A Case Study on Internal Security Missions: The Pacification at the City of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil 2008 - Present)

The military role in Latin America internal security has largely increased since the end of the Cold War. Notwithstanding, scholars have not devoted much attention to this object of study. With the exception of the normative answer saying they should not be there in the first place, literature on civil-military relations seems once more to be led by a general tendency of classifying Latin American countries as deviant ones. But what if military internal security missions are becoming a permanent one in countries such as Brazil and Mexico? In these countries, drug trafficking and organized crime have contributed to blurring the line between public, internal and national security. In the city of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), military forces have been used to restore order and maintain public security as part of a larger state policy to implement communitarian polices in poor areas since 2008. Thus, this study intends to analyze the decision-making process at the federal and state levels which preceded the operations for the guarantee of law and order in Complexo do Alemão (2010), Vila Cruzeiro (2010) and Complexo da Maré (2014). My aim is to verify if expanding military internal security missions decreases democratic civilian control over the Armed Forces. Content analysis will be used to analyze local daily newspapers as well as official data concerning homicide rates, drugs and arms seizures before and after federal interventions. I expect to contribute to our understanding on contemporary changes of the military profession in developing countries, especially those related to combatting non-state actors. Preliminary research findings show a high degree of coordination between civilian authorities at the federal and local levels and high-ranking officials to deploy these operations, the former ones being the decision-makers.