THE CHURCH HELPS THE UPP, THE UPP HELPS THE CHURCH: PACIFICATION APPARATUS, RELIGION AND BOUNDARY FORMATION IN RIO DE JANEIRO’S URBAN PERIPHERIES

A IGREJA AJUDA A UPP, E A UPP AJUDA A IGREJA: DISPOSITIVO DE PACIFICAÇÃO, RELIGIÃO, E FORMAÇÃO DE FRONTEIRAS NAS PERIFERIAS URBANAS FLUMINENSES

Abstract

This article looks to explore the analytic consequences of thinking about the urban peripheries of Rio de Janeiro not from the perspective of the city itself, capital of the State, but from the Baixada Fluminense, a cluster of cities in its Metropolitan Region. To do so, I suggest an analysis of the ‘pacification apparatus’: a set of discourses, practices and imaginations linked to the pacification policy as a public security project, but transcending the latter by articulating state, religious, cultural and media actors. The empirical material discussed in this article concerns the case of a partnership between a UPP in the city of Rio and a church from Baixada Fluminense. The conclusions reached suggest that Baixada Fluminense, despite its intrinsic relationship with the capital of Rio de Janeiro and its public problems, has its own processes, formulates specific territorial regimes, and influences the processes that take place in the Rio metropolis by producing borders with it, and through it.

Key words:
pacification; religion; public security; Baixada Fluminense; peripheries

Resumo

O presente artigo pretende explorar as consequências analíticas de se pensar as periferias fluminenses não a partir da cidade do Rio de Janeiro, capital do estado, mas a partir da Baixada Fluminense, conjunto de cidades da Região Metropolitana do Estado. Para tal, sugere-se uma análise do dispositivo da pacificação: conjunto de discursos, práticas e imaginações vinculado à política de pacificação enquanto projeto de segurança pública, mas que o transcende articulando atores estatais, religiosos, culturais e midiáticos. O material empírico trabalhado foi o caso de parceria entre uma UPP da cidade do Rio e uma igreja da Baixada Fluminense. As conclusões alcançadas sugerem que a Baixada Fluminense, apesar de sua intrínseca relação com a capital carioca e seus problemas públicos, tem processos próprios, formula regimes de territorialidade específicos, e influencia reciprocamente os processos que se passam na metrópole carioca ao produzir fronteiras com ela, e através dela.

Palavras-chave:
pacificação; religião; segurança pública; Baixada Fluminense; periferia

Introduction

In September 2012 the mass media reported various deaths in the ‘favela’ of Chatuba, located in Mesquita, a municipality in the Baixada Fluminense region of Rio de Janeiro. Events adhered to the script typically followed by almost every police intervention in Rio de Janeiro over recent years: after the bodies of six youths were discovered on the side of a highway, the special police unit BOPE¹ was mobilized to occupy the ‘favela’ and various news stories circulated in the mainstream media about the occupation. But the intervention in Chatuba ‘favela’ didn’t follow the entire script of the typical response to violence by the state agents in Rio and therefore introduced a new element to this political cartography: Chatuba is a district (bairro) of a municipality in Baixada Fluminense² - a region formed by several cities of the Rio de Janeiro Metropolitan Area - not a favela located in the city of Rio de Janeiro. And it is precisely this differential element that forms the basis for the questions I shall explore in this article. What I intend to discuss here are the consequences of the displacement of analysis centred on the problems put by the city of Rio de Janeiro and its favela’s, to studies more interested in Rio de Janeiro Metropolitan Area and its peripheries.

Most of the police operations conducted in favelas in Rio de Janeiro city were limited to this type of reactive and usually highly aggressive invasion by special forces, a high-impact intervention - generally very violent - designed to neutralize or scare the criminal perpetrators and curb their activity. This logic of urban confrontation, built on a ‘metaphor of warfare,’ has predominated in Rio de Janeiro for many decades (Leite 1997). Historically, various public security projects implemented in the city of Rio de Janeiro have sought to propose alternatives to this model of devastating invasion and its logic of warfare. In this sense, the Pacification Policy launched as a new public security project in the State of Rio de Janeiro in 2008 was no different. Aimed at long-term occupation of territories located in the urban peripheries of Rio State by community policing groups in order to remove them from the control of the drug gangs, the pacification policy interventions retained the same initial shock tactic of the BOPE entering the favelas, but sought to distinguish itself from earlier practices in which the incursion of special forces had no more than limited and momentary objectives. The pacification project anticipated, therefore, after the entry of the special police forces, the implantation of community policing and subsequently a Police Pacification Unit (Unidade de Polícia Pacificadora: UPP). The year of the massacre in Chatuba,³ 2012, would be the apogee of Rio de Janeiro State’s Pacification Policy.

In the case of the ‘Chatuba Massacre,’ though, we can note two deviations from the standard plotline: first, an event organized by the residents days after the massacre - given little coverage in the mass media - denominated ‘Chatuba is not a favela.’ This response was addressed directly to the media itself, which had reported the deaths as happening in the ‘favela of Chatuba.’ In Baixada Fluminense, a region located outside the political cartography of Rio de Janeiro city, the use of the label ‘favela’ galvanised the refusal of the population to accept this form of classification, not used on a day-to-day basis in the locality.

