Urban Revolt and Social Movement Adaptations in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Simone da Silva Ribeiro Gomes
To discuss the subject of urban struggles in contemporary Rio de Janeiro is both a theoretical and empirical challenge due to the myriad of problems the city faces in terms of its challenging geography and endemic violence.1 My main goal in this study is to present some of the findings of my doctoral research on the ongoing political opportunities for militancy in the West Zone of Rio de Janeiro. The research is concentrated in a periphery, which faces several difficulties that will be further analyzed in this text.
When examining a megalopolis like Rio de Janeiro, it is essential to investigate inhabitants living in precarious situations, including local militants who live in vulnerable conditions in communities without adequate services and who face a multitude of violent actors who marginalize them even further. Broadening research on this underworld of urban communities is important to understanding the complex process of mystification that peripheral movements suffer.
Rio de Janeiro is understood, in this research, as a core megalopolis for world geopolitics and for the conflicts and movements that can take place in urban environments, but frequently the specific spaces within the city that generate urban disputes are neglected. As with poor communities in major urban areas across the world, there are local particularities in the social organization and militancy of the inhabitants, and these are the object of this analysis.
This study used a qualitative approach that included ethnographic research involving participant observation, with the intention of unveiling some of the potentials and limitations of social movements in an urban periphery. During three years of field observation, nineteen semistructured interviews with young militants between the ages of nineteen and twenty-five were conducted. The militants were active in various organizations, such as popular education groups; cultural movements; LGBT movements; popular anarchist organizations; feminist movements; and antiracist movements, among others.
The diversity of data from the fieldwork must be noted in our case study, as well as the variety of themes the militants worked with. They lived and acted in different neighborhoods in the West Zone, but mainly Campo Grande, Realengo, Santa Cruz, and Bangu.
The data drawn from the interviews demonstrates that the urban militancy they developed had to do with state violence: specifically, fighting against the form of it assumed by the milícias, who use violence to control and threaten people living in those areas.2 A key element was police repression, which happened when militants—individually or collectively—tried to rise up against any injustice. I began my research by frequenting meetings of a popular education group in order to get to know a few local militants, as well as attending events that might attract people identified with issues relating to inequality and economic injustice in Brazil. All interviews were recorded and later transcribed; the names of the militants and their organizations have been altered, as have the specific names of the groups.
The brutality of the conditions they live in and the state’s responses to their demands were the main concerns guiding the interviews. The forms of organization amid the urban problems the militants face and the constant menace of violence were unveiled during the interview process. Nonetheless, the solutions the militants proposed for police brutality were very distinct and included cultural and educational solutions intended to enable like-minded people to more freely discuss the problems they daily faced. These tended to avoid any semblance of a mass-scale urban revolt, which would attract negative attention from the state.
I will first introduce some of the contemporary urban struggles going on in Rio de Janeiro, presenting definitions of social movements and of militants and featuring some aspects of their struggles, whether these are more clandestine or able to take place relatively freely. In examining the social organization of urban militancy, I highlight how these movements are silently organized at the margins of society. I then examine the West Zone of the city: its particular confluence of distinct coercive actors, its structural poverty, and the ways in which its challenging geography segregates or facilitates the different struggles that take place there.
Further on, I examine the routine strategies of the militants in the West Zone, focusing on their collective organization in more structured social movements as well as in their quotidian resistance practices. I then conclude with some final remarks on the effects of social struggles in our case study in the West Zone, in highly coercive areas.
My main objective in this section is to work on a historical analysis of the urban struggle—mainly, but not exclusively, in relation to community responses to police brutality. To that end, I will briefly present how urban struggles are taking place in the city of Rio de Janeiro, moving on to its idiosyncratic West Zone. I do not intend to be exhaustive, understanding that the full complexity of the urban struggles theme in a megalopolis like Rio de Janeiro extends beyond the scope of this research.
Tilly (2004, 308) defines social movements as repeated public demonstrations in the public space by a large number of people, in defiance of the state and in the name of securing more rights for a given population. Nonetheless, contemporary militancy does not always fit into those twentieth-century definitions, engaging in processes that also take place in virtual platforms, with networks that are transnational and invariably with identity claims, even when it is organized to fight against state violence.
