Weaponizing Urban Development: Critical Geographies of Militarism in Rio de Janeiro

Abstract

Access to land and to adequate housing—a constitutionally granted right in Brazil—is currently under attack by non-state armed actors, the so-called militias, in Rio de Janeiro. In their attempts to widen territorial control, “militias” weaponize urban development. To understand such form of militarization, I argue that we need to add a geographical perspective to literatures on criminal governance: Terrain and its political materiality is the basis and not only the outcome of spatial claims to power. To sustain this contribution, I turn to local scales and add insights from ethnographic studies on how paramilitary groups affect the lives of residents. I trace the paramilitary influence along their terrain-shaping and urban development activities. The empirical basis of my argument is drawn from the northern periphery of Rio de Janeiro, looking at how “militias”—emerging as armed developers out of a past as Death Squads—expand their influence by investing in urban development. In this paper, “militia” is conceived as a floating signifier. As such, the meaning of militia is contested, as it encompasses a wide range of practices including civil construction, laying infrastructure, and landscaping. This way, the term “militia” becomes a cornerstone of a militarized urban development discourse and practice. “Militia,” as the encompassing center of a narrative cluster, bolsters bellicose forms of governing urban expansion, thereby further militarizing the everyday life of a large part of the marginalized urban society.

Introduction

In a poll conducted months before former President Jair Bolsonaro (2019–2022) took office in Brazil, a huge majority of citizens expressed their support for the massive military intervention in the state of Rio de Janeiro (Insight Crime, 2018). The intervention aimed at reestablishing the sovereign presence of state security institutions, both the military and the civil police, following the declaration of interim President Michel Temer (2016–2018) under the predicament of the Guarantee of Law and Order (Garantia da Lei e da Ordem, GLO). The intervention was formalized by Decree 9288/2018, expanded to various cities of the state, and went on until December 31, 2018. Between 1992 and 2022, the Ministry of Defense has ordered 24 operations in response to urban violence equally falling under the category of a GLO (GoB, 2022). The Ministry characterizes these as “non-war operations” since, although deploying military power in domestic space, they do not foresee immediate combat, while “in special circumstances, [they] involve the use of force in a limited way” (MdD, 2014, p. 17).

On official justification, the “non-war” intervention was a reaction to an increased number of casualties among state security agents during confrontations with criminal organizations—in this case, drug traffickers—in the state of Rio de Janeiro. However, and despite their general support, an about-as-huge majority proved skeptical toward the positive outcome of these interventions: Would the armed forces be able to put an end to, or at least significantly reduce, the abundant violence and everyday presence of crime in the city? Would the armed forces be able to strengthen the formal security apparatus and to make cities safer?

Local security experts form consensus on the point that a war-like confrontation, or armed combat, is an insufficient response and cannot sustainably reduce violence (Muggah, 2018). However, the war-like jargon used to qualify the “special circumstances” (cited above) in Rio de Janeiro requires further attention. Vis-a-vis rather quotidian weaponized confrontations between organized criminal groups and the Military Police, ¹ the thin line between a war and a non-war situation is also shaped through discursive practices. By claiming that language shapes human activities, such as military interventions, I do not deny the very materiality that characterizes a violent situation in urban Latin America. While the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) considered the region to be a zone of peace in 2014, such “peace” does not imply a social context of low violence for the population. The average homicide rate in the Americas is the highest in the world, with Brazil’s homicide rate per 100,000 inhabitants at 30.5, topped only by El Salvador, which reaches 61.8, and Honduras, 41.7, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.

However, these numbers tell little about the locally specific and often more intense forms of violence, particularly in urban Brazil. The militarized combat against “organized crime” in the peripheries of Brazil’s larger cities suffices to constantly destabilize the thin line between war and non-war, and normalizes widespread attitudes that consider military interventions as ultima ratio.

The implementation of the GLO in 2018 was marked by a militarized rhetoric, with Interim President Michel Temer vowing to confront and defeat organized crime and gangs using all necessary measures: “The government will give tough, firm answers and will adopt all the necessary measures to confront and defeat organized crime and gangs” (UOL, 2018a). This stance was echoed by then-governor of Rio de Janeiro, Luiz Fernando Pezão, who deemed the military intervention necessary due to the inability of the police forces to “stop the warfare between criminal factions.”

Temer’s speech promoted a friend-and-foe rhetoric, calling the “honest citizen” to support the armed forces’ search and combat mission in the “streets and squares” (ibid.). This divide-and-conquer approach normalizes bellicose attitudes in public security and has a spatial component. Lieutenant Colonel Uirá Ferreira, commander of the special police unit BOPE, emphasized the importance of specific training for urban warfare in tackling criminal activity in densely populated areas such as Rio de Janeiro’s favela complexes (W2C, 2022). BOPE’s approach to urban warfare involves reading the terrain, and “clearing” a suspiciously crime-controlled area by identifying individual leaders and undermining their spatial practices such as building barriers and strongholds (Müller & Müller, 2016; Muggah & Mulli, 2012).

Such counterinsurgency-like policing precedes and accompanies armed forces’ interventions, leading to an increase of lethal, extra-juridical confrontations by 36.3% during the intervention in 2018 (Suarez, et al., 2021, p. 799). The GLO, in turn, also expands armed forces’ competencies to include policing activities. The collusive, militarized policing framework establishes conjoint crime-combatting actions in urban space. Police-backed military interventions assemble special police forces’ tactical knowledge on the human terrain, identifying suspected criminals’ spatial practices, with a public support for armed forces’ heavy-armed and thus—both materially and symbolically—potent semi-permanent presence in the streets.

In short, public security rhetoric and praxis in contemporary Brazil is highly militarized and spatialized. Terrain becomes an important variable within militarized security strategies, not only as an expression of, but also a medium to acquire power. Reflection on such spatialization of militarized policing is often absent from theories of militarism and militarization, and from discussions of criminal urban governance. Yet, “terrain itself,” understood in this article as a dynamic, and always already, political materiality, takes an important position in military strategizing, as its conditions can be conducive to a certain outcome and to one conflict partners’ success or failure (Gordillo, 2023; Kilcullen, 2013). Terrain is not passive or static in or to such confrontations, but “a process, continually made and remade, transformed by geophysical and human transformations” (Elden, 2021, p. 177).