“The district of Chatuba is not a favela. It has been occupied over recent months by people from outside and who is bearing the brunt of the oppression is the population, which has suffered greatly. These bandits are not residents [they came from other communities from the same faction where UPPs had been installed]. They took refuge in the district because purchasing power is lower in Baixada,” said Jania Bizarelli, coordinator of the movement. According to her, the forest and waterfalls of Gericinó National Park, where the massacre occurred, are used by residents for leisure activities.⁴

‘Favela’ is a stigmatizing category extrinsic to the Chatuba district and was introduced as a category to interpret events by the mass media. In terms of urban violence in Rio de Janeiro, the view tends to prevail that, if a massacre took place in a particular place, then this place must be a favela. As various authors have already analysed,⁵ more than a descriptive category for an urban territory, ‘favela’ is a qualitative category, strongly marked by moral evaluations that are mobilized in its situated usage. This is what happened in the case of the Chatuba massacre: the massacre qualified Chatuba as a favela. However, the category ‘favela’ is more carioca (from the city of Rio de Janeiro) than fluminense (from the State of Rio de Janeiro). Indeed, the history of the term is related to the history of the city of Rio itself (Gonçalves 2013). In other territories outside the city of Rio, especially within its Metropolitan Region, the category ‘favela’ is employed, accepted and rejected in very specific and situated ways, as in the case of Baixada Fluminense (analysed by Freire 2016).

In response to what they considered to be the mass media’s inadequate use of the category ‘favela’ to speak of the district of Chatuba, local actors made their own video, which was posted on YouTube at the height of the media attention received by the locality. The video lasts just ten seconds but makes its point: it opens with a journalist outdoors beginning his report with the following: “The atmosphere remains tense here in the favela of Chatuba de Mesquita. The police are still in the forest...” Before he can complete the phrase, the supposed journalist is struck by a blow from behind, throwing him to the ground. A phrase then comes up on screen: ‘Fucking favela indeed!’⁶

The second deviation from the standard plotline was how the police action unfolded. The obvious question at the time concerned the possible installation of a UPP in Chatuba after the massacre. Instead of installing the famous UPP, the public security forces responding by implementing the unknown CISP: Companhia Integrada de Segurança Pública (Integrated Public Security Company). Beltrame, Rio’s security secretary, stated the following in a news report concerning the decision:

“We want to break the paradigm that the police enter, produce a spectacular event, and leave. This facility is an extension of the battalion and is there to stay,” he said. “At the moment CISP is what we can do. It is an intermediate solution. CISP is already operating successfully in Macaé and Niterói and we plan to install one more in Madureira⁷. There isn’t the logistics to run a UPP in Chatuba. We have to be honest," Beltrame added.⁸

Unlike the UPP, which relied on police personnel especially trained to implement the pacification policy, CISP was a normal unit, an extension of the police battalion already existing in the region, and not a police facility linked to the pacification strategy. During the pacification policy, therefore, a split was introduced in the kind of street police force present in the conflict zones of Rio de Janeiro State: personnel predominantly made up of new military police trained in the principles of community policing in those areas with UPPs, and personnel from the military police already with years of service in the force, linked to the local battalions rather than the UPPs. The number of personnel in these units also varied considerably: in those areas with UPPs, a larger number of police officers were present in the day-to-day lives of the populations compared to those areas without UPPs.

According to a report on the increase in violence in Baixada after the arrival of the UPPs and on the inequality in police contingents in different parts of the Rio State, published in the newspaper O Dia on 4 March 2012, the Morro da Mangueira UPP [located in a favela of the city of Rio] had 403 MPs (military police), more officers than the 389 in São João de Meriti Battalion (21^st BPM), where almost 600,000 people live, and more than the Belford Roxo Battalion (39^th BPM), which at the time had 336 MPs for a population of 470,000 inhabitants [São João de Meriti and Belford Roxo are both cities of the Baixada FLuminense Region].

This data obviously needs to be assessed and discussed from at least two angles: from the viewpoint of the supposed lack of policing in Baixada, and from the viewpoint of a possible excessive presence of military police in the favelas with UPPs in Rio de Janeiro. My interest here is to emphasize, through this debate, that public security policy and its facilities, personnel, techniques and technologies produce different regimes of territorialities both through their presence - and absence - and through their differences and modulations. An analysis of the problem of violence in Rio de Janeiro, based on the question concerning the ‘absence of the UPP,’ as discussed by Miagusko (2016), is thus indispensable to understanding the production of territorialities in the State of Rio de Janeiro through state interventions. According to the latter author, “there is the production of a new territorial regime under the impact of the UPPs, even in territories outside their area of implantation, and these new configurations are not an outcome of the favela/pacification model” (p.2). This is the question I intend to explore in the rest of the text.

In my recent works I have not only analysed the Pacification Policy as a specific public security project but, more widely, have suggested analysing them as a population management apparatus, a pacification apparatus, that operates through an entanglement of practices, discourses and imaginative constructs articulated by actors from various domains of social life: state, religious, ‘social,’ cultural and media agents, among others (Machado 2016). I follow Foucault’s (2010) concept of apparatus (dispositif) understood as a set of discourses, practices, and knowledges that form a movable support of the correlations of force that continually induce states of power, but always localized and unstable. In this article I look to analyse the consequences of thinking about this pacification apparatus when this is traversed by the regimes of territoriality specific to Baixada Fluminense and its very particular relation to the city of Rio de Janeiro.