Academic research seldom refers to the members of social movements as “militants” in the sense intended here; words like “militant” and “militia” are commonly associated with more radicalized and possibly terrorist movements. In this paper, however, I understand “militants” as people who take part in a cause and identify themselves with it but do not necessarily constitute a homogeneous population in their own right. While some may engage in social movements, taking part in meetings, sharing tasks, and disseminating their causes both online and in the streets, not all militancy will be institutionalized.
Roberta, from Guaratiba—one of the frontiers of the West Zone, at the outer limit of Rio de Janeiro—is engaged in a popular education group and in hip-hop groups that discuss the right to the city, In her interview, she relates being born in a deprived zone and surviving through the fights she engages in herself. She then states: “The question is what is to be militant, because I think I was born a militant. I come from a very poor family, and to keep myself alive—to fight to live and like what I do—is not easy: to dance and try to be happy in a city that imposes a lot of things. I think to militate is to be resistant and have that strength, and I think poor people are in that place, so I was born with it. I think militancy is to be in a space of trying to live, not just survive.”
It is, however, important to consider even local urban militancy as part of a transnational framework, since—both in terms of claims they make and networks they establish, mainly by virtual communication—the local movements communicate with movements that share their causes, however geographically distant.
On transnational activism Tarrow (2005) states that, although the claims made by militants may be transnational, the resources are drawn from personal networks, and the opportunities are accessed through the local communities in which they live. Perhaps the most interesting characteristic of this form of activism is how militants connect the local and the global. The phenomenon of acting collectively requires activists to marshal resources, become aware of opportunities, and frame their demands in ways that enable them to join with others. Across borders the difficulties are greater, especially because in deprived contexts such as the West Zone of Rio de Janeiro, the security risks are more substantial while financial resources are less, so actions must be based on economic considerations and well planned.
The case of Rio de Janeiro, known for its historical struggles and for being the main landscape of the Brazilian military dictatorship (which lasted twenty-one years, from 1964 to 1985), helps explain the demobilization of social movements presently. The highly repressive environment during that time—especially the persecution, torture, and incarceration of militants, which severely inhibited social action in the following years (Loveman 1998; Gomes 2015)—has had lasting effects on urban movements, resulting in the picture described by the popular education militant Roberta: “I think all movements in Rio are disarticulated, so the escalator is going down and we’re trying to go up. It’s an effort; it’s not just a force that you can generate by yourself.”
The disarticulation takes place in a context of severe cases of state violence. That said, in spite of the repressive environment, Rio de Janeiro currently has many important movements. For example, the struggle for housing is one of the most important battlefields in a city dealing with a wave of expropriations and other abuses by public officials in the wake of the World Cup in 2014 and the Olympics in 2016. In that sense, the struggle of Vila Autódromo, a deprived zone in a wealthy part of the West Zone, became famous for its popular mobilizations, as well as for the militants from other parts of the city who came to join in that important movement against mass eviction.
Within a tense political climate, the movement arose as a symbolic critique of the Olympic project and the way it is currently being utilized to justify removals all over the city, creating a commission that, together with specialists, proposed the “Vila Autódromo People’s Plan.” The movement fights repression by the state in its many attempts to forcibly remove people from their houses.
Another important struggle of regional and global importance shares a cultural perspective: feminist and antiracist movements in Rio de Janeiro have also become increasingly significant. Feminist movements lead many marches that gather militants in different parts of the city, as well as leading small and university groups to discuss feminism. The annual Marcha das Vadias is an essential gathering for movements and militants all over the city.3
Antiracist movements are also very important in Brazil, as it was the last country in the Western world to abolish slavery, in 1888. In Brazil, half the population is Black, and Rio de Janeiro was one of the main ports for the slave trade in former centuries. It is notably one of the cities whose Black population exceeds its Caucasian and mestizo populations and where there are major battles against both institutional and personal racism. From racially homogenous groups like Coletivo Denegrir, which is based at a public university, to thoroughly heterogenous ones, the historical struggle has an identity component that easily blends with Rio de Janeiro’s history.
