In this article, we explore the reactions and comments of three residents of a Rio de Janeiro favela in response to the publicity and repercussions of the circumstances surrounding the death of a resident of a neighbouring favela. We argue that these reactions and discourses are guided by moralities that express senses of justice and conceptions of rights that articulate attributions of differentiated status, based on identity criteria, with expectations and demands for an unequal distribution of forms of treatment. This formulation reveals an understanding of rights as a privilege of specific moral types that are articulated with experiences of moral insult and processes of discursive exclusion.
Neste artigo exploramos as reações e comentários de três moradoras de uma favela carioca diante da publicização e repercussão das circunstâncias da morte do morador de uma favela vizinha. Sustentamos que as referidas reações e falas são pautadas por moralidades que expressam sensos de justiça e concepções de direitos que articulam atribuições diferenciadas de
In this article, we explore the reactions and comments of three residents of a Rio de Janeiro favela in response to the publicity and repercussions of the circumstances surrounding the death of a resident of a neighbouring favela. We argue that these reactions and discourses are guided by moralities that express senses of justice and conceptions of rights that articulate attributions of differentiated status, based on identity criteria, with expectations and demands for an unequal distribution of forms of treatment. This formulation reveals an understanding of rights as a privilege of specific moral types that are articulated with experiences of moral insult and processes of discursive exclusion.
This article explores the reactions and comments of three residents of the Pavão-Pavãozinho favela in Rio de Janeiro in response to the publicity and public outcry surrounding the circumstances of the death of a man known as Amarildo, a resident of the Rocinha favela. We argue that these reactions and statements are guided by moralities that express senses of justice and conceptions of rights that were fundamental when the three women spoke about their everyday experiences with the police and with members of groups controlling the illicit drug trade, active in the favela at the time. Our aim here, therefore, is not to discuss police brutality or to reflect specifically on the circumstances of Amarildo’s torture and murder by Rio de Janeiro’s Military Police.
Our interpretive endeavour aligns with the proposals developed by the anthropology of law in Brazil, which places a concern with the lived dimension of rights at the centre of analysis, exploring how these rights are conceived, articulated and mobilized in everyday life by social actors and groups (Kant de Lima 2023, 1995; Cardoso de Oliveira 2020a, 2020b; Fonseca 2021;
Pavão-Pavãozinho, where Nathalia, Ana and Maria live and where the fieldwork was situated, is a favela in the city of Rio de Janeiro, located in Copacabana. The fieldwork was conducted intermittently between 2001 and 2014 by Marcus Cardoso. For this article, however, we concentrate primarily on the ethnographic material deriving from fieldwork carried out between 2013 and 2014, material that we have not previously subject to interpretation.
The article is organized as follows: we begin by presenting the circumstances of the Rocinha favela resident’s death and the reactions of Nathalia, Maria and Ana to the repercussions of this event. Next, we provide a more detailed introduction to the three protagonists of this article and their life trajectories. From there, we explore the connections between the critiques and reactions of these women and the moralities, senses of justice and conceptions of rights they share.
Amarildo and the repercussion of his death
Starting in 2013, the Pacifying Police Units (UPPs),
Facing public pressure over the footage, the police officers captured in the video were placed under preventive arrest. Compounding the situation, in September 2013, it became public knowledge that a Military Police major had coerced witnesses who had seen Amarildo being taken into the police station into giving false testimony. The fallout from the recordings, the coercion and the manipulation of the investigations put further pressure on the state government. It did not take long for subsequent investigations to reveal that the Rocinha UPP had become a centre for torture to extract information about hidden caches of weapons and drugs, and that Amarildo had died during one of these sessions.
During this same period, one of the initiatives that gained prominence on social and legacy media was the “We’re All Amarildo” campaign,
It was precisely during the shows organized by the “We’re All Amarildo” campaign that Maria, Nathalia and Ana, all residents of Pavão-Pavãozinho, voiced their dissent.
This is too much for my sanity! ‘We’re all Amarildo’? You’ve got to be kidding me, right? Human Rights activists definitely don’t represent me. Go up into the favelas – not for a daytime visit. Go up in the middle of the night, preferably in the favelas that haven’t been
There are news stories that just ruins my day. This is one of them. I’m disgusted by what all this has turned into. I hope they also put on shows to celebrate when some ‘Amarildo’ holds a gun to their heads. (Ana, November 2013).
How should we understand these comments and the visceral reactions provoked by the case’s repercussions and the “We’re All Amarildo” campaign? Immediately, the ironic and outraged tone of their statements makes it clear that the irritation and indignation of the three women were not due to Amarildo’s death, nor to the strong evidence that, even at that moment, pointed to the involvement of police officers in his torture and murder and the concealment of the corpse.
