Tropic of Chaos

by Christian Parenti

  To live in a slum that looks down on a wealthy beach community is a provocation of unique intensity. This contrast makes Rio the geographic embodiment of “relative deprivation.” Sociology reveals that absolute deprivation, poverty alone, does not cause violence. Rather, it is deprivation experienced in relation to the status of others, or in relation to what could be, should be, or once was, that hurts the most and drives crime, rebellion, and violence.1 Thus, relative deprivation destroys the social cohesion within communities.2

  The police were giving me an airborne tour of this strange geography and explaining how they manage it with violence and about their new offensive against the favela gunmen. As we approached Favela Vidigal, the pilot steered the chopper out over the water in a wide defensive arc. Vidigal is “hostile,” under the control of the Comando Vermelho (CV), one of Rio’s gangs known to shoot at police helicopters. The cocky young pilot, wearing a blue jumpsuit and dark shades, made sure to point out three freshly patched bullet holes near its tail rotor just before we took off. Damage the tail rotor, and the chopper spins out of control.

  In October 2009, favela gunmen shot down a police helicopter during a daylong firefight between two rival gang factions and the police. Three officers were killed and four were badly injured. Twelve civilians were also killed, and in the surrounding area young men firebombed ten buses. A year later it happened again: police raids killed thirteen, and then gang members burned fifteen buses during four days of violence.3

  Indeed, the gangs of Rio run the favelas and the city’s retail drug trade. Inside the communities they carry machine guns openly as if they were the police, tax local economic activity as if they were the revenue service, and operate informal courts and mete out punishment as if they had a legal code. Steal a cell phone? Get shot through the hands and feet. Snitch someone out? Expect execution.

  Roughly the size of New York, Rio has a murder rate six times higher. In 2009 about five thousand people were slain here. The police enter the favelas only for short and brutal raids—arriving at night in armed columns to ransack, torture, and kill. In most slums, they have not established police stations. According to a 2009 Human Rights Watch report, the Rio constabulary kills more than eleven hundred people every year. Only four Rio police officers have been convicted of abuses in the past decade. But Rio’s cops face other risks: almost ninety died in the line of duty in 2009.

  If that weren’t enough, now a third source feeds the violence: off-duty police, firefighters, and prison guards have formed militias to check the gangs. These vigilantes can be just as criminal as their enemies. In 2008 such militias even tortured journalists from the city’s biggest newspaper. The situation increasingly looks like a low-intensity war.

  Catastrophic Convergence Urbanized

  Why are there so many people in Rio? Why is it so violent? And what will climate change do to places like Rio? I decided to explore this megacity because it reveals how climate crisis in the countryside is expressed as urban violence. One of the most dramatic transformations of the last fifty years has been our planet’s rapid urbanization. The process continues, and climate change is now helping to fuel migration from the countryside to the city. Rio allows us to forecast political issues linked to climate change because, in many ways, it is a city produced by extreme weather elsewhere. A brutal rhythm of drought and flooding hundreds of miles away in Brazil’s arid Northeast, or Nordeste, has fueled Rio’s growth. As weather patterns grow more chaotic and extreme due to global warming, outmigration from the countryside will increase.

  Already disruptions in the patterns of the Intertropical Convergence Zone are leading to new weather shocks—prolonged drought punctuated by violent flooding—that are making subsistence farming in the Nordeste even more difficult. Displaced farmers of that region—internal climate refugees—make their way south to the megacities like Rio and São Paulo. There, they become trapped in the favelas, and many of the youth are pulled into the vortex of the sub-rosa economy, that carnival of guns, drugs, money, sex, music, solidarity, and respect. Thus, by displacing people into the favelas, the extreme weather associated with climate change fuels Rio’s crime wars.

  Rio, too, faces extreme weather. Just after I visited, a freak storm dropped eleven inches of rain on the city in about twenty-four hours—the worst downpour in its recorded history. The streets flooded with sewage, traffic seized up into daylong jams, slabs of shantytowns slipped away down hillsides, and more that one hundred people died. In January, São Paulo had seen similar weather; two rivers broke their banks, thousands were temporarily homeless, and sixty-four people drowned.4 But the real front line of climate change in Brazil is the dry Nordeste.