Another social movement expression is the great number of active popular education groups in some parts of the city, especially in favelas in the city center. Such groups have also gained ground in the North and West Zones, with a strong component of awareness raising and the declared objective of enabling students to access public universities. These groups gather militants from a range of movements that are actively engaged in getting poor students to access higher and free education. They draw on Paulo Freire’s concepts of pedagogy of the oppressed in a struggle for the democratization of knowledge.
Lastly, but without claiming to have comprehensively presented all the movements people engage in, I would like to note another important and idiosyncratic movement in the city of Rio de Janeiro: the Favelas movement, which seeks to strengthen the rights of people who live in precarious settlements. Young people seem to be the majority in this movement’s acts, marches, and meetings to discuss mainly state violations to the rights of favelados (a generic term for people who live in areas featuring difficult terrain, which are violent due to high levels of poverty, drug trafficking, and police violence). The Forum de Lutas de Manguinhos and Coletivo Papo Reto are important related favela movements.
All these movements share a common struggle against violence, which in the case of Rio de Janeiro has to do necessarily with police violence. The military police of Brazil, an anachronistic institution established in 1808 to protect the Portuguese nobility established in Rio, is one of the few police corps that remains subsumed to military law while being dedicated to petty crimes and regular policing of the streets. The result is that policemen trained for war walk the streets of the favelas and the city’s peripheries, not uncommonly acting with brutality and killing one out of every two thousand people every year, all over the country.
In this sense, Della Porta and Tarrow (2005) stated that the makers of demands are not the only ones who rely on common repertoires: authorities also share a repertoire of repressive tactics. The same police known for incurring high death rates are the ones policing protests and social movements with the same repressive repertoire used during the antiglobalization protests in Seattle: strong shows of force, closures of streets where demonstrators intend to march, mass arrests, rubber bullets, and pepper spray.4
Our case in the present study does not take place in just any part of Rio de Janeiro’s complex web of problems and organizations of resistance but in an area that is one of its most intricate, due to violence rates, poverty, public transportation problems, and other issues, especially those that are drug related. The West Zone of the city can be divided into a densely populated wealthy area and the poorer area that I have chosen to analyze. The latter includes neighborhoods outlined and populated by the train line opened in the twentieth century, such as Campo Grande, Santa Cruz, Realengo, Bangu, Barra de Guaratiba, Cosmos, Deodoro, Gericinó, Guaratiba, Inhoaíba, Sulacap, Magalhães Bastos, Paciência, Padre Miguel, Pedra de Guaratiba, Santíssimo and Senador Camará.
As one interviewee put it: “The West Zone here, from Magalhães Bastos to Santa Cruz, is very interesting, very rich, and has changed and suffered a lot. And all those things … the UPP and the widespread violence—the West Zone is a big reflection of all that.5 It’s like we’re living today in a state of siege” (Diogo, antiracist movement, Santa Cruz). After all, we are talking about an area with the lowest human development rate in the city of Rio de Janeiro, amid high social inequalities and daily realities that stand in stark contrast to richer areas of the city.
Among other factors, what draws those highly populated areas together are the high rates of poverty, the distance from the city center and its jobs and cultural equipage, and the strong presence of the criminal groups known as milícias. First, there is a shared perception that both in peripheral areas of Rio de Janeiro and in favelas, the Brazilian state has failed to exercise an effective monopoly on the means of organized violence (Pinheiro 1997). Corrupt police strengthen drug traffickers by taking bribes that allow the traffickers to operate openly in the favelas and peripheries, as is the case in the West Zone (Pessoa 2002; Leeds 1996), taking advantage of the considerable distance from the media and public opinion.
The conditions of violence in those areas are diverse, but it is important to note that they have to do with not only drug trafficking but also the corrupt police force and its more sadistic variant, the milícias. The latter groups are made up of armed agents of the state (plumbers and police officers) and former agents, such as retired military, who alongside traffickers control entire regions. Their offer is protection, and for that they charge traders and inhabitants weekly or monthly, as well as monopolizing several economic activities in those neighborhoods, like gas, alternative transport, and cable TV.
