A couple of weeks ago, I found out that the military police had installed surveillance cameras in the favela of Santa Marta, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, which I visited back in April. This is the first time such police cameras have been put into such informal settlements in Rio. My friend and colleague, Paola Barreto Leblanc, sent me this link to these youtube broadcasts from a local favela TV company, in which residents discuss their (largely negative) views of the cameras.
There is also a poster that has been put up around the area produced by the Community Association and other local activist and civil society groups – see here – which reads as follows in English:
SANTA MARTA , THE MOST WATCHED PLACE IN RIO
At the end of August, the inhabitants of Santa Marta were surprised to learn from newspapers and TV that nine surveillance cameras would be installed in different areas of the favela. A fear of being misinterpreted paralysed the community.
Many of the people of the city, and some in the Moro itself support this initiative. However, we are a pacified favela, so why do they keep treating us as dangerous?
Walls, three kinds of police, 120 soldiers, cameras – this is no exaggeration. When will we be treated as ordinary citizens instead of being seen as suspects?
Wall: 2 million Reais, Cameras, half a million Reais. How many houses could this amount of money build? How many repairs to the water and sewage system?
The last apartments built in Santa Marta are 32 square metres. The Popular Movement for Housing [an NGO] says that the minimum size should be 42 square metres. Other initiatives have gone with 37 square metres. So why don’t we stand up and demand this minimum standard? This should be our priority!
When will the voice of the inhabitants of this community be heard?
We need collective discussion and debate.
Fear is paralysing this community and preventing criticism. But the exercise of our rights is the only guarantee of freedom.
“Peace without a voice is fear”
We want to discuss our priorities. We want to know about and be involved in the urban development project in Santa Marta.
Most people will probably have heard the announcement that Rio de Janeiro has been awarded the 2016 Olympic Games. While I am pleased that Brazil has beaten the USA in particular in this race in the sense that it shows a slight shift in global power balances towards the global south, I am very concerned as to how the current right-wing administration of both the city and region of Rio will deal with the ‘security’ issues around this mega-event. The Pan-American Games, which Rio hosted in 2007 led to the violent occupation by military police of several particularly troubled favelas (informal settlements), and the new administration has already shown its authoritarian tendencies with the Giuliani- wannabe ‘choque de ordem’ (shock of order) policies that involve building demolition, crackdowns on illegal street vendors (i.e. the poor) and more recently, the building of walls around certain favelas, and most recently the unwelcome imposition of CCTV cameras on favelas that were just starting to enjoy improvements in trust between police and community. The favelas that line the main highways into the city from the international airport were already slated for such ghettoization, and the Olympics will only make this more likely to happen and more quickly – just as has happened in South Africa, similarly afflicted by race and class-based social conflict, during the various international meetings and summits there in recent years. Foreign delegates and tourists don’t like to see all that nasty poverty, do they?
I will write more on this later (I am on the road right now…).
Leading the new Community Police efforts in Santa Marta was Capitao Pricilla, an indomitable and well-liked young female officer of the Military Police, one of several rising female officers with a new approach, and we heard from residents how trust was being rebuilt between police and community because of her. At the same time, there were storm clouds on the horizon as the city administration was insistent on cracking down still further with its policies of choque de ordem (the shock of order), which involved harassing illegal street vendors from the favelas, and demolishing illegally-built buildings, and also building walls along the edges of some favelas. The word ‘ghetto’ was mentioned on more than one occasion by our interviewees and in more casual conversations.
Now, just last month, the Military Police have decided to install seven CCTV cameras in Santa Marta, in different areas of the community. This has prompted complaints of invasion of privacy, an there have already, my sources report, been protests about this in he favela, but it seems that this is coming from further up the chain of command than Capitao Pricilla and the community police. She isn’t mentioned at all by the article in O Globo, despite being a bit of a PR star, and instead the justification for the cameras is given by one Coronel José Carvalho, who also stated that there are plans to put cameras into the other two areas currently being targeted for development, the famous Cidade de Deus, and the much less well-known and more distant favela of Batan. This also contradicts what I was being told by the Commnder of the police central CCTV control room we visited, which is quoted as being one of the places where the cameras will be monitored. What is interesting is the cameras seem to be being treated by police almost as a tool of urban warfare: a Major Orderlei Santos talks about their experimental use for determine the deployment of officers in the favela.