  New Climatic Normal

  Since the 1970s the Nordeste has suffered increased drought; now, it is also regularly hit by flash floods. The summer of 2010 saw devastating floods, as had the year before. They killed almost 50 people, made 120,000 homeless, wiped out 1,200 miles of roads, and destroyed at least 80 bridges. The crisis was bad enough for President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to skip a G20 conference.5

  This new normal of flooding, drought, and freak storms forms part of a larger pattern of extreme weather that scientists say is the product of anthropogenic climate change and predict will hit northeastern Brazil very hard. Though they are careful to point out that no single weather event can be definitively blamed on climate change, the larger pattern, on the other hand, can be. Consider the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report: “Over the past three decades, Latin America has been subjected to climate-related impacts of increased El Niño occurrences. . . .The occurrence of climate-related disasters increased by 2.4 times between the periods 1970–1999 and 2000–2005, continuing the trend observed during the 1990s.”6 Later the report notes, “Prolonged droughts in semi-arid north-eastern Brazil have provoked rural-urban migration of subsistence farmers” and increased outbreaks of disease.

  Many favela residents are from the Nordeste. Dejacir Alves, whom I met on a stairway in the favela Do Morro dos Cabritos, is typical. He migrated to Rio from Varjota, up in Ceará. “I came here to work, about twenty years ago. My family was in farming. We have a big family, but only two of us still work the land. They do subsistence farming. It is very hard to survive there, and now it is getting harder; there is so much drought there.”

  Alves has done “all sorts of work” in Rio—construction, services, taking tickets on a bus. Talking on this concrete-covered hillside, inlaid with walled paths and a warren of hand-built homes, he wears flip-flops and a green football shirt; farming and the land seem far away in the past.

  In colonial times the Nordeste hosted a coastal plantation economy and cattle industry. Then, droughts in the late 1870s and early 1880s provoked the steady outmigration of the region’s poor. During much of the twentieth century, Brazilian agriculture remained backward and underdeveloped. Unlike many Latin American countries, such as Mexico and Bolivia, Brazil never had a proper bourgeois revolution to check the power of the feudal landed oligarchy and impose land reform. The redistributive programs of the 1930s Estado Novo only affected urban workers and the middle classes.7 The military takeover of 1964 brought a government-led program of rapid modernization in agriculture, but that did not include land redistribution.

  To this day, about 3 percent of the population owns about two-thirds of all farmland.8 Agricultural modernization in the form of the Green Revolution and mechanization caused rising rural unemployment, thus a mass outmigration to the cities. By 1972, major crops, like wheat and soybean, were nearly 60 percent mechanized. Displaced rural workers moved to the cities and built the favelas.9 In 1940 only 15 percent of the country’s population lived in cities; by 1970 that ratio had reached 50 percent. 10 Today, over 80 percent of Brazilians live in cities. And now, we see harbingers of a new wave of migration driven by the strange weather of the unraveling climate system.

  Repression in the Megaslums

  Social
pressure in the cities—driven to some extent by socioclimatological crisis in the rural Northeast—is expressed as criminal violence and state repression. After leaving the favelas to fester for decades, the state is moving to retake them. The strategy runs as follows: First, Rio’s military police special forces—known by their Portuguese acronym, BOPE—invade the favelas and suppress the gangs. Then regular military police units establish permanent bases and begin patrols. Once an area is secured, government services—such as health care, education, cultural facilities, and civil courts—move in. Or that is the plan. They call it pacification; it is classic counterinsurgency except the enemy is a specter, an amorphous threat, a milieu of crime, gangs, and chaos rather than a coherent insurgent foe.