To address the geographies of militarism, shaped by human agency, I frame militarism as a socio-spatial process that normalizes bellicose attitudes in and through spatial referents and practices. Militarism is a discursive praxis. To address militarism in this way, I look at its local embeddedness in the everyday production of space in and beyond language. I assume that militarized security practices are closely tied to war-like, symbolic representations and the material forging of urban space. Symbolic representation includes, at times, strategic and intentional use of language, words, and signifiers. The material production refers to urban planning, construction, infrastructural development—in short, what I will address as urban development. The militarization of urban development normalizes a constant situation of “non-war” in urban peripheries. Such non-war, however, resembles quite war-like forms of violence.

This paper also argues for expanding the analytic focus on militarization of society beyond the armed forces. Militarization is a socially and spatially marginalizing process which encompasses governance arrangements between state and non-state, often criminal, armed actors of different modalities, from more confrontative to more collaborative ones. When investigating militarization and militarism, we need to include non-state armed actors and to investigate the close ties between politicians, military personnel, and milícias (organized crime). In the local context of Rio de Janeiro, the ascription milícia, or as I will use it in the following, “militia,” is often used to describe a criminal group composed of active and former public security agents, as well as public officers who illegally charge for the provision of services—from water to protection services (Souza Alves, 2019a; Zaluar & Conceição, 2007). More recently, “militias” also have come to perform illegal practices directly related to the production of territory and the making of cities (Benmergui & Gonçalves, 2019; Hirata et al., 2022; Müller, 2021). Here, the focus will be not on who they are personally but on the spatial and discursive practices deployed to make space governable (e.g., landfills, the provision of infrastructure, and civil construction).

The paper proceeds as follows: Firstly, I will contextualize my argument in literatures on militarization and militarism in Latin America. Secondly, I will summarize the methodological procedure that I used to weave together my argument and for transparency regarding the data gathering and analytic procedure. Then, I will turn to the empirical substance of this paper, taking three steps: The first approximates links between politicians, military ranks, and “militias” as they are discussed in public media outlets (newspapers, TV, blogs, public debates); the second step turns to the local scale of the state of Rio de Janeiro and characterizes the militia’s engagement in urban development. For such, I will review academic literatures and other reports on organized crime and police violence in the Baixada Fluminense, the northern periphery of Rio de Janeiro, where private armies have for long been tasked as security agents and today’s “militias” can be accounted for as their successors. Finally, I wish to turn to the militias’ terrain-shaping activities, suggesting that these bring them closer to being a military-like actor. This third and final step is based on my own material gained from interviews and ethnographic observations in different locales of the Baixada.

Militarization, Militarism, and Urban Security in Rio de Janeiro

Militarism refers to “martial, bellicose, and warrior-like attitudes” (Solar, 2021, p. 6) that shape civilian daily life and sectors, including economic, educational, and security. The social basis for militarism lies in what Michael Mann defines as a “set of attitudes and social practices which regards war and the preparation for war as a normal and desirable social activity” (Mann, 1987, p. 35). While Mann’s definition of militarism refers to interstate war situations in the formation of modern statehood, the attitudinal core of both definitions is crucial to frame the puzzle that this paper wishes to address. The puzzle lies in the collective normalization or social embeddedness of war-like attitudes as well as of confrontative and combative activities in response to insecurity, crime, and violence. With high rates of crime and violence, police abuse of power, and violent confrontations between state security agents and non-state armed actors, why is support for the military (still) so strong?

To address the current militarization of urban societies in Latin America, we need to include the involvement of non-state armed actors. The activities of “militias” ² in Rio de Janeiro are a crucial part of this societal militarization. This section situates “militias” in the often-studied involvement of the armed forces in the militarization of fights against organized crime and delinquency (Moncada, 2013; Valenzuela Aguilera, 2012) and in the militarization of law enforcement in Latin America (Flores-Macias & Zarkin, 2019; Sung et al., 2022), focusing on a particular aspect of organized criminal groups (OCGs). “Insurgent OCGs” mainly engage in “turf wars” (Zaluar, 2021), and more direct threats to state sovereignty might be more directly linked to militarized police interventions (ibid.). Yet, the more relevant sector of OCGs, when it comes to further understandings of the widespread socialization and spatialization of militarism, sits in the “predatory” activity embodied in the “militia” that “extorts the population by demanding direct payments in exchange for protection or basic services. The criminal faction associated with this type of behavior is the Militia [sic.].” (ibid., 31).

This definition brings “militias” near the armed forces in that they regain strength as visible, militant opponents of criminal insurgents. According to Zaluar, the “militia’s” “business” (ibid.) consists in maintaining a position that is clearly distinguishable from drug trafficking factions; yet, in being present in day-to-day (or weekly) collection of security fees, such antagonism constantly reminds the public of the ongoing war situation, thus normalizing bellicose attitudes and interventions. Rather than being the armed forces’ opponent, “militias” are nurturing a societally embodied militarism.

The bellicose security policy in (urban) Brazil is often related to the close ties between military personnel and civil government positions (Harig, 2021; Souza & Serra, 2020), the military indoctrination and normalization of hierarchies within police institutions (de Lima & Barros Geraldo, 2022), or the international circulation of military knowledges and policing strategies (Hoelscher & Norheim-Martensen, 2014; Grassiani & Müller, 2019). In the midst of the return of the armed forces in Latin America, civilian control of military institutions in Brazil is often seen as being unfinished, and armed forces taking over domestic policing functions is seen as a necessary “lesser evil” (Diamint, 2015; Phillips, 2018).

Such deployment is not surprising given Latin America’s widespread tendency to reproduce the conditions of “violent democracies” (Goldstein & Arias, 2010). In these, “the police, far from being a solution, have become part of the problem due to corruption and a lack of preparedness” owing to a situation in which “Latin American populations place consistently higher trust in the military than in the police” (Jenne & Martinez, 2021, p. 58). Attitudes that support war-like interventions can be accounted for as resulting from the deeply rooted personal connections between Military Police and organized crime and the region’s history with the armed forces’ focus on defending infrastructures and resources against internal enemies (Kruijt, 2017).