Could the old macho, male, approach to policing as a war on the poor be trumping the new trust being developed by community policing? I hope not, but everything points that way.
(thanks once again to Paola and David for keeping me in touch…)
One of the most interesting meetings we had in our last week here in Japan was with two representatives from the Japan Civil Liberties Union (JCLU) and the association to defend the rights of foreign migrant workers. One thing that has always been clear to me from being a gaikokujin (or more casually, just gaijin – foreigner) in Japan is how distinct is this status. I’m a white, western European and therefore at the top of the list of acceptability in foreigners in Japan, but even so I’ve had some interesting experiences, including having two police squad cars and 5 officers deal with the matter of my ‘suspicious’ bicycle (an experience that practically all resident foreigners have had at one time or another), and just the other day I was stopped at the train station by two plain-clothes police officers, who started off quite strong, but then backed down and started mumbling apologies about ‘looking for someone’ when they realised my (Japanese) wife was just behind me. It was pretty obvious that they were conducting an immigration sweep – i.e. just stopping anyone who ‘looked foreign’ to check their immigration status.
This gave me just a tiny taste of what life can be like here for those whose immigration status is problematic. And, as the campaigners told us, this is an increasing number of people who have come to Japan because of the wealth and opportunities and because, whisper it, Japan needs immigrants. Like so many advanced industrial nations, Japan is a hyper-ageing society, with an increasingly unbalanced population pyramid. There are not enough working age Japanese people to support the increasing number of retirees, and government schemes to encourage people to have more children simply haven’t worked. The problem is that successive Japanese governments have refused to recognise the implications. The rules now make provision for ‘skilled’ immigrants, but not for those who are ‘unskilled’ and it is actually those in this latter category that Japan needs. In practice this is demonstrated by the increasing numbers of foreign delivery and construction workers in Tokyo as well as those working in the shadier areas of the ‘night economy’ – doormen, bar staff, masseurs, prostitutes etc.. The same politicians who deny the need for immigrants are probably having their personal ‘needs’ serviced by Filipino or Vietnamese women and this hypocrisy colours all the mainstream political debate about the place of foreigners in Japan, especially in Tokyo where Mayor Ishihara has never disguised his nationalist views in this area.
So, whilst the politicians refuse to deal with reality, the police are enforcing the law as it is. We have spent some time, whilst we are here (and I have gathered data on previous visits) in the night city of Kabukicho in Shinjuku. This time I was taken out to bars in the old post-war neighbourhood of Golden Gai by Professor Tonoma, who formerly led both Shinjuku-ku and Tokyo city planning bodies, and we also talked to Shinjuku community safety officers, and to the Kabukicho Town Manager, who runs the day-to-day operations of the body trying to improve Kabukicho’s image, Kabukicho Renaissance.
Kabukicho of course is famous as the first place that the Tokyo police installed CCTV, ostensibly to deal with Chinese gangs, but according to what we learned from these visits and from talking to the campaigners, as crime has declined (as it has nationally – it’s probably nothing to do with the cameras), the cameras and intensive policing (raids etc.) have been used largely to curb illegal migrant workers. And the authorities seem to make no distinction between the gangsters and the mainly South-east Asian women who work in the bars and massage parlours. They are all visa-overstayers. There is no attempt to treat the women as people in need of help and support at all. Of course this all inflates the crime figures and makes it easy to paint what the police always term ‘foreign crime’ (whatever the exact nature or seriousness of the crime) as a growing threat, as it becomes proportionally a larger part of shrinking crime rates (which were already low by global standards to begin with).
Now there is a new threat to this already massively targeted population. The inclusion of foreigners on the jyuminhyo (residents’ registry), combined with the digitisation and networking of this registry through juki-net, means that the authorities will be able to correlate residency and immigration status much more easily – the residency information for foreigners will be linked to the Houmusho (Ministry of Justice), which has entry records, and now fingerprints and facial photos too, following post-9/11 reforms. Of course, resident skilled foreigners wanted to be in the residents’ registry. They argued that not being on it was itself a form of discrimination and meant further difficulties in terms of things like buying property. However the inclusion of foreigners now opens up new forms of discriminatory practice against those who are already the most disadvantaged in Japanese society, the kinds of foreigners who more high-status ‘official’ foreigners do not generally recognise as kin to them at all.
