Form and Failure: Notes on State Violence in Rio de Janeiro

Regarding what is happening in Rio de Janeiro, and let it be clear from the outset, I am not only talking about today's mega police operation, nor about specific governments that imagine they can solve a structural problem with confrontation strategies and seizure statistics. Rather, I am talking about the way the Brazilian state, and particularly the state of Rio de Janeiro, has acted in the field of public security since at least the time of Leonel Brizola. Or even before him.

There is something paradoxical in this debate: the consensus, both on the left and the right, that the State holds the monopoly on the legitimate use of force—a concept that Max Weber enshrined in 1918—seems to have become an alibi for the reproduction of violence and not for its control. Weber said that the State is the human community that, within a territory, claims for itself the monopoly on legitimate physical coercion. But, if the monopoly of force becomes a routine of extermination, it is worth asking: 

And when is legitimacy lost? At what point does the use of force cease to be a prerogative of the State and become a symptom of its failure?

The problem, as they say, lies not in the concept, but in the form. And "the form," here, is everything. It is the way the State makes itself present, or absent, in popular territories; it is the type of body over which it exercises its power; and it is the grammar of fear and control that organizes this presence. Since the arrival of the Portuguese royal family, our police forces have been conceived not as an instrument of protection, but as a force of containment: an institution molded to guarantee the order of those at the top, repressing any deviation from those at the bottom. 

Colonial logic has never left us; it has only become more sophisticated, now supported by the technical discourse of "public security." That is why, although the legitimacy of police action as a function of the State is recognized, it is impossible to endorse the way it has been conducted. The operations currently sweeping through Rio's favelas violate not only human rights but also the federal pact itself. Rio does not produce drugs or weapons; it is the stage, not the origin, of the trade that sustains crime. Therefore, the front line of this fight should be federal, articulated with intelligence policies, border control, and financial repression. 

By insisting on treating the problem as a local issue, the Brazilian state reproduces the logic of the scapegoat: it makes the favela the testing ground for its impotence.

There is also a silent erosion of democratic values. In other times, leaders who exalted armed confrontation would not have progressed beyond the campaign platform of a small town. Today, belligerent rhetoric and the imagery of war have become electoral currency. The electorate has come to recognize violence as synonymous with authority and death as an index of efficiency. In this environment, the State ceases to protect and begins to perform, as if the spectacle of confrontation replaced security policy.

Even more serious is the way this war becomes a political instrument. The police forces, which should act as an expression of the State and not of the government in power, become an extension of the ideological discourse of the Guanabara Palace. The confusion between State and government, between legality and political loyalty, is one of the most dangerous hallmarks of the Brazilian crisis. Foucault reminded us that modern power is legitimized less by the right to kill and more by the management of life; in Rio, it seems we have regressed: the State has returned to governing through death, choosing who can and who cannot live.

It is true that some defend this confrontational policy with understandable arguments: the advance of drug trafficking, the dominance of militias, institutional collapse. But the insistence on this form of combat is an admission that the State has lost control over its own monopoly on force. The militias, formed by former police officers, are a cruel metaphor for this collapse: the State, in its decay, has become the supplier of its own illegitimate violence.

All of this is exacerbated because the war on drugs is, above all, a social war. It is selectively waged against the same bodies and territories: the three Ps, Black, poor, and marginalized. The shortsighted and hypocritical society of Rio de Janeiro pretends not to notice that the cocaine that finances the deaths in Jacarezinho is the same cocaine that circulates in the VIP areas of the South Zone. What we see is a class morality disguised as public policy, a tacit pact that normalizes the death of some in the name of the tranquility of others.

In this sense, trafficking is less a "market" that obeys the law of supply and demand, and more a form of governance of abandoned territories. There, the State has lost not only control of weapons, but also of legitimacy. And, in trying to recover it through force, it only reinforces what Agamben would call a "permanent state of exception," zones in which life is reduced to its biological nakedness, without rights or guarantees.

There is, therefore, nothing new under the sun. Governments of different ideological orientations have already experimented with versions of this same policy: Brizola and Benedita, Saturnino and Witzel, some with more social discourse, others with more punitive fury. None of them managed to break the cycle. The problem is not only ideological, it is structural. The left, when in power, seems constrained by the need to exercise the hard face of the State; the right, on the other hand, seems to find pleasure in doing so. Both, for different reasons, reproduce the same mechanism of exclusion and failure.

The state of Rio de Janeiro, overrun by militias, private interests, and manipulation tactics, operates today within a perverse rationale: it wages war against its own population to simulate authority. And society, by accepting this simulation, becomes complicit. As in any economy, there are producers, intermediaries, and consumers. As long as the focus remains on the intermediaries, those who die every day at the visible end of the chain, the problem only shifts. The operation "solves" the insecurity of the formal city at the expense of the security of the favela.

In the end, perhaps only the bitter realization remains that the Brazilian State continues to efficiently exercise only one of its defining functions: that of killing. Not because it doesn't know what it's doing, but because this is, historically, the easiest, and most cruel, way to reaffirm its presence. What is wrong is not the concept, but the method. And, in Rio de Janeiro, this method smells of gunpowder, is the color of blood, and has a specific target.