Beyond the tensions in the relationship between morro and asfalto⁹ specific to the city of Rio de Janeiro and its social and political cartography, thinking both about and from the viewpoint of Baixada Fluminense implies reflecting on the State of Rio de Janeiro, the relationship between towns and cities in its metropolitan region, as well as the relations between different regions of the State, a topic less frequently discussed in the urban research on Rio de Janeiro. I intend to pursue this line of inquiry by setting out from the specific case of the relationship between a church from the Assembléia de Deus (Assembly of God) in Baixada Fluminense and a UPP in the city of Rio de Janeiro.

Baixada Fluminense, religion and the production of boundaries

Studies of Baixada Fluminense provide a dynamic and intense field of representations and analyses on this territory. The works of Alves (2003), Enne (2002), Freire (2016), Santos (2014) and Miagusko (2016), among others, give an insight into the principle themes marking the analyses about and from Baixada: the historicity of the formation of Baixada Fluminense as a territory and its circuits of production; the issue of violence in Baixada; representations of Baixada Fluminense in the media; its reputation as a problematic and violent area; the relational dimension of urban experience in Baixada Fluminense, perennially lived and conceived through the production of boundaries and its relationship with the city of Rio; the region’s economic dynamic; the particularities of the world of politics and culture in Baixada Fluminense, as well as its local network of associations; and Fluminense public policies and major projects, among other themes relevant to this field of inquiry and debate.

From these studies I would highlight the relational aspect that characterizes Baixada Fluminense: urban experience in each of its municipalities is constituted on the basis of a continuous process of constructing boundaries within the region, always connected at the same time to the formation of boundaries with the city of Rio de Janeiro. The most objective concretization of this process of boundary formation is the intensive history of municipal charters that characterize the region (Maia & Rodrigues 2009). But beyond this official aspect, the constant process of boundary formation in Baixada is directly linked to social processes, meaning that these boundaries are continuously reconfigured. In this article I seek to analyse one of these processes as a starting point to think about the potential configuration of these political boundaries and what we can proceed to think on its basis.

Here I shall focus in particular on the analysis of an ‘informal partnership’ between an Assembleia de Deus church in the city of São João de Meriti in the Baixada Fluminense region and the Turano UPP in Tijuca, a district located in the city of Rio de Janeiro. This partnership involved the flow of drug addicts (or dependentes químicos, ‘chemical dependents’) sent by police officers from this UPP for treatment at the church in question.

The relationship between religion, politics and violence in Baixada Fluminense is historically part of the political process in this region. Alves (2002) analyses a transition in the public sphere of Baixada from a predominance of Catholic actors in the 1970s to strong Pentecostal and neo-Pentecostal activism in the 1990s. The author discusses the historical imprint left by the Christian Base Communities (Comunidades Eclesiais de Base: CEBs) on the social fabric of Baixada Fluminense and on its public sphere.

Training courses, debates, marches for peace, healthcare and children, popular holy missions, pilgrimages, Biblical circles, spirituality groups and street groups still exist and deepen the reflection on an ever more complex reality, based on a popular culture that is altering under the impact of the globalized media of the market. This is the Church of the CEBs that, in the case of Baixada, is exemplified especially by the community Nossa Senhora dos Mártires da Baixada [Our Lady of the Martyrs of Baixada] in the Parish of São Simão, in the Diocese of Nova Iguaçu (Alves 2002: 20).

In the sphere of political parties, Alves re-examines the historical relationship between the Catholic Church (via the CEBs), social movements and the Workers’ Party in Baixada, while also discussing specific problematics that emerged over time with these relations in Baixada Fluminense: on one hand, the electoral fragility of the candidates linked to the Catholic groups; on the other, the concrete and controversial results of their party political activities, including conflicts within the Workers’ Party and the controversies surrounding their alliances and support in elections to the executive, particularly to the Rio de Janeiro State Government. Meanwhile, as Alves (2002: 71) also shows in his analysis, the relationship between political candidates and churches became consolidated on the Pentecostal and Evangelical side.

In terms of the specific issue of the relation between religion and violence, Alves (2002: 25) emphasizes how his analysis of the political processes in Baixada Fluminense, grounded in local conceptions of power in which “the criminal and illegal power of the death squads and drug traffickers is perceived in terms of their interaction with the power structure of the state, enabled through state apparatuses, especially the political apparatus, contains an interpretative possibility that overcomes the dichotomization between the legal/state sphere and the illegal/criminal sphere, allowing us to see the diverse threads that weave a particular strategy of domination.”

In this sense, Alves suggests, it is important to analyse the possibilities opened up by religious practices in people’s everyday experiences and identify the relations between these practices and more complex power structures that bring to light the microstructures of power constituted in Baixada. For Alves, comprehending religion and religious actors in Baixada means comprehending local power, its vectors of organisation and resistances.