The clientelist functioning of those criminal groups includes not only traffickers but also state agents, a new type of political actor linked to a wider privatization of violence, whose political position in poor communities stems from an appropriation of state power made possible only by the unique ways international illegal markets have expanded into Rio de Janeiro. The new forms of clientelism developed by these newly empowered criminal enterprises involve the deployment of an illegal network that brings criminals together with state and social actors to engage in a variety of activities (Arias 2006).
Those enterprises gained public attention in 2008 in Rio de Janeiro, according to Cano and Duarte (2012), especially for the torture and death of a journalist investigating the phenomenon of milícias. The violent milícias are mostly located in the West Zone of Rio, in Campo Grande and Santa Cruz, both around 40 miles from the city center. Campo Grande accounts for most of the complaints about the activities of milicianos made by inhabitants to a confidential state hot-line, leading the area with more than 15% (followed by Santa Cruz, with 7%).
The historical coercion of the milícias, mainly acting in those remote areas of Rio de Janeiro, can be compared to an irregular enterprise of private security, with the addition of profits from the monopolies from which they gain most of their funds. The continuum of fear in which they operate unveils the lack of security in which those who inhabit the poor and distant zones of Rio de Janeiro live; most are too intimidated to denounce any criminal or illegal conduct. Moreover, the fact that many of those criminals are agents of the state means they know how the state apparatus works and how the investigations might be carried out. This allows them to interfere. Their networks include politicians at both the municipal and federal levels, which makes them even more difficult to prosecute.
So the persistent violence facing contemporary Rio de Janeiro does not reflect an absence or collapse of state power but a particular articulation of state, social, and criminal relations, where state power is highly mixed with the service of criminal interests (Arias 2006). What the situation also reveals is a status quo of draconian state violence that nevertheless fails to control drug-trafficking violence in Rio de Janeiro, especially in its most deprived areas like favelas and peripheries. This has the paradoxical effect of reinforcing criminal legitimacy, as residents suffer police abuse and lose faith in the state. Among the difficulties faced by the inhabitants are, according to Zaluar (1998), that drug traffickers maintain prominent roles in most poor communities and their conflicts with police are continuous.
But it was not only traffickers who pointed to coercion forces, especially clientelist ones, as being equally or more frightening. As Roberta states, “It’s a big issue in Guaratiba, where there are many farms and rural areas owned by powerful people. So these spaces, including many slaughterhouses, are places to dump the bodies. There are still many cases of cronyism, of people knocking on your door and telling you ‘I’m the owner of that farm there and I want to widen the space, and your house is so near that I need you to get out.’ And you don’t have another option, you have to leave your house, because you’re afraid to die, and there’s a possibility, though not a certainty, that this guy will kill you. So you feel vulnerable, you don’t know the mechanisms to fight against that, you feel the absence of the state to support you.”
The existence of external social forces and organizations that not only resist efforts to extend the rule of law but also engage with state actors to promote illegal activities and rights violations (Arias 2006) is an important factor to consider with respect to the coercion that takes place in the regions we studied. Nonetheless, the fear is so widespread that one cannot necessarily decipher what it is that actually frightens them. As one militant puts it: “Walking through certain spaces can be dangerous, especially at night. I know there are places that are dangerous because people say they are and others where you can’t walk, where lighting is precarious. You don’t see armed people all the time, but you know that you can be raped or robbed; it’s other [forms of] violence. I’ve recently stopped walking around my own neighborhood” (Carina, popular education movement, Santíssimo).
What is most interesting for the purposes of the present study is how social movements in highly coercive zones manage to resist, and what strategies the militants in those regions use to survive and maintain their struggles. In a context of ongoing violence, existing theories of democratization have succeeded in building a model for how social networks can help translate protest into concrete political change when traditional strategies for political transformation are ineffectual. Nevertheless, this is not enough, since extremely violent communities are much harder for militants to be successful in. This includes, in particular, dictatorships wherein movements become targets of government repression on a regular basis (Arias 2004).