The fact that during Bolsonaro’s presidency we can observe the highest number of higher military personnel in political positions since the country’s transition to democracy in the 1980s is also telling for such re-militarization. To this day, the relationship of the armed forces with political leaders remains complexly close (Harig, 2022). Consequently, acceptance of measures such as the Law and Order decree (GLO, introduced above) in 2018 by the larger share of society stands in contrast with a broadly spread and deep mistrust in state security agents in Brazil—as expressed in the abovementioned poll—it seems that public opinion assumes that although a violent society cannot be cured by increasing the presence of arms and the executive power on the streets, the military, as an institution, is nevertheless the most credible reinforcement of the polity’s executive branch.

The deployment of GLO-backed interventions can then be accounted for as a performance of force by a seemingly reliable institution. Such performance furthers militarization as “acceptance”: “Militarization refers to a multifaceted social process by which military approaches to social problems gain elite and popular acceptance” (Flusty et al., 2008, p. 625). Seen as a discursive event, such interventions then attempt to reinforce the public conviction that behind the walls of military quarters, there sits an armed force always ready to be deployed when things (criminal violence, police violence, or corruption) get out of the hands of public security agents. In addition to the mere material presence of weapons and soldiers in the streets of Rio de Janeiro, such symbolic retaking of urban space by the military, subjecting it to a potential battlefield, thus also shifts the widespread perception of a potentially strong state and the possibility to reduce police or criminal violence.

The militarization of police work, seemingly supporting the above-stated paradox of a non-war situation, also permeates the attitudes of police personnel. A huge majority of police officers has described their work as taking place in a war-like situation. Their quotidian work on the streets consisted in directed, weaponized confrontations with “enemies,” that is, criminals, suggesting a prevalent “warrior ethos” among Rio de Janeiro’s police (Costa Neto, 2022). The Military Police, despite attempts to “civilize” the institution from training up to practice and administration of policing, continues to work within a strict military mindset (Storani, 2008).

A third modality of security governance arrangements is closely related to the arrego practice—the informal institution of partly skimming of traffickers’ profit by police officers (Cano, 2013)—and to the warrior mentality: a “tirania miliciana” now prevails in many places in the metropolitan area of Rio de Janeiro (Soares, 2019, p. 18). Different from the arrego, the “militia tyranny” consists in criminal organizations becoming more broadly engaged in establishing local protection rackets in combination with the installation of a set of diverse business activities, from urban services (gas, electricity, transport), through land-grabbing and real estate activities. The activities of the “militias” have been constantly widening into a full set of urban development-related capacities (Araujo & Petti, 2022). Yet, their emergence in the country’s southern urban centers, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, began in the 1950s when vigilantes and private armies started to undertake crime-fighting missions (Paes Manso, 2020). For a portion of society, illegal vigilante attacks of parapolice groups on thieves and criminal suspects were however justified. Nevertheless, positive expectations as to the legitimate law-and-order principles—self-justice—exercised by “militias” quickly ended (Tinoco et al., 2018). Thieves and tiny drug traffickers started to show up dead and marked with a symbol identifying the people who carried out their assassination. These early militia forces also engaged in the extortion of their victim’s enemies and demanded a cut of the money made from trafficking (Misse, 2018).

The “militias” of Rio de Janeiro are often defined not as “parallel” to state power but as “state power itself” (Souza Alves, 2019b), militarizing security by placing military or ex-military personnel in informal security governance arrangements. Active and retired police officers and young adults hired to operate as vigilantes often form these groups. The “militia,” then, is not opposed to the armed forces, but rather linked to a hybrid mode of security governance. While some authors assume that the incomplete democratization of Brazil can serve as explanans for the militarization of public security (Suarez et al., 2021), such argumentation falls short of explaining how the militarization of security is linked to popular support and correlated attitudes. Militarism then must be searched for elsewhere, outside of, or at least in addition to the proximity of the armed forces or, more broadly, of law enforcement, to the state’s governing executive.

In view of the above, the remainder of this paper aims to turn toward militarism as a mode of governing violence and crime based on the idea of confrontation, which adopts the logic of war and the notion of “enemy” (Suarez et al., 2021). Within an urban security discourse, oppositions of good versus bad, binarily denoting who is the enemy, sustain political positions that demand strong-arm responses and the deployment of increased violence. However, such strong-arm discourse in Rio de Janeiro rarely conceives of “militias” as the state’s enemy, contrarily to drug traffickers. A strong-arm approach sustains and is sustained by the “militia’s” militarized mode of governance. I wish to further tease out such different situatedness or embeddedness of “militias” within urban society along the personal interconnections, urban developmental activities, and terrain-shaping activities in the empirical section further below.

Methodology

This paper builds on two types of data sets. The first consists of archival work from media outlets, including videos, newspaper articles, and podcasts, spanning from late 2018 until Summer 2022. I searched the archives of two influential cross-regional newspapers (O Globo and Folha) for information on “militia” in Rio de Janeiro’s peripheries. I also searched for the emergence of urban developmental activities ascribed to the presence of organized crime to militias. For such, I expanded the time range of my archival searches until the beginning of the 1990s. The first associations of urban development and military signifiers were found in the early 2000s, including development-specific notions such as loteamento (land subdivisions), grilagem (land grabbing), reassentamento (population resettlement), areas de risco (risk areas), and inundação (flooding). The second set of data includes interviews and walk-along interviews with residents, politicians, researchers, journalists, and local activists, as well as my own observations during research stays in the Baixada Fluminense in 2019 and 2022.

Analysis proceeded deductively along the pre-established categories that guided preselection of relevant articles, followed by an inductive approach to reconstruct larger categories related to urban development, militarization, and transversal links between formal state and illicit actors. Depending on the social position of the articulating subject, the signifier “militia” is used to describe and valuate different practices, fluctuating between positively applauded law-and-order policing, through denouncing the corruption of formal politics, to alerting of informal service provision in the urban peripheries. Examining “militia” as a floating signifier means dissecting its internal fragmentation and differentiation. This is also a viable way to study the militarization of society and to retrofit the initially cited normalization of a “non-war” situation.

After discerning the diverse practices ascribed to the actor “militia,” I wish to add a critical angle to such discursive production by attending to the social embeddedness of the fragmented set of actors referred to as “militia.” For such, I will turn to the military-like terrain-shaping operations of “militias” which motivated me to suggest the term “armed developer.” This caters both to the social embeddedness and to the now observed diversification of practices. The wide range of practices exercised by the armed developers encompasses construction, laying of infrastructure, and landscaping, all associated with these strongmen’s widely recognized relations to local politicians.

