Introduction
‘To each brother executed, we will gun down two police officers … Life is paid with life and blood is paid with blood’.Footnote 1 These words were part of a salve (memorandum) issued from a São Paulo prison by leaders of the self-identified criminal organisation Primeiro Comando da Capital (First Capital Command, hereafter PCC or Partido) to its members in response to a series of extra-judicial killings by the Military Police in 2011. Since then, PCC members have killed almost 200 police officers, while deaths of favela residents alleged to be PCC members at the hands of the police have simultaneously skyrocketed.Footnote 2
The ongoing ‘war’ between the PCC and the police in São Paulo's favelas is part of a contest over territorial sovereignty that has emerged on the city's periphery in recent years. Killing police officers, bombing police stations, closing businesses, and shutting down the city's public transportation system have all amounted to a relatively successful military strategy employed by the PCC to fend off the state. As the de facto authority in many of São Paulo's favelas, the PCC controls drug trafficking, protects favela residents from widespread police brutality, and imposes a moral/spatial discipline that has shifted the dynamics of violence in the city.
Known as one of the most violent cities of the Global South in the 1990s, over the past two decades, São Paulo has witnessed a decline in homicide rates from 66 to 11 per 100,000 inhabitants.Footnote 3 There is no consensus regarding an explanation for this drastic reduction in violence, but the PCC's control of the city's favelas and corresponding retreat of the police has paradoxically (and controversially) made the periphery a safer place, especially for young black men subjected to long-standing police brutality. Although there are multi-casual explanationsFootnote 4 for the reduction in the homicide rate, I am interested in the role played by marginalised and predominantly black youth as ‘soldiers’ of the PCC, in confronting state-produced anti-black terror. Their practices indicate the need for a different term of engagement with the racial sate. In the context of this article, this need becomes even more salient if we consider that killings by the police constrain the further reduction of homicides in São Paulo,Footnote 5 as 20 per cent of murders are committed by the police and 66 per cent of the victims are young black men.Footnote 6 What are the racialised and gendered conditions that make the PCC so appealing in São Paulo's poor outskirts? How does racial terror enacted by the police inform the outlawed practices of marginalised and predominantly black youth under the PCC's domain? What are the implications of this particular form of agency for the ways we understand black politics within the context of Brazil's racialised regime of law?
Much of the literature on criminal groups in Brazil has been trapped in a debate about whether their practices can be considered autonomous from or a caricature of the state. Echoing earlier critiques of the state itself as a form of organised criminality,Footnote 7 some scholars contend that criminal organisations are part of the process of state formation.Footnote 8 Because the margins of legality are part of the process of state formation, others argue that criminal groups’ functional connections with the police and politicians can be viewed as a ‘perverse symbiosis’ with the state. Police officers, after all, do their work in a complex (social) terrain in which they have to negotiate with distinct forces such as the larger public, their commanders and criminal groups.Footnote 9 Some see organisations like the PCC as ‘nothing but a smokescreen’ or a tactic to ‘terrorise society’ and control the highly profitable drug trade.Footnote 10 From this vantage point, the PCC would lack a political project and given their ability to recruit ‘soldiers’ and control favelas and prisons, it would be more appropriate to regard the organisation as a shadow or ‘parallel state’.Footnote 11
Although such approaches provide new insights into the blurring of the lines between state and state-like actors, they still tend to rely on the state as the paradigm of order and justice (the ideal-type), from where the critiques of other forms of corrupt power are enabled. While ‘criminal groups’ like the PCC may be part of the constitutive process of state formation in urban Brazil, when seen from the perspective of marginalised and predominantly black youth, this story takes a different, and previously unexamined, form. There are certainly some pragmatic relations between criminals, local forms of political associativism, and the police to govern urban embattled geographies.Footnote 12 It can also be said that the influence criminal groups have in these territories is largely based on their ability to deploy coercive practices and mobilise a set of discourses on the protection of local residents from state violence.Footnote 13 However, to read outlawed groups as simply a grotesque caricature of the state inhibits our intellectual ability to locate and interpret autonomous practices of resistance in various contexts saturated by state violence. In the case of the PCC, scholars have failed to consider what the killing of police officers, storming of state facilities and setting buses on fire mean to marginalised black youth carrying out such practices.
Elsewhere, Cathy Cohen urges scholars to consider a research agenda that situates blackness (as always/already deviant) as a paradigmatic location where we may identify a ‘radical politics’ of black resistance.Footnote 14 I build upon this challenge by looking at what such black politics looks like when we consider that black young men are viewed as enemies of the state and as permanent threats to civil society. That is why, contrary to other scholars who place too much emphasis on the bureaucratic/hierarchical structure of the PCC,Footnote 15 I focus instead on the everyday practices of marginalised and predominantly black urban youth serving as the PCC's rank-and-file members or ‘soldiers’. This theoretical strategy poses some methodological challenges, the most critical ones being how to account for racial oppression when race is not part of the common lexicon of the subjects in our research; and how to avoid reifying particular forms of black resistance (black men's criminality) as the model of black politics.
To be clear, not all members of the PCC are black and not all black men engage in criminal behaviour. In fact, despite having been criminalised by their proximity to the ‘world of crime’, most black youths embrace alternative political strategies, ranging from self-help initiatives, participating in local grassroots activities and developing cultural repertoires in street-art.Footnote 16 However, some do embrace criminality as a strategy of resistance and in doing so they explicitly challenge civil society's moral norms. How do we make sense of their actions?
