To fully understand the scale of what happened in Rio de Janeiro on the 28th I’d like to refer to the following public utility. It is a map of the territories in the Rio Metro Area that are under control of criminal factions - which is the word used by brazilians to refer to organized crime on the ground, as opposed to gangs, mafias and so on.

This is a zoomed in portion of the map, centered around Rio city’s North Zone or more specifically the Zona da Leopoldina - which is a mixed use, middle to lower class dormitory continuum connecting the international Galeão Airport with the City Center and the affluent South Zone of Rio, where most of tourism lies. The northern black circle is the Penha Complex, the southern black circle refers to the Alemão Complex. Complexes are agglomerations of slums, older housing complexes and the occasional neighborhood which are fully under the control of a criminal faction. The Penha Complex has a population of around 100.000 people, the Alemão Complex is almost 60.000. If you look closely there’s one thing between both complexes which is a forested region. That is where most of the extra bodies were found today.

If you look at the full utility I linked above you’ll see a bunch of colors and abbreviations. CV stands for Comando Vermelho or Red Command, which is an older faction originally focused on drug trafficking. TCP and ADA are schisms from Red Command, which follow more or less the same logic only more extreme and less pragmatic in its governance of the occupied populations. The blue colors with the CL and 5M abbreviations refer to Milícias (Militias), criminal groups formed out of police and military personnel and their families in the 90s and early 00s. Each of these factions often go to war with each other for territory and this war has been accelerating over time with the frontier moving from one part of the metro area to the next. Moreover, the leadership of every faction has become relatively young and unstable, increasingly paranoid and more aggressive over time - likely due to the fact that the traditional heads of the factions moved on from the coastal cities and took over the drug trade at the border after the FARC disarmed and the Paraguayan syndicates lost ground.

I mentioned criminal governance beforehand and I meant it. When you look at the revenues of criminal factions on the ground nowadays the drug trade can reach up to 11% of the money being made. Most of the money comes from taxes extracted from the working poorest: water, electricity, internet, television, natural gas, rent, protection rackets and so on. There are even bootleg transportation apps in some communities of Rio. All in all, this sort of ad-hoc state organization of crime adds up to more than 70 billion dollars a year which for Brazil’s economy is massive.

Where does that leave the Brazilian State in all this? More than 15 years ago when Rio became the centerpiece of a number of international events such as the World Cup and the Olympic games, the State found itself in a pickle. The old modus vivendi it built with the criminal factions was intolerable for capital. The risk was too great. So the state delivered an ultimatum to the factions: we are going to move in, we aren’t going to rock the boat all that hard we’ll just built police barracks within your territory and you aren’t supposed to do anything - hell, you’ll probably sell drugs anyways we don’t care, we just can’t let any of this spill into the touristy areas of Rio. For the most part the factions of Rio complied. There was only one real rebellion in the Vila Cruzeiro, which was immediately met with armoured cars from the marine corps and its interesting to note that Vila Cruzeiro is within the Penha Complex from yesterday’s events.

The problem arises from how the factions complied. It would have been one thing if they stayed in place and things were business as usual, just with fewer robberies and turf wars and such. But naturally they branched off. First they moved into the municipalities of the Metro area, which are even poorer than Rio’s periphery. Then they moved into Rio State’s interior. After that they started making more concerted moves into the peripheries of Brazil as a whole. A few years later, once the imperative to keep things under control for the Olympics was gone the occupation programme was met with a return of the faction wars only now with a vengeance. Now the factions don’t just hold territory, they manage and extract resources from its people to fund real military campaigns across the greater Rio Area.

Fast-forward to this year, 4 months ago the government of Rio State tried to do a megaop against the Israel Complex - controlled by the Terceiro Comando Puro (TCP). Megaops are not that uncommon. They are part of the modus vivendi between the state and the criminal elements because, let’s face it, the people at the top who launder all the money are tied to politicians, religious leaders and financiers. A Megaop is supposed to kill a handful of people - thereby satisfying the public’s need for revenge - arrest a few others but not rock the boat too hard. It was not uncommon for such and such tons of drugs to be apprehended while local leaders somehow escaped. The old leaders of Rio’s factions understood this fact and, sure, sometimes they were caught but its not like they lost control over their domains. They still called the shots from prison. But you’ll remember that I said the new leaders are young, unstable and increasingly paranoid. It’s not just that they’ll see you making a vague gesture with your hand and immediately execute you for making ‘gang signs’ of a rival faction. This also affects how they treat the state.

So what happened 4 months ago in Israel Complex? The Terceiro Comando Puro of the region is led by religious pentecostal fundamentalists. Its in the name Israel Complex. The moment military police was poised to enter they didn’t bother shooting at the police officers. Instead they shot at Avenida Brasil, the main thoroughfare of the city. Thousands were in effect kept hostage in a massive traffic jam and the state couldn’t even enter the territory. This was a humiliation to the police and the state government both. And humiliations like these need to be avenged. Today’s op mobilized 2,500 civil and military police, moved against two Complexes at the same time and actually managed to capture some of Comando Vermelho’s middle managers, arrest dozens and kill hundreds (the latest toll at this moment being 168). Needless to say, by the very nature of this lashout many executions were summary and many innocent people died along the way. But it didn’t stop there.

Comando Vermelho is big, like all factions today it is a para-statal organization and its unity is always at stake. For the past 5 years Comando Vermelho has been fighting wars against ADA and TCP, schisms from it. And Comando Vermelho is not a centralized entity, it is quasi-feudal in structure. As such, it needs to answer humiliation with humiliation. That retaliation is partly in the form of killing power: they set fires across the city and used makeshift drones to throw grenades at police officers. But for the most part, the relatiation took the form of disrupting activities everywhere from Rio’s North Zone, to the Center and to certain cities of the Metro Area.

This is a map of the main thoroughfares that Comando Vermelho ordered closed via barricades - makeshift blockades with torched buses and cars, often also used to delay police action into their territories. This map is meant to be illustrative of their reach because it goes beyond just this action. Threats and rumours online of Comando Vermelho authorizing petty robbery within its territory (often done in order to fund its war operations, now done as retaliation against the state), sackings and killings were enough to force the closure of schools, hospitals, clinics and commerce all across the city.

I cite this retaliation by Comando Vermelho because what we have is a full display of necropolitics, of death and killing as a solution to life’s problems. Only it is also part of an old, outdated paradigm of dealing with crime. The assumption in the War on Drugs always that if you can arrest the Dealer, then crime Disappears. It was harder to argue otherwise in the past, when so much of crime hinged on the drug trade. But nowadays the real drug money lies in retail (controlling supply across the country) or international drug routes into Europe. As mentioned, things have changed, drugs are a minimal portion of the revenue of these political entities, which now act and extract revenues from people as though they are the state. They do not necessarily provide public services, but increasingly do. This is the new war that places not only Rio de Janeiro but much of Brazil’s peripheric states at a crossroads. And that crossroads is well known.

(continued)