The Architecture of State Violence

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Police siege and mass arrest of protesters in Cinelândia on October 15, 2013. (Photo: Daniela Fichino)

In recent weeks, the world has once again been reminded that the boundary between the State and violence is more fragile than we would like to admit. In Sudan, the city of El Fasher was taken by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), triggering a trail of brutality: summary executions, mass graves, disappearances, and thousands of civilians forced to flee without even knowing whether there was anywhere left to flee to. The UN and humanitarian organizations reported that entire neighborhoods were turned into human-hunting zones, where death ceased to be an exception and became daily administration.

A few days later, in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo, the territory of Lubero experienced its own sequence of horrors: coordinated attacks by armed groups left at least 89 civilians dead between November 13 and 19, 2025. Women, children, and the elderly were killed in rural communities already living under chronic abandonment. For these territories, where the State is more ghost than protection, life continues to be worth less than the local geopolitics.

These episodes are not mere violent events; they are structural warnings. When institutions fail, whether due to corruption, armed dispute, state absence, or political collapse, the ones who pay are always the same type of body: the stateless body, the peripheral, racialized, invisibilized body. It is a pattern. And, like every pattern, it reappears wherever there are vulnerable territories and governments that treat them as disposable areas.

It is at this point that the discussion crosses the ocean and arrives at Brazil’s doorstep.

On October 28, 2025, Rio de Janeiro experienced the most lethal police operation in its recent history, when a joint action by state forces in the Alemão and Penha complexes, officially announced as part of Operation Containment, resulted in more than 120 deaths, according to independent counts published by international outlets such as Al Jazeera, ABC News, and The Guardian. There were days of continuous gunfire, residents reporting bodies on the streets, interruption of basic services, and allegations that many deaths occurred without proper forensic examination, compromising the ability to identify who died, how they died, and under what circumstances. Several human rights organizations raised the possibility of extrajudicial executions and crime-scene tampering, especially in areas where press access was restricted.

In the official report released later, the state government described all the dead as “suspects,” while residents reported people shot inside their homes or trying to flee through the woods. Police officers also died, reinforcing the chaotic and uncontrolled nature of the clash. The final number of victims currently ranges from 121 to 130, depending on the source; the State, however, has not provided a nominal list nor clarified how many civilians were among the victims.

This episode reignited the same debate as always, with the same speed, the same childish polarization, and the same collective blindness to the questions that matter. The country tries to frame the tragedy as a binary dispute: “Did the police do wrong, or is crime forcing the confrontation?” But such framing is shallow. The real question is another: “How does the State produce, reproduce, and authorize violence in the territories it has itself abandoned?”

To understand how we reached this point, it is necessary to shift the focus away from the immediate episode and ask where the logic that authorizes the State to act this way comes from. State violence does not arise as a spontaneous response to present-day crime; it is rooted in historical decisions, forms of urban organization, and social hierarchies that the country has naturalized for more than a century. The question is not only why the State enters the favela with heavy weapons, but why it only ever fully appears in these territories when it is armed. And that answer is not in police reports: it lies in the very formation of favelas as spaces produced by exclusion, neglect, and the persistent idea that certain Brazilians are not full members of the city.

The Historical Construction of Favelas and Their Transformation into an “Enemy Territory”

Brazilian favelas did not arise by chance. They emerged in the late 19th century, when formerly enslaved people, soldiers returning from Canudos, poor workers, and migrants who did not fit into the elite’s Europeanized vision of the city were pushed into hills and areas disregarded by the real estate market. During this period, as the city expanded boulevards, hygienist avenues, and neoclassical buildings, the poor were treated as urban excess. The State never planned to integrate these territories; it planned to remove, sanitize, or simply ignore them. In the early 20th century, the press referred to favelas as “dens of vice,” “fortresses of the filthy,” “lairs of degenerates.” As Lícia Valladares observes, “the favela was, above all, a social representation, not a territory to be understood but a danger to be fought.”

Given this scenario, it becomes necessary to present a brief historical overview of the construction of favelas and of the different visions that shaped them in each period, since such perceptions molded both how the State acted and how society came to see these territories.

From the 1930s onward, especially with intensified urban modernization policies and during the Estado Novo, the favela came to be treated as an “urban problem” to be eliminated. For sociologist Florestan Fernandes, the Brazilian elite has always exercised a form of “authoritarian and tutelary” power, producing “incomplete citizens and rights granted only halfway.” In the 1960s, under the military regime, urbanization became a program of removals, as recorded in the studies of Ermínia Maricato, who argued that “removing the favela never solved the problem: it merely displaced it to places where it would not disturb elite sensibilities.”

In the 1980s and 1990s, the expansion of armed drug trafficking offered new fuel to the stigma. The favela ceased to be merely poor or disordered: it became dangerous, contaminated, armed. Political discourse adopted expressions like “recover territory,” “retake control,” “pacify contaminated areas.” This is war language, not urban policy language, and every war presupposes enemies. It is in this period that the favela consolidates itself as an internal enemy territory. The symbolic construction is so strong that, in 2007, the then-governor of Rio declared, “We will enter these communities as occupying forces.” The phrase, widely criticized, was not a rhetorical slip: it was the synthesis of a historical vision.

