Abstract
In September 2002 drug traffickers in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, brought the city to a standstill. In a dramatic esca-lation of a decades-long conflict with the state, Rio’s drug syndicates used fear, threats and strategic innuendo to force businesses to close, schools to cancel classes and buses to stop running, momentarily paralysing a city of over 6 million people. Since that first shutdown, Rio’s traf-fickers have repeatedly used this tactic as a way to send specific messages to local authorities and to demonstrate, as one trafficker put it, that the city’s drug traffickers pos-sess a ‘power that they don’t have’.Drawing upon ethnographic research in a
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