Today, around 4 million residents – 34.9% of the population – live under rules imposed by factions and militias
“We cannot say that there is no more trafficking in Cidade de Deus.” The statement by the Secretary of Public Security, José Mariano Beltrame, during the administration of former governor Sérgio Cabral, during the implementation of one of the first Pacification Police Units (UPP), was the harbinger that criminal factions would not leave the territories conquered decades ago in Rio de Janeiro. On the contrary, Comando Vermelho (CV), Terceiro Comando Puro and the militias expanded their presence in the State during the proximity police program.
This is what the research “Historical Map of Armed Groups in Rio de Janeiro” shows, by the Study Group on New Illegalisms at the Fluminense Federal University (Geni/UFF) and the Fogo Cruzado Institute.
Produced since 2018, the research shows that Comando Vermelho expanded its presence in territories in Rio de Janeiro during the period of implementation of the UPPs, between 2008 and 2015, probably due to the “balloon effect”, according to the study.
The presence of the Military Police in the occupied favelas encouraged some of the members of Comando Vermelho to settle in other regions of the metropolitan region of Rio de Janeiro – especially in Baixada and Leste Fluminense – according to the research.
The migration of traffickers sought to avoid police confrontation in their territories of origin, at the same time that the occupied areas were still under group control.
Sociologist Daniel Hirata, professor at the Department of Sociology and Methodology of Social Sciences at UFF and coordinator of Geni, said that although the expansion of factions during the implementation of UPPs was an unintentional effect, security policy directly influenced the expansion of groups into the interior of the State.
“The UPPs had a very important impact on the expansion of the Red Command. They didn’t exactly have a metropolitan planning, thinking about the entire metropolitan region of Rio. And even the interior. Of the 40 UPPs that we had in Rio, 39 were in Red Command areas. This caused not only leaders, but other members of this organization to move to other locations”, he said.
Today, around 4 million residents – 34.9% of the population – live under rules imposed by factions and militias. In 2007, there were 2.5 million people in these conditions.
The “great expansion”, between 2016 and 2020, of criminal groups was the result of a context that combined “opportunities in land markets and expansion of urban infrastructure services, favored by investments associated with mega events, as well as greater state dysfunctionality, the dismantling of UPP’s and the target system, in addition to the disastrous federal intervention in public security”, says the study.
According to Hirata, the dismantling of the UPPs and the scrapping of public security policies in Rio de Janeiro also expanded the factions’ access to regions of the State.
“The dismantling of the UPPs is part of a broader context of the dismantling of the State of Rio de Janeiro itself. The State of Rio went bankrupt in 2015 and there is an important detail which is the target system as well. It is a bonus system that practically doubled the police officers’ salaries in that period. The police officers started to not even receive their salaries, much less bonuses”, he explains.
“In the case of drug trafficking factions, the impact of the UPP’s, with their well-known “balloon effect” – the internalization caused by the migration of drug traffickers – was perhaps a driver of the expansion of territorial and population control for Baixada and Leste Fluminense, but it should be noted that the growth of this type of organization is continuous throughout the 18-year series considered”, says the study.
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