What really upset them was the kind of public repercussion the case had garnered. Part of this reaction was provoked by how the episode was covered in the newspapers. But what vexed them the most was the public mobilization of the “We’re All Amarildo” campaign. As Ana, Nathalia and Maria explained, their understanding was that Amarildo was part of the group controlling the sale of illicit drugs in the Rocinha favela – he was a
For the three women, indifference was the appropriate reaction to the death of individuals linked to crime. Watching Amarildo being treated as a victim left them particularly irate, therefore, which, in turn, prompted their provocative remarks, such as the suggestion that those who defended Amarildo should visit the city’s favelas to discover what the “Amarildos of the world” really did for a living and what they were capable of perpetrating. There was a clear implication that the man killed was involved in the local
It is important to highlight two facts regarding these women’s perception of Amarildo’s supposed involvement in the group that organized the sale of drugs in Rocinha: first, the police investigations did not confirm any participation by Amarildo in the group’s activities; second, none of the three women had known him personally. Nathalia and Ana used to visit Rocinha to see relatives – aunts, cousins and their father, who had moved there in 2001 and established a new nuclear family.
Precisely for this reason, it is essential to stress that we should not assume, based on the statements of Maria, Nathalia and Ana, that the Rocinha resident in question was indeed involved in “drug trafficking.” However, this caveat does not mean that we should disregard the reactions and interpretations of these women. For the purposes of this article, determining whether Amarildo was actually involved in illegal activities or not is irrelevant. Drawing on anthropological terminology, the opinions of the three women, even if founded on unconfirmed assumptions, reveal worldviews that are “good to think” about the senses of justice and rights shared by these women. After all, practices and events are evaluated through the framework of specific values that guide the comprehension of moral problems (Fassin 2018), which provides the basis for the analysis undertaken in this article.
Let us return to the reactions of these women. For all three, the possibility that police officers had killed Amarildo during or after torturing him was a question of secondary importance. What mattered was determining whether Amarildo was a
In 2013, when police participation in Amarildo’s disappearance had already become public knowledge, the women once again invoked these categories to discredit the demands for an inquiry into the incident and the punishment of those involved. At the time, they were asked to clarify what they meant. Ana said:
A decent person [
Nathalia said:
For me, it’s someone who is not involved with drug trafficking, no direct involvement with drug trafficking (…) It’s about working, about not getting involved, not being directly connected. I think that’s what it is – a decent person, in the favela, what I’m talking about, it doesn’t mean they’re a ‘good guy’ [
From the perspective of the three women, Amarildo was not a “decent” or “hardworking” person. And it was precisely this understanding that allowed them to downplay the crimes committed by the police, making the circumstances of Amarildo’s death, for them, irrelevant. A conversation we had with Ana a month before the impassioned reactions discussed here is illustrative. On that occasion, while remarking that the conduct of the police officers had not been ideal, she downplayed the consequences of their actions.
It’s true that what happened to Amarildo shouldn’t have happened – the police can’t just turn up and kill someone. But it’s also true that Amarildo wasn’t just a bricklayer, like everyone is saying, that he was some poor victim [
It is important to emphasize that these indifferent reactions were not limited to the killing of Amarildo. From the perspective of the three women, the crimes committed against “drug traffickers” were either not serious or were less serious than those committed against “decent people.” Reflecting a certain native sociology shared in the Pavão-Pavãozinho favela among some of our interlocutors, the perception prevailed that individuals involved in criminal activities were responsible for their choices and assumed the inherent risks. Precisely for this reason, there was nothing to lament when they were killed.
Nathalia believed that Amarildo got what he deserved, and she “wouldn’t lose a single night’s sleep” over people like him. In the same vein, Maria said that “as long as they’re killing each other, it’s fine,” alluding to the deaths of “traffickers.” Moreover, these women reflected on the threats, intimidation, humiliation and violence perpetrated by “faction members,” subjecting other favela residents to their control, which, in their view, was yet another reason not to sympathize with their personal tragedies.
The criminals [
It’s different from: ‘Oh, I discovered that the drug traffickers broke into your home and killed you.’ But come on, why? A criminal killing another criminal is really… in the favela, there’s a lot of: ‘Oh, a criminal killed a criminal. That’s normal.’ That’s acceptable. It’s acceptable because he was already expecting it – he probably did something outside their rulebook. You know how there’s a little rulebook for drug trafficking? So, he probably did something outside their rulebook, he stepped out of line… pissed outside of the pot, and so he was killed. (Ana, October 2013).
In turn, initiatives like “We’re All Amarildo” fuelled indignant reactions.
It’s very easy to blame everything that’s wrong on others, much easier. What I also see people in the favela doing a lot is this: ‘Oh, but I’m a poor victim.’ The favela residents… they often place themselves in the position of a victim, like: ‘I’m a poor victim [
Indeed, if we wanted to witness an impassioned reaction from the women, all we had to do was suggest that poverty and lack of opportunities pushed young people from the favelas into “drug trafficking.”
If everyone who’s poor and a worker and didn’t have the chance to study is a victim of society – if that gives them the right to enter the ‘world of crime’ to obtain things the fast and easy way, and if that gives them the comfort of being called a victim of ‘society’ – then I’m left asking myself