Barreto (2004) analyses the presence of the religious dimension in the local politics of Baixada Fluminense. She emphasizes that interest in the Baixada was mainly awoken among researchers from the 1970s and 1980s onward, and developed into analyses of the relation between politics, social movements and religion, initially dominated by the Catholic Church and the CEBs. In this period, the relationship between religious vocation and political practice was channelled through the formation and consolidation of the electoral bases of local politicians. Religion, the author argues, is usually a means of redemption from the ‘impurity’ or ‘contamination’ that may be associated with the residents of regions subject to violence, like Baixada Fluminense. Politics, meanwhile, as Barreto (2004: 47) adds, “despite very often being taken by residents of Baixada as the place of a kind of impurity - dishonesty, lies, opportunism, etc. - in some ways presents itself as one of the pathways for revising and reinventing one’s status as a resident through the valorisation of cultural initiatives and forms of broadening citizenship.” The candidacies of Evangelical politicians for elected government positions in Baixada Fluminense, Barreto suggests, express a more recent form of conjugation between religious vocation and collective political project in the region.

In the diverse forms assumed over time, the religious and political practices of Baixada Fluminense always intersect in the territories, configuring situated fabrics of local power, as understood by Alves - that is, through the interaction or, as I prefer to put it, the entanglement of powers that occupy the territories: state, criminal, political, police and governmental powers, among others.

Specific public policies from specific periods pose (or impose) themselves on this already existing - and mobile - entanglement of local powers in the Baixada Fluminense region. Such was the case of the pacification police. Its effects reach Baixada as one more element in this entanglement that produces practices, discourses, imaginations, populations and territories. As I have analysed in a previous work, it also leads to the foregrounding of some actors and the withdrawal of others in what I have denominated a ‘choreography of pacification’: a movement that continually institutes new boundaries, connections and ruptures (Machado 2016).

Various specific situations in Rio de Janeiro confirm that the pacification apparatus relies on a close relationship between state and religious practices as a means of promoting the redemption of people and territories dominated by violence. The mediators of this articulation appear in different positions of the social fabric of security and insecurity in Rio de Janeiro State: religious actors, members of organised civil society, gang members, former gang members and also the representatives of the public authorities themselves all act in highly differentiated forms but in the same direction - closely articulating the world of the religion with the world of crime and security, succeeding through this articulation in potentializing the dynamics of good and evil in the State and, of course, the disputes between them.

On the ADUD, moralities, the media and mediations

The Assembleia de Deus dos Últimos Dias (ADUD: Assembly of God of the Last Days) is known and renowned more widely, beyond the specificities of a Pentecostal church in Baixada Fluminense, due to some key components of its activities: 1) services held in prisons; 2) services held in favelas, including entering and interrupting funk parties; 3) actions that involve ‘rescuing from death’ men sentenced by the so-called ‘drug gang courts’; 4) widespread media dissemination of its actions through institutional videos posted on the internet, including videos of people ‘rescued from death’; 5) the figure of its leader, Pastor Marcos Pereira, protagonist of the services in prisons and favelas, ‘rescue’ actions and videos produced by the church; 6) a fairly successful ministry of gospel music; 7) broad participation in the state of Rio political scene through the support of candidates to different public offices and the running of its own candidates to the chamber of deputies and mayor’s office of Nova Iguaçu; 8) mainstream media programs about Pastor Marcos (Fantástico 2008, Conexões Urbanas 2008, Profissão Repórter 2010 and 2012; 9) and the public controversies surrounding the church, especially involving its Pastor.

In terms of its doctrine, the ADUD is notable for its rigid codes of behaviour that require strong control over the body and over the relationship between church members and ‘the world,’ the latter seen to be composed of everything outside institutional religious life. Its gender politics is strict, dictating appropriate and inappropriate behaviours and clothing for men and women.

As well as its specific policies relating to gender, the ADUD asserts a strict moral code in relation to images and the media. It tells its members not to own or watch television, nor indulge the habit of reading newspapers and magazines. Consequently, at the same time that it invests intensively in the production of its institutional media - with DVDs, TV programs, TV screens placed throughout the church, cameras, CDs, websites and so on - the ADUD’s doctrine is strongly concerned with the relationship between its believers and the mass media, conceived as a potential source of evil and sin.

The church’s videos are its main media product. The attraction that they exert on the general public can be traced to the exoticism of the performances of Pastor Marcos who uses his jacket to fell armed gang members, his Bible to throw at the devil who occupies the gang member’s body, his breath that cures those possessed by the devil. The script of the ADUD’s videos also wins viewers over by conjuring an atmosphere of adventure, courage and amazement provoked by the entry of the Pastor and his missionaries into favelas and dark alleys to rescue people on the brink of death, among armed drug dealers and desperate families - always featuring a happy ending. The ADUD’s videos circulate in all kinds of contexts, therefore, through their diffusion via the internet, as well as sometimes appearing as content on mass media programs.

Hence the audio-visual material produced by this church is notable for its broad circulation. The material is seen, commented on and produced in a wide variety of places and by diverse audiences: inside the church, in police stations, in prison, in the Legislative Assembly of Rio de Janeiro, in the favela, on TV, on the computer, on the internet, at home and in the street. Sumiala (2008) discusses the centrality of the relation between circulation and media in an approach to the social informed by the notion of networked society. The author claims that the anatomy of mediated circulation consists of a number of encounters with different actors: old and new media, images, texts, spectators, subjects, places, consumers, vendors, markets, specialists, journalists and producers.