Japan’s surveillance society, like most, is therefore a profoundly uneven one. Every society has its Others, and surveillance is deployed both to distinguish those Others and to control them. In each of the cities I have been studying the Others are different populations. In London, the Others are (at the moment) the resident Muslim community (or more particularly, ‘radicalised’ young Muslims). Here the surveillance combines repression and ‘caring’ programs to bring the disaffected back into the mainstream. In Rio de Janeiro, the Others are the urban poor, the favelados. They are largely simply excluded – walls protect the rich in their homes, and now walls are being built around the poor communities. In Tokyo, the Others are foreigners, but there are gradations of Otherness, and effectively still aping the western ‘scientific racism’ that it acquired during the Meiji period modernisation at the end of the nineteenth century, Japan’s Others are poor Blacks and Asians (for many on the right here, the Japanese are not ‘Asian’ at all, but something unique). Just as the British state is struggling with the legacy of its particular colonial and post-colonial approach to immigration, and the Brazilian state with a history of years of differentiated citizenship, the Japanese state has still not yet really come to terms with the prospect of the mixing of people at all.
What is rather less well-known to the outside world is that Japan developed such an automated camera system far earlier, from the early 1980s. The so-called N-system thereafter was gradually expanded to cover almost all major expressways and strategic urban locations in Tokyo and Osaka. Kabukicho, the entertainment district in Shinjuku, which I have spent some time studying over the last few years and will write about more tomorrow, is surrounded by N-system cameras and it is, I estimate, impossible to drive into this area without your license plate being recorded. These cameras are in addition to the 50 CCTV cameras that cover just about every street within the district. N-system is supposed to have played a major role on snaring suspects from the apocaylptic cult, Aum Shinrikyo, which carried out the Sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo underground in 1995, and who also assassinated top policemen and judges. Aum, now renamed ‘Aleph’, has been under official state surveillance ever since.
The Japanese police are not very forthcoming about N-system, let alone the details of how long data is kept and what it is used for. However one particular lawyer’s office in Tokyo did a very good investigation of the constitutional, legal and practical aspects of N-system back in the late 90s, and the updated pages are available here, including a nice little animation explaining how the system works.
We will hopefully be talking to them before we leave Tokyo. We still have time for a few more interviews here including the East Japan Railways security research lab, the Japanese consumers’ association, the organisation for the welfare of foreign workers, and the Suginami ward community safety people. And I will also just about have time to shoot down to Kobe to talk to Professor Kiyoshi Abe, a friend and collaborator, who is also one of the leading surveillance researchers here.
The Guardian today has an interesting report on how women are getting to more senior positions in the police in Rio de Janeiro and changing the way policing is done as a result. I reported on my own observation of this back in April, an whilst there are many bright young female officers who want to do things differently, the top echelons of Brazilian policing are still a long way from being feminized and these young guns may not ever get much higher up to where policy is made. There’s also suspicions that such officers are being used largely for their PR value and to defend the police against being just another macho gang.
Of course, there’s more going on than just in the police. A whole generation of men lost to the drugs war has left women in more influential positions within community organisations in the favelas of Rio – we met several during our research. Considering the lack of effective state surveillance and the relative increase in power and local knowledge of these women both in community associations and the police in Brazil, I jokingly referred to them as ‘not so much Big Brother as Big Mothers’…
The connection between what are often called ‘mega-events’ (international summits, major sporting competitions etc.), securitization, and he intensification of surveillance is becoming a very interesting area and one which we wrote about in our recent book on urban resilience. I am writing some further stuff on this with Kiyoshi Abe on how mega-events have been managed in Japan.
It seems that in general, such events are either used as ‘test-beds’ for new technologies and procedures which are then either continued afterwards (as with The Olympic Games and CCTV in Greece in 2004 and The FIFA World Cup and video surveillance in Japan/Korea in 2002), or become ‘islands’ of temporary exemption where normal legal human rights protections are reduced or removed and whole areas of public space are often literally, fenced off (as in Rio de Janeiro for the Pan-American Games of 2007, whose model will apparently be extended to include walling off the poor favelas in time for the 2014 FIFA World Cup). There’s going to be a very interesting conference on The Surveillance Games later this year to tie in with the Vancouver Winter Olympics.