Military, Militias, and Urban Development in Brazil

How can we analyze the involvement of state and non-state actors in urban development in ways that allow for a better understanding of the complex process of militarism that affects people in their everyday lives? This question has received little attention despite important work of scholars showing the historical roots of such mutually beneficiary, violent liaisons, and observing that in Latin America, “personal rulers used the army, the political police and death squads to maintain order and assure obedience” (Kruijt, 2017, p. 12). Urban peripheries of Latin American cities have often been studied as space for informal security arrangements. More generally, the production of urban space has for long been conceived as being coterminous with the establishing of state sovereignty (Davis, 2020), involving an illicit side within planning procedures and in construction (Chiodelli, 2019; Koivu, 2018). Thus, those liaisons can be traced as forming within, and therefore being constitutive of, urban development.

To recall a widely discussed example, according to investigations of the Prosecutor’s Office in the State of Rio de Janeiro, Flavio Bolsonaro—former Brazilian President Jair Messias Bolsonaro’s oldest son and senator of the Liberal Party in Rio de Janeiro—redirected public funds for investment in real estate developments in Muzema, a residential area in the west of the city. The investment supported the illegal and unlicensed construction of condominiums for low-income clients (Ramalho, 2020). The construction was executed by “militias,” armed racketeers, which have expanded their economic portfolio from acting as death squads to protection and extortion more broadly, and now included urban services like real estate construction. This case received much public attention when two of these condominiums collapsed in 2019, killing 24 inhabitants.

In response to this spectacular involvement of organized crime in illicit urban production, the UPPs (Pacifying Police Units) successor program Cidade Integrada was launched at the beginning of 2022. Following the militarized approach of Rio’s pacification program (Rocha, 2019), the Military Police, initially supported by specially trained shock units, the abovementioned BOPE, aimed at taking over or, as public media qualified it, “occupied” areas located in Rio de Janeiro’s western districts that were not only marketed and controlled by “militias” and factions, but also partly constructed by the former.

As militarization pervades the social life and civil construction in urban peripheries, the complex link between state sovereignty and alternative authorities also diversifies. While criminal governance is predominantly authored by armed criminal groups when these “set and enforce rules, provide security and other basic services—such as water, electricity, or internet access—in an urban area, which may be a part or the whole of an informal settlement or a neighborhood” (Sampaio, 2021, p. 2), criminal groups are also linked to state officials. Criminal governance is not an alternative mode of governing people and territory but should be conceived as embedded in ongoing negotiations and violent contestations of territorial expansion (Davis & Denyer Willis, 2015; Ferreira & Gonçalves, 2022).

Police and tax authorities, and in the case of urban development in marginalized territories also their respective municipal secretaries, are present in quotidian issues. And so are other authorities, which are not always opposed to state authorities, that is, the police, tax authorities, or municipal secretaries. Rather, literature observes sometimes “cooperative crime–state arrangements based on corruption, alliance against other armed threats, or outright crime–state integration” (Lessing, 2021, p. 855). Such “collaborations” (Arias, 2019; Magaloni et al., 2019) can also lead to situations in which criminal actors benefit from state interventions and investments, often in return for corrupt flows, a crime problem often observed in favelas (Arias & Barnes, 2016) as well as in social housing developments (ISER, 2018).

“Militias” had not only learnt how to get a grip on drug traffickers, and thereby to extend the arm of the Military Police, but also how to extract financial benefit from this activity, basing their support less on violent extortion and more on public support for being an ambiguous and unaccountable, yet lesser, evil. In short, what is today considered “militia” resembles military tactics, as when “militias” are informal armed formations made up of police officers or military personnel who are primarily motivated by rent-seeking objectives. By providing protection, they established security, ensured law and order, and gained some credibility (CPI, 2008).

Militarism is well seated in the militias’ ambiguous relation with state security agents and within the political spectrum. Although military interventions in urban space have occurred throughout Brazil’s young post-dictatorship democratic history and relatively independently from the political color of changing administrations, violent confrontations between the Military Police and citizens have sparked since the right-wing took over the federal and state level in Rio de Janeiro. Three of the deadliest chacinas (police-authored massacres) in the state of Rio de Janeiro occurred in the past 2 years (Paes Manso, 2022). Rio’s recently re-elected governor, Claudio Castro (Partido Liberal, PL) applauded these and other confrontations, calling out a more systematized war against organized crime (UOL, 2022). Additionally, in Rio de Janeiro, police raids against organized crime occur disproportionally more often in areas controlled by drug trafficking groups than in those that are controlled by “militias” (Hirata et al., 2022).

This suggests that “militias” are well tied to state security via informal and often localized security arrangements—an observation that is brilliantly documented in Paes Manso’s investigation on Rio de Janeiro’s “militias” (2020). Such informal security arrangements and their militarized character unfold territorially, involving actor-specific histories and practices. “Militias” are not only often directly employed in formal security institutions, the police, or armed forces; they are also historically rooted in military-like law-and-order, crime-fighting ideologies (Souza Alves, 2019a). “Militias” are furthermore an executive power that expands control over the population by taking over civic responsibilities of urban development.

Studying “militias” and their embeddedness in informal security and urban development arrangements allows me to address civic support for military attitudes. For such, I build on recent research within the subfield of Military Geographies that suggests that “to truly grasp the importance of these phenomena we must focus on the people, and the places, which militarism affects, and the processes of militarization through which it is constituted and expressed” (Rech et al., 2015, p. 57). Following this suggestion, below we will focus on places and people. My focus lies more on how “militias” are involved in the resettlement from riverbanks to social housing developments, in running construction firms, or sand transport vessels, and less—however desirable it may be—on unpacking the individual figures that are called “milicianos” and their personal relationship to elected officials (but see Filho, 2018).

Hirata et al. (2022) show that, at present, popular opinion sees “militias” as predominant occupiers of urban territory in the metropolitan areas of Rio de Janeiro and ruling most of their population. The authors conclude that “the expansion of militias is the most relevant phenomenon to think about the armed conflicts in the Metropolitan Region of Rio de Janeiro.” The municipality of Rio and the Baixada Fluminense (BF) are the regions in which the expansion of “militias” is most concentrated; however, more than 91% of territorial expansion occurs in so far non-weaponized territories. In other words, “militias” today do not necessarily expand the territory under their control through turf wars against drug trafficking factions. Differently from the time of their shift from death squads to local law-and-order armies, “militias” are now more often related to illegal land invasions and land cleansing or grabbing (grilagem)—see details in the next section. This suggests that we need to trace the qualification of such militarized activities in terms of spatial occupation but also through the very means that materially sustain such expanding territorial control—that is, urban development.