Sumiala (2008) reinforces the idea that an analysis of the anatomy of media circulation affords an understanding of how these encounters are constructed in the media and how specific modes of gaze, recognition, identification and imagination engage within it. The author also emphasizes the circulation of religious reference points and the relations between these and the diverse modes of absorbing media imagery. The process of circulation, Sumiala writes, can be described as an infinite chain of associations and relations developed in these encounters.

Through the ADUD`s videos circulate contents, imaginaries, people and also territories. These videos are embedded in the set of religious references circulating in Rio state and in the country, and thus these videos too produce boundaries. In the ADUD videos, the church is represented in Baixada Fluminense as the origin point of the actions to rescue gang members on the brink of death, the source of salvation, and a safe place to which people can return; the Rio favelas, by contrast, are presented as the target of the church’s actions, the territories of crime and sin that require intervention. The videos produced by the church themselves participate, therefore, in the production of these regimes of territoriality, reinforcing some stereotypes, challenging others, and redefining relations between territories and populations.

Baixada as a territory of salvation

The ADUD’s interventions, as described briefly thus far, point to a specific cartography of poverty, violence and redemption in contemporary Rio de Janeiro. ADUD has operated its temple in one of these areas of Baixada Fluminense for more than 20 years now, and consolidated itself as an important point in the circulation of politicians and other actors from the ‘social’ world in Rio de Janeiro, including regular strategic visits to ADUD’s temple, its services and dinners with Pastor Marcos, as part of their essential itinerary.

Yet despite the traditional representations of Baixada as a violent territory, it is not there that the church prioritizes its actions. The ADUD’s ‘target public’ is not the residents of Baixada Fluminense. And this is an important point. It is not there that danger ‘resides.’ It inhabits other spaces. The first territory historically privileged by the ADUD was not even a district or a city, but Rio State’s jails. For many years the church worked inside prisons and still today engages in regular activities in police stations, most of them located in the city of Rio de Janeiro. The moral community of the ADUD, as I have previously argued in another work (Birman & Machado 2012), implicates a geography of the city’s police stations, which, named by the numbers that identify them, form part of the prayers held in the church. When duly traced, these provide us with a map of the actions of these missionaries in Rio de Janeiro.

But beyond the jails, the ADUD targets its actions at Rio’s favelas, thereby configuring a particular circuit in the relation between Baixada Fluminense and the favelas of Rio de Janeiro city. Freire (2016) analyses the conceptual and symbolic relation between the definition of ‘Baixada Fluminense’ and the idea of the ‘favela,’ and discusses how this analysis necessarily involves a relation between Zona Sul (the south zone of Rio) and Baixada (Freire, 2016). In the grammar of stigma, the merit resides in Zona Sul and the demerit in Baixada.

In the cartography of the ADUD, Zona Sul and its favelas are the danger. The church reinforces the inversion of a moral axis that situates redemption in Baixada and danger in the ‘city.’¹⁰ A danger that requires the help of missionaries from Baixada Fluminense who, as in their videos, cross the large highways connecting the towns and cities of the Metropolitan Region towards the city of Rio, most of the time towards Zona Sul, to hold their church services or perform the actions of ‘rescuing from death’ young people at risk, condemned by the ‘drug gang courts.’

One of these dislocations led the church to the district of Tijuca, in Rio de Janeiro, more specifically Morro do Turano. And there, in the words of the church’s leaders, “the work of the ADUD found an ally, the UPP.” The ADUD attended with its choir and some of its main leaders at the official commemoration of one year of operation of the Turano UPP. At the ceremony, held in the presence of the commander of the UPP, the Rio State security secretary and diverse public figures, the ADUD took up a portion of the official ceremony with a small service: music performed by the church choir, solos by its singers, talks by its preachers, and the testimony of a ‘former drug addict,’ sent by the UPP agents to the ADUD where she recovered.

Pastor Marcos’s brother, a preacher attending the event, thanked the UPP by referring to the project as something that “came to strengthen the work of the churches in the favelas,” the ADUD having already been present in Rio’s communities prior to the UPPs, according to this Evangelist. As living testimony of the ADUD’s partnership with the Turano UPP, the young Ediléia was presented at the event duly rehabilitated by the ADUD for life in society, using the clothing typical of women from the church: a straight monotone dress with long sleeves and skirt. Ediléia was invited to cut the first slice of the cake commemorating the UPP’s first anniversary.

One of the church’s female singers sang a hymn at the event, whose lyrics, highly pertinent to the situation, asserted: “you were not born to suffer, today my God is going to make you happy, He’s going to drag you from the pit of despair, He’s going to raise you, turn you into a new vessel, show all of your enemies that He is always with you.” The church’s message was directed at the oppressed populations of the favelas, supposedly ‘addicted,’ offering them a path to liberation, transformation and social reinclusion.

