This chapter focuses on the governance practices of the Comando Vermelho gang that has controlled Complexo da Maré’s most populous favela, Parque União, for more than three decades. Like their CVNH allies, CVPU has been part of the CV faction for this entire period. And yet, their governance styles have diverged considerably. CVPU evinces a less chaotic evolution as they have remained, aside from several years at the turn of the millennium, a social bandit regime. Overall, the absence of an active rival threat has produced a gang that employs far lower levels of coercion than their counterparts while active enforcement has incentivized CVPU to provide significant benefits to residents. This chapter traces the evolution of these dynamics through a combination of oral histories with residents and gang members, analysis of newspaper archives and anonymous denunciations, as well as participant observation during the author’s time living in Maré.

This chapter begins by motivating the puzzles the book seeks to answer. Why do Rio de Janeiro’s drug-trafficking gangs govern neighborhoods? Why do some of these gangs rely on violence and coercion while others resolve disputes, offer welfare, and organize cultural activities for residents? This book argues that gangs govern in these ways because they need the obedience and support of local residents to survive amid shifting relations with rival gangs and the police. This chapter outlines a theory of criminalized governance which revolves around the relations that emerge between gang members and residents within distinct security environments. This theoretical framework builds on three traditions that view criminalized governance akin to processes of state formation, rebel governance, or state perversion. Finally, this chapter outlines its mixed method approach, and describes the methodological and ethical considerations involved in eighteen months of participant observation in three rival gang territories, 206 semi-structured interviews with residents and gang members, and the collection of more than 400 archival documents and a dataset of more than 20,000 anonymous denunciations.

This concluding chapter first brings the reader up to date in Complexo da Maré and Rio de Janeiro. Since concluding fieldwork in 2015, much has changed in Brazil. Dilma Rousseff was impeached in 2016 and Jair Bolsonaro became president in 2018. More importantly for Rio de Janeiro, Wilson Witzel, an extreme right wing candidate, was elected governor in 2018 and took control of the state’s public security apparatus. The dynamics of policing and violence have changed accordingly. Rio’s public security apparatus confronted and violently engaged Rio’s gangs with an intensity never before seen. Police shot into densely populated favelas from helicopters, showing little restraint even when innocent bystanders were present. In 2019 alone, Rio police killed an estimated 1,600 citizens. This chapter reflects on these developments and contemplates possibilities for the future. Finally, it addresses the generalizability of the book’s findings for other cities in Brazil and beyond while suggesting several avenues for future research.

This chapter develops the concept of criminalized governance, defining it as the structures and practices through which criminalized groups control territory and manage relations with local populations. It distinguishes between two primary dimensions: coercion and the provision of benefits. The chapter then provides detailed descriptions of the various activities and behaviors included within each of these dimensions. A typology of criminalized governance regimes is then presented, which contains five ideal types: disorder, benevolent dictator, tyrant, social bandit, and laissez-faire. Finally, existing explanations from the literature on criminalized governance in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas are addressed.

The third of Maré’s gangs, Terceiro Comando Puro (TCP), controls an enormous territory, encompassing ten contiguous neighborhoods with an estimated population of 68,000 residents, more than twice that of Maré’s Comando Vermelho-connected gangs. Moreover, TCP’s turf has changed significantly over time as the gang has lost and won territory through violent battles with several rivals, which have had horrifying consequences for both gang members and residents. This chapter also shows how the nature of enforcement against gangs can shift radically as TCP developed highly collaborative relations with the police especially after 2009. The chapter traces these developments in TCP’s historic territories as well as the housing projects that they would control from the mid-1990s until 2002 and again after 2009. This chapter interweaves multiple types of data, including eighteen months participant observation, dozens of interviews with current and former gang members and residents, as well as journalistic accounts and denunciations to an anonymous hotline, to trace how TCP’s shifting security environment has shaped their governance practices over time.

In April 2014, two months before the start of the World Cup, 2,500 Brazilian Army and Marine soldiers occupied Complexo da Maré. They would stay there for the next fifteen months. The occupation of Maré was the culmination of Rio’s once-heralded Police Pacification Units, a public security program intended to recapture the state’s monopoly of violence from drug-trafficking gangs in hundreds of favelas throughout the city. This chapter begins by tracing the confluence of factors which led to the Brazilian military’s intervention. A mix of participant observations, interviews, and newspaper accounts then document the military’s arrival and their various operations and activities to combat gangs and gain the support of the local population. The chapter proceeds to analyze how and why each of Maré’s gangs responded differently to the challenges of occupation, arguing that the military lacked the capacity to fully expel or dismantle them though their presence shifted the dynamics of rival competition and threat, which produced the divergent gang responses observed.

This chapter goes beyond Surama Village and focuses on how Anglican missionaries from the Church Missionary Society (CMS) established missions in British Guiana during the mid nineteenth century that impacted the Makushi and other Indigenous groups. Based on archival sources, it closely describes how Thomas Youd formed three successive missions in the Makushi territory during the 1830s and 1840s. The chapter considers the relational modes, acquisitions of desiderata, and patterns of interaction evident among Makushi groups in this context. It considers the strategies and intentions involved in their seeking relations with Youd and other Anglican missionaries against the backdrop of ongoing threats of slaving expeditions directed against them from Brazil. The chapter also examines a later visit to the Makushi by an Anglican missionary during the 1850s and introduces early evidence of the aftermath of such missionisation. The chapter builds up to a discussion of the shamanic dimensions of these historical interactions.