The State Production of Vulnerability and the Logic of Exception

When the only arm of the State that reaches the community is the armed one, every encounter becomes a potential confrontation. Not because the community is inherently violent, but because the State only shows up when violence has already reached its saturation point. This late and selective presence reveals a historical pattern: the State does not operate as a continuous guarantor of rights but as a repressive response to crises it helped produce, maintain, or allow. Before any operation, what prevails is structural absence: precarious schools, insufficient health units, nonexistent sanitation, deficient transportation, massive unemployment and informality, and the complete lack of preventive policies capable of offering real alternatives to young people growing up in these territories. This negligence turns urban organization itself into fertile ground for parallel powers, which grow precisely in the vacuum left by the State. In this void, organized crime begins to exercise functions the State does not fulfill — regulating relations, imposing norms, promoting its own order, establishing authority where the formal State only appears intermittently.

However, when the State finally arrives with force, it arrives through repression. Instead of daily, civic, social presence, it manifests through armed helicopters, armored vehicles, dozens of police teams, prolonged gunfights, and bodies on the ground. This inversion creates a geography of control based not on guaranteeing rights but on the punitive administration of poverty, as Loïc Wacquant describes when examining how unequal societies govern their peripheral territories. The State, instead of acting as a provider, takes on the role of administrator of order through force, treating the favela as a permanent risk zone. Violence becomes not just a response to crime but a way of governing territories considered unruly or undesirable by dominant urban logic.

This logic produces a double perverse effect. In the daily life of the peripheries, it reinforces the experience that the State only sees its residents as potential threats, never as citizens. Outside them, part of society interprets violence as a synonym of efficiency: deaths become useful statistics, lethal operations are presented as “victories,” and public indignation becomes selective. Here, Achille Mbembe’s reflection on necropolitics becomes crucial: modern power defines who must live and who may die, administering the value of lives unequally. In the Brazilian context, this means that certain lives, predominantly Black, poor, and peripheral, are perceived as less legitimate, less protected, and less worthy of mourning. The favela becomes, therefore, a permanent laboratory of this sovereign decision over death, where public security policy dangerously approaches a legitimized policy of extermination.

The cycle feeds itself: structural abandonment generates vulnerability; vulnerability fuels crime; crime justifies repression; and repression reinforces the stigma that legitimizes abandonment. In the end, security policy ceases to protect and becomes a mechanism for managing killable life.

The Structural Impasse of Fighting Criminal Factions

And here we reach the knot no one wants to untie. If the police do not confront, factions do not dissolve out of “goodwill”; organized crime does not surrender territory spontaneously; no one abandons a multimillion-dollar business simply because a school was renovated or a health clinic opened. Social policies play a vital role in reducing the entry of new young people into trafficking, but alone they are not strong enough to dismantle complex criminal networks sustained by financial flows, transnational alliances, and consolidated armed power. On the other hand, massive confrontations produce exactly what they are meant to avoid: civilian deaths, police deaths, strengthened resentment between communities and security forces, the local narrative that “the police do not protect us,” and a retreat of the State itself, which reappears only to repress and then disappears again, leaving the population under the control of armed groups. Caught in this contradiction, the State ends up doing the worst of both worlds: it fights poorly and invests little, producing improvised interventions that barely affect the structure of crime but deeply affect the lives of residents.

In this context, whenever violence explodes, someone suggests “ending the favelas,” as if it were a simple, intuitive solution. In the imagination of part of society, the favela has become synonymous with problem, and its physical elimination seems, at times, like an obvious answer, albeit historically misguided. In the 1960s, for example, attempts were made to demolish and remove entire communities, but the result was the creation of new favelas, farther away, more precarious, and even more invisible to public power. When you do not destroy the problem but merely displace the territory, you produce more inequality, more urban fragmentation, and more social suffering.

Another recurring interpretation of this proposal is the permanent militarization of these spaces, as if “retaking control” meant turning communities into occupied zones. The effect, however, is the opposite of what is desired: it establishes an internal state of war, normalizes human rights violations, reinforces lethality as an instrument of governance, and destroys any possibility of trust between residents and the State. The promise of security turns into a routine of fear, tension, and violence.

There is, however, a third path, the only one with historical and urbanistic grounding: fully integrating and urbanizing these territories. “Ending the favela,” in this sense, does not mean removing it from the map but transforming its material conditions: adequate infrastructure, dignified housing, efficient mobility, cultural facilities, income opportunities, structured schools, quality health services, and active participation in decision-making about the territory. Ending the favela only makes sense if it means ending the inequality that produces the favela as the only possible form of housing.

However, transforming these territories materially is not enough to confront the consolidated power of criminal organizations that already operate there. To understand how to dismantle structures that do not dissolve through urbanization alone, it is useful to observe how other countries have dealt with large-scale mafia groups.