  When I was in Rio in early 2010, about ten of the city’s roughly one thousand favelas were undergoing pacification. The people of the favelas were of a mixed mind about the occupations. The gangs, however, were not pleased, and they were taking revenge on the larger society by firebombing commuter buses down “on the pavement,” as nonfavela Rio is called. “Whoever has the guns is the law,” explained Claudio Carvalha, president of the resident association in Do Morro dos Cabritos. For years this favela was subject to a constant struggle between the CV and a rival gang, Amigos dos Amigos (Friends of Friends).

  “When one of theirs was wounded, they would dump the guy—bleeding, half dead—at the association, and we were expected to take them to the hospital,” explained Claudio.

  In Dona Marta, the first favela occupied back in November 2008 and said to be a showcase of social programs, I met a group of unemployed young people. They may or may not have been enrolled foot soldiers of the CV, but they saw the occupation as all stick and no carrot.

  “They are just beating people up,” said a short, tattooed twenty-three-year-old named Max. He wore red shorts and plastic flip-flops and leaned on the wall of the old wooden shack where he lived with his wife, Amanda. A small radio blared a tinny stream of baile funk, essentially Brazilian hip-hop, as Amanda did dishes by an outdoor tap just off one of the main stairways. A few other young men, shirtless and wearing baggy shorts in the heat, gathered as we talked.

  “Most people just want the cops to go away and find someone else to harass,” said Amanda. “They treat us like criminals. They force us inside after eleven. If you have what they think is too much money, they take it from you.”

  “They push us around when we leave or enter the community,” said another guy, his arms heavily tattooed, who went by the nickname The Moor. “They take us in for minor crimes; they kick us, grab our crotches, search us, kick in our doors, beat us up. They do whatever they want. And we can’t fight back, or we get killed.”

  “This whole ‘social vision’ is not well thought out,” said Max. “They promised day care, clinics and jobs. But all I see are cops.”

  Blowback Brazilian Style

  Scholars argue that Brazil’s crisis of violence is rooted in its history of slavery and frontier conquest. This is true, but more recent origins lie in the country’s intense economic inequality and the violent class struggles it has provoked. Workers’ organizations were long met with brutal repression. From 1964 to 1985, Brazil suffered outright military dictatorship and a decade of “dirty war”; from that age of rebellion and repression, it now experiences a form of blowback. In this history, we see two elements of the catastrophic convergence at play: neoliberal economic restructuring and Cold War violence.

  The story of the largest and oldest Rio gang is rooted in the armed struggle of the Cold War, specifically in the story of right-wing military dictatorship and the Marxist resistance to it. According to its veterans, the Comando Vermelho was founded during the mid-1970s in the Cândido Mendes Prison on Ilha Grande, when captured guerrillas were housed with common prisoners.

  Like most Latin American countries in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Brazil saw the rise of urban guerrillas opposing economic exploitation and political repression. In 1968, commandos from the tiny MR8 even managed to kidnap the US ambassador, Charles B. Elbrick. The man who coordinated the kidnapping, Fernando Gabeira, is now a famous journalist, author, and leftist politician. The film Four Days in September is based on those events. Another prominent former guerrilla and political prisoner of that era is Dilma Vana Rousseff, Brazil’s first woman president.

  Not all the revolutionaries had such illustrious careers. The dictatorship met the Left with the extreme violence of death squads, torture, and incarceration. More broadly, it applied a sweeping national security law that allowed the detention of anyone who gave off the slightest whiff of bohemia—long hair and a guitar could get one arrested. A very complete history of the repression exists thanks to the Catholic Archdiocese of São Paulo, which assembled a secret team of lawyers to illegally copy and publish documents from 707 secret military-tribunal cases, involving 7,367 defendants.11 The purloined dossiers show that torture and murder were widespread, and when a synthesis and summary was published as Brasil: Nunca Mais, it became a sudden bestseller.12

  While some elements of the revolution later rose in politics, other lumpen cadre became the first-generation leadership of Comando Vermelho (other gangs later formed by splitting off from the CV). As Ben Penglase writes, “In a fairly direct sense, the Comando Vermelho was the bastard child of the dictatorship’s attempt to repress armed political opposition.”13