While black men are the main focus of this article, similar stories could be told of black women in the PCC (they are called O PCC de saias)Footnote 17 who also challenge long-standing state violence against their communities. Although they occupy mostly low-ranking positions as dealers and ‘mules’ who smuggle drugs across the city and into the prisons, these women's participation in crime also helps to redefine their traditional place in the city as maids, street vendors and faveladas.Footnote 18 The focus on black men, however, emerges from my weekly visits to a male detention centre while I conducted fieldwork as a member of Pastoral Carceraria, a Catholic Church prisoner's advocacy group. I also draw insights from my conversations and close interactions with black men on street corners of Zona Sul's favelas while working as a member of Uneafro-Brasil, an organisation for black youth in São Paulo's outskirts. Between 2009 and 2010, I worked alongside colleague activists to denounce abuses against favela prisoners, followed the judicial processes of those who had been arrested, visited the families of prisoners, and organised public events in response to mass incarceration in São Paulo. By privileging the favela-prison pipeline as the ‘site’ of fieldwork, I connect a mosaic of black urban youth whose lives have been impacted by state violence. In doing so, I locate the mundane work of race in the reproduction of São Paulo as an anti-black city. From the fragmented interactions in the prison halls I was driven into other human tragedies in ‘Dreaming City’, a conglomerate of favelas on the south side of São PauloFootnote 19 where I attended monthly meetings at the local security council, participated in the local branch of the black movement, and ‘hung out’ with black young men on street corners.
Finally, the rather difficult endeavour of interpreting outlawed practices by marginalised urban youth as resistance should not be read here as politically sympathetic to the PCC or with the state. Instead, my research is an effort to identify a quite often overlooked form of black agency in an overtly explicit anti-black regime of legality. I position myself alongside those scholars committed to challenging negative constructions of black urbanities as apolitical and pathological. However, my aim here is to explore the moments when black protest takes forms other than the politics of rights because black matters quite often fall on deaf ears in the traditional spheres of political activism within civil society.
PCC: a racial question?
When a Brazilian Congressman asked him to explain how the Partido emerged, Marcola, the supposed leader of the PCC, replied that ‘the prisoners woke up [and] became aware their rights would never be granted’. ‘It was an awakening’ Marcola added. Marcola also elaborated on the discipline of the PCC's members, and their willingness to carry out military operations against the state. He insisted that it was their structural condition and their intimate experience with violence that made them unafraid of dying. ‘We are all sons of poverty, we all are descendants of violence … We are forced to live in misery, violence. So, in any favela you will see bodies every day’, he replied.Footnote 20
While Marcola portrayed the organisation as an army of poor young men excluded from the rights of citizenship, journalists, politicians and public safety experts describe the Partido as a criminal organisation, a parallel state, or a left-wing terrorist organisation.Footnote 21 I argue that this is a fundamentally racial question. Marcola's assertion casting the PCC and the prisoners in terms of the intimate violence with the state, and his assertion that the favela is the ‘site’ inhabited by ‘descendants of violence’ invites reflection on the racialised bodies and racialised geographies where violence is viewed as mundane. Even though the PCC's leaders do not frame their discourses around race, nor do black youth PCC members or the police, it is within very specific racialised/outlawed geographies that the Partido recruits most of its low-ranking members. I do not suggest that the PCC's practices are confined to favelasFootnote 22 and prisons, since its ramifications extend throughout the city and beyond, but it is in the favelas and the prisons, historically constituted as black spaces, that the PCC exercises its hegemony. How we consider those inhabiting these black spaces, as passive victims, political insurgents, or simply criminals, affects the ways we understand the Partido's practices. Lourraine Leu's analysis of Rio's ‘violent spatial history’ and Donna Goldstein's study of state and gang violence in a Rio favela offer important insights on the nexus of spatial/racial/criminal identity. Leu suggests that drug traffickers’ disruption of everyday life are strategies to redraw the city's rigid socio-spatial division.Footnote 23 Through these actions, Leu argues that drug dealers produce an ‘emergent form of spatial agency’.Footnote 24 Likewise, Goldstein argues that within the context of widespread police violence, poverty and racial discrimination in the job market, gang membership becomes an option for marginalised young black men. According to Goldstein, ‘In many cases, gang members’ decisions to join a gang and their anger against the wealthy bacanas were based on a clearheaded analysis of the injustice of the system’.Footnote 25
This is especially pertinent in order to understand the context of black youth's transgressive spatial praxis in São Paulo's racialised geographies of opportunities. Scholars have identified a spatial pattern of racial domination which manifests itself in the city's (social) geography.Footnote 26 Whites are largely concentrated in the southwest side of the city (the sudoeste paulistano), where socio-economic indices such as educational opportunities and income level are much higher and vulnerability to violent death is lower than those registered in the predominantly black, hyper-poverty districts, mainly located in east and south São Paulo.Footnote 27 The unequal distribution of life chances can be seen in the city's annual report on social inequalities: unemployment in the city of São Paulo is 27 per cent higher and income 70 per cent lower for blacks than for non-blacks.Footnote 28 In terms of homicide, at state level, while the rate for white youth is 60.5 per 100,000, for black youth it is 120, and for killings by the police, six out of ten victims are young black men and favela residents.Footnote 29
These statistics help to expose the Brazilian racialised regime of citizenship. While in mainstream discourse Brazil is regarded as a land free of racism, or at least a place where it is hard to identify who is black and who is not, access to education, the job market, land and health care and life expectancy, are all distributed along racial lines.Footnote 30 In fact, the very denial of racism, crafted in Florestan Fernandes's assertion that ‘Brazilians have prejudice to have prejudice’Footnote 31 – demonstrates the centrality of race in organising social life in Brazil.Footnote 32 This racial awareness that permeates social relations can be better understood through the tragic joke Afro-Brazilians often make about their fate: ‘Se você quer saber quem é negro ou quem não é, pergunta a polícia’ (If you want to know who is black and who is not, ask a police officer). Indeed, racialised policing practices leave no room for speculation about the significance of race in Brazil, regardless of the colour of those performing state duties on the streets.Footnote 33 What the maxim suggests is that the ‘uncertainty’ of racial categories in Brazilian society is challenged by the police's ability to locate and reinscribe racial alterity through (and in) death.
