Violence, Citizenship, and Religion in a Rio de Janeiro Favela

Abstract

Across Latin America armed groups have come to dominate large sectors of social, political, and economic activity in poor and working-class communities. While scholars have noted the importance of religion in offering individuals and communities protection from violence, there has been relatively little study of the place of religion in contemporary armed activity in the region. This paper looks at the role of religion in the governance practices of an armed group in one Rio de Janeiro favela. The article will show that religious activities in this context provide an important arena in which mem- bers of the armed group can discuss autonomous and collaborative strategies to address security issues in the city. Most critically, religious discourse provides space to move discussions of politics in this community away from issues of citizenship and rights and into a discussion of justice and the distribution of resources among poor communities. Rio de Janeiro has experienced signifi cant criminal violence since the mid- 1980s. During this period the city has faced a rolling security crisis in which vio- lence has diffused from the state into the hands of various armed actors, leading to questions about the meaning of citizenship in the city. Indeed, a host of scholars and policy makers have characterized favelas as parallel polities set apart from the city as a whole (Arias 2006, 6-8). Confl ict in Rio reached its peak in 1995, when there were 67 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants. A slow but long-term decline in homicides has occurred since then, with the number falling to 23 per 100,000 in 2011. Nevertheless the city re- mains a highly violent place characterized by ongoing engagements between an imperfect police force that often takes bribes from the very criminals it claims to be fi ghting, and drug traffi ckers that dominate the favelas (shantytowns), where perhaps a quarter of the city's 6.3 million inhabitants live. Poor and working-class Rio residents have developed a wide variety of strate- gies to deal with the complex political and social situations they confront. These have included organizing through nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in- stead of offi cial associative groups and reducing their general involvement in lo- cal civic affairs. Others have sought protection by joining Evangelical religious communities, which, in the context of urban violence, provide a social circle that seeks to remove itself and the families associated with it from the wider problem of drug abuse that many believe accompanies much gang activity. Indeed, today Rio de Janeiro is nearly one-quarter Evangelical, with high concentrations in the