The risk those militants run is becoming the targets of corrupt officials or criminals (Leeds 1996). Authors such as Arias (2004) aim to explain the local-level political organizing of social movements in those areas by using the model of networks, which would transcend conventional understandings of state-society relations by allowing participation from nontraditional political actors such as international organizations and the media. This model explains how social groups can remain active even under the threat of violence. Being horizontal organizations, they also work based on connections among actors with similar interests and by exploiting the skills of different member groups in order to obtain political gains.
Arias (2004) argues that, through a network, groups with similar objectives can share work and risk among themselves. The networks help member groups accomplish complex objectives under difficult circumstances by allowing those that are subjected to violent conditions where they live to be exposed to risks in a way that promotes change. If the militancy is organized in local-level networks, that raises the cost to violent actors of silencing individual groups.
On the functioning of militancy networks, Roberta tells us: “Iv’e taught break dance since [I was] very young, so I ended up identifying with the people leading this popular education project, as well as with their socialist group, and I ended up in several networks … [including] a network with lots of popular educators…. We never know, we can’t actually tell the extent of what we’re getting ourselves into from the inside.”
Finally, one must take into account the June 2013 protests, Brazil’s biggest national protest wave in two decades, whose immediate trigger was an increase in public transportation fares, although the list of grievances quickly expanded to the precarious state of public infrastructure and services, public spending on the World Cup and the Olympics, corruption, and urban violence. Here this emblematic situation becomes analytically more complex (Alonso and Mische 2015). The protest wave in 2013 was representative of the type of mobilization that is possible in the city center, as well as of how coercive agents react in more distant zones.
A young militant affirms that a march in late 2013 was paradoxically initiated by the milicianos themselves. The militants only found out a few hours after it started, with the support of local politicians who shouted, “It’s no use coming masked—we will discover who you are and you’ll suffer the consequences.” The interviewee continues: “After that, the march had around three hundred students—do you have any idea of how hard it is to get three hundred students in a march in Campo Grande?—we saw two militants of our group speaking with the guys that had the microphone there, but we had to run after that, not only from the regular repression—this time they were heavily armed” (Pedro, popular education movement).
This section will seek to further explain how social movements in highly coercive areas structure their actions. The West Zone of Rio de Janeiro will serve as a test case for the hypothesis that high rates of violence and selective repression severely discourage social movements from acting and force actions to be clandestine, avoiding urban revolts. I will mention some of the resistance techniques I observed from the reports of the militants interviewed, but first I will try to lay a theoretical groundwork for understanding what can be done in such violent neighborhoods.
With no intention of being geographically determinist, it must nonetheless be noted that spatial structures such as the built environment, communications infrastructures, and transportation, as well as the configuration of mountain ranges and rivers, set real constraints on social actions. Yet even those extremely solid and durable challenges can be enabling for social movements (Sewell 2011). River valleys and mountain ranges might constrain communication, but this spatial constraint is also an advantage to those who are positioned to serve as agents of communication between adjacent valleys.
Additionally, the relative isolation of mountain geography, with locals having specialized knowledge of the terrain, enhances the chances of militants becoming involved in highly subversive activities, as with the example of guerrilla militants. The West Zone of Rio de Janeiro is surrounded by a mountainous area known as Maciço da Pedra Branca, with a recent history of military maneuvers taking place in the highlands after several confrontations in the 1980s.
If one observes the distance of this region from the city center, as well as the limited entrances to its neighborhoods, which are carefully watched by people who work with the local milícias, one understands the necessity of limiting social action to a certain space. What contentious politics do, after all, is attempt to overcome deeply rooted structural disadvantages. This is the case if one takes into account a spatial agency that may convert disadvantages into advantages when activists enact certain practices and countermeanings in their involvement. The restructuring of those meanings can show a strategic valence of space in new spatial structures and relations (Sewell 2001). Militants produce space by changing the meanings and strategic uses of their environments.
In Rio’s violent context, militants are confined to “everyday forms of resistance,” in the terms introduced by Scott (1985, 1986) and Joseph (1990). For those thinking about a continuum of peasant resistance, it is important to note that it may proceed without overt protest and with little or no organization; such “routine” resistance has historically lain at the core of peasant politics. What Scott (1990) calls analysis of the “everyday forms of peasant resistance” can contribute valuable insights to a broader conceptualization of Latin American banditry, a category in which we place the main criminal actors, including the police and politicians, in Rio de Janeiro.