The Brazilian impasse feels insoluble only because, domestically, the country insists on reducing the issue to the duality between armed confrontation and late social investment. But international experience shows that no large criminal organization, be it mafia, cartel, yakuza, or militia, has been dismantled exclusively through repressive operations or isolated social policies. Countries that confronted powerful criminal structures understood that such organizations do not disappear with increased visible policing, but with the destruction of their financial and political ecosystems. Italy, for instance, only decisively weakened the Cosa Nostra when it shifted its emphasis from armed repression to dismantling the financial and institutional networks that sustained the mafia. Investigations led by magistrates such as Falcone and Borsellino showed that, to hit a criminal organization, it is not enough to kill low-level soldiers: it is necessary to attack the capital, shell companies, public contracts, money laundering schemes, logistical flows, and, above all, connections with state agents. The Sicilian mafia did not lose power because the police became more lethal, but because the State became smarter. The “Maxiprocesso” of 1986–1992 was not a massive police operation, but a massive operation in financial and legal intelligence, with international cooperation, witness protection, specific legislation, and a strengthened judiciary.

The same pattern appears elsewhere. In Colombia in the 1990s, the fall of the Medellín and Cali cartels did not result from increased military incursions into the comunas but from the advancement of financial tracking strategies, extradition agreements, deep infiltrations, international cooperation, and economic fragmentation of criminal networks. Armed repression existed, but it was not what brought down the cartels; it was the loss of their economic operating capacity. When money stopped flowing easily, the organizations unraveled. Similarly, in Japan, the weakening of the Yakuza in recent decades did not occur through violent confrontations but through a set of laws that restricted their participation in the financial market, prohibited companies from maintaining relations with mafia groups, and criminalized contracts, businesses, and partnerships that were previously tolerated. The Japanese logic was clear: make the crime economically unviable, not physically impossible. The more the flow of resources and social relationships that sustain the organization is suffocated, the less room it has to operate.

These experiences reveal a consistent pattern: criminal organizations are only destroyed when the State stops treating them as exclusively police phenomena and begins to understand them as complex economic and political structures. Violence, in these cases, was a secondary component.

This is precisely the dimension Brazil lacks. Here, the discussion remains trapped between spectacular operations and sporadic social policies, as if factions could be defeated with the same logic used to confront a riot. Meanwhile, the State ignores that militias, factions, and local cartels depend less on territorial control, which is what is fought with gunfire, and more on logistical networks, institutional corruption, control of legal and illegal markets, and capital circulation. Without attacking these deeper layers, any armed victory becomes short-lived, and each police operation becomes a prelude to the next.

Conclusion

In light of everything presented, it becomes evident that Brazil does not merely suffer from episodes of violence but from a political architecture that produces, legitimizes, and reproduces it. El Fasher, Lubero, Rio de Janeiro: distinct contexts, similar symptoms. When the State fails early and intervenes late, what emerges is not security but governance through exception. Public policy ceases to operate in the realm of rights and retreats into the realm of control, transforming historically excluded communities into laboratories for the experimentation of force.

Brazil’s trajectory reveals that violence is not born in confrontation but in the abandonment that precedes it. Favelas, created by neglect, stigmatized by discourse, and governed by fear, have become spaces where the State is only reliably present when it arrives armed. And this is not an inevitable consequence: it is the result of choices. Choices that prioritize instantaneous repression over structural transformation; choices that accept inequality as destiny; choices that treat certain Brazilians as negotiable lives within a necropolitical logic.

International comparisons show that large criminal organizations are not defeated through lethality or spectacular operations, but through institutional intelligence, economic dismantling, strengthening of the justice system, transparency, and the breakdown of the corruption that feeds illegal networks. Italy, Colombia, and Japan demonstrated this to the world, but none of it can prosper in a country that does not recognize the favela as part of the city, and still believes that “eliminating the territory” is the same as “eliminating the problem.”

References

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Fernandes, Florestan. Poder autoritário e tutelar no Brasil: produção de cidadãos incompletos e direitos pela metade. São Paulo: Editora Brasiliense, 1975.

Fundação AIS. R. D. Congo: Muitos dos 70 corpos descobertos numa igreja de Lubero estavam amarrados e decapitados. Disponível em: https://fundacao-ais.pt/r-d-congo-muitos-dos-70-corpos-descobertos-numa-igreja-de-lubero-estavam-amarrados-e-decapitados/.

G1. Operação no Alemão e Penha tem 121 mortos, a mais letal da história recente do Rio.

Disponível em: https://g1.globo.com/rj/rio-de-janeiro/noticia/2025/10/28/operacao-historico-da-cidade-do-rio.ghtml.

Maricato, Ermínia. A política de remoção de favelas no Brasil: deslocamento e desigualdade urbana. São Paulo: Editora Hucitec, 1996.

Mbembe, Achille. Necropolítica. São Paulo: N-1 Edições, 2019.

Valladares, Lícia do Prado. A invenção da favela: do mito de origem à favela.com. Rio de Janeiro: Editora FGV, 2014.

Wacquant, Loïc. Punir os pobres: a nova gestão da miséria urbana. Rio de Janeiro: Revan, 2009.