TheEconomistJune 1st 2019 391L
ate lastyear mysterious trucks started
dumping industrial waste at a precolo-
nial archaeological site in Duque de Caxias,
an industrial city of 900,000 people some
24km (15 miles) north of Rio de Janeiro. En-
vironmental activists thought they knew
who was behind it. Over the past decade,
their battle to protect local nature reserves
and the poor people who live near them has
become a battle against criminal groups
known as militias.
Prosecutors say that from the mid-1990s
these groups, often made up of rogue po-
lice officers, started snatching swampy
federal land. They filled it with dirt and
sold the lots to families, mostly poor mi-
grants from other states. In São Bento, a
neighbourhood in the city, a hill overlooks
thousands of identical tin-roofed shacks.
“The militias control all of it,” says an activ-
ist. For a fee, they provide transport, water,
cooking gas, cable television and internet.
But they also flaunt heavy weapons, run ex-
tortion rackets and threaten to kill anyone
who opposes them.
According to an investigation last year
by g1, a Brazilian news site, militias control
348 square kilometres of land—roughly a
quarter of the Rio de Janeiro metropolitanregion. That territory is home to 2m people.
Unlike drug-traffickers, who also control
plenty of neighbourhoods in Rio, militias
have close connections to the state.
“They’re untouchable by the law because
they themselves are the law,” says José
Cláudio Souza Alves, of the Federal Rural
University of Rio de Janeiro. As a congress-
man, Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s populist presi-
dent, defended militias, though he is more
careful now. “Where the militia is paid,there is no violence,” he claimed last year.
Violence and politics have long been
intertwined in Rio de Janeiro. In the 1950s a
federal deputy from Duque de Caxias prow-
led around with a German machinegun. A
film in 1986 romanticised his life, but histo-
rians pin several dozen violent crimes on
him, including at least one murder. Brazil’s
military dictatorship, which fell in 1985,
used police death squads to kill political
opponents (some of whom were urban
guerrillas) and other unwanted people.
Militias evolved out of citizen-led vigi-
lante groups that emerged in the 1990s to
tackle drug gangs, says Mr Alves. Today
they are de facto mafias. They thrive in the
power vacuum of Rio’s peripheries, offer-
ing what Mr Alves calls “false security”.
They are popular with politicians thanks to
their talent for getting out the vote. Police
officers among their members help them
to thwart investigations. Their political
ties help them to filch public money.
In 2007 Marcelo Freixo, then a state
congressman from the left-wing Socialism
and Liberty Party (psol), proposed a parlia-
mentary commission to investigate mili-
tias. But it was not until 2008, after militia-
men kidnapped and tortured two
journalists and their driver, that politi-
cians agreed to the inquiry. After months of
testimony, the commission released a 282-
page report that accused 226 people of hav-
ing militia connections, including police
and army officers and city and state politi-
cians. Most were eventually jailed.
Those who avoided prison and
worse—25 of those named in the report
have since been murdered—shifted theirRio’s militiasShadow state
DUQUE DE CAXIAS
Groups of rogue police officers are terrorising the peripheries of Rio de JaneiroGuanabara
BayCopacabana
MuzemaSão BentoDuque de
Caxias MaréRio de JaneiroNovaIguaçuRio de Janeiro metropolitan regionWestzone20 kmBRAZILThe Americas
40 Bello:Exportorstagnate
42 Mapping Rio’s favelasAlso in this section