Now The Guardian newspaper is reporting that the London Olympics 2012 may make use of a proposal originally designed to stop the proliferation of unofficial commercial advertising near games venues in order to prevent protest. The legislation even allows police to enter private houses to seize material.
Of course the government say that they have no plans to use it in this way, but it’s interesting to see the way in which the ‘standards’ being imposed by such travelling cicuses of globalization tend to end up looking more like the authoritarian regime in Beijing (host of the highly securitized 2008 Olympics) than the supposedly liberal west, whilst at the same time promoting a very controlled but highly commercialized environment. Even the original purposes of the 2006 law (necessary for London to host the Games) are an interesting reflection of the massive corporate interests involved in the Olympics, for which they apparently need a captive and docile audience.
Whilst finishing up my work in Rio de Janeiro yesterday, I came across this interesting bunch of people, mv-brasil, who appear to be a Brazilian nationalist movement, with much in common with organisations like the British National Party or the various right-wing groups in the USA. Their website contains the usual odd mixture of anti-globalisation, evangelical Christian (they campaign against Halloween) and anti-United Nations / New World Order stuff with the added anti-Americanism. There of course is the usual rather uncomfortable fact of the ‘Brazilian Christian’ nationalist being a representative of a colonial power that invaded the country and took it from the indigenous people, but they roll over this one with some nods to Indian rights when it suits their cause, most notably when it comes to the Amazon.
A t-shirt with anti-internationalisation and privatisation of the Amazon slogan
One of the T-shirts for sale makes reference to this, being against ‘internationalisation and privatisation’ of the Amazon by the USA. It is a conspiracy theory I’ve come across before when I was doing some research on the SIVAM program – which provides some actual evidence for contentions that there is a secret American program to control the rainforest. I had someone tell me here in complete good faith that it was a ‘fact’ that several Amazonian tribes already thought that they were part of the USA and flew the US flag! This is combined with the fact the UN and international environmental organisations are very concerned about the destruction of the rainforest and the perceived lack of effort by successive Brazilian administrations to stop it. Put all this together and you have the ingredients for nationalist paranoia.
So what is SIVAM? And why would I be interested in it anyway? The reason is that SIVAM is a surveillance system. Announced at the Earth Summit in 1992, and finally completed in 2002 and fully operationial from 2004, the Sistema de Vigilância da Amazônia (SIVAM) is a multipurpose, multi-agency network of satellite, aerial and ground surveillance and response that aims to monitor the illegal traffic of drugs and forest animals and plants, control national borders and those of indigenous peoples’ lands, and prevent the further destruction of protected areas of forest. A good technical account in English can be found in Aviation Today from 2002, and there is an interesting article on its construction here.
Donald Rumsefld visits the SIVAM control centre, 23 March 2005 (Wikimeda Commons)
The problem is that, although an initiative of various Brazilian government agencies including the environment and Indian affairs ministries, the federal police and the army, SIVAM is supported and funded by the USA – most of the initial $1.39Bn US cost came through a grant from the U.S. Export-Import Bank, and the consortium that supplies the equipment includes giant US military supplier, Raytheon – amongst many others from Brazil to Sweden. The visit of former President George W. Bush’s right-hand man and then Secretary of State for Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, to the SIVAM control centre in 2005, was widely reported in Bazil. It was of course interpreted by many as further evidence of Brazil’s ceding of control of the Amazon to the USA, or even presaging a US invasion of the Amazon, as Senator Norm Coleman discovered on a fact-finding mission later that year.
Latin American countries have every right to be suspicious of US motives: the Monroe Doctrine; George Kennan’s Cold War ‘grand area’ vision; the support for dictators like Augosto Pinochet; the invasions of Panama and Grenada; Plan Columbia and the widespread use of military ‘advisors’… the list goes on. And it is certainly the case that US strategic surveillance plans for ‘Full Spectrum Dominance’ and the like, have have long included ‘leveraging’ any system in which they are involved from the International Space Station to things like SIVAM. So of course they will have a strategic interest, and no doubt SIVAM data will find its way to US military C4ISR centres, but this does not amount to a plan to invade Brazil or take control of the Amazon.