  From Guerrillas to Gangs

  Behind bars, the political radicals of Galeria B of Cândido Mendes Prison organized themselves and then united with the general-population inmates. The common criminals saw how the political prisoners maintained unity and, through it, had strength and a higher standard of living. The jailed radicals were “sharing any food or money that they received from outside the prison and enforcing strict discipline that banned inmates from attacking or stealing from each other, practices which were common in the prison. The political prisoners also joined together to defend any political prisoner who had been assaulted by guards or by other prisoners and to demand better conditions.”14

  The first written account of this history was Four Hundred Against One, the memoir of William da Silva, who as a young prisoner helped start the CV. He describes how the first “red” prison gang was the Falange LSN, which in 1979 killed off the leaders of several rival apolitical organizations, assumed control of the whole prison, became the Comando Vermelho, and then imposed new revolutionary rules. These, according to da Silva, included “death to anyone who assaults or rapes fellow prisoners; conflicts brought from the street must be left outside of prison; violence only to attempt to escape; constant struggle against repression and abuse.”15

  This discipline and unity was soon extended to the favelas. The notion was to support returning prisoners and control the communities, including the drug trade, in preparation for a revolution in Rio and beyond. The CV functioned as a political organization and a beneficent society for prisoners and ex-convicts. It reached into communities, armed in the name of self-defense and revolution, and started taxing the drug trade.16 The first generation of radical CV leaders was soon wiped out, and by the mid-1980s Comando Vermelho had become just another drug gang, albeit very big and well organized.

  As the CV was beginning its rise, Brazil’s larger political economy began a process of brutal, neoliberal transformation. It was the concatenation of the early stages of the catastrophic convergence taking form: political violence met a new wave of poverty.

  Neoliberal Brazil

  It was 1983, the lapels were still wide, the sideburns long, and the protesters furious. Newly unemployed industrial workers—thousands of them—marched down São Paulo’s streets. Screw the military government! These people had reached their limit. Some chanted, “The people united will never be defeated,” but others just screamed, “We’re hungry!”

  As the Comando Vermelho was moving into the favelas, the Brazilian economy was falling to its knees; the protests were a symptom of that. In the first two weeks of January,
14,860 workers in São Paulo were fired. At the same time, the government was implementing austerity measures: cutting public services, aid to the poor, and support for industry. In early April, the rage boiled over: the unemployed marched, only to be met by 10,000 riot police. The protests and chanting soon gave way to rock throwing and looting. The police answered with volleys of tear gas, charges, and vicious beatings. For three days the violence went on, and at least 11 supermarkets and dozens of bakeries were looted; thousands of protesters, shouting for jobs, even attacked the state governor’s palace. Police arrested more than 450 people; damages reached $1.5 million.17

  Brazil was entering a period of painful economic restructuring. Mired in debt, the government turned to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank for new loans, but emergency help came with strict new economic conditions. To balance the books, Brazil would suffer a wave of pauperization, unemployment, hunger, homelessness, and desperation.

  This was the context for the rise of the drug trade and the Comando Vermelho’s pivot from Rio’s prisons out into the favelas. To understand the catastrophic convergence, we must first understand the foundational crisis of violence and poverty into which is now added accelerating climate change.

  From ISI to IMF

  Like many developing economies, Brazil had followed a model of state-directed import-substitution industrialization (ISI) from the 1930s onward. Arrived at as a reaction to the collapse of markets for traditional exports during the Great Depression, this state-led form of capitalist development involved an uneasy compact between business and labor brokered by an interventionist state. In exchange for discipline on the shop floor, the state created social security programs and allowed rising wages for the aristocracy of labor. Investment and finance were regulated, and banks were often state owned. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, in response to the Great Depression and World War II, forms of corporatism took root in many places. Sometimes corporatist policies were enacted by democratic states; witness the American New Deal. More often the developmentalist pact between labor and capital was delivered by “relatively autonomous” and authoritarian states, such as mid-century Italy, Spain, Portugal, Japan, Bolivia, and Argentina.