In an interview given by the public security secretary of Rio de Janeiro, José Mariano Beltrame, to the ADUD website on the internet, the following remark stands out: “we have to give thanks, we have to pray for what has already been achieved, and pray for the strength to continue moving forward.” The official spokesman of the Rio de Janeiro State Government thus consented to the church’s action, agreeing with the formula that combines ‘police’ and ‘Pentecostalism’ as a model of a ‘pastorate of souls,’ in Foucault’s terms (2008), in the context of ‘pacification.’ The secular project of public security that aims to pacify the bodies and souls of dangerous populations converges comfortably with the church’s religious project, which seeks, at the same time, to redeem the groups oppressed by drugs and thereby mark out a political position within the State.

With the territory occupied by the State, how to deal with the dangerous populations, those that supposedly occupy a tenuous frontier between the legal and illegal? How to control them? The church suggests treating and converting them. The UPP agrees. The danger posed by crime is transformed into the danger posed by drugs, and ‘treatment’ of addiction becomes a path to moral recovery for the drug gang member or ‘almost’ member. More than a disease, drugs are an ‘evil,’ and what matters in this context is, more than a course of ‘treatment,’ a form of ‘care’ that tackles all evils: physical, moral, spiritual and social.

This partnership between the ADUD and the UPP should not be analysed in isolation, however, focusing solely on the specific strategies of the pacification policy. It takes place within a history of continuities and ruptures in the relation between the church and the Rio de Janeiro State Government. Present in Rio’s jails since 1991, Pastor Marcos Pereira has occupied a key place in the evangelization of inmates in the State’s prisons. Likewise the church services held in prisons across Brazil, authorized by the State, evince the association between public security and the Evangelical churches working with dangerous populations.

In 2003 Pastor Marcos Pereira was prohibited from entering Rio de Janeiro’s prisons by the then State Secretary of Penitentiary Administration (SEAP). At the time, he was suspected of having close ties with one of the criminal factions in the state, since the two sisters of a known Rio drug trafficker were members of Marcos Pereira’s church. Barred from conducting his religious activities in the prisons of Rio, the Pastor was asked in 2004 to act as a negotiator during a rebellion in the Benfica Custody Centre. Everything suggests that this request came from authorities linked to the government of Rosinha Garotinho, state governor at the time, publicly self-declared evangelical.

The ADUD’s interactions with governments and politicians in the State of Rio de Janeiro were formed over time through diverse ties. In May 2010 the ADUD’s institute for drug addiction treatment was officially declared a state public utility by Law 5712/2010. As in the case of the UPPs and prisons, so too in the field of policies for combatting drug dependency, the comfortable and unquestioned alliance between the State and Rio’s Evangelical churches is long-lasting and widely recognized by everyone. Running extremely precarious public programs for the treatment of drug addiction, different Rio de Janeiro State and municipal governments depend on the close partnership of ‘rehab clinics,’ officially called therapeutic communities, operated in the State by Evangelical churches, most of them Pentecostal. While the wealthy receive treatment in expensive and luxurious private clinics, the poor Fluminense population is ‘taken in’ by the clinics run by religious actors.

For the work of his church’s Therapeutic Community, Pastor Marcos Pereira received two awards from the Rio de Janeiro State Legislative Assembly (ALERJ). In 2011, he was given the Tiradentes Medal at ALERJ. And on 31 August 2012, he was awarded the title of Honorary Citizen of the State of Rio de Janeiro.¹¹ During both celebrations, moments of secular public ritual alternated with moments of worship, religious songs and prayers. Both events were dominated by the ADUD’s religious practices.

The drug apparatus employed in the management of poor populations thus adheres to the pacification apparatus as an integral part of the management of violence. The UPP-ADUD relationship is mediated by the Therapeutic Community: it enables the transition from risk to control, marginality to citizenship. These issues are intensively related to the discussion proposed by Das and Poole (2004) on an anthropology of the margins of the state. Questioning attempts to define a general and universalist idea of “state” Das and Poole suggest the work in states and regions that are frequently characterized in comparative political theory as “new nations” with “failed,” “weak,” or “partial” states. These ethnographies, affirm the authors, “are framed, not as studies of regional or failed states, but rather as invitations to rethink the boundaries between center and periphery, public and private, legal and illegal, that also run through the heart of even the most ‘successful’ European liberal state. An anthropology of the margins offers a unique perspective to the understanding of the state, not because it captures exotic practices, but because it suggests that such margins are a necessary entailment of the state, much as the exception is a necessary component of the rule” (Das and Poole 2004: XX). As part of the alternative management of violence, the therapeutic communities comprise one of the various facilities and spaces that receive, take in or shelter populations on the margins of the state and that inhabit the folds of the legal and the illegal: the street, crackland, the churches, therapeutic communities, psychiatric hospitals, shelters and prisons (see Fernandes 2016). The same set of actors circulates through all these spaces, and in each of them these actors are managed by a policy: mental health policy, anti-drug policy, religious salvationist projects, public security policies, and so on successively and continually.

The therapeutic communities also comprise a specific dimension of the production of boundaries and territorialities in the State of Rio de Janeiro. Many of these institutions are located in regions of Rio de Janeiro city some distance from the centre, on its urban outskirts, as well as the towns and cities of its Metropolitan Region. Baixada Fluminense is an especially important territory for the localization of these communities, and through them specific circuits and movements of populations are established within the territories.

