Public Safety in Rio De Janeiro: On Track, Barely

Abstract

Disque Denúncia, Rio's crime hotline, is located on the third floor of a 1943 art déco building atop the city's main train station. The station sits about midway along Presidente Vargas Avenue, an eight-lane avenue built by a dictator in the forties to parade his tanks and soldiers. Parked at the entrance of the hotline building is a blue-and-white VW Bug marked with the Military Police insignia. When I first came to Brazil, in the 1980s, this is what cops drove. Many of these cars sputtered along on the first round of the country's sugar cane alcohol fuel program, not yet perfected. Between that and the Bug's sluggish pickup, criminals enjoyed a certain advantage. On a fall afternoon,I rode an elevator -manned by an actual operator -to the third floor of the building atop the train station, to visit the founder-director of Disque Denúncia, which means "Dial an Accusation". Zeca Borges is a bearded 72-year-old who likes to wear Panama hats. He and a colleague received me in a conference room, where they showed me a PowerPoint presentation heavy on impact, and then took me on a tour.In an open space housing staff in charge of areas such as social media, press relations, cash rewards and the "Wanted" program, Borges stopped to tell me about drug traffickers' birthdays.In Rio, everybody knows that drug traffickers, intent on keeping good relations with the favela residents who live in their territories, hold enormous birthday barbecues, with abundant and free grilled meat and beer. Having lived here for 34 years,

Land policy by other means: democracy and the military in contemporary urban Brazil

“…By outlining military practices behind the management and commodification of public spaces, I explore how these agents have galvanized dynamics of city production. Beyond the dimensions of security, surveillance, and population control, I employ the notion of military urbanism to grasp a complex set of forms, organizations, and facets of the occupation of cities as spearheaded by military agents (Graham 2010;Michaels 2016). For the purposes of this work, I define military RASILIANA: Journal for Brazilian Studies.…”