Non-State Military Actors in Rio: Emerging Militias

Today’s “militias” have emerged from what was earlier referred to as Esquadrão da Morte (Death Squads), became Grupos de Exterminio and later a political institution embedded in criminal governance structures. My focus leans toward the study of militias’ military mode of governance, looks at the history of this actor, and unpacks its fragmentary history of development. In this way, I am following a recent emphasis on the spatiality of militarization as part of the agenda of critical military studies, peculiarly within human geography (Rech et al., 2015; Basham et al., 2015; Gordillo, 2023). I am interested in the new geographical practices as well as the role of terrain-shaping, landscape-shifting practices, that is, the spatiality of militarism. I do so drawing on the example of the northern peripheral region of Rio de Janeiro, largely metropolitan, the Baixada Fluminense.

The Baixada Fluminense (literally River Lowlands) is a space of industrial and urban development with a history of violence that connects old property distribution and violent attempts to maintain inequality. It comprises 13 municipalities, stretching north of the city of Rio de Janeiro toward Serra do Tinguá and limiting south-easterly to the Guanabara Bay. The “militias’” activities are diverse and not only cause environmental harm but also link in with the local political establishment in the BF. Washington Reis, former mayor of Duque de Caxias—a municipality adjacent to the city of Rio de Janeiro—was convicted for covering up environmental crime in a natural reserve in the state (MPF, 2016). He also backed his brother’s illegal construction in the Tinguá area, an important water reserve in the same region. But it was only just before the past elections in which he ran for vice-governor with elected Claudio Castro that criminal investigation forced Reis to step down from all political office (Agencia do Brasil, 2022).

Differing from earlier debates on paramilitaries or “militias,” which define the latter as a strong arm of state-sanctioned terror, nurturing private armies (Tapscott, 2019), Rio de Janeiro’s “militias” have ventured into civil sectors, first and foremost construction and urban development. They are thus less the earlier Grupos de Exterminio or Death Squads (Souza Alves, 2019a); they are institutionally seated within formal politics and embedded in everyday forms of urban production. As Souza Alves repeated during an interview, in short, “the state is the militia. They are created by state agents themselves. In one person, or a small network, you’ll find a militia member, a murderer, a deputy, and a counselor.”

The involvement of “militias” in urban development can be deduced by examining the telephone hotline, Disque Denuncia, along three development-related categories—illegal extraction of soil, invasion of terrain, and irregular constructions. Out of 170 cases of illegal soil extraction reported in 2009, only 6 were explicitly related to “militias,” whereas in 2019, out of 934 reported cases, 102 mentioned the term. A strong increase in invasions from 2009 (1217 cases) to 2019 (2015 cases) accompanied an increase in instances of “militias” behind the cases: in 2009, 115 cases were registered compared to 250 cases in 2019. A similar tendency concerns irregular constructions: 1962 cases in 2009, of which 25 were related to “militias,” increasing up to 2065 cases in 2019, of which 130 were related to “militias.”

The more frequent naming of “militias” in the reports does not necessarily mean that “militias” are more actively present in these areas but that they have come to be a more widely recognized actor. However, one can assume that the reports are informed by public debates and personal experiences with militant, armed, and collectively organized actors.

Weaponizing Social Housing

As mentioned with regard to the situation of “non-war” characterized in the GLO directive, various military interventions and combats between factions and the Military Police are a part of the everyday security situation in Rio de Janeiro. The presence of “militias” further undermining access to land and housing complicate the everyday lives of urban residents in this situation. Particularly for urbanites on the lower income strata, the weaponization of urban development goes directly against the heart of social welfare measures and granted citizenship rights as institutionalized in the Brazilian Constitution of 1988. The Brazilian Constitution guarantees a right to housing. The City Statute (Estatuto da Cidade) further reinforces the social function of property (Lopes Martins 2019; Ondetti, 2016), balancing an individual’s right to property against an obligation to make use of the commodity in favor of the wider society. However, the witnessed expansion of armed actors constitutes a serious threat to the ways this right can be claimed and implemented, with regard to both the territories and the population.

Elsewhere I have argued that as organized criminal groups weaponize housing—expanding illegal markets to social housing developments and turning these into battlegrounds in territorial confrontations—the aims of social housing policies are further challenged (Müller, 2022). Within this militarized urban development, the house plays a central role not only as a place of protection but also as a place from where to interfere in local politics (Müller, 2020). My focus here lies on this aspect of militarized urban development, the production of urban space by shaping terrain, creating new frontiers of urban expansion, and improving management abilities over local populations.

An additional way by which “militias” are reportedly expanding their spatial influence and economic revenue basis is via direct influence in social housing condominiums. By naming this practice the weaponization of housing, I refer to the many reports of weapons being present in social housing condominiums carried by local private security companies, which thereby expand their known form of control over favelas (Zaluar & Conceição, 2007). Media reports frequently demonstrate that “militias” are invading condominiums subsidized by the federal housing program Minha Casa Minha Vida (MCMV; Folha, 2018) and installing protection rackets by “offering” their security services (Extra, 2019), which make up the security “militia’s” central good for sale. In addition, groups or individuals referred to as “militias” in residents’ reports violently expulse residents or, in other cases, establish a local sales and rental market (Exame, 2015). Since the sale of an apartment by the program’s beneficiary is not possible prior to a certain timeframe, usually 10 years after receiving the apartment, residents who need to move away consider they have no choice but to deal with the illicit real estate company.

While, reportedly, 60% of 388 social housing developments in the state of Rio de Janeiro is controlled by “milicianos” (O Globo 23/12/2021), confrontations between the Military Police and the “militia” on the matter of irregular invasions are rare. This can be explained by the personal entanglements resulting from the fact that Military Police officials own the unlicensed buildings. Such seemingly peaceful liaison is often explained by the deeply embedded presence of militias, which supposedly guarantees enforcement of law and order. In other instances of weaponized social housing developments, resettled individuals become subject to territorial conflicts between rivaling groups.

