Themes

Public security history

A century-long history of how Brazilian states have organized — and frequently failed to organize — public security in favelas, from intermittent presence under earlier regimes through the UPP program and the rise of militias to the contested present.

The history of public security in Brazilian favelas is a history of inconsistent state presence, periods of explicit absence, and recurrent attempts at occupation that have produced uneven results. No single narrative covers it. The pattern in Rio de Janeiro differs from that in São Paulo, which differs from that in the Northeast. What the patterns share is a high baseline of lethal violence connected to policing and to non-state armed groups, and an unresolved question about what legitimate public security in informal settlements should look like.

Mid-twentieth century: intermittent presence

Through the middle decades of the twentieth century, policing in Rio de Janeiro favelas was intermittent and frequently abusive. State presence was concentrated in the surrounding formal neighborhoods. The military dictatorship of 1964–1985 produced an era of removal-oriented intervention — the BNH and CHISAM programs — that was not, in the main, a security program in the sense of providing protection, but rather of clearing land.

Late twentieth century: the rise of organized drug trafficking

From the late 1970s and through the 1980s, the consolidation of drug-trafficking organizations in Rio de Janeiro favelas — particularly the Comando Vermelho, which originated in the federal penitentiary system on Ilha Grande and reorganized in Rio favelas — changed the security landscape. The CV and subsequent organizations exercised territorial control in particular communities, mediated internal disputes, and engaged in recurring armed conflicts with state police forces and with each other. Lethal-violence indicators in Rio rose sharply through the 1990s and into the 2000s.

In São Paulo, a different organization — the Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC), founded in the state's prison system in 1993 — developed a distinct logic: more centralized, less territorially open in its operations, and producing a different and broadly lower lethal-violence pattern across São Paulo's peripheries from the mid-2000s onward.

The BOPE and high-lethality operations

Rio's military police developed the Batalhão de Operações Policiais Especiais (BOPE), a tactical unit specializing in operations in favelas. BOPE operations through the 1990s and 2000s produced high casualty counts and became internationally familiar through the 2007 José Padilha film Tropa de Elite and its 2010 sequel. The unit's emblem and tactical approach became reference points in international policing literature.

The UPP era, 2008–c. 2017

The Pacifying Police Unit (UPP) program launched in late 2008 in Santa Marta and expanded through the run-up to the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics. The model — preceded by a military or police "intervention" against armed groups, followed by the permanent installation of a community-policing unit — was the most ambitious public-security experiment in Rio's recent history. For several years lethal-violence indicators dropped in occupied communities. The program experienced sustained criticism over disappearances (notably the 2013 case of Amarildo de Souza in Rocinha), its geographic concentration in tourist-facing areas, and the absence of complementary investments in services.

From 2014 onward the program weakened. The 2017 state fiscal crisis effectively defunded it. By the end of the decade the UPP was a residual force in a small number of favelas.

The militia question

From the early 2000s, militias — extortion organizations rooted in current and former members of the police, military, fire service, and prison system — expanded across Rio's West Zone. They are functionally distinct from the drug-trafficking organizations: their economy is built on protection rackets, illegal transportation, illegal real estate, and clandestine gas distribution rather than on drug retail. Their territorial reach in Rio's West Zone has grown substantially through the 2010s and into the 2020s, with several mappings — by Folha de S.Paulo, the Grupo de Estudos dos Novos Ilegalismos at UFF, and the Núcleo de Estudos da Violência at USP — documenting militia control over large portions of the city.

The 2020s

The current period has been defined by three currents. First, the return of large-scale police operations in Rio favelas, with several producing multi-casualty incidents (the May 2021 Jacarezinho operation; subsequent operations in Vila Cruzeiro in 2022 and 2023). Second, the consolidation of militia territorial control across much of Rio's West Zone. Third, the implementation of Federal Supreme Court orders under ADPF 635 — the so-called ADPF das Favelas — that have placed restrictions on police operations in Rio favelas and required protocols for the use of lethal force.

What is contested

Two questions remain open. The first is whether community-policing models on the UPP design can be made to work in the Brazilian context; the program's failures are well documented, but the alternative — a return to discretionary, high-lethality tactical operations — has produced its own well-documented failures. The second is the appropriate response to militia expansion, which differs structurally from drug-trafficking and has not yet produced a coherent policy response.