Not 4 days before the 28th there was an interview online (portuguese) with the bureaucrat in charge of the whole massacre, a federal police officer and current Secretário de Segurança (Security) of the Rio State government. The interview follows the logic of the state, the primary means of solving violence in Rio is to estabilish the State’s monopoly over violence. And yet the discourse on display kinda shocks with how candid it is that military occupation doesn’t work, military incursions work even less and that a full programme of reintegration is needed.

The secretary proposes, amongst other things, that police intervention needs to be recalibrated to ensure the provision of public services, that communities need to be heard and understood according to their specific needs, that the working poorest need to be given rights of property over their houses and land (which, in turn, should cut criminal opportunities to extract rent or expel people for speculation), and that competitive social tariffs be levied on people - instead of paying the full cost of electricity, they should pay something closer to the protection racket charged by the factions to keep their refrigerators running. The only thing he doesn’t propose is reurbanizing the slums and the impression I’m left with is that the only reason he didn’t is because the interviewers didn’t bring it up. More importantly the guy is almost hostile to the sort of operation that he commanded yesterday. The idea that if you lock up the bandit you solve banditry, what he really wants to do is attack crime as an enterprise. Prophetically, in response to the political side of things he says that ‘we tell politicians what can work and what can’t, but I’m not a politician myself’. Hell, the guy outright says reintegration cannot start with the regions subject to police action yesterday because faction power there is too well estabilished.

This interview was weird to me because it shows a state bureaucrat (again, the guy in charge of the 28th’s megaoperation) cutting through the entire political discourse that polarized this massacre right afterward. You see, the Governor of Rio State Cláudio Castro is a member of the PL (Bolsonaro’s Party), and once the breakdown of law and order spread through the city he was quick to blame Lula’s Federal Government for not providing the state with enough aid. This is nothing new, its the oldest tactics in the Rio electoral playbook, something the Garotinho political dynasty used a lot (mostly to their loss). Only this was done in a very, let’s say, opportune moment. The President is returning from meetings in Malaysia and, coincidentially, he wasn’t using the presidential plane. He was using an airforce plane which, on the one hand, was meant to make his journey quicker, but on the other left the President incommunicado for 20 hours. There are already conspiracy theories tied to this fact.

So even in the best case scenario, where the intellectual consensus that military confrontation doesn’t solve shit, that necropolitics doesn’t solve anything, that the war on drugs is neither winnable nor even the war being fought nowadays has reached the state bureaucracy (and I don’t doubt it has, I mean, police officers probably don’t like dying for useless causes either) the fact is that the political cadres don’t care. We are faced with elections next year. This megaoperation - 1 year of intelligence gathering in the making, from what was reported - was just a pawn in the electoral agenda of one man and his party.

Moreover, there’s a larger context in place here. The brazilian far right enjoys talking about how it is under a judicial dictatorship (dictatorship by the Supreme Court), the same Supreme Court that legalized gay marriage and condemned Bolsonaro, as well as barring the most flagrantly illegal things that the far right Congress and Bolsonaro’s government tried to pull. As part of this claim, the far right information networks claim that ADPF 635 (a Supreme Court demand that Rio State fully follows the Constitution when doing police ops) is the reason criminal territory grew across Rio and in Brazil. It is an actual difficult discussion to be had, where both sides have points to make. For an example, the Supreme Court originally stipulated that schools and clinics should be avoided during a police op and never used by police as a base of operations. No brainer right? Well that stipulation only caused the factions to then invade schools and clinics themselves, as they were converted into safe zones for factional soldiers - at which point the Supreme Court relented. Problem is, in the far right parallel reality this extremely complex situation is all distilled into ‘the leftist communist Supreme Court and its President Lula is doing the utmost to protect crime and banditry’.

Governor Cláudio Castro played into that politics with early claims that he requested loans of armoured cars from the federal government in order to carry this police op. Turns out he didn’t, because such loans would have to be done under a GLO (Garantia de Lei e Ordem, Guarantee of Law and Order) a constitutional tool by which the state government claims itself unable to provide security services and places its forces under the control of the Armed Forces, the Ministry of Justice and the Federal Government. This was never requested and, plain to see, if one is to claim that yesterday’s operation was a success because ‘it killed lots of bandits’ then its clear that Rio State still has the werewithal to act mostly alone. Which it isn’t, soldiers of the Força Nacional (National Forces) are already in Rio and have been for quite a few years. From what I understand, without a GLO there can only be a full Federal Intervention (which has happened before) and which nobody wants to see done because it fully paralyzes the federal government. Congress can’t really make vote on important reforms as long as one state is saturated with federal troops.

But the play has been done. Pro Bolsonaro networks have already circulated ‘documents’ which prove Lula and the Federal Government denied aid. None of them will mention Castro’s mea culpa ‘my words were misinterpreted, I never intended to criticize the Federal Government’. A massacre was done within the context of a city grasping with civil war-like conditions all across its peripheric and middle class regions. I do not expect this to have been an electoral misplay by anybody in particular, be it an eventual play by the Federal Government or this massacre by the Rio State government. I do not expect the people by and large to reject the paradigm of killing bandits being a good thing. On the contrary, for those who don’t live in the favelas there is only the demand that more operations of this kind be done until the factions are erradicated. Especially once Comando Vermelho decided to retaliate against a full third of the city of Rio, as people even outside their zone of control remain cowed and fearful today.

A final note of political context is the far right push to declare the factions Terrorist Organizations. The center left will argue that this is a means of legitimizing political violence by the United States against Brazil, like it is happening in Venezuela and Colombia right now. The center and the judicial system will argue that this doesn’t actually change anything. The current legal situation already allows for operations like the August 28th’s Federal Operation in Av. Faria Lima (Brazil’s Wall Street, in São Paulo) against the financial side of the PCC (Primeiro Comando da Capital, Brazil’s most comprehensive faction and hegemon of São Paulo state, controllers of the international drug trade into West Africa and Europe but that’s the least of things). But I’m not going to lie: this may not be politically sustainable. As someone who lives rather close to the war and massacres that happened yesterday I cannot blame anyone who wants to see something, anything done. The Brazilian Left has to create its own ‘tough on crime discourse’ capable of outmaneuvering the necropolitics of the right. Not on a Clintonian sense of full capitulation to the right, but as part of its sovereigntist discourse. Otherwise sovereignty starts ringing hollow to people’s ears.

Wether things stabilize where they are or the cogs of the state move yet again, that’s something to be seen.