Irregular War in Favelas of Rio de Janeiro: A Macro-Micro Approach

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.