: Diálogo e Comunicação nas Favelas – an annual event that combines an open-air fair and discussions at the seat of Raízes on Avenida Central in Complexo do Alemão (or online, during the restrictions for physical meetings during COVID-19) – and the “Vamos Desenrolar” course, a series of talks and conversation circles involving residents, activists, and researchers. Communicatively, in line with the enregisterment of papo reto that we discuss in Chapter 4, the initiatives of Raízes em Movimento have aimed to “estabelecer o diálogo, a conversa, o ‘desenrolo’ com todos os presentes que queiram se pronunciar,” or “establish dialogue, conversation, the ‘desenrolo’ [the unroling of the lines of talk] among all those present” in the events (Instituto Raízes em Movimento, 2016, n.p.). In other words, Raízes is an institution promoting participation frameworks and conditions for communicative practices that, in defiantly speaking to “point,” challenge the “code of silence,” cordial racism, and inequalities narrated above.

Instituto Marielle Franco

As we discuss in Chapter 3, in 2018, our work with favela activists was crucially impacted by the assassination of Councilor Marielle Franco. A personal friend of Adriana Lopes and Adriana Facina and part of the extended network of activists connected to Daniel, Marielle Franco was born in Complexo da Maré, a group of favelas contiguous to Complexo do Alemão. As we write this book, over four years after her assassination, the person or the group who commissioned the murder of Marielle and her driver Anderson Gomes is still unknown. This tragic event has been crucial to Brazilian politics far beyond the progressive sectors where Marielle built her influence. Under Bolsonaro, Brazil’s far right invoked Marielle’s figure as an icon of the “perversion” of the left, the enemy against which Bolsonaro’s conservative, anti-gender, and anti-communist crusade gathers traction (see Reference CesarinoCesarino, 2020; Silva & Dziuba, 2023). On the left, Marielle appears as a figure of present immanence (Reference Silva and LeeSilva & Lee, 2021; Reference Khalil, Silva, Lee, Makoni, Kaiper-Marquez and MokwenaKhalil, Silva, & Lee, 2022). As part of the transnational movement of struggle for justice that has emerged following Marielle’s murder, her family – namely, Anielle Franco (her sister), Luyara Franco (her daughter), Monica Benicio (her partner), Marinete da Silva (her mother), and Antônio Francisco da Silva Neto (her father) – established the Instituto Marielle Franco. In line with the sociolinguistic imaginations and metaleptic temporality that we are dedicated to describing throughout this book, the declared mission of the Instituto is to “luta[r] por justiça, defende[r] sua memória, multiplica[r] seu legado e rega[r] suas sementes,” or “fight for justice, defend [Marielle’s] memory, spread her legacy, and water her seeds” (Instituto Marielle Franco, 2022, n.p.).

The Instituto Marielle Franco has been active on several fronts in politics and education. Some of its main initiatives have included advocating for anti-racist agendas in education and politics, facilitating the interaction of activists throughout Brazil and across the world, strengthening the candidacies of Black women, and protecting elected representatives and candidates against gender-based political violence. An example of the Instituto Marielle Franco’s activity in the political field is the study “Violência política de gênero e raça no Brasil em 2021” (“Political Violence of Gender and Race in Brazil in 2021”; see Reference FrancoInstituto Marielle Franco, 2021). In the face of the vulnerability of the Black female body in politics, a team of female researchers gathered data about threats and violence against Black women in politics, and interviewed eleven Black female legislators who had been targets of violence. In line with hope as practical reason and action, the study mounted evidence of online and offline threats to female politicians, and recommended lines of action to curb it. On the educational front, the Instituto Marielle Franco produced the graphic novel Marielle Franco, Raízes (Marielle Franco’s Roots). Resulting from Anielle’s expressed need to find a discourse genre to tell more effectively “Marielle’s story to the children and young people she was teaching,” the book “was written, drawn, colored and designed by a team of 100% Black professionals” (Reference FrancoInstituto Marielle Franco, 2021, n.p.). In addition to being distributed to teachers and students through the Institute’s collaborative networks, the material has can be downloaded for free from the Internet. In short, the Instituto Marielle Franco is another example of a crucial agency for literacy and the enregisterment of Afrodiasporic political signs in contemporary Brazil.

Coletivo Papo Reto

During the Vamos desenrolar training course promoted by Adriana Facina and Raízes em Movimento in 2013, Daniel met Raull Santiago, a Complexo do Alemão activist whose sociolinguistic digital practice we describe in Chapter 5. A year later, alongside other local Black activists, Raull would create a collective named after one of the main speech registers described in this book: Coletivo Papo Reto (see https://coletivopaporeto.org). The activists from this coletivo have expanded the notion of papo reto as a straightforward register of talk that opposes the indirectness of cordial racism and other social and economic inequities by articulating this communicative practice with digital and political affordances. The approximately thirty members of the collective have organized digital channels to denounce human rights violations in the Complexo do Alemão. For instance, the collective has maintained several social media groups with users strategically placed throughout the neighborhood, allowing residents to map security in the neighborhood: these instant-messaging groups have mapped shootings in real time, circulated images and videos of potential human rights violations, and provided evidence for possible denunciations of police abuse. Coletivo Papo Reto’s activists have also marshaled the affordances of other digital platforms to monitor violence in Complexo do Alemão and communicate with broader publics. Politically, the collective has teamed up with other collectives and institutions in Complexo do Alemão – such as Raízes em Movimento and Voz das Comunidades – and NGOs and foundations in Brazil and abroad – such as Witness and Brazil Foundation – to promote security for the Complexo do Alemão residents, counter the “war on drugs” and other neoliberal policies that transform social inequality into incarceration and seclusion, offer affirmative discourses about faveladas/os, build alliances with other peripheries in Brazil and South America, and offer material opportunities for labor, education, and entertainment in the favelas.