Within this context, we need to consider how black youth's encounters with state terror affect the forms and scope of their political practices in racialised urban geographies of Brazil. The relative absence of race from scholarly analysis of crime in such geographies, as well as the difficulty in carrying out such analysis without falling into the urban pathology narrative that equates blackness with crime and poverty, reveals the need to interrogate black youth's encounters with the state because these encounters ultimately define their urban experience on a broader scale. Admittedly, the PCC galvanises marginalised youth in its project to attain money, power and control over drug trafficking in São Paulo. Yet, this critique is a zero-sum game because the same can be said of state-backed NGOs, philanthropic initiatives, and religious groups, which all employ ‘pedagogical’ practices that target black men as a ‘social problem’ to be ‘fixed’.Footnote 34 In a regime of citizenship where marginalised, predominantly black youth find no place, the PCC effectively organises, articulates, and brings coherence to dispersed frustrations with civil society and a collective anger towards the police.
Mass Incarceration and the PCC's Emergence
There are conflicting accounts of the PCC's origins. The most widely accepted version is that the PCC began as a response to the 1992 Carandiru Massacre in which the police invaded the Carandiru prison and killed 111 prisoners. Josmar Josino, however, argues that the organisation was created after a 1993 soccer game between two rival groups of prisoners at the Taubate Custody House. A fight between the teams resulted in a rebellion, and in the aftermath the PCC emerged as a self-styled criminal organisation to advocate for prisoners’ rights and paz entre os ladrões (peace among the thugs) in São Paulo's prison system.Footnote 35
Ironically, as the state of São Paulo attempted to incarcerate more black urban poor in the context of its ‘war on drugs’, the PCC found in prison the ‘raw material’ to establish themselves as an army against the penal state.Footnote 36 Although the state of São Paulo's population represents 20 per cent of the total Brazilian population, it houses 36 per cent of Brazil's half-million prisoners. São Paulo's prison population jumped from nearly 60,000 in 1995 to the current count of 200,000 inmates, with drug trafficking (29 per cent) and robbery/burglary (37 per cent) being the leading causes of arrests.Footnote 37 Increasing incarceration, along with astonishing levels of police violence against favela residents, provided the political opening for the Partido's hegemony in the prisons and in the favelas.Footnote 38 The PCC's appeal is powerful; the Partido provides protection to prisoners by imposing a moral code that combats the scourges of rape, torture and murder within the prisons. The members of the organisation mediate prisoners’ demands and defend their rights in the face of prison authorities. Outside of the prisons, the Partido provides social protection to prisoners’ families, and economic opportunities to marginalised and predominantly black youth employed as drug dealers.
The racialised outcome of the ‘war on drugs’ is another dimension that should make readers sceptical of the established link between PCC membership and racial domination/resistance pause. The drug economy is fuelled by a self-reinforcing cycle of symbolic and structural violence. As Brazilian society associates drugs with the favela and views black men as the quintessential enemies of civil society, thus preventing them access to the job market, the biqueiras (drug selling points) become an attractive economic option. The very structure of the drug market, with predominantly black and poor low-ranking dealers and white middle-class consumers, reveals this system of racial domination.Footnote 39 This structure certainly resonates in the multi-layered aspects of racialised anti-drug policing practices in which white traffickers are quite often seen as consumers and black consumers are regarded as drug traffickers. This intertwined context points to the troubling relationship between the emergence of the PCC, urban mythologies of the black criminal and state carcerality as reflected in prison demographics. Although only 34.6 per cent of the São Paulo state population self-identified as blackFootnote 40 in the 2010 census, blacks comprise as much as 53.4 per cent of the prison population. Black men remain the largest segment of the inmate population (50.86 per cent), and black women are the fastest growing group, comprising 53.17 per cent of female inmates in the state. São Paulo's incarceration rate is 76.8 per 100,000 for whites and 561 for blacks.Footnote 41
My weekly visits to a prison detention centre dominated by the Partido confirmed the expanding relation between the PCC and criminalised young black men. My data are constrained by the organisation's very nature as an omnipresent and invisible entity. Some individuals would not admit their membership (or, being a brother), and others referred to themselves as primos (cousins, i.e. those loyal to the Partido but not members). I managed to establish a relationship with the faxina (those in charge of a prison block), and brothers or primos who were in the provisory detention centre awaiting their trial. They also provided me with the names of individuals in the favelas who I could interview to complement our short/precarious encounters in the crowded prison halls. As I moved between the favela and the prison, it became clearer why the Partido had become an important political player in the city's governance. Deco, a 34-year-old black ex-prisoner for drug trafficking explained that loyalty to the Partido is in response to the PCC's work to ‘humanise the prison’. According to Deco, before the PCC there was ‘a lot of cowardice’, with prisoners being tortured and poisoned by prison guards. The Partido also ended prison rapes, established strict rules to protect inmates’ relatives against prison guards and other inmates during visits, and helped sick inmates purchase medicine. ‘The system treats us like animals and PCC advocates for us and for our families’, Deco explained.Footnote 42
When they are released from prison, inmates who are affiliated with the PCC are expected to ‘help the brothers’ that remain inside the prison walls by making a monthly contribution to the Partido, otherwise they are ‘excluded’ from the organisation. At the time of our conversation, Deco's monthly contribution was around R$ 500 (or US$ 200). Deco explained that the money would pay for legal assistance for inmates in need, and a portion would support the families of poor inmates. The Partido also provides transportation for families to visit their loved ones serving time in prisons far away from their homes.
Vander, a light-skinned prisoner and faixina, admitted that despite the Partido's help to families in the favela, and its advocacy of prisoners’ rights, it rules the prison through violence.Footnote 43 Disciplinary measures range from a warning, to banning a member from the organisation, to forcing a member to commit suicide. However, Vander cited the Partido's statute, emphasising the principles of paz e igualdade entre os lad rões (peace and equality among thugs) to suggest that even when violence is employed against one member, it is not indiscriminate nor irrational; rather it is a cobrança (charge) employed by ‘equals’ to preserve the Partido. As Vander pointed out, the struggle is not against one another but against ‘the system’. The ‘system’ is an encompassing figure that includes the police, the judiciary, the politicians or the prison guards. During my work in the prison, Vander often came to me with a list of inmates in need of legal assistance, or with a legal petition that needed to be filed with the court requesting the revision of an inmate's sentence or a transfer to a prison closer to an inmate's family. Other times he would tell me about inmates who needed medical care, or update me on his own judicial process. Generally, the inmates’ demands went unanswered or inmates would receive dismissive answers from the prison lawyer in charge of following their situation. However, Vander's requests confirm the common portrayal of the PCC as a ‘crime union’ since poor inmates rely on the Partido to defend them against state abuse.Footnote 44 The PCC builds its political support through a wide range of strategies, including the deployment of human rights discourses against the police, the mobilisation of the territorial identity of its ‘soldiers’ as favelados and ‘da quebrada’ (‘the hood’), and advocacy for prisoners’ relatives subjected to humiliations inside the prison gates. As mass incarceration escalates, the PCC expands its influence over an extended network of predominantly poor favelados whose lives are impacted by the penal state, regardless of their ‘criminal’ status.