Over the last two weeks, we’ve talked to all kinds of police. We’ve talked to officers, both senior and junior from the Policia Militar (PM), the state-level equivalent of the French ‘gendarmerie’ or Italian ‘carabinieri’, including some who have been rebranded as ‘Policia Communitaria’; we’ve met guys from BOPE (the Rio-specific special operations group within the PM here) – and hopefully we will meet their Commander today; we’ve interviewed the Subchefe of the Policia Civil (PC), the detectives, again based at state-level; and we’ve visited the headquarters of the Guarda Municipal (GM), the relatively recently-formed city police. I haven’t talked to the firefighters, another military-state legacy, who are still an armed force, although a report from the State parliament in January recommended that they be disarmed. Back when I was in Brasilia, I also had a meeting with the Policia Federal (PF), the Brazilian ‘FBI’, another post-dictatorship development, who operate at federal level.
It is a confusing organisational landscape, and not just for me. Throughout the interviews with all the different representatives, very different perspectives emerged on what is important in policing, which force is more important and for what purpose, to what extent the current system works, and what would be the best way forward. Corruption was also something that came up time and time again, with everyone arguing that their force was improving and dealing with this, but hinting that there was still a problem with other kinds of police. There was lots of talk of ‘new generations’ of officers free from the taint of the past. But at the same time it was quite clear on the ground that people from all social classes still do not trust any of the police in general, even when they have established quite positive personal working relationships with officers in their own community.
Cesar Couto Lima, Diretor de Operacoes of the Guarda Municipal
The GM are less than twenty years old and they ‘know their place’ in the hierarchy of police: at the bottom. They are not true ‘professional police’ in the sense that they have only three months basic training, followed by some specialist extra work. They are really somewhere between police and a private security force that just happens to be employed by the city – their commanders at the top level are however, ex-PM. They do, however, have a growing field of responsibility, acting both as a kind of protective and preventative force on the ground in the city centre and as a street-level agency of the ‘eyes on the street’ form of surveillance.
Operator in the Guarda Municpal emergency control room
They also act as the emergency services co-ordination, and this role will increase and be better integrated and funded in future. They are largely disarmed, though not because as many believe, the law prevents them from being armed. This is a strategic decision based on keeping a clear line between them and the PM. This is also the reason why they have a different uniform (in Rio a kind of unflattering beige) from the PM (blue). In our interview with the Director of Operations, Cesar Couto Lima, we were told that in the past, the uniforms had been the same colour but that this had been changed under the last mayor, Cesar Maia, to prevent GM officers from being shot by criminals in the mistaken belief that they were PM. They now have a very low rate of injury and death. The Dir Ops also wants to increase the numbers and in the very long term for the GM to be the be the main police force of a disarmed and less violent city.
It is a fine aspiration, however the new Mayor Eduardo Paes, has apparently suggested that the uniform is changed back to blue and that there should be more arming of the GM. The Dir Ops is utterly opposed to both, and I think he sees it as a deliberate ploy to give the impression of more PM around – the State Secretary for Security has already announced a plan to increase the numbers of PM in Rio by thousands, as we found out when we visited his office. The officers we met at the GM were generally pleasant, relaxed people, however the GM is not immune from corruption. I have heard allegations of extortion from street traders, the poor and criminals, in much the same way as gets reported of the two main forces, and indeed of death threats to officers who refuse to get involved with such practices. Any generalised or regular arming of the GM would only increase the temptation to act on the new power in an irregular way, and also, with so many weapons in the hands of relatively poorly paid and untrained officers lead to greater numbers of killings and a further channel for criminals to obtain weapons.