Peasant resistance, as conceptualized by Scott (1985, 1987), makes no requirement that resistance take the form of collective action, let alone overt protest. His definition includes “any act by a peasant (or peasants) that is intended either to mitigate or deny claims (e.g., rents, taxes, corvée, deference) made on that class by superordinate classes (e.g., landlords, the state, moneylenders) or to advance peasant claims (e.g., work, charity, respect) vis-à-vis these superordinate classes” (Joseph 1987, 419). This resistance, even if entirely unanticipated and long-lasting, does not need to take the form of collective action. There is also symbolic resistance, which is critical.
Scott seeks to build a definition of collective action rooted in what he considers peasant resistance that has always proceeded on a day-to-day basis, outside the bounds of strictly organized movements—and I agree, based on my research. What Scott calls everyday forms of resistance are daily strategies used by relatively powerless groups, among which we can highlight sabotage, theft, false compliance, slander, and other daily practices.
The most important trait shared by those strategies is that they represent a way for peasants to help themselves that usually avoids a direct and likely costly confrontation with elites (including organized crime). One important feature that we observed as quintessential for the militancy in the West Zone is that the peasants typically avoid any direct symbolic confrontation with authorities or with armed groups, operating within a framework that requires a regular state of anonymity. As Scott says: “There is rarely any dramatic confrontation, any movement that is particularly newsworthy…. It is seldom that the perpetrators seek to call attention to themselves. Their safety lies in anonymity” (1987, 422). As Junior, an anarchist from Realengo, puts it: “What I think is essential is anonymity. Those who get here and start showing off won’t last for long. [Those who succeed are] people who come here and face their work as only work, and do not intend to run for anything in the congress or other public office in a few years. I mean, anonymity is the key, as is the work you do on a daily basis. Instead of doing big events, trying to sit with five people and do it routinely is much more important.”
What Scott tells us about the peasantry is also valid for militants in violent zones. They have been less concerned with formal changes in the arrangements governing the overall state of affairs but still focus on attempts to mitigate the most harmful effects of those arrangements, which impact their lives.
The strong and pragmatic goal of the daily resistance, as discussed by Scott and later Joseph (1990), is not to overthrow or immediately transform the ruling system but rather to survive daily. This form of peasant organization can be expanded to militants in violent areas, who are often isolated from outside allies and have historically confronted formidable obstacles to mobilization. They are to a significant extent unable to organize collective action.
After all, as is the case with the wide range of resistance by peasants in Malaysia surrounding which Scott (1987) developed his theory, not all movements involve contentious politics and direct action. A highly restrictive definition of social movements does not, as Joseph (1990) argued, include the everyday forms of peasant resistance, and that is reductive, though of course we must maintain distinct categories for forms of resistance such as social movements and prepolitical activities, which may enable a better understanding of how the system of domination in which they occur functions. We cannot reduce the open, radical political activity of the subordinated to sporadic acts of resistance, either—but we must nevertheless avoid letting the structures of domination define for us what is and what is not a popular movement.
First let us consider how distance from the center of a megalopolis like Rio de Janeiro affects local militants. Ana, a feminist, reported on the First Encounter of Women of the West Zone in Campo Grande, 2013: “Political acts, such as marches and other things, always take place in the South Zone and in the center of the city; we must bring them here [into the peripheral areas where we live].”
The feminist militants of more outlying zones must also consider other forms of oppression related not only to machismo but to its consequences when moving around town: “People who live here in the West Zone know the difficulties of mobilizing here. The gender issue is always important to us…. Women who regularly commute to and from the city center know the problems and dangers of coming back at night after a certain hour” (Clara, feminist, on the First Encounter of Women of the West Zone, Campo Grande, 2013).
Young feminists articulate a strategy that is very important for militants who suffer from veiled threats, which is to forget about the fear they might experience. They may have to suppress their feelings entirely. Amanda, a militant feminist of Pedra de Guaratiba, affirms, “I have noticed that it is necessary to lose fear. I’m tired of waiting for the next day’s bus in the city center to go back home. A friend of mine and I, she lives in Camará, we go out by ourselves to the marches and go back by ourselves, and yes, we do it, we make the conscious effort of letting the fear go.”
