Urban Public Works, Drug Trafficking and Militias: What Are the Consequences of the Interactions Between Community Work and Illicit Markets?

Abstract

This paper explores some of the interactions between community workers, drug traffickers and militiamen in the city of Rio de Janeiro and in the Baixada Fluminense region. It is mainly intended to examine and compare the tensions created by the territorialization of social housing policies into drug gang-controlled favelas and militia-controlled areas. To conduct this examination, I specifically sought to grasp how the interactions between public policy agents and illicit market actors can be framed (in the goffmanian sense) to avoid the use of force and how different interactional framings impact drug and illegal security markets. My fieldwork and interviews with community workers allowed me to identify two lines of argument successful in maintaining social interactions and pushing away the use of force: the good of the community and the good of the business. I argue that the negotiations between community workers, drug traffickers and militiamen eventually fuel illicit markets in unexpected manners.

For a war yet to end: Shootouts and the production of tranquillity in massive Rio de Janeiro

“…And yet their powers of governance and their continued acceptance rest on the spectre of the drug trade and continued shootouts. The spectral presence of the drug trade and of the shootouts related to it is key to understanding why people keep moving into the rapidly urbanising areas of the city built and run by the milícias (Araujo, 2019; Araujo & Cortado, 2020; Araujo Silva, 2017; Cortado, 2021; Petti, 2020). Blackness in Rio is to live in areas controlled by groups of armed men, who constitute neighbourhoods as their territories guarded by weapons and by an atmosphere of armed conflict.…”

Necropolitics Beyond the Exception: Parapolicing, Milícia Urbanism, and the Assassination of Marielle Franco in Rio de Janeiro

“…Thereby, milícias have exerted considerable influence on urbanisation processes and urban politics. Controlling neighbourhood associations and government programs of social housing, as well as running sectors of the local and regional construction, extraction and service economies (Araujo 2019; Benmergui and Gonçalves 2019; Müller 2021), they form part of what Rivke Jaffe (2013) has called a “hybrid state”. In such a hybrid state, criminal organisations, politicians, police, and bureaucrats “share control over urban spaces and populations” (Jaffe 2013:735), variously implicating urban populations within these hybrid entanglements.…”

“…Second, Lessa’s case illustrates the broader networks of actors that support and benefit from parapolicing and that are constitutive of what Jaffe (2013) calls a “hybrid state”. Typically, these actors include, for instance, politicians striving for electoral success, traders of illicit goods fending off competitors or criminal investigations, and further parties who seek to take vengeance, pursue gains, impose authority, or secure territorial dominion over urban areas (see Araujo 2019; Arias and Barnes 2017). These networks can also be understood as emerging from “clandestine connections” in Auyero’s (2010) sense, as they skilfully elude broader visibility and public accountability (see also Auyero and Mahler 2011).…”

“Captains of the Sands”: Urban Illicit Ecologies and Sandscapes in Rio de Janeiro

“…Mostly illiterate and impoverished orphans, they perform their illegal activities, such as burglaries and robberies, in Salvador's wealthier districts. Published in 1937, the story depicts the gang members as victims of a discriminatory, disciplinarian stigmatisation of black, poor urban men (Amado 1937). While the youngsters inhabit the very edges of the urban peninsula, its beaches, they expand their control beyond the sandy terrain, astutely escaping the eye of the police and the state's reformatory institutions.…”