A Tale of Two Cities: ‘Pacification’ and the Marginalisation of the favelas in Rio de Janeiro

This paper traces the evolution and the effects of the pacification strategy against growing criminality, arms- and narcotics-trafficking trends that has been rolled out over the last decade in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas. It problematizes from a critical military studies perspective the militarised approach that the Brazilian state has adopted whilst trying to deal with urban poverty, racial segregation and criminal violence within the favelas. This paper examines the structural consequences of inequality and criminality and the increasing marginalization of favela residents that have stemmed from Brazil’s increasing Neo-Liberal economic policies (Wacquant 2014) and examines how these have been dealt with, and thus aggravated by, the growing militarisation of policing operations conducted amongst the residents of Rio de Janeiro’s favelas often in the guise of the war on drugs/crime (Oosterbaan & Wijk 2015). Whilst the state’s security apparatuses have tried to conduct “pacification” operations through the Police Pacification Units in order to reduce criminality, to fight against organised criminal gangs, such as Terceiro Comando (Third Command) and claim back such “ungoverned” spaces by moving the state’s military police away from war-oriented to community based policing (Siman & Santos 2018), this paper shows how the increasing adoption of urban warfare tactics to the detriment of community-based policing initiatives and the disinterest in implementing any serious socio-economic regeneration projects within the favelas (Salem 2017), have strengthened the “punitive containment” (Wacquant 2008) of the racially and socio-economically marginalised favela residents and, in fact, augmented rather than diminished the segregation between favela residents and the rest of the city in the name of security . The data that will be analysed and used in this paper will mainly consist of socio-economic, criminal and violent mortality statistics and reports from organisations such as the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics, the Ministry of Justice, the Brazilian Forum of Public Security, etc. as well as extensive online and printed media coverage of the criminal violence and police pacification operations conducted in Rio de Janeiro over the last decade.