“Militia” governance in MCMV takes on various forms: they are involved in resettlement (see next section), strangulate access to urban utilities (Pierobon, 2021), and, as it is the case of the recently imprisoned former city counselor Davi Brasil Caetano (Avante), monetarize their influence in social housing condominiums. In Duque de Caxias, a municipality adjacent to Rio de Janeiro, the “militia” has been able to keep one block of a nine-block MCMV social housing development uninhabited despite huge necessity and right of residents living in close-by risk areas. The decision to first resettle a community settling on another river (which was no less exposed to floods but nevertheless not originally foreseen as a development project) was based on close personal ties between a local resident, acting as spokesperson for the community, and the public institutions organizing the resettlement: “When we were moved here, it was not the president of our neighborhood association who became employed as síndico [building manager]. It was X who took the position. He arranged himself well with those of the other sections [the whole development consists of three sections with three blocks each],” recalls one participant of the focus groups (all in their 60s and 70s and with a long trajectory of living in the neighborhood). The respondent expresses her surprise to the choice of X as new síndico since, naturally, this should have been someone who had held a leading role in the community. Yet, with resettlement, the main ruling party had split from the faction, Comando Vermelho, to which they had formerly belonged. And with that change in ruling structure, the building manager was replaced.

Another participant goes on to explain that “we knew that that guy [now building manager] has been behind the resettlement for a longer time, but he did not inform us well.” Among the community’s residents some were more in favor of being resettled than others, depending on how high they themselves estimated the value of their house, an aspect rarely considered in the implementation of resettlement orders (but see Araujo & Petti, 2022). However, despite month-long rumors about the projected resettlement, residents remained uninformed as to the concrete day of their removal until one morning the municipality’s trucks arrived unannounced to rehouse the community, one household and their belongings after another. Thus, in seemingly clandestine negotiations, local leaders—referred to as “militias”—remain crucial in the implementation of local development projects, and the historically established positions of social power were unsettled with resettlement to social housing developments.

This suggests that, in the negotiations between government officials and local strongmen, apartments in social housing developments turn into a currency and a game changer. In an interview, a social worker for the Secretary for Urban Development of Nova Iguaçu, capital of the equally named municipality, mentioned the effect of such unsettling of hierarchies in social housing condominiums on the beneficiaries of social housing programs. Cases of residents that are being resettled from a drug faction-controlled favela and into a militia-controlled housing development fall under her responsibility. I interviewed four out of the five people whose case the social worker accompanied at the time (March 2019). Their stories were most telling in the sense that “militias” used their control over who may live in a condominium to expand their territorial influence. As one respondent having moved recently from one condo to another explained,

The militia here know everyone. My personal safety was no longer guaranteed. Friends warned me first and then the guys came and said, “We don’t want you here,” and I answered that I had nowhere to go. They didn’t care and said I had to leave. So, I went to the secretary [for Urban Development].

The respondent refers to his background: Having formerly lived in a neighborhood controlled by a rivaling faction, the “militia,” whose group in control he named, forced him out of the apartment. In this case, the respondent was not able, even illegally, to sell the apartment to the group. He had to leave fast, and under such exceptional circumstances, received a substitute apartment.

The four interviews all revealed similar complications and conflicts. The armed groups provide apartments to their clientele, threatening out those who they consider as enemies, regardless of what such “enemy” has or hasn’t done, and to what extent, or whether they had been involved at all in rivaling activities: they must leave. Thus, the “militias” weaponize social housing by controlling access to the apartments, not only in immediate physical ways by standing guard at the entrance but also by direct involvement in resettlement processes and forced evictions. Exact numbers about how many apartments the “militias” possess, however, are not (yet) available (see also Araujo, 2019, p. 170). Yet, given the reported involvement of “militias” in urban development, it is safe to say that they do limit equal access to housing and thus further marginalize citizenship in the areas under their control.

Terrain-Shaping as Militarized Urban Development

Turning to local scales, and avoiding another simplifying reiteration of terms, I highlight the “militia’s” involvement in urban development by coining the term “armed developer.” With this, I emphasize that their secure embeddedness in local urbanization projects allows this actor to militarize urban production. Armed developers perform and gain in political authority by shaping terrain in illicit ways.

Terrain is a key term in physical and critical military geography (Gordillo, 2018). Terrain is a “relation of power, with a heritage in geology and the military, the control of which allows the establishment and maintenance of order” (Elden, 2010, p. 804). Terrain materializes power and political and economic intentions, knowledges, and practices of governing people. Knowledge of urban terrain is, as military strategists have it, crucial for successful military, police, and humanitarian activities of armed forces (Sullivan, 2022). Defined by their multi-party, distributed complexity, operations in urban terrain demand good knowledge of local support structures and liabilities between strongmen and clientele which “set the conditions for maneuver by military forces in a megacity” (Frerichs, 2019, p. 114). The notion of terrain draws attention to the materiality of such military interventions and conditions these in unexpected and unintended ways.

In Rio’s margins, urban terrain plays a crucial role in the armed developers’ attempts to create new frontiers of urban expansion. In civil construction and infrastructural provision, armed developers do not only shape terrain as a way of expanding territorial control. Terrain also poses resistance to their control. Floods, unstable, swampy ground, or the necessity to drain and to carry material for landfills offer opportunities for militarized activities. Mimicking the territorial practices of the armed forces, armed developers are organizing territorial control to secure their own dominance and keep out the enemy, that is, competing criminal groups.

They constitute their portfolio in response to the necessities that arise from terrain: In the flood- and rain-prone Baixada Fluminense with its many rivers, and thus a terrain with rich vegetation and high phreatic surface (Brito, 2019), expanding territorial influence depends on the massive movement of soil, rubble, and gravel. In late 2019, illegal sand mines in Xerem, a municipality of the Baixada, were shut down by the armed forces. Many of them belonged to “milicianos,” as the local media put it, and, as rumor had it, to local politicians (Ramadon, 2021). The armed forces were called to shut down pits and to destroy heavy carving machinery after a long process of collecting proof and preparing the legal case by an engaged liaison of a state attorney and local activists (Müller, 2021 and Müller, 2022). Prior to this military intervention, attempts were less successful:

Until today what was done was: the police would go there with the inspector of the State Institute of the Environment and arrest the people who were extracting sand illegally. Then, this generated criminal proceedings that ended up getting cold because generally these people were just workers and effectively did not control the business. So that was not effective. (Julio Araujo, then Federal State Attorney in Meriti, BF)

This more profound intervention was necessary not only to chase away workers but also to threaten the strongmen behind the activity. In addition to the physical destruction of machinery by “bombing,” the intervention had to personally catch the upper ranks of sand mining firms (interview with Araujo, May 2022). The personnel, however, had their leaks in local Military Police institutions, as the attorney explained: “They must have known of the planned intervention. Despite having kept it secret and having an intervention early in the morning, some of the machinery had been removed just the day before” (ibid.). Sand extraction as an activity to broaden power is related to further urbanization activities. One reason for this is that sand is needed to provide material for filling otherwise flood-prone areas in the BF. In addition to rubble, sand is being carried to swamps and riverbanks to prepare these spaces, although they are risk areas, for construction of housing units (Müller, 2021).