The production of boundaries is operated, therefore, by physical facilities, social technologies, mediators, discourses, practices and imaginations. In Baixada Fluminense, in its relation with the city of Rio de Janeiro, what function above all are the social technologies related to the management of crime, violence, drug policy and the prison system.

Prisons, churches and therapeutic communities: peripheral transversalities

On 7 May 2013, Pastor Marcos Pereira was arrested by the Delegacia de Combate às Drogas (Anti-Narcotics Unit). The crimes of which he was accused included rape (which would lead to his imprisonment) as well as involvement with drug trafficking, money laundering, coercion, homicide and other crimes. For the purposes of the present work, it is not a question here of analysing the veracity of these charges. What interests me here is discussing the aspects of this event relevant to the theme under analysis: the relationship between the ADUD and the peripheries of Rio de Janeiro.

The relation established by Marcos Pereira and his church with the prisons is a constitutive part of its project for managing poverty. Marcos Pereira, however, had been prohibited from entering Rio’s jails since 2008. His own imprisonment took him ‘back’ to the Bangu penitentiary and in some aspects gave a boost to his work among the prison population:

Accustomed to going in and out of prisons, where he became famous for his work of evangelization with prisoners, Pastor Marcos Pereira da Silva adapted this routine after he was sent to Bangu 2 prison, in the Gericinó Complex, in Rio’s Zona Oeste [West Zone]. Accused of committing two rapes (another four denunciations are being investigated), he cannot leave the jail, but continues his ritual of preaching.

- He has not held a service (which is banned). On the patio, he conducts a prayer at the request of the prisoners themselves. The pastor has already prayed for the son of an inmate who disappeared and also converted a lad who was in a great deal of pain caused by a swollen lymph node on his waist. The pastor prayed and the pain passed, and he became a convert on the spot. The lad cried a lot - recounted the pastor’s lawyer, Marcelo Patrício (Jornal Extra online, on 13 May 2013).

Marcos Pereira gained standing in public space as the pastor who cared for those who nobody wanted, the ‘dregs of society,’ and his main target public had always been the incarcerated population. When he himself became a prisoner for a time,¹² his imprisonment was interpreted by the church as a ‘journey to hell’ to rescue more souls for Christ.

The ADUD program for confronting violence involves the liberation of criminal souls from the sway of devil. To this end, the dialogue with ‘crime’ is always open, and all circulation in the territories of violence - whether the favelas or the prisons - is negotiated and authorized. The crossing of boundaries essential to undertaking this type of project places its mediators, like the ADUD pastor, in a grey, liminal, border zone, and their probity is continually questioned. Numerous suspicions always hover over them. On the other hand, we know, by inhabiting this liminal, impure space, the self-same mediator is imbued with power (Douglas 1966).

This power, local and localized, creates important inroads for partnerships with the State. The work of undermining the criminal factions on the frontline is supported by the State, whose operations take place behind the scenes. Whether churches or NGOs, different organizations receive or request public funding to develop their programs. As well as funding, the political capital of the connections with the State is also an important element in these partnerships. The relation between the ADUD and the UPP described previously is one such example.

The question of violence in the State of Rio de Janeiro suffers from an impasse made worse by its social policies: where should the marginalized, criminalized and ‘dangerous’ populations be located? If fixed, the only social place suitable for them is the prison. Other solutions for social inclusion such as employment and income generation, housing, education and healthcare are not granted to them. The other alternative is circulation and dislocation. The need or obligation for these populations to circulate creates boundaries in the urban peripheries, including those that increase and decreases the distances between territories of Baixada Fluminense and other territories in the State of Rio, including its capital. In the case analysed here, approximations are generated between prisons, police stations, therapeutic communities, UPPs and the church. The religious and political community linked to the ADUD produces and traverses these boundaries and thus participates in the production of regimes of territoriality that continuously configure these spaces.

Final considerations

Discussing Rio de Janeiro’s urban peripheries is an invitation to dislocation. The Brazilian Social Sciences have intensely examined the displacement to the favelas situated in the city of Rio. The present article has looked to provoke another displacement, exploring the analytic and conceptual consequences of thinking about the Fluminense peripheries not from the viewpoint of the city of Rio de Janeiro, the state capital, but from the viewpoint of Baixada Fluminense, a cluster of towns and cities in the state’s Metropolitan Region.

With this aim in mind, it has discussed the pacification apparatus: a set of discourses, practices and imaginations linked to pacification policy as a public security project in Rio de Janeiro. However it suggests an analysis that goes beyond police technologies and also discusses the diverse pacifying elements engaged in this process of forming populations and the territories to be affected by the intervention of moral and territorial control. In this apparatus operate state, religious, cultural and media actors, among others.

The specific case of the relationship between a UPP based in Rio city and a church from Baixada Fluminense provided the specific empirical material for these subsequent reflections. Confirming the analyses made by different studies of Baixada Fluminense, in this article it was possible to reflect on the centrality of local powers in the region - powers that form territorialized entanglements of state, criminal and religious powers.

