3 - Particularistic Confrontation

Summary

This chapter explains why Rio de Janeiro endured a nearly uninterrupted confrontation between drug gangs and the state’s Military Police since redemocratization in the 1980s. High fragmentation withered multiple initiatives to professionalize the police while recurrent political turnover generated successive police reform cycles. The dispersal of political power also decentralized rents from police corruption. Police thus regulated drug trafficking through splintered corruption deals and rampant violence, reinforcing criminal retaliation, gang invasions and successional struggles. The Pacification program that began in 2008 briefly disrupted this pattern, ushering a temporary coexistence arrangement that significantly decreased both police and criminal violence. However, the state’s fiscal and political crises and the end of the international events that promoted Pacification not only sparked a return to grim normalcy but increased police violence to unprecedented heights in the ensuing decade.