Ricardo Martins, the Subchefe of the Policia Civil would also like to see a demilitarisation of the police in the long-term. He argued that basically, the PM should be gradually abolished and absorbed into a purely civil police. He was also strongly in favour of more ‘intelligence-led’ and surveillance-based solutions, rather than force of arms or numbers. According to him, the expansion of the video surveillance system in the city was essential and absolutely necessary if the city was to be ready for the 2012 soccer World Cup (to be held across Brazil) and more particularly for the 2016 Olympics, for which the city is a frontrunner. All the senior officers an officials with whom we talked agreed that currently it was nowhere near ready. The GM also agreed with the expansion of CCTV, although they seemed to think that they would have a greater role in operating the systems in future, talking of plans for neighbourhood control rooms integrated with the emergency services control system. Neither the PC, nor more importantly, the Superintendente de Commando e Controle of the State, Claudio de Almeida Neto, gave any indication that this was the direction in which things were proceeding. Indeed the Superintendente was quite clear that there was a greater centralisation, co-ordination and professionalisation of video surveillance operations taking place through his office and his control room, which is in the old ‘Centro do Brasil’ railway station. The office of the Secretary of State for Security seemed not to be that interested in surveillance at all, and commented that it was very expensive, which suggests that the funds for the expansion of the video surveillance system that all expect, whoever they think will be running it, may not be quite as lavish as they believe or would want. I will write more about this later. The PC, however has the reputation of being the most corrupt of all the forces. Subchefe Martins pointed to the internal investigations branch as evidence of the effectiveness of their fight against corruption. Other interviewees were not as easily impressed!
Capitao Pricilla, Head of Santa Marta Community Police initiative
So where should policing in Rio go? One way forward was obvious when we interviewed Capitao Pricilla, the current ‘star’ of the PM, who heads up the Community Policing initiative in Morro Santa Marta. Capitao Pricilla is a PR-dream: attractive, articulate, intelligent, convincing in her arguments, and clearly dedicated to her work with the community. She is everything you would hope a new generation of younger PM officers would be, and she clearly stated that she is part of a new generation. And she is popular too. As we talked with her, officers would constantly come over just to say ‘hello’ and older women in particular, would treat her like a TV celebrity. Now, of course I am wary of the way in which such charisma would make her an obvious choice to head such an operation, which is much promoted as ‘the way forward’ in the media. However there have been many ‘ways forward’ before which have come to nothing and Rio is constantly making and destroying innovative initiatives before they even have a chance to have a real effect. The Santa Marta initiative probably cannot be replicated in many favelas, like Prazeres, where there is a more intimate relationship with the ‘parallel power’ of the traffickers. But Capitao Pricilla seems like the real deal. Let’s hope that she and officers like her get the support they need and are not undermined by the violence and corrupt practices of so many of their colleagues. It’s a utopian hope perhaps, and Rio is still going to need the other far more aggressive hand of the other attempt to get around corrupt practice in the PM, the BOPE – about whom I will write more after our visit today – as much as it needs the helping hand of Community Policing initiatives for a while. It is that large and less articulate mass of PM and PC officers who have no interest in doing anything different, and the equally corrupt politicians who prevent change for their own selfish reasons, that are the main barrier to any organisational change.
One question that has been preoccupying my thoughts recently has been the question of why the simple things are not being done in Rio to address the problems of the favelas: sanitation, education, healthcare etc… many of the people we have talked to look back to the regime of Leonel Brizola, the Governor of the State of Rio de Janeiro from 1983 to 1987 and then again from 1991 to 1994. Brizola was a left-progressive populist, a social democrat and a former opponent of the dictatorship who had had to live in exile for much of the 1970s. Sadly he died in 2004, but we had the opportunity this week to talk to his former Secretary of State for Public Security, and also briefly Governor himself from 1994-5, Nilo Batista.
We met Professor Batista in the Instituto Carioca de Crimonologia (ICC), an independent research organisation, which he runs (and funds from his legal work), along with his wife, sociologist, Vera Malaguti Batista. The Institute is housed in a sleek modern building up in the hills of Santa Teresa, from whose picture windows the city below is all but invisible and the bay appears almost as it was when Europeans first arrived. However, the concerns of the Institute are very much with the reality of the city today.
We had a long and wide-ranging conversation, which would be impossible to recount in detail here, but the basis of it was an understanding of Brazilian society, and in particular that of Rio, based on the ongoing legacies of the past, in particular slavery and authoritarianism. Vera Malaguti’s book, O Medo na Cidade do Rio de Janeiro: dois tempos de uma historia (Fear in the City of Rio de Janeiro: one story in two periods) examines previous periods of revolt by Africans in Brazil and argues that the often unspoken elite fear of the africanisation of Brazil. They argue that repressive public security strategies today are founded in this same fundamental fear, driven by the media that serves the powerful middle classes who aspire to elite values and lifestyles.
