The Politics of Crime and Militarised Policing in Brazil

Abstract

This article queries the effects of international police assistance in the Global South, focusing specifically on Brazil. Utilising recently declassified documents accessed in Washington, DC, this article shows how United States officials sought to intervene in Latin American politics through international police assistance to Brazil during the 1960s–1980s. The article considers the geopolitical motivations behind these programs and highlights the connections between international police assistance, weak democratic institutions in Latin America and legacies of authoritarian policing in the region. The academic objectives are twofold: to foreground debates that emphasise the need for Southern Criminological research perspectives and to explore the broader effects of international police assistance programs in the Global South. By drawing attention to these issues, the article contributes to studies of policing, politics and public security in contexts like Brazil, where extreme levels of everyday violence are a threat to democracy and human rights.

Urban orientalism and the informal city in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

“…To be sure, militarized policing of the poor is not new in Rio (Machado da Silva, 2010), but what stands out in recent decades are a series of interventions that have accompanied the onset of neoliberalism. These changes are similar to ones that have happened globally, with new policies, technologies, and resources devoted to an escalating war on crime (Cavalcanti and Garmany, 2020). In Rio, this coincides with the rise of organized narcotrafficking and ongoing battles between police and traffickers throughout the city.…”

“We fight for the memory of our children”: Political memory, favela heritage, and mothers of victims of state violence

“…In this sense, the public security agenda in Brazil has been deeply influenced by US police assistance, which has been ongoing from the military dictatorship to the present time. As shown by Cavalcanti and Garmany (2020), this has reinforced Brazil's military style of law enforcement without fostering respect for human rights or rule of law. Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, Brazil's development agenda was tightly connected to the state's ability to project its power and authority into favelas (Håndlykken-Luz, 2020).…”

The Pursuit of the ‘Dead Bandit’: A Decolonial Analysis of the Persecution of the Marginalized in Brazil

“…Approximately 60,000 Brazilians are killed each year (Cerqueira et al 2016), making fear of crime and the political currency of security and crime control agencies central to the country's social picture. Experiences of violence, unsurprisingly, are deeply unequal and heterogeneous (Cavalcanti 2020;Marques 2021). For example, even when Brazil experienced improvements in reductions of economic inequality, levels of lethal violence continued to rise, disproportionately affecting urban poor afrodescendant communities (Cavalcanti 2020;Marques 2021).…”

“…Experiences of violence, unsurprisingly, are deeply unequal and heterogeneous (Cavalcanti 2020;Marques 2021). For example, even when Brazil experienced improvements in reductions of economic inequality, levels of lethal violence continued to rise, disproportionately affecting urban poor afrodescendant communities (Cavalcanti 2020;Marques 2021). This high-violence context gives prominence to debates around the constructions of crime, criminals and police use of force, including questions around "whether police should combat public insecurity with even more violence, or whether police violence is a major part of the problem" (Cavalcanti and Garmany 2020: 104).…”

“…A growing body of critical criminological literature has begun to question the roles and legacies of colonialism and their effects on a range of fronts. These range from the everyday operations of criminal justice (Cunneen 2011;Cavalcanti 2020), to the very origins and development of criminology (Agozino 2003; and the definitions, concepts, frameworks and questions with which the discipline engages (Aliverti et al 2021;Dimou 2021). This body of literature has created a crack in criminological discourse, which is generating important ongoing discussions and new knowledge relating to contexts, theories and ways of thinking that go beyond the boundaries of Eurocentric, Anglo-centric, northern thinking.…”