Democracy, Thuggery and the Grassroots: Antoine Magarinos Torres and the União dos Trabalhadores Favelados in the Age of Carioca Populism

Abstract

Shantytowns have long been critical to urban popular politics. In Brazil, both phenomena gained strength from 20th century mass urbanization, and the two have been locked in a relationship of mutual dependency ever since. Yet – given high political stakes – it is notoriously difficult to glimpse the internal dynamics of these informal dependencies: to understand how politicians used shantytowns to achieve their own political goals, to comprehend frustrated attempts at mass radicalization, to gain insight into residents' political strategies and the ways in which political connections could grow on the basis of local thuggery. This paper will analyze these issues by tracing the story of Antoine Magarinos Torres, a communist lawyer who was a central figure in Brazil’s shantytown politics in the 1950s. Admired for his role in founding Brazil’s first citywide shantytown federation, Torres later faced charges of land grabbing, violence, and political manipulation – precisely the abuses he’d built a career combating. While the accusations were politically motivated, the case revealed a wide variety of internal shantytown conflicts, ranging from ethnic and turf disputes to disagreements about the just bases for land claims or local rule‐making. Torres’ political demise did not spell the end of shantytown politics in Rio. But his story highlights the difficulty of "community organizing" in places with deep internal divisions and a long history of political exploitation, and also demonstrates the ways in which politicians eager to limit the impact of local governance adeptly exploited such fragilities.