In opposition they place Brizola and that brief (and they argue, unrepeated) period at the end of the dictatorship when social justice and in particular, education, were priorities and favelas were provided with services in the same way as any other neighborhood. The security strategy of Brizola and Batista was effectively one of anti-stigmatisation. They argue that since then, media-driven fear and repression has been far more the norm and this had undermined the progress made under Brizola.The current public security-based strategy of the Governor Cabral and the ‘choque de ordem’ of Giuliani-wannabe Mayor Eduardo Paes, is one example. By concentrating on ‘pacifying’ one or two places as examples (Santa Marta and Cidade de Deus at present) without being able to afford the same strategy elsewhere, it constitutes simply a public relations exercise, and elsewhere repression without development continues as normal.
The Batistas are passionate and well-motivated, but there are many who argue that this picture of a progressive Brizola regime subsequently undermined by repressive policies is at the very least, a limited view. It was, after all, under Brizola that the traffickers grew in power and acquired weapons; the mid-eighties was the key period here as the cocaine trade grew from almost nothing to being the driving force of gang activity in Rio. This isn’t just a view held by political opponents: whilst he certainly does not (and could not with any justification) claim that the rise of the cocaine trade was anything to do with Brizola, Enrique Desmond Arias in Drugs and Democracy in Rio de Janeiro, argues that the personalist populism of Brizola undermined the leadership of the Community Associations in the favelas and left them open to co-option by drug gangs. When we visited the office of the current Secretary of State for Security, Jose Mariano Beltrami, and talked with his representative, it was quite strongly argued that Brizola neglected the issue of the growing arming and violence of drug traffickers, and also did nothing to solve the massive problem of police corruption (on which I will write more later). The current longer-term strategy is now to recruit a lot more Military Police, in the hope that numbers will do what force has not, and enable the gangs to be beaten.
We also visited the office of a leading critic of human rights abuses, Alessandro Mollon, a Deputy in the State parliament. He said that Beltrami is actually shifting, without ever having admitted to it, from a very macho and repressive approach when he first arrived from the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul, to a more considered (but hardly progressive) strategy now, of which the emphasis on police officers on the streets, rather than invasions, is one aspect.
Former Mayor of Rio, Cesar Maia
The claim that Brizola was the last real progressive figure to lead Rio also neglects some others, particularly those who have held the office of the Mayor. Under Cesar Maia (1993-7; 2001-2008), the ‘Favela Bairro’ program had much in common with what Brizola did in social terms. Indeed when we asked the leader of the Morro dos Prazeres Community Association what would be the one thing she wanted above all else, it was ‘more Favela Bairro’. In Dona Marta they also had some time for the former governor, Anthony Garotinho (1999-2002) a frankly quite foolish evangelical populist, currently under investigation for corruption, as is his wife, Rosinha, who was Governor from 2003-7. However, we heard from others that the things that they attribute to Garotinho were actually planned or initiated under previous administrations and just did not see the light until his.
What is certainly the case is that Brizola had a better attitude to the favelados as people, than other administrations, regardless of his mistakes. The current regime certainly seems to be more driven far more by middle-class fears than by social progress, but it is also the constant undermining of the progress of previous administrations like Brizola’s and then later Maia’s terms as Mayor by new waves of media-courting repression that is so depressing in Rio. It happens in every democratic country, but here in Brazil there is the most blatant inequality of any wealthy country still crying out to be addressed. If it was, then most of the issues of ‘crime’ and ‘insecurity’ would start to disappear. It would, as Deputado Mollon also pointed out, be a lot cheaper than the massive amounts of money now going into the hands or private security companies – who, as Professor Batista noted are often run by the families of senior police officers, who therefore have no actual interest in reducing crime and every reason to want to see fear continue to grow.
(With thanks to Nilo Batista, Vera Malaguti Batista, Alessandro Mollon and the staff of the office of Jose Mariano Beltrami for their time and patience. In particular, I hope to return to the Instituto Carioca de Criminologia sometime in the future to talk about the findings of this project, and to submit something to their excellent journal, Discursos Sediciosos: crime, direito e sociedade)
So what is SIVAM? And why would I be interested in it anyway? The reason is that SIVAM is a surveillance system. Announced at the Earth Summit in 1992, and finally completed in 2002 and fully operationial from 2004, the 
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