Politics From Below
Research on black insurgency in Brazil has been dominated by scholars of slavery who have identified several acts of rebellion, such as killing the masters, burning of crops, theft and other subversive actions, as ways to help demolish the institution of slavery.Footnote 45 Clovis Moura makes a convincing argument that criminality became a channel to articulate black frustration with the unfulfilled promises of the new regime. Blacks relied on the white myth of the ‘good slaves and bad citizens’Footnote 46 (the latter represented as the feared urban criminal, the protestor and the angry radical activist) to launch a radical critique against the persistence of racial domination in the post-abolition period.Footnote 47 When it comes to contemporary scholarship on urban violence, however, we still rely on these historical texts to account for how blacks embrace crime as a strategy of urban survival. In order to avoid the insidious association of blackness with criminality,Footnote 48 the field of urban studies in Brazil remains largely silent on the question of black criminal agency. There is an uncanny sociological preoccupation with identifying exotic places of blackness: in the carnival, soccer, the favela tour, capoeira and so on. Yet, most sociologists avoid studying black criminality since most of those engaged in criminal practices do not self-identify as ‘black’. When scholars do engage with race, they tend to regard blacks as passive victims of an unjust social structure. Even critical examinations of the categories ‘bandit’ and ‘marginality’ fail to consider the troubling relation between race and crime.Footnote 49 Despite their incisive interventions, mainstream scholarly works on urban violence in Brazil do not account for black criminality as a form of agency; they simply deny its existence. This silence begs the question, How do discourses of ‘black crime’ reinforce urban mythologies of fear and order in Brazil?Footnote 50 What kind of political subjectivity is constituted through young black men's mundane encounters with the police? Or, evoking W. E. B. Du Bois’ famous question, ‘How does it feel to be a problem?’Footnote 51
Young black men are hyper-conscious of their place in urban narratives of crime. Several times I was asked my opinion about their public image and asked whether or not my research would help to change the way society sees them. On one such occasion, Gustavo, who was serving time for a drug arrest and insisted that the police had planted drugs on him, asked me: ‘You know that outside they don't give a shit about us. They take everybody here as criminals and that is it. So, your book is going to show to society that we are human beings, right?’Footnote 52 In essence, he wanted to know if I subscribed to the stereotypes of black men as perverse and outlawed. Poor and relying on state legal aid, Gustavo awaits trial in the crowded detention centre. With a criminal record, he tried to bargain for his freedom, but he did not have enough money to pay for a bribe so the police arrested him. He eventually gave up trying to prove that the police officers framed him and made up his mind to play guilty to the judge so he might bargain for a minor sentence. While Gustavo's concern about his public image made me even more aware of my responsibility in not reproducing pathologised narratives of black masculinity, his experience with law-enforcement was a reminder of the web of criminalisation in which black men find themselves. During a conversation with Deco, our shared identity as black males prompted him to advise me on how to deal with the police in the face of such ordinary criminalisation:
If the patrol gives you an order to stop, you just stop, ok? Do not run, just answer them looking down. Have you been to jail? Yes, sir, I didn't pay the rent and the landlord came to hit me and I broke his face. You wait patiently. They come to humiliate you. That is ok, their day will come. I am black and I have struggled since slavery.Footnote 53
An interpretative hypothesis is that these racialised encounters shape the way black men respond to their structural conditions in Brazilian society. If they are constantly linked to deviation, crime and violence in the racial imaginary, and since their criminalised status justifies mass incarceration and death, it may be the case that a radical research agenda of black politics should consider criminality as a valid category not only to understand black social death Footnote 54 but also to locate other forms of life that may emerge outside civil society.
The question of subaltern agency has been long explored by scholars like James Scott and Robin D. G. Kelley who view resistance as a cumulative process embodied in less-overt practices such as sabotage, refusing to comply with authority, and even strategic negotiation with systems of power.Footnote 55 Scott challenges normative accounts of resistance that usually rely on politically defined (and clearly motivated) subjects to argue that how one challenges power depends on how one is positioned within the social structure made by power. Likewise, Kelley takes Scott's notion of ‘hidden transcripts’ to write what he calls ‘politics from below’Footnote 56 to uncover daily practices of resistance among the urban black working class (such as spitting at a bus driver, cursing in public, the ‘gangsta rap’ culture and so on). While such an approach contributes to reframing narratives of (black) politics that usually focus on formal activism, and that usually regard dispersed daily actions as false consciousness, the question of black structural positioning vis-à-vis political resistance is still open. Although her emphasis on the ‘intent’ of black deviant practices may limit the scope of what we may consider political action, Cathy Cohen's call for the need to queer black politics opens up a new perspective to consider practices outside the (hetero) normative domain of counter/publics. As she argues, ‘scholars must take up the charge to highlight and detail the agency of those on the outside, those who through their acts of unconformity choose outsider status, at least temporarily’.Footnote 57
It is an urgent call, as the positionality of the black subject poses a challenge to the question of political agency. A sceptical Fanonian perspective forcefully contends that the very term ‘resistance’ is irrelevant, if not illogical, when the structural antagonism between blackness and civil society is taken into consideration.Footnote 58 Resistance, the argument goes, implies the recognition of the humanity of those who are resisting; they must be seen as contractual subjects that act as autonomous individuals in the struggle for (counter) hegemony. The political terrain (civil society) where this struggle takes place cannot incorporate the black agenda because contrary to the working class, black relation to the sphere of the political is a ‘relation of terror as opposed to a relation of hegemony’.Footnote 59 This outside position, the zone of ‘non-being’,Footnote 60 makes any conversation around black agency, if one is possible, irrelevant from within the logic of civil society. Although this approach enables a critique of the politics of rights that falls short when confronted with black bodies, its dead-end critique of black agency poses extraordinary challenges for an appreciation of forms of black political life that do exist despite racial terror.Footnote 61 Far from offering a comprehensive account of black resistance, the experiences of Eliseu, an imprisoned young black man, may shed light on the complex and contradictory ways black political subjectivity comes into play among black men participating in criminal activities in São Paulo.
