\n\n\nS\u00c3O PAULO, Brazil \u2014 More than two months have passed since the assassination of Marielle Franco,\n a human rights defender who was a member of Rio\u2019s City Council. But the\n killing remains unsolved. The most probable hypothesis, according to \nBrazil\u2019s public security minister, Raul Jungmann, is that local militias\n were behind her death.
\nMilitias in Brazil\n are different from paramilitary groups in other countries. Their \norigins here can be traced back to the 1970s, the days of the military \ndictatorship, when off-duty police officers formed death squads to \nexecute criminals and political opponents, according to Jos\u00e9 Cl\u00e1udio Souza Alves, a sociologist who studies the groups.
\nIn\n their current form, militias were established in Rio de Janeiro in the \nlate \u201990s and early 2000s, under the pretext that they were protecting \nresidents from drug traffickers. Although more civilians are joining, \nthe militias have been dominated by active-duty and retired police \nofficers, who essentially assume control of suburban slums, or favelas, \nunder the guise of defending them.
\nOnce\n they have a foothold in the community, militia members extort money \nfrom residents and shopkeepers (in other words, they demand payments \nthat are partly for protection against themselves). They also control \nlocal unlicensed public transportation, since city buses are scarce or \nnonexistent in remote areas. They offer illegal internet and television \nconnections, charge commissions on real estate deals, and control the \nsupply of gas and water. In the Gard\u00eania Azul favela, for example, \nmilitia members collect money from street vendors and even popcorn \ncarts.
\nOne of them is irony. After careful \ndeliberation with their accountants (at least that\u2019s what I imagine), \nand in the name of business diversification, some militias have entered \nthe field of drug trafficking. Others have decided to work with their former rivals from drug gangs, selling them weapons and recruiting members from their ranks. In 2015, according to the newspaper O Dia,\n a militia \u201csold\u201d the area of Morro do Jord\u00e3o to a drug gang for three \nmillion Brazilian reais, or about $800,000. So much for the righteous \nexcuse of vigilante justice.
\nAccording to the news website G1, two million people in the Rio metropolitan area live in territories controlled by militias. A 2013 academic report concluded\n that of the roughly 1,000 favelas in the city, 45 percent are \ncontrolled by militia organizations and 37 percent by drug gangs. The \nmain difference is that police brutality is less common in \nmilitia-controlled neighborhoods, probably because those groups have \nstrong ties to the official state security apparatus.
\nAnother\n feature that they share with the Italian mafia is that they have \ninfiltrated political institutions. In 2008, Ms. Franco was an aide on a\n parliamentary commission that investigated the involvement of \npoliticians in Rio\u2019s militias, whose findings led to the arrest of \nroughly a dozen members of the City Council and two state congressmen. \nThe commission had found that during election years, militia groups try \nto field their own candidates for office, and threaten voters and even \nkill competitors. In 2016, at least six candidates running for City \nCouncil were executed by militia members in the area of Baixada \nFluminense.
\nWhich bring us back to \nthe militias\u2019 original configuration as extralegal death squads. Their \ncold-blooded concern for public safety has been converted into a \nbusinesslike approach to protecting their criminal assets. According to \nRio\u2019s Homicide Division, militia-controlled neighborhoods generally have\n the highest homicide rates.
\n@jaherafi pointed me to this which has implications for the upcoming election where Bolsonaro\u00a0has promised to give the police a free hand.
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this is state formation.
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