The Militarization of Urban Marginality: Lessons from the Brazilian Metropolis

Abstract

This article examines the workings and effects of the penalization of poverty in urban Brazil at century's turn to uncover the deep logic of punitive containment as state strategy for the management of dispossessed and dishonored populations in the polarizing city in the age of triumphant neoliberalism. It shows how ramifying criminal violence (fed by extreme inequality and mass poverty), class and color discrimination in judicial processing, unchecked police brutality, and the catastrophic condition and chaotic operation of the carceral system combine to make the aggressive deployment of the penal apparatus in Brazil a surefire recipe for further disorder and disrespect for the law at the bottom of the urban hierarchy and steers the country into an institutional impasse. The policy of punitive containment pursued by political elites as a complement to the deregulation of the economy in the 1990s leads from the penalization to the militarization of urban marginality, under which residents of the declining favelas are treated as virtual enemies of the nation, tenuous trust in public institutions is undermined, and the spiral of violence accelerated. Brazil thus serves as a historical revelator of the full consequences of the penal disposal of the human detritus of a society swamped by social and physical insecurity. Drawing parallels between penal activity in the Brazilian and the U.S. metropolis further reveals that the neighborhoods of urban relegation wherein the marginal and stigmatized fractions of the postindustrial working class concentrate are the prime targets and proving ground upon which the neoliberal penal state is concretely being assembled, tried, and tested. Their study is therefore of urgent interest to analysts of international politics and state power at the dawn of the twenty-first century.

"Vintage Nightlife": Gentrifying Lisbon downtown

“…If we consider here the criminalization of "being young" (Castells 2012;Nofre & Feixa 2013) as part of the recent instauration of the Neoliberal Penal State (Wacquant 2008) in post-industrial countries, the definition provided by Galtung acquires great timeliness in these last decades of "zero-tolerance politics" that feature the neoliberal city (Garnier 2010). Furthermore, I have implicitly used the Galtung's definition in some previous publications about nightlife, urban transformations, and social contestations in Euro-Mediterranean cities such as Lisbon, Barcelona, and Sarajevo (Nofre & Martín 2009;Nofre 2011;Nofre & Feixa 2013).…”

The securitization of citizenship in a ‘Segregated City’: a reflection on Rio’s Pacifying Police Units

“…limits them. More specifically, they arose from a context of widespread preconceptions about citizenship, criminality, marginality and favelas (Perlman, 2010) within a neoliberal framework that exchanges economic laissez-faire for an increasingly authoritarian "penal state", a model exported by the United States and readily imported by Brazilian authorities (Wacquant, 2008).…”

“…Brazil's current form of state intervention has been on the rise since the military dictatorship as economic reforms towards neoliberalism meant increasing inequalities within the country and the criminalization and militarization of the marginalized, urban poor and the spaces associated with them. The latter are targeted as the loci of crime and the origin of the recurring public security crises 3 as well as high crime rates often associated with the international network of drug and weapons trafficking that affects the country since re-democratization (Wacquant, 2008;Malaguti Batista, 2003Batista, 1997).…”

“…The war-like invasion of favelas is legitimized through this gradual establishment of the 'neoliberal penal state' (Wacquant, 2008), a historical process initiated under the military dictatorship during the Cold War linked to the consolidation of what Nilo Batista (1997) has called the "military model of criminal policy." Drugs came to symbolize Communist subversion, and therefore the 'internal enemy' to the "moral bases of Christian civilization" (Batista, 1997, p. 12).…”

“…Within this setting of public insecurity and a culture of fear, the public is accepting and even supportive of 'more state' in matters of public security and crime (Caldeira, 2000;Batista, 1997;Wacquant, 2008). In the private sphere and with this perceived lack of security and state control in mind, the Brazilian middle and upper classes have allocated growing investments to private security and gated communities.…”