This article examines Brazilian media reports on two incidents in Rio de Janeiro in the 1990s, arguing that reports on these events were turning points in the emergence of a discourse of crime that has come to shape how residents of Rio de Janeiro understand and experience violence. Newspaper and magazine articles on a 1992 beachside mugging incident and the Brazilian army's 1994 occupation of several of Rio's poor neighbourhoods are examined as cultural texts through which violence becomes culturally imaginable and new discourses of social difference emerge. The article shows how reports on crime came to constitute a neo-racist discourse centred on images of infection and the creation of social stigmata according to spatial, and not primarily racial, criteria. The key shift in this discourse of crime is from a hegemonic national narrative that celebrated mixing and transgression to one where social and urban boundaries are increasingly impermeable, and transgression is seen as dangerous and threatening.
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