Abstract
This paper is about the irregular war in Rio de Janeiro regarding its rules and dynamics, its links with local politics and transnational business, as well as the actors’ subjective meanings, part of the ethnographic data gathered over years. My approach has been to interact with many actors during long periods of time using multiple sources of data to adjoin clues and contradictions provided by the various agents interviewed. I followed the precepts developed by Gluckman and Buroway on the extended case method, adapting it to the violent social contexts in the favelas of Rio emphasizing conflicts and diversity within them. The analysis bears also statistical and historical material. In 1980, I found a new neighborhood organization: drug-dealing gangs engaged in turf wars. In them, a kind of male identity was the crux of the matter to understand the subjective meanings and the ethos not revealed on the surface of everyday experience. Some youngsters, who plunged in violence and crime, interiorized the warrior ethos or violent practices, becoming their own executioners by killing each other with increasing cruelty justified by the warfare. This altered completely not only the local balance of power but the sociability between neighbors in such areas.
Highlights
Drug trafficking is typified as a crime in Brazil, there is still some moral acceptance of such activity, even more so if the dealer lives in a poor neighborhood where youth unemployment is large
My text sustains a concern with the changed subjectivity of youths that started, as they say, ‘put a gun on their waist’, changing their social identities to be part of illegal drug trafficking
In Brazil, there is a great lack of information on the upper sectors of organized crime, due to corruption, lack of resources for institutional intelligence and investigative police, and as yet little connection between the Police and the Public Prosecutor or the Judiciary
Summary
This paper is about the irregular war in Rio de Janeiro regarding its rules and dynamics, its links with local politics and transnational business, as well as the actors’ subjective meanings, part of the ethnographic data gathered over years. A kind of male identity was the crux of the matter to understand the subjective meanings and the ethos not revealed on the surface of everyday experience. Some youngsters, who plunged in violence and crime, interiorized the warrior ethos or violent practices, becoming their own executioners by killing each other with increasing cruelty justified by the warfare. This altered completely the local balance of power but the sociability between neighbors in such areas
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