Another commonly used strategy that was widely mentioned by interviewees was blatant lying and dissimulation about the nature of their activities. According to Scott (2011) in his investigation on subordinated groups in Malaysia, political life under severe repression must incorporate disguise, lies, and evasive behavior, while at the same time keeping a straight face and an enthusiastic attitude.
The creation of safe places for militants is also a quintessential part of surviving in contexts like these. The strategy of having a central hub, even if established somewhat accidentally, which must be very careful not to attract the attention of repressive forces, deserves to be noted. A popular education group in Campo Grande, functioning in a house where other meetings also take place, performs this role of meeting point, where militants (as well as those who look to the militants as people who might know what to do in a context of rights violations) can come for advice.
According to Scott (2011), such spaces must be understood as belonging to the quotidian forms of resistance, being enclosed social spaces where resistance feeds itself and becomes meaningful. Such places do not demand coded speech. They are places where people need not fear the consequences of their combative actions and where, beyond the reach of oppressive relationships, they can talk freely. Nonetheless, this territory must be rather isolated, so that no control, vigilance, or repression reaches people who share similar experiences of domination. Roberta, a popular educator, tells us:
Everyone is trying to understand this [June 2013] movement, and to that end people found in our group a focal point of resistance in which to exist and think together—not to find answers, because nobody had those, but to give a hug, cry together—people found in our house that place. We did not hold a meeting, but thirty people spontaneously showed up in the house anyway, so we got a bit overwhelmed and frightened because we lost the dimension of it, of how we became a hub, and we felt pride but also fear. And if we’re a hub for the people, how long can we maintain ourselves in this house? Because the milícia always ends up knowing what we’re doing there, and if they’re not happy with that, they can do anything they want with the space and with us.
All these strategies take place in environments with constant displays of force. Thais, a popular education militant, confirms this: “When the milicianos are around I don’t feel safe. At night they’re everywhere, going around the place; every Saturday they charge me a fee for the establishment I work in. At 8:00 p.m. they’re already in the streets, armed, especially on weekends. Every Thursday they have a ball showing off their guns. It’s completely unsafe.”
For Scott (1985), those public displays of force must be counterpoised by resistance acts, since resistance relations are also integrally linked to power relations, which produce frictions by using the same power to extract services and taxes from the dominated, against their will. This power is exercised not only by the official authorities in the West Zone but also by milícias and corrupt policemen on a daily basis, through public shows of force, public punishment, and other subterfuges.
Resistance can be observed even in highly coercive environments. However, the resistance in the West Zone does not necessarily take the traditional form of social movements militating explicitly against the causes of oppression. Regulatory regimes and government policies influence the forms of struggle and repression in a way that makes militants more aware of the dangers they face, and for that reason they organize themselves beyond the boundaries of constitutional or legal constructs. Under such conditions, the urban revolt must be clandestine.
It was not my intention to present an exhaustive picture of the urban struggles in Rio de Janeiro but rather to shed light on some lessons that can be learned from this case study in the poor peripheries of the West Zone. The first of these is that the struggle might be organized in an underground network trying not to call attention to itself, existing in a state of anonymity that goes unnoticed by people looking for signs of traditional social movement organization. A quotidian resistance is also part of this struggle, made up of the everyday acts that try to undermine coercion at its fringes, with tactics such as lying and dissimulating about struggle activities and finding a safe place to encounter each other.
Even if, at first glance, these small and of necessity unnoticed acts of militancy might not seem revolutionary, one must not neglect the transformative potential of quotidian urban struggles. What this case study aimed to address was the extent to which resistance can operate beyond the boundaries of legal constructs and the degree to which it can be successful in spite of coercive forces. The organization of militants in the West Zone of Rio de Janeiro, together and separately, in their quotidian sabotage, is, one might affirm, a form of mitigation of the effects of neoliberalism and the privatization of security. The different groups these militants represent and the performative politics they engage in constitute a politics of silence: ever aware of the need not to call attention to itself, yet addressing crucial problems of public security through cultural activities.