More broadly speaking, however, such molding of terrain is a militarized activity: “The militiaman is a geographer, messing with the landscape” (Interview with M, March 2022), states local activist M involved in the sand mining case and working with families to be rehoused. As we drive along the riverbank of the Iguaçu River and further through some of the communities that form the neighborhood of São Bento in Duque de Caxias, I converse with X, a local social activist supporting the case against environmental crimes in the area. Illegal urban expansions toward the riverbanks, landfills, and civil constructions on polders and the exploitation of clay have transformed the swampy area into a now ever more densely urbanized periphery. Despite concerted efforts by activists and the state prosecutor’s office to contain these urbanization activities and to resettle populations living in flood-prone areas to state-financed social housing compounds, “militias,” as X refers to them, continue the urban expansion.

This civic construction undermines attempts to formalize urban development through the implementation of Projeto Iguaçu. The Iguaçu Project is a disaster prevention plan financed by Brazil’s federal Growth Acceleration Program (INEA, 2010). As such, it forms part of a wider economic strategy, summarized under the term of “novo desenvolvimentismo” (new developmentalism), a state-centered strategy to hype the global competitiveness of national industries (Bresser-Pereira, 2020). The Iguaçu Project aims to guarantee environmental protection, flood prevention, and infrastructural development, connecting major industrial hubs and international harbors, such as in the nearby Itaguaí (Tinoco, 2019). In addition, the program foresaw urban integration of the BF municipalities by constructing roads along waterways, the rivers Sarapui and Iguaçu. Complicating issues, these riverbanks had been inhabited for decades and were controlled by organized criminal groups, some by the Comando Vermelho and others by “militias,” according to the Secretary of Urban Planning and Infrastructure of Duque de Caxias (Interview with Secretary of Urban Planning and Infrastructure, Duque de Caxias, April 2019).

The observation that armed developers actively take part in such state-centered development project is widely spread also among government functionaries. In an interview, the secretary demonstrated his data base on infrastructural and land development in the Baixada Fluminense, including Project Iguaçu. As the secretary explained, organizational difficulties and negotiations with these groups had delayed the project’s conclusion for years; yet, urban expansion in the area north and south of the river Iguaçu were ongoing, fortifying riverbanks for later constructions. These were put forward by construction firms and companies interested in providing urban utilities not only despite but because of the expectable resettlement efforts. As a member of the local group of activists representing the case of the to-be-resettled communities at the riverbank of Sarapui said in an interview:

“Many see no alternative but to buy from these guys. You simply accept the best offer. And you think you cannot lose: You buy cheap, and even when you are buying into a risk area, that is actually an advantage – they fake the papers [the title, a common practice is to maintain an archive of falsified ownership of a place over the years, called grilagem] and so [their clients] earn the privilege of receiving an apartment in the social housing program.” (Interview with C, April 2022)

Interviews with residents demonstrated reluctance to name “militia” as being the authority behind such activities—either due to fear or because of direct personal involvement in treats of land and houses. Nevertheless, military terms are frequently employed by residents referring to developmental activities, such as in “There is a new invasion there further down the road” (Interview with R, April 2022). They also show that residents are well informed about combative territorial takeovers, such as in “We live in this section which is rather peaceful,” adding that peace came along with the provision of asphalt and public lighting (Interview with L, April 2022). However, and directly pointing to the link between war/peace, socio-spatial antagonisms, and urban development, the interviewee continues: “We are more consolidated than that section there. The guys are not investing in improvements there any longer, since families were to be reseated away from there” (ibid.). The respondent referred here to a promised collective rehousing of about 70 families into the nearby social housing development, which never occurred.

Regarding the case of surprise resettlement introduced above, the local strongmen had managed to sublet the apartments to that group of families living in a different risk area; using their ties with local politicians and employees in the Secretary for Urban Development, they have been able to rehouse their clientele to apartments that had (also) been promised to that other group. Referring to the contested distribution of apartments in the nearby constructed MCMV developments, the above cited Secretary described his work as “peace talks” in which “you have to assume a neutral position, in-between different opposing factions. And then there is the militia that secures frontiers to those other areas” (Interview Secretary for Urban Development, 2019). By “other territories,” the interviewee referred to areas which drug trafficking factions dominated at the time. Differently from the case with these factions, the secretary assigned a certain reliability to their opponents, the local “militia,” stating that “with them we have always come to a good result” (ibid.).

In the interview, the secretary uses a map to distinguish the territorial influence of said actors. He refers to the dividing line of the river to demarcate different strategies in dealing with these. To such acknowledgement of the terrain-specific elements that underpin the negotiations in the area, the interview allows to highlight the conditioning effect on the militarization of urban development. This includes the terrain-shaping activities of moving soil from one place (a sand mine) to another, a swampy area. Beyond the economic benefit of sand extraction, such molding of terrain is also a way to perform and materialize territorial influence; on top, designing an area to be further developed for habitation, including infrastructural development and housing construction, is a practice of spatial planning through which armed developers take a stronger position in local, criminal governance. These urban planning practices, however, did not only occupy, but also produce terrain: Armed developers mold the terrain under their control, modify the riverbanks, and by doing so, build the unstable ground of their political basis in the area.

Urban development, then, unfolds on a battlefield on which state-sanctioned armed developers are being catered to as facilitators of large-scale infrastructural projects. The goals of urban development—infrastructural provision and industrial integration into (global) value chains—seem to justify negotiations with armed developers, like in the reported narrative. With growing interdependencies of terrain-shaping, urban development and non-state armed exercise of control suggest that urban development is becoming more militarized.

