Criminal Governance and Bolsonaro

The Bolsonaro administration poses many pressing questions for social scientists, most notably about the boundaries between antidemocratic rhetoric and authoritarian practice. Associated with this large theme are questions about the meaning of the rule of law in a country governed by a man who is an apologist for brutal police action and seemingly even complicit with criminal militias in his original electoral bailiwick of Rio de Janeiro. 

Gabriel Funari’s recent article in the Bulletin of Latin American Research dives deep into the implications of Bolsonaro’s ties to organized crime, reviewing a wide swath of the recent literature on criminal governance and drawing connections to Bolsonaro’s political agenda. Funari’s effort is necessarily focused primarily on Rio de Janeiro, given the “consolidated political authority of organized crime” in that state and the electoral origins of Bolsonaro and his family in local politics. But Funari implicitly goes further, pointing to the fact that with Bolsonaro and his cabal in power, the essentially local politics of crime has become a national issue. 

At the core of the discussion is the question of whether criminal governance groups – such as the Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC) of São Paulo, comprised of current and former prison inmates, or the milícias of Rio de Janeiro, with close ties to serving police officers – can be distinguished from formal institutions. In the case of the PCC, the distinction is self-evident: as several recent books have shown, the group prides itself on a narrative of “o crime” against the state and actively eschews formal institutions. In the case of the milícias, however, the dynamics of organized crime and the dynamics of political institutions mutually reinforce each other as overlapping spheres (3). Funari draws on an eclectic range of sources – including scholarly works, judicial documents, and a transcript of a cabinet meeting – to illustrate the elaborate ties between the Bolsonaro family and the milícias, and the implications these ties have for Bolsonaro’s political agenda, particularly regarding gun ownership, policing, and the use of violence by state or parastatal actors. 

Drawing on a wide literature, Funari notes that various normative orders coexist in Brazil. In high-income neighborhoods, it may be possible for citizens to conceive of a formal system of law and order (Feltran 2020); in more marginal bairros, “the state itself looms as an unhinged presence” (Denyer Willis 2017).  This pattern is hardly new: in the past, Funari notes, coercive agents of the state have supported para-statal groups, including death squads, anti-guerrilla units, and slave patrols. The novelty of the milícias is that they have actively sought to “consolidate armed dominion” over particular territories, imposing their own perverted ‘order,’ and in the process supplanting legitimate state actors. 

The milícias have achieved this by drawing on material links to political institutions: personal ties to federal, state, and municipal legislators such as the president’s sons; the mobilization of a voter bloc that identified with lethal policing; and the public recognition and rewards that legislators have heaped on lethal police. But the milícia phenomenon has also drawn strength from an anti-democratic rhetoric of violence. Funari cites a chilling congressional speech from Bolsonaro in 2003, in which the future president noted, “so long as the State does not have the courage to implement the death penalty, the crime of extermination, in my view, will be very welcome” (8). This rhetoric carries over naturally into support for weaker gun laws, a crusade against a “supposedly conspiratorial leftist movement,” and most alarmingly, the recent proliferation of somewhat farcical but also potentially violent pro-Bolsonaro extremist organizations, such as the 300 do Brasil.

For many years, it has been possible to imagine that the predations of police and abuses against lower income citizens were somehow an “exception” or a lingering residue of the authoritarian regime. But as Funari’s extensive review points out, the overwhelming evidence suggests that there is no longer much question that criminal governance intersects with political governance, both in Rio and nationally. This intersection is also present in other arenas that Funari’s essay did not have space to cover: political corruption, for example, where just this week the Congress further diluted the law on administrative improbity, in a vote that was as brazenly overwhelming as it was self-serving. Scholars now seem to have two orders of business: first, to understand what conditions have made democratic politics susceptible to the political-criminal nexus, and second, and more urgently, how to extricate criminal governance networks from both state and national politics.