I met Eliseu during one of my weekly visits to the temporary detention centre where he shared a cell with 40 other inmates while waiting for his transfer to the penitentiary to serve a long sentence for homicide, robbery and drug trafficking. While Eliseu's criminal record enables different readings of his practices (while watching a football match in ‘Dreaming City’, he got involved in a fight and allegedly killed another black man), I want to focus on his life's path because it is illustrative of the racialised context in which black men's (controversial) practices become politically meaningful.
One of eight children of a single mother who survives as a domestic worker, Eliseu was pushed into street life when he was 14 and began stealing from the ‘playboys’ (middle-class young men) in the well-off areas of the city known as the Jardins. He was 18 when he was caught stealing from a supermarket, whose private security guards took him to the back of the store, beat and tortured him, and called the police. He was sent to the juvenile prison, where he spent the next six months. After being released, Eliseu began working at a hardware store. But when his boss discovered he had a criminal record, he was fired and did not receive his monthly salary. Eliseu called the brothers from the PCC to complain about his boss, and they gave him permission to ‘go ahead, screw him up’. PCC members surrounded the boss when he was closing the store and cleaned out the safe. Later, they went to his house and stole all the money kept there. Eliseu wanted to make sure the boss understood that the robberies were in retaliation for being fired. ‘We were going back and forth, passing in front of the store with a car full of girls, drinking beer’, Eliseu recounted. ‘I was avenged’.Footnote 62
Eliseu's experience illustrates not only the conditions of the urban black subject in terms of access to the city; black youth have the highest levels of unemployment, low-paid work, incarceration, and homicide and they also embrace a set of practices to ‘refuse victimisation’. While it is explicit that Eliseu's action was one of vengeance against an unscrupulous boss, less visible is how the political comes into play in such apparently selfish acts. The effectiveness of such responses in terms of structurally changing the conditions of black men and women is also in question. I argue that the answers lie not so much in the intent or result of the practices, rather they highlight what Eliseu's criminal status tells us about the racialised Brazilian polity. If we agree with the disturbing assertion that in the white gaze the black subject is ‘only recognised as human to the extent of his/her criminal culpability’,Footnote 63 Eliseu's criminal status may itself be a political possibility to reclaim black existence in the anti-black city.Footnote 64
Certainly one can argue that highlighting criminality as a condition of possibilities may reinforce the insidious conflation of blackness and pathology. Yet, considering that such a construct is already part of a racial common sense, it may be the case that the feared figure of the urban black criminal gives us a way to think about resistance not in terms of a left-inflected and well-defined political agent, but in terms of the negation of (normative and even counter) politics. To be sure, the negation of the ‘political’ is in itself a political event. As Saidiya Hartman forcefully argues, black ‘dispersed resistances’ are not apolitical. Rather, they point to ‘the closure of the political’ within the constrained context of (white) civil society.Footnote 65 With this reasoning, one question remains: how do we interpret black men's practices of asserting their humanity through crime (or their ‘radical refusal’Footnote 66 to comply with the regime of law) in terms of collective action?
Bloody Consciousness
On 12 May 2006, what began as a prison riot quickly spread throughout the city of São Paulo. Members of the PCC burnt buses, stormed state facilities, attacked police stations and killed dozens of police officers. In the days that followed, state authorities denied the existence of any organisation behind the coordinated attacks, and tried to convince journalists not to mention the Partido in their coverage. In the aftermath of the attack, the Military Police occupied favelas and killed hundreds of civilians.Footnote 67 Days later, after a controversial deal with the state authorities, PCC leaders ordered the end of the attacks and the city returned to ‘peace’.Footnote 68
The media portrayed the attacks as terrorism and called for severe punishment of PCC members.Footnote 69 Predictably, there was little discussion of the political message behind the riots by marginalised black youth ‘terrorising’ the city, until right-wing Governor Claudio Lembo blamed the white elite for the structural injustices that led to the attack: ‘We have a very bad bourgeoisie, a very perverse white minority … It is a country where, when the slaves were freed, it was the master who received compensation, not the former slave’. He went even further and criticised the ‘national cynicism’ that denies violent Brazilian history and the elite's complicity with the current state of social inequalities and insecurity. ‘The purse of the bourgeoisie will have to be opened to alleviate Brazil's social misery’, he added.Footnote 70
