Necropolitics in Rio: When Public Safety Becomes State Murder

The helicopters arrived before dawn, their blades slicing the humid air above Rio de Janeiro’s northern hills. In the Complexos do Alemão and da Penha, mothers pulled mattresses against the walls and told their children to stay low. Smoke drifted through the alleys; gunfire echoed off the bricks. Messages began to appear in family chats: “Estou viva.” I’m alive.

By nightfall, that phrase had become both prayer and testimony. More than a hundred people were dead — the highest toll ever recorded in a single police operation in Brazil. Governor Cláudio Castro went on television, composed and smiling. “This is no longer common crime,” he declared. “It’s narco-terrorism.” With those words, the massacre became a military success.

The performance of order

The Megaoperação deployed 2 500 officers, armoured vehicles, and drones into neighbourhoods that together house over 300 000 people. Officially, it was meant to capture leaders of the Comando Vermelho (Red Command). Unofficially, it was political theatre — a muscular show of force for a Bolsonarist governor who thrives on images of war.

Castro’s administration has turned militarisation into a brand. Each operation becomes a campaign ad: Rio portrayed as a city under siege, its salvation measured in body counts.

But behind the spectacle lies a deeper, older choreography — a network of complicity in which the State, militias, and traffickers trade blood for influence.

The governor and the gangs

That complicity is no longer abstract. It has a name and a face.

In September, former PL deputy TH Jóias — a political ally of Cláudio Castro and photographed alongside him at official events — was arrested on suspicion of brokering weapons sales for the Comando Vermelho. Investigators allege that Jóias acted as a go-between, arranging deals for assault rifles and ammunition destined for the faction’s arsenals. His detention exposed, in plain view, the proximity between Rio’s political elite and the criminal networks it publicly condemns.

Castro, confronted with the photographs and mounting evidence, denied knowledge of Jóias’s activities, calling him “a former acquaintance.” Yet the images of the governor smiling beside a man now accused of arming the very gang he claims to be fighting have become the perfect emblem of Rio’s moral inversion — a government that feeds the fire it pretends to extinguish.

The connection is not an anomaly; it is structural. From city councillors to federal deputies, the overlap between the Partido Liberal’s machine and Rio’s militia and trafficking economies has been documented for years. Politicians rely on territorial control for votes; traffickers and militias rely on political protection for survival. The two powers coexist, sometimes competing, often collaborating, always converging when money or elections demand it.

Necropolitics as governance

Human-rights organisations described the Alemão-Penha massacre as what it plainly was: a policy of extermination. Justiça Global called it “the most lethal operation in Rio’s history.” The Instituto Marielle Franco warned that necropolitics — the management of life and death — had become routine government practice. “There isn’t a drop of blood at the door of those who ordered the massacre,” they wrote. “Necropolitics sustains itself in the distance between those who die and those who sign.”

That distance — between Alemão’s alleyways and the governor’s palace — is where Rio’s democracy collapses.

The colonial blueprint

This violence was designed long before Castro. When the Portuguese royal family arrived in 1808, it imported Europe’s colonial policing model, built to defend property and hierarchy. By 1831, Brazil had permanent municipal guards whose mission was to control the Black and poor majority — enslaved, freed, or unemployed.

As sociologist and military police captain Fábio França observes, “The idea was for the white elite to keep the Black and poor majority under control.” That idea endures, encoded in the DNA of Rio’s institutions.

From witchcraft laws against African religions to bans on capoeira and samba, every mechanism of “public order” in Brazil’s history has targeted the same bodies. Today, they are called “suspects.” The uniforms have changed; the logic has not.

The economy of fear

Activist Vini Almeida calls the war on drugs “a business plan disguised as policy.” Its violence feeds a whole ecosystem — arms contracts, police bonuses, private-security budgets, and political fundraising.

But the true profits of this war are not counted in blood; they are laundered in spreadsheets. In São Paulo’s financial district, along Avenida Faria Lima — where hedge-fund managers wear Patagonia vests and talk about “innovation” — prosecutors have traced millions in narco-linked investments flowing quietly into real estate funds, fintech startups, and logistics companies.

While the police turn Rio’s favelas into killing fields, the white-collar architects of Brazil’s cocaine economy sip espresso in glass towers, untouched by the laws they help write. The same capital that arms militias and traffickers circulates through venture portfolios and campaign donations. The supply chain of fear runs from the alleys of Alemão to the boardrooms of São Paulo.

If investigators traced the weapons trail honestly, it would lead to the same offices where Cláudio Castro takes photographs with deputies like TH Jóias. Fear is profitable because it justifies everything: more funding, more surveillance, more exceptionalism. Every operation renews the contract between power and panic.

The Bolsonarist doctrine

Castro’s rule is an inheritance of Jair Bolsonaro’s theology of force — God, guns, and order. He voted against President Lula’s Security Reform Bill, lied about federal support, and prays on camera while denying the racism embedded in his own institutions. His politics are a sermon for an empire in decline: moral absolutism masking institutional rot.

Selective justice

The hypocrisy is not only moral; it’s geographical — and statistically undeniable.

According to the Instituto de Segurança Pública (ISP-RJ), over 80% of all police killings in 2024 occurred in Rio’s North and West Zones, home to the city’s largest Black and low-income populations. In the wealthy South Zone, the figure was under 2%.

In the North, where the Comando Vermelho operates across dozens of favelas, police raids rose by over 40% in the past year, turning neighbourhoods into semi-permanent occupation zones. Meanwhile, in the West — where militias control roughly 60% of the territory and rule over nearly five million residents — operations fell by 30% since 2021.

The message is clear: the State kills where people are poor and negotiates where they are powerful.
The favela remains an expendable frontier; the militia zone, a silent partner. Both sustain the same empire of fear — but only one bleeds for it.

The occupied city

By midnight, Alemão and Penha were still burning. Families searched morgues lit by cell-phone flashlights. The official death toll kept climbing. Governor Castro posted another video beside an armoured truck, congratulating the troops and promising “order.”

But the order he celebrates is the order of silence — a colonial equilibrium maintained by fear. The city that once outlawed samba now criminalises survival. The State that once whipped enslaved bodies now buries their descendants in the name of security.

Rio is not at war; it is being ruled as one.
Until Brazil confronts the alliance between politics, police, militias, and traffickers — until it admits that its war on crime is a racial and economic arrangement disguised as law — the helicopters will keep circling, and mothers will keep whispering into the dark:
“Estou viva.”