‘Intensify raids in favelas’ is an order that has always marked the actions of the police in Brazil

On August 12, 1971representatives of various bodies of the dictatorship’s repressive structure met at Palácio Duque de Caxias, an imposing building located on Av. Presidente Vargas, in the center of Rio de Janeiro.

After agents from the information section of the First Army, the Navy Information Center, the Federal Police and the Department of Political and Social Order, Dops, took the floor, it was the turn of the representative of the Military Police of the state of Guanabara to speak. .

In the remaining minutes of the meeting, the message he gave was quite direct: “He will intensify the raids in the favelas, carrying them out on the order of 3 to 4 times a week”.

These were weekly meetings, in which each agency shared information about the actions they were developing.

Part of these minutes were stored in the collection of the National Information Service, the SNI, and survived the dictatorship, being located today in the National Archives. A reading of these documents shows how, in general, the information exchanged had to do with operations against opposition militants, especially guerrillas.

However, the PM’s participation in that August 12th meeting sheds light on a lesser-known aspect of the military dictatorship: the connections between the daily actions of the police in combating so-called common crime – a task that hides the use of State violence as a means of social control of poor and peripheral populations – and the role of the regime’s security forces in so-called political repression.

These connections allowed, in practice, mutual learning between the police officer who tortured in the favela and the soldier who tortured at DOI-Codi.

‘I spent a lot of time interrogating favela inmates. So we’re getting practice.’

Philosophers as different as Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault, recovering an idea originally formulated by Aimé Césaire, worked with an idea that can be useful to understand this connection: the boomerang effect. With this, Arendt drew attention to the fact that European colonialism in African territories would later return to Europe itself, in the form of Nazi-fascist violence.

Generalizing the concept, Foucault pointed out that colonies and peripheries always function as laboratories for technologies and devices of violence that will later be used in the metropolises.

So let’s see how the boomerang effect between the military police and the Armed Forces occurred in practice during the Brazilian military dictatorship.

“I spent a lot of time interrogating prisoners from favelas, to find out where the weapons deposit was. So we start getting practice. I had experience.” With these words, Riscala Corbage, a major in the Rio de Janeiro Military Police, responded to the Federal Public Ministry about his role in the Information Operations Detachment of the Internal Defense Operations Center (DOI-Codi), the most feared repression agency of the military dictatorship (1964-1985).

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The statement took place as part of an MPF ​​investigation into the forced disappearance of Rubens Paiva, which occurred in 1971.

The agent explains that the expertise accumulated by “interrogating” – a euphemism for torturing – favela residents was what enabled him to be called upon to act in the fight against the regime’s political opponents.

But the opposite was also true. Actions to combat the guerrilla produced lessons that were later incorporated by the police more generally.

This is what a document from the General Inspectorate of Military Police (IGMP) also found in the SNI collection shows. The IGPM itself was created by the dictatorship in 1967, as a way of subjecting the police to regime control and connecting “public security” with “national security”.

The document is an “instruction note” from June 1971, which aimed to “highlight lessons learned from experience in rural guerrilla and counter-guerrilla activities”.

According to the report, “in the repressive phase, the PMs cannot neglect the importance of their actions, complementing those of the Army”.

The note presented several concrete cases that had occurred in the context of the repression of armed resistance groups to the dictatorship, and sought to extract lessons from them.

One of the teachings was that “the moral factors, courage, drive and aggressiveness have to be developed in men. The commander must seek to maintain the combat initiative.”

In the same year of 1971, therefore, a Military Policeman gave his knowledge about torture to improve the Army’s work at DOI-Codi; the military involved in combat operations against rural guerrillas shared their learning with the Military Police; and the Guanabara PM representative informed that he would “intensify the raids in the favelas” in a meeting with representatives of all bodies of the regime’s repressive structure.

Presented as a matter of ‘public security’, the 1991 Acari Massacre was not seen as a sign that the democratic regime had serious limits.

These documents and reports seem sufficient to support the idea of ​​the boomerang effect. In other words, there was a deep connection between the state violence perpetrated in the favelas and peripheries, mostly against the black population – violence that evidently predates the 1964 coup itself -, and that which was directed against militants opposing the regime.

But why, then, when talking about dictatorship today, do we seem to be limited to this second aspect?

Because during redemocratization these two dimensions of State violence began to be treated as distinct. The evident connections between them were being erased, to the extent that only some forms of repression began to be seen as “political violence”.

Violent practices that were not framed in this way by society as a whole entered democracy without being seen as a problem. It is the construction of this double discourse on State violence that I try to analyze in my recently released book, The unfinished transition (Companhia das Letras).

New regime, old practices

If a few years after the 1988 Constitution, military police officers murdered under torture and disappeared with the bodies of 11 political activists at once, and justified this as a practice to defend “national security”, there would have been a scandal of major proportions.

Everyone would say that the newborn democracy was at risk. But that didn’t happen.

It happened, however, to 11 young black people living in the Acari favela. Presented as a matter of “public security”, not “national security”, the 1991 Acari Massacre was not seen as a sign that the democratic regime that was beginning to be institutionalized in the country had serious limits.

The consequences of this division are many, even today. The first is that it prevents us from knowing in more depth the extent and size of the violence perpetrated by the State during the military dictatorship.

The social authorization for violence in favelas and peripheries is at the origin of the speeches that later legitimize political authoritarianism and attacks on the electoral process.

And this is a problem because the discourse that our dictatorship would not have been so violent is at the center of denialist views that seek to legitimize that period. In the 60th anniversary of the 1964 coup, overcoming this vision is an urgent task.

But another consequence has nothing to do with how we view the past. It has to do with the way we see current problems.

Since the 2016 coup, and particularly with the Bolsonaro government, the issue of the Armed Forces has returned to the center of public debate.

At the same time, the problem of police violence, which has never ceased to be present, has also been on the rise. Unfortunately, however, these topics are often treated as separate things.

It is true that there are specific measures to deal with each of them. For example, it is urgent to review article 142 of the Constitution to definitively submit the Armed Forces to civil power; at the same time, it is necessary to demand that Public Prosecutors exercise their task of external control of police activity.

However, the persistence of this division between what would be the problem of the police, on the one hand, and the issue of the Armed Forces, on the other, prevents us from seeing that the same connections that existed during the dictatorship continue to operate.

In other words, I want to draw attention to the fact that we need to see a boomerang effect, for example, between the massacre perpetrated by the São Paulo Police in Baixada Santista and the participation of the Armed Forces in the coup attempt on January 8th.

One feeds the other. The social authorization for violence in favelas and peripheries is at the origin of the speeches that later legitimize political authoritarianism and attacks on the electoral process.

Because after all, in both cases, what is at stake, as political scientist Ana Penido said in a recent text, are the “instruments (human and material) of State violence” and the historical difficulty of establishing any type of control political about them.

The Broad Front that was formed in 2022 to defeat Bolsonaro in the elections had as its fundamental axis the defense of democracy.

However, it is already evident that many sectors of society that mobilize to defend the holding of elections do not think that a police operation that leaves more than 50 people dead is also a problem for our democracy.

Highlighting the boomerang effect and the connections between these two points, and combating them as two sides of the same coin, is the only way we can try to definitively break the cycles of state violence and authoritarianism that have marked the history of Brazil.