Although they did not frame the issue in explicit racial terms, I met several inmates who defended the Partido's actions as the only way to put an end to the ‘cowardice of those with the law behind them’, against the black favelados. Framing their defence of the PCC's riot as a ‘war against the system’, these prisoners voiced a deep frustration with human rights organisations’ inability to make the state comply with even minimum legal standards. They saw the police as the enemy to be defeated, and the law as only for the poor, black (preto) and prostitutes (‘A lei é para os tres Ps: pobre, preto e prostitute’).Footnote 71 Back on the street corners of Dreaming City, Eduardo, a black man in his early 20s who works as a dealer, told me he celebrated the uprising as a remarkable day when ‘the Partido taught a lesson to those wearing the uniform to kill’.Footnote 72 He also justified the killings of police officers by recounting the killings, beatings, extortions, and kidnappings of drug dealers and other favela residents by the police. He told me stories of children and older adults who were brutalised by the police; the constant police threat to plant evidence and forge warrants against local youth, and the safety network organised by the Partido to protect the community. These protections included intelligence work to gather information on police operations, helping the community identify and denounce violent police officers, and open military-style confrontations and retaliations. Eduardo also criticised law-abiding citizens, churchgoers, youth engaged in local NGO projects, and those who participated in human rights workshops and the police-related neighbourhood security council. In one of our meetings, I was offended at being called zé povinho (a pejorative way to refer to law-abiding citizens) because I was ‘too naïve, too straight, and too afraid to die’. In the words of Eduardo, I was a cuzão (an asshole) because I lacked ‘blood in reasoning’.Footnote 73
It was Eliseu who later explained what it means to have ‘blood in reasoning’. He rooted his explanation in the difference between a street mugging to meet a person's ordinary needs and the anger born out of the awareness of being socially dead. ‘Jaime, there is the revolta da barriga [revolt of the belly] and the revolt of the consciousness’, he explained.Footnote 74 Eliseu clarified that the revolta da barriga leads to the development of consciousness about one's structural condition. Yet, this apparent linear model of development in political consciousness, from committing a crime out of economic necessity to politically calculated acts against the system, is challenged by my interlocutors’ vocal insistence on their permanent rage over being excluded from the city. The manifold ways in which black men express their constant frustration and anger towards society was synthesised in Eliseu's decrying of the social division between the favelados and the ‘playboys’, a categorisation that exposes the class and race divide in Brazilian cities. For Eliseu, putting a gun to the head of a playboy meant more than just stealing something from him (more than just the ‘revolt of the belly’). This act, rather, is contextualised within the city's dramatic racial, spatial and class disparities. Eliseu explained it this way: ‘Shit, this is for me and for the brothers in my quebrada [hood]. This is for minha velha [my old lady; mother], changing the playboy's diapers; that son of a bitch’.Footnote 75
Being exploited by employers, beaten by the police, discriminated against on the job market, and segregated in the favelas are not only ‘sites’ of reinscription of black subjugation; these dynamics also produce a ‘hyperconsciousness of race’Footnote 76 and a permanent state of anger that, in Eliseu's terms, can be labelled sangue no raciocinio (blood in the reasoning): ‘So you think thugs have no sangue no raciocinio [blood in their reasoning]?’Footnote 77 Such remarks suggest that the painful experience of being black is inherently political, not only in terms of the mutually constituted structure of privilege and disavowal, but also due to the explosive identity borne out of the condition of being socially dead. Within this context, black criminality seems to be a ‘fatal way of being alive’.Footnote 78
Who goes to the police?
Denise Silva argues that the favela is a place inhabited by ‘nobodies’ since the state's right to kill recognises no boundaries between ‘workers’ and ‘bandits’, ‘citizens’, and ‘terrorists’. As she argues, because ‘raciality’ produces the favelas as dangerous spaces, and their residents as already outlawed, ‘anyone, everyone […] residing there does not figure the subject of ethical life, the self-determined persons the law and the state protect; before these juridical structures, these racial subaltern subjects are nobodies’.Footnote 79 This generalised ‘outlawness’ invites reflection on the ways blacks are constructed not only as criminals but also as enemies of the state. The distinction between criminal and enemy is important here because while the former can be punished by law, the latter is subjected to a sovereign decisive power to kill.Footnote 80 Blacks may well be subjected to the power of law but, as killings by the police demonstrate, their relation to the regime of rights is not one of protection or punishment, but rather one of terror. The state recognises no ethical/juridical boundaries when it meets black bodies and this terroristic relation may also help us understand why organised forms of violence like the PCC's practices find resonance in poor, predominantly black urban communities.
The link between generalised ‘outlawness’ and the PCC's strategies of governance is perhaps more evident in the ordinary responses to the state's attempts to control the troubled geographies of São Paulo. Favelas like Dreaming City have long been known for the practices of police-linked death squads. Evidence of their existence comes in the form of the dozens of bodies that have been found in clandestine cemeteries in recent years and in the executions so prevalent in the city's outskirts.Footnote 81 In addition to massacres and other brutal police tactics, the state also developed a ‘soft power’ approach to crime by encouraging participation in local Community Security Councils, establishing community police stations, and supporting programmes on domestic violence and drug prevention in state schools. However, favela residents often refuse to participate in state-led community forums (at least through the kind of participation envisioned by the state). Through my fieldwork, I identified a resolute dismissal of the official channels for addressing everyday matters of security, the police station, the Community Security Council, the human rights NGO, because these spaces were thought to be for ‘citizens’, ‘hard workers’, churchgoers, and those living in the regularised areas at the edge of the favela. These soft power structures often legitimised the operations of the Military Police against residents who were viewed as criminals, or associated with criminals by virtue of their proximity to a biqueira (drug selling spot).
