Rio has lived, for decades, under the sign of "urban war". Such a representation, however, more masks than explains a reality much more complex than its alleged struggle between forces of good against evil. As is known, the configuration of armed groups of traffickers and militias in favelas and popular territories has historically been associated with perverse forms of articulation with State agents, making everything much more difficult to understand.
It is also true that the sign of "war" has been building a configuration homologous to it, defining behaviors that contribute to confirm its existence. This is followed by an arms race, which awakens greedy interests in weapons traffic in the “Rio war”. The result is the absurd increase in lethality and suffering among the police themselves and their families, and among residents of the slums and peripheries of the metropolis, preferential victims of this disastrous logic.
The UPPs represented a partial truce in this process, especially for the popular territories where they were installed, but were never seen by favela residents as a sustainable solution. According to surveys in the most successful period of the UPPs' experience, they saw it as positive, but much more because they perceived it as a pacification of the police itself, as with the UPPs, the worst police practices in the slums were suspended.
With the exhaustion of the experience of the UPPs and the resurgence of police incursions, the population of the favelas and peripheries is now experiencing a situation of absolute terror. Although the mainstream press has frequently reported on the residents' drama, the daily tragedy goes beyond what appears in the newspapers. But, perhaps, the most serious aspect of the current situation is the lack of perspective, which tends to produce fatalism and resignation in the population, but also loss of meaning for the police themselves regarding the rationality of their actions. They themselves are victims of the narrative of the idea of war, and they need to transform them into “heroes” who “die for society”, as the police authorities have reiterated, when what they need is to be treated as public security professionals.
This scenario of lack of perspective allows, dangerously, to be accepted as legitimate positions such as that of the Chief Minister of the Institutional Security Office, Sergio Westphalen Etchegoyen, who, insisting on the sign of war, admits the inevitability of human losses in operations with Armed Forces in Rio: “It will happen. It is foreseeable that undesirable things will happen, including injustices. Either society wants it or doesn't”, declared Etchegoyen to an audience of businessmen, at the “Brazil of Ideas” panel, in August, in Rio.
The profound crisis of perspective creates, paradoxically, a window of opportunity for a broad renewal of the public security paradigm historically adopted in Rio. For this, it is necessary that civil society, especially neighborhood, slums and peripheries organizations, universities, the Public Prosecutor's Office, the Public Defender's Office and political leaders really committed to the well-being of the population, come together in the construction of a public space for dialogue and defense of a sustainable security policy guided by the language of rights.
We believe that the first tangible result of this mobilization may be the deconstruction of the sign of war and the understanding that public security is a public service, which must have as a non-negotiable basis the recognition of the right to life of all citizens of Rio de Janeiro, regardless their zip code.
Eliana Sousa Silva
Director and founder of NGO Redes da Maré, researcher in public security and visiting professor at the Institute of Advanced Studies at USP
Itamar Silva
Director of Ibase
Marcelo Burgos
Professor in the Department of Social Sciences at PUC-Rio
This article was originally published at O Globo on August 24 of 2017