The studies of Baixada Fluminense point to the importance of thinking about the region through its relation to the city of Rio, while also emphasizing the potency of the local inscriptions of the actors and powers from the territory of Baixada Fluminense itself and its political processes. The analysis developed here concerning the church’s relation to the pacification policy implemented in Rio city confirms that the model of the metropolis does not necessarily expand and impose itself on other territories beyond this kind of city. Baixada Fluminense, despite being in the so-called ‘metropolitan region’ and in close relation with the city of Rio and its public problems, has its own processes, formulates specific regimes of territoriality, and reciprocally influences the processes that unfold in the Rio metropolis by producing boundaries with and through it.

The politico-religious articulation between the church and the UPP explored here also lends support to Miagusko’s thesis (2016) that there is a specific and relevant potential to discussing the question of the ‘absence of the UPP’ as an aspect in the production of regimes of territoriality and management in the populations of Rio de Janeiro State. In the case analysed here, the main effect of this ‘absence’ is the consolidation of transversalities and modalities of circulation of actors in and between cities. In these relations we can highlight the fact that the ‘absence of the UPP’ does not generate just a supposed flow of criminal actors to Baixada (one of the theses of the moment) but also a flow of actors from the field of combatting violence who join other groups working in the city of Rio after judging that their participation is needed there. Here, therefore, we can identify a moral inversion of centre and periphery: the centre that emanates salvation is Baixada, and the periphery to be rescued is the favela of Rio city.

The church’s native media and its potential for circulation have been prominent elements in this analysis. The production of the religious and political imagination mobilized by the ADUD’s videos forms part of the set of references and representations that dispute conceptions of Baixada and Rio de Janeiro, especially the latter’s Zona Sul.

Another key element in the analyses developed here is the alliance between the drugs apparatus and the pacification apparatus, and the specific place of religious actors in this interconnection. The particular case of the ADUD and its therapeutic community point to a reality broader than the intrinsic relation between religious and state powers in the management of populations located on the margins of the state through the construction of the ‘drug problem’ and its (im)possible solutions.

Still in relation to the therapeutic communities, in this article I identified their role in the management of violence by providing a place for ‘sheltering the drug addict’: a category that operates as a generic term for much of the marginalized population of the urban peripheries, effectively avoiding their criminalization through their pathologization. This therefore suggests the possibility for more studies that can explore the reality concerned and broaden the debate on this ‘problem’ or this modality of local solution to the problem of violence. We can also reinforce the proposal made in this article that the therapeutic communities are not in themselves the tool for managing violence and criminalized populations, but they are one of the points of the web of the living formed by those who find themselves on the margins of the state and caught in the folds of the legal and illegal: also forming part of this web, aside from the therapeutic communities, are the Rio prisons, shelters, churches and psychiatric hospitals, among other spaces of residence and circulation.

Finally, I conclude my observations by emphasizing the specific yield of those studies of urban peripheries located away from the big Brazilian cities, capitals and metropolises. I follow here an invitation already put to the field by several academicals that points to the fact that a territorial and theoretical shift in urban research has potential yields too for Latin America in other fields of investigation. I also stress that the shift in focus suggested here does not mean discarding the rich material produced thus far on favelas and metropolises: rather, it adopts another stance in relation to this work, analysing its indispensable elements, but exploring possibilities beyond its agendas.

References

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• 1
  Rio de Janeiro’s Military Police’s Special Operations Battalion. BOPE is renowned for its aggressive and often lethal interventions in urban conflicts in Rio, especially in favelas.

• 2
  “Carioca” is a term that identifies persons, things or places related to the city of Rio de Janeiro, while “Fluminense” is the term that refers to the state of Rio the Janeiro. Baixada Fluminense can be generically translated by State of Rio de Janeiro Lowlands.

• 3
  The case of the Chatuba Massacre has also been analysed by Miagusko (2016).

• 4
  http://www.brasil247.com/pt/247/rio247/80793/ Consulted 30 September 2012.

• 5
  See Valladares 2005, Zaluar 1985, Machado da Silva 2008.

• 6
  ‘Favela é o caralho!’ See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWMeK5k-jsw Consulted 30 September 2012.

• 7
  Niterói is a city of the Metropolitan, Area located 20 km away from Rio; Macaé is a municipality 200 km away from the city of Rio; and Madureira is a district of the city of Rio, 28 km away from its main touristic area.

• 8
  http://ultimosegundo.ig.com.br/brasil/rj/2012-09-28/companhia-integrada-de-seguranca-publica-e-inaugurada-na-baixada-fluminense.html Consulted 30 September 2012.

• 9
  TN: The contrast between morro (hillside) and asfalto (asphalt) reflects the geographic occupation of Rio de Janeiro city, with planned urbanization, higher-income populations and asphalted roads generally located in the coastal strips between the local mountain ranges, and irregular occupation by lower income groups taking place on the steep hillsides.

• 10
  Many residents of Baixada Fluminense refer to Rio de Janeiro as the ‘city.’ Questions like “are you going to the city today?” are frequent.

• 11
  Resolution n. 505, issued 2012, Rio de Janeiro.

• 12
  Pastor Marcos was released on 24 December 2014.

• 14
  Translated by: David Rodgers

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  2017

History

• Received
  24 Jan 2017
• Accepted
  12 July 2017