During my time with the local Community Security Council in Dreaming City, complaints against favelados were commonplace, and they centred on black youths’ ‘anti-social behaviours’ such as lack of respect for authority, laziness, sex, and drug use.Footnote 82 The president of the council invoked the binary of good and bad citizens to make a case for state intervention in the favelas. Violence, he argued, is due to the ‘sources of evil, the cancer which, if not extirpated, will eat the whole body’.Footnote 83 He complained that the police needed to be more present and take action against the young men listening to loud music, dancing, and selling drugs at street corners. On the other hand, Fernando, a young black man and favela resident expressed his distrust of the state's calls to comply with the police:
Who the fuck goes to the police? Do you go to the police when something happens to you? I don't go… If you go to the police station as a victim you probably will leave as a criminal.Footnote 84
In place of the state, the PCC has become the de facto authority in the favela, distributing ‘justice’ and punishment in an effective, although highly controversial way. Not only does the PCC articulate a language of resistance to state terror, which in many aspects can be seen as part of broader trafficker rhetoric,Footnote 85 but it also grants real protection and security for favela residents seen as criminals by the state and mainstream society. One of my interlocutors highlighted this reality by bringing to my attention the decrease in crime in the favela after the PCC took control. According to the state,Footnote 86 the dramatic reduction in homicides in the last decade is due to new law-enforcement approaches: community policing, mass incarceration and tough anti-drug legislation. Yet residents offer an alternative explanation, noting that the PCC challenged the police's right to kill, and claimed for themselves the responsibility of distributing punishment and justice. Fernando explained the PCC's approach:
The truth is that nobody can mess with the favela anymore. Do you remember when people used to kill each other all the time, all these deaths during the weekends? Now if you want someone's head, you need to get permission from the pilot [the PCC member responsible for maintaining discipline in the area]. Then, the pilot will call all the parties involved to have a fair judgment. It is not as if the PCC goes crazy and kills a person just for the sake of killing. No! You have the opportunity to talk and defend yourself. Now tell me, can you negotiate with the police like that?Footnote 87
I leave the question open as to whether or not there is room for negotiating with the police although their everyday encounters through bribes and extortions reaffirm local residents’ precarious positions in relation to the rule of law.Footnote 88 Moreover, killings, extortions, torture and disappearances are all part of racialised policing practices in these outlawed geographies. Instead, I call attention to the racial conundrum produced by the territorial dispute between the state and the PCC. While it is true that criminal groups like the PCC regulate favela social life through despotic forms of ruling, the exchanges between favela residents and PCC members are not simply based on fear and coercion. Most of the individuals engaged in the PCC are not outsiders but members of the community; they are sons, husbands, lovers, neighbours and childhood friends. The young black man who sells cocaine on the corner at night is a footballer during the day, the brother of a victim of police killings, or the son of a domestic worker. Likewise, the PCC's legitimacy is built on its capacity to produce a new language of justice in a space marked by state delinquency. The favelado recognises the PCC's moral authority in some matters and seeks help with state authorities in other matters (not among the PCC's brothers). During my fieldwork, I witnessed several moments in which the favelados would occupy the security council meetings to bring complaints against the lack of resources in the local public health clinic, public transport, or the mudslides that were threatening their community. In that case, they recognised the limits of the PCC and ‘chose’ to engage with the state, not in terms of the security rhetoric imposed by the council but rather pushing forward their urgent demands, using the very language of rights the state promotes, as a way to legitimise their claims.
This strategic compliance with the state does not undermine the argument outlined so far. In fact, if we consider the entangled context of racialised police practices, spatial segregation, and economic dispossession, the PCC's regime of governance may offer insights into the predicaments of black life in urban Brazil. That is also to say that the resonance of the PCC's military and economic strategies among black urban youth should make scholars sceptical of the simplistic explanations of urban criminal groups as merely mimicking the state to control territory and populations. When the perspectives of black youth (those often viewed as enemies of public order) are taken into account, the PCC's underground practices enable a form of collective agency that takes the form of black criminality in São Paulo's racialised geographies.
Black Criminality as Tragic Agency
Reading black criminality as black agency is an insufficient analytical approach if one fails to consider the grey zone between victims and agents of violence. Goldstein's work on racialised communities in Rio de Janeiro shows that self-destructive misogynist behaviours embraced by marginalised youth within those communities generate further social suffering.Footnote 89 Goldstein does not downplay the anti-establishment practices of black men engaged in criminal activities, but rather asks us to consider the non-linear road of resistance in places structured around intersecting axes of power. With this consideration in mind, I reflect on two ethnographic moments that highlight what I refer to as tragic agency. Although the adjective ‘tragic’ carries a moral and political judgement, this term should be read in this context as an attempt to account for the political subjectivity produced by the everyday racial interpellation of black men as public enemies, those men's refusal to comply with the law, and their investment in reproducing domination along gender and racial lines.
During my fieldwork, I was with Dona Maria at a church, going over the paperwork for the burial of her son, who had been killed by the police. Dona Bete, an elderly, brown woman, approached us. She was highly anxious about both the abusive drug dealer who lived next door and the young people who frequently consumed cocaine in the stairwells of her building. She had heard that I was doing research on violence and requested my assistance to solve these problems. I was taken aback by her request to mediate in these conflicts, as it was my first time meeting her. She stated that her neighbour had threatened to kill her if she complained to the police. The police had been called on several occasions, but never arrived to investigate, and the situation had continued to escalate.
Dona Maria overheard our conversation and approached us nervously to advise Dona Bete not to involve the police, because if the irmãos (PCC brothers) discovered that she had done so they would call her to the ‘debate’. In the PCC's justice system, calling someone to the debate means bringing a person in for questioning and, if she/he is found guilty, imposing a punishment that ranges from beatings to death. In the Partido's code, no one in the quebrada should call the police to solve conflicts which should instead be addressed through PCC trials in which members deliberate about misconduct and decide upon punishments.Footnote 90 ‘I'm telling you … don't call the police. You can go to PCC and tell them what is happening and they will teach [the drug dealer] a lesson. But if you keep calling the police, I wouldn't wanna be in your shoes’, Dona Maria warned.
Visibly afraid, Dona Bete told us that she had already gone to the police station, but the officers did not want to register the complaint because they felt it was a minor problem among favelados. Upon her insistence, the police finally recorded her complaint and went to speak to her neighbour. He did not give up his drug dealing, however, and continued to threaten the elderly woman. Dona Maria reprimanded Dona Bete for being naïve and explained how the PCC would have handled the situation. According to her, they would take him to ‘the shack’ (o barraco) where he would be beaten up (vai para o pau) and the brothers would warn him, ‘When Dona Bete passes by from now on, you will lower your head, okay? And never again look at her …’. As for Dona Bete, Dona Maria also anticipated some reprimands: ‘Now be prepared, because they will tell you, “When you have a problem tia [madam], you have to call us. If you call the police you will mess things up [zoar a parada]’”.Footnote 91 Despite Dona Maria's admonishments, Dona Bete did not seem to be convinced of the efficiency of the PCC's debates. Dona Maria became angry and started raising her voice, demanding that Dona Bete forget the police and shred the report she had filed against her neighbour:
If you keep on calling the police you will have to move out. You will have to move out with only the clothes you are wearing. I'm not kidding. If they know that you are calling the police to the biqueira you better run away … You filed a report at the police station. You have to clean it up … I advise you as a friend. For Jesus’ sake … woman, shred your report.Footnote 92
Bete's vulnerable position between the PCC and the police sheds light on the precarious place occupied by black women within the city's racialised and gendered economy of violence. On the one hand, the police dismissed her request for protection from an abusive neighbour who felt entitled to terrorise her. It was just a favelado's problem. On the other hand, she felt that she could not seek protection from the PCC because as a male-dominated organisation, it would favour the neighbour and dismiss her complaints, or generate even more violence with their brutal system of justice. Black women have to negotiate their precarious positions between these two forms of masculine power: the moral structure of the PCC and the racialised and gendered policing practices. As for the latter, neither Bete nor Maria could redress their victimisation through the state because black women faveladas are seen as part of the region's security problems. After all, in mainstream narratives of urban violence, black women's bodies and the favela itself are seen as ‘factories of criminals’.Footnote 93
At the same time, these women's experiences illustrate how PCC members reinforce gender domination in the very process of fending off the state. Black men resisting victimisation invest in (and to a certain extent are benefited by) the patriarchal order of Brazilian society. In other words, an unsolved question on black criminal agency would be the following: if violence is a condition of possibility to reinvent black urban life, where are the spaces for the gendered/sexualised ‘others’ within these ‘radical’ politics?