Conclusion: Weaponizing Urban Development

Despite the differences in a changing conundrum of meanings, the use of the signifier “militia” in quotidian mediatic and academic discourse exerts its meaning in referring to an unstable, uncertainty-raising, often violent destabilization of urban development. The reference to “militias” is crucial in the narrative of urban development processes, bridging seemingly antagonistic positions. On the ground of political struggles in Rio’s periphery, the signifier bundles a cluster of meanings that together characterize a so-perceived exclusionary, sometimes threatening urban development. Independently of its internal fragmentation in referring to a broad set of activities and actors, “militia” has a politically empowering value, becoming the common referent for denouncing not only criminal, but bellicose, militant forms of urbanization.

Within this homogenizing process, the signifier encompasses internal antagonisms, characterizing everyday situations of “non-war.” Notable examples of such antagonisms are: the separation of “militias” as a distinct actor from the wider population; the separation of “militias” from “the state,” being its opponent and “the other” of a formal polity; and the militarization of development by polarizing communities and neighborhoods. These “totalizing” operations (Laclau, 2007, p. 70) and the construction of frontiers between the othered poles play a constitutive role in the fostering of bellicose attitudes. On the one hand, drug trafficking factions and formal law enforcement (military and civil police) define an external position for the “militias.” While reference to the former acts discursively as the enemy of the efforts of the “militias,” legitimizing their position in urban security production in the eyes of some, the latter enters more complex relations, between collusion and infiltration to law-enforcing intervention. On the other hand, the process of constituting the signifier “militia” shows internal differentiation: A section of workers does the landfills, threatening residents of MCMV condos out of their apartments, while a representative leads the negotiations about resettlements with formal government officials.

With the aim of grasping the involvement of “militias” in urban development, I introduced the term “armed developer.” Armed developers emerge from the studied context as authors of bellicose land-grabbing, terrain-shaping activities, in addition to their personal close ties to positions of political power. Armed development is an important driver of the militarization of urban Brazil, spatializing the paradoxical state of “non-war” beyond formal military interventions. Despite the paper’s local perspective, this reflection on the internally fragmented yet externally homogenizing signifier “militia” offers broader takeaways for military geographies and literatures on criminal governance beyond urban Brazil.

Firstly, studying the militarization of urban development goes beyond conceptualizations of territory as passive container. Literatures on criminal governance, and on militarization, frequently localize contested authority in urban space, yet do not include urban territories’ physical and material conditions as variables that shape these contestations (Abello-Colak & Guarneros-Meza, 2014; Arias, 2019; Arias & Barnes, 2016). In turn, approaches to hybrid governance (Villa et al., 2021; Colona & Jaffe, 2016) do not consider the way in which terrain, architectures or other spatial materialities shape such governance arrangements (but see Scott, 2016; Pinzon and Mantilla, 2021). My examination of terrain as a dynamic political materiality has built on conceptual reflections within political geography. Following Elden’s call to look at the physical and geological conditions of terrain as a governing technology that shape contestations, negotiations, and collaborations of diverse governing actors emphasizes space as a condition of criminal governance. Spatial analysis, then, is critical to understand the militarization of criminal governance and, more generally, highlights the critical potential of political geography as a subdiscipline to understand how space reconfigures criminal and security governance.

I have shown how terrain acquires meaning as a vehicle to conduct urban combat. As a spatial practice, the transformation of terrain calls onto the stage a set of armed, illicit actors well embedded within formal political institutions; in such collusions, terrain is a political materiality, nurturing struggles from below: Residents and activists denounce illicit expansions into natural reserves conducted by armed developers. Yet, their activities often occur under the tolerating eye of formal government officials or, as in the abovementioned cases, in direct collaboration with them. As armed developers benefit from the uncertainty of populations to be resettled, holding these on standby, they also benefit from the unstable characteristics of the terrain: A so-defined risk area offers the armed developer ways to expand the basis of their economic income while the very flood-proneness is what they can use in negotiating the conditions of resettlements with formal officials.

Secondly, the closer look into the spatial practices of criminal governance suggests an agency-based, rather than an actor-based approach to urban development. Acting through diverse ways and with distinct strategies and objectives, the set of activities by which I characterize the armed developer, the latter simulates a project of state formation in the urban periphery of Rio de Janeiro. Conceived in this way, militarized urban space production is an expression and a claim of symbolic and material “infrastructural power” (Mann, 1987), sustaining and normalizing bellicose attitudes. State territory, in this sense, is co-produced by heterogeneous claims of authority, including paramilitary activity. I call the weaponization of urban development the increasingly perceived involvement of potentially armed actors in urban development. This is a form of othering which serves to criminalize certain activities and localize crime toward the margins of the city, nurturing bellicose thinking in everyday space and in public security debates.

Highlighting armed development as a differential activity that involves military, economic, and political interests, I thus propose that urban development serves for “making spaces governable” (Ballvé, 2012, p. 603). While armed developers do not follow or directly support longue durée state-formation objectives, but rather engage in ad hoc and more spontaneous local alliances similar to “non-state armed actors” whose state-formation capacity is thus questionable (Davis 2010; Koivu, 2018), they are nevertheless forming part of an “embedded” criminal governance arrangement (Lessing, 2021). As such, they produce on-the-ground or on-the-terrain facts which a “formal” urban development following democratically sanctioned development plans could not produce to a similar extent.

Thirdly, the present paper suggests thinking about territorial sovereignty through terrain’s political materiality. Bringing in critical geographical conceptualizations of territory into debates of (urban) criminal governance allows for future empirically informed analysis of militarized interventions into public security and narratives of securitization from around the world. As literature on historical state formation has it, the evolution of modern states depended on symbiotic relationships with “criminal” groups (Andreas, 2013; Tilly, 2017). This is not a concluded process. Armed developers mimic military practices and further spur bellicose thinking as constitutive of domestic peace. In this encounter of modernization-oriented urban development and informal, mostly illicit government structures, the material production of urban space depends on violent intermediation techniques observed in many parts of the globe (Lebas, 2013; Bartu, 2000; Blok, 1974; Volkov, 2002). Weaponized development, conditioning access to state-subsidized aid via housing, and permeating urban planning, servicing, pavement, and sanitation in areas that are not designated for urbanization in official development plans constitutes an interstitial moment between war and non-war.