A second ethnographic moment reveals the PCC's brutal domain over the favelados. At a baile funk (dance party) supported by the PCC, José, the president of the local residents’ association, introduced me to a ‘brother’ called Tatu, a black man in his 30s who was just released from prison. He was curious about my research and welcomed me when José told him I was ‘from the direitos humanos’ (working as a human rights activist). He promised to give me an interview but I never managed to get hold of him. Tatu would occasionally pass by the residents’ association but our conversations were always brief fragments and always interrupted by his busy schedule and phone calls that seemed to be related to drug transactions. I had already given up on interviewing him when José called to tell me that Tatu was dead. He was executed after a long PCC debate (trial), in which, after being found guilty of raping a little boy, he was condemned to capital punishment.Footnote 94
The debate is one of the few moments in which the diffused and mysterious regime of governance imposed by the Partido comes to the surface. Ironically, no one denies its existence and yet there is a silence around the organisation's underground system of violence. The victim, the alleged offender, witnesses and relatives all participate in the ‘debate’ along with the ‘brothers’ who equally participate (de igual) in the deliberations. The brothers play the role of lawyers, questioning or defending both victim and defendant. These trials address residents’ everyday problems, including noisy neighbours, domestic violence, street fights, rapes and debt related to drugs. Death is the most extreme punishment meted out by the PCC, mainly in response to betrayals of the Partido's statute, rapes and murders. It has been employed more frequently in recent years. The verdict is decided after exhaustive discussions that can take hours or even days, between the ‘piloto’ (PCC member in charge of a favela), other brothers and PCC members in prison who participate via conference calls.
The Partido has also established a restorative system of justice in which the offender must publicly apologise for his/her misconduct, pay back the value of a stolen object, or move out of the favela. First-time offenders are given some leniency, but murder and rape are punished by death. In the case of Dona Bete, I learned later that the neighbour was given a warning to stop threatening her and she received a warning to not involve the police in local security problems. In the case of Tatu, there was an exhaustive trial in which the testimony of witnesses and the child's parents agreed on the death penalty, despite the appeals of Tatu's mother. Tatu was judged according to the Partido's code of conduct, which emphasises respect for and obedience to the rules, behaving according to the norms of the favela, and respecting the collective good of the community.Footnote 95 As José, the president of the residents association warned me, ‘in the favela one has to know how to get in and how to get out’ (saber entrar e saber sair).Footnote 96
While the PCC redesigns the favela/state/civil society relation, the debate is an example of the tragic agency embedded in the Partido's power over life and death in the favelas. PCC members, at least those youth engaged in criminal activities under its auspices, engage in a transgressive politics that challenges the carceral state, blurs spatial boundaries, and reclaims black urban life from the margins of civil society, all while organising social life in the favela around a new regime of dominance.
Conclusion
This article offers a race-centred analysis of urban criminality in Brazil. As I have shown, the actions of young black men, participating in the PCC, must be understood within the mutually entangled context of urban poverty, police terror and mass incarceration. I do not claim that the PCC represents an alternative to state violence nor do I sustain that criminality is the only form of political action with which black youth engage in the favelas. Instead, I invite further reflections on the meanings of black criminal agency in light of both the racialised regime of law and civil society's failure to account for enduring racial injustices. Responding to this challenge is timely because the scholarship on urban violence in Brazil and Latin America has yet to sufficiently engage in an analysis of crime and insecurity that takes into account the racialised regime of citizenship in which young black men are seen as public enemies. Such an inquiry is also relevant to progressive social movements attempting to mobilise marginalised black youth through the language of rights. In my own experience as an activist in São Paulo, I confronted this difficulty in the form of frustrating attempts to effect mass mobilisation after waves of police killings in 2010. During this time, a black activist challenged us to consider why the PCC found resonance among black youth while we did not. Claudia, whose son had been involved with the PCC, argued that ‘it was about time to stop pretending the PCC doesn't exist and talk with the guys in the quebrada’.Footnote 97 She recounted her personal experiences relying on the PCC to get her son out of trouble with the police and attempting to negotiate his debts to local drug dealers. Therefore, Claudia argued that while we were at a comfortable office downtown, strategising about mobilisations under the banner of human rights and citizenship, the ‘guys’ in the favela were teaching us what resistance really meant in a city under siege.
Claudia's reminder was an important one. Because the human rights/civil society approach has failed to redress the urgent needs of the black urban poor, for whom the regime of law has always been a racialised regime of terror, resistance to state violence would have to take a form other than the politics of rights. If that is correct, then what remains a dilemma is the question of what black politics might look like if we are to consider both Claudia's call and the ‘afropessimist’ premise of black social death. What happens, then, if we consider burglarising the houses of the elite, selling drugs on street corners, bombing police stations, granting protection to favela residents terrorised by the state, and refusing to comply with state-incited modes of spatial discipline, as (anti)political practices? Unless we regard them as apolitical or irrational, a focus on the participation of black youth in the PCC is admittedly controversial, and limited in scope, but may also offer critical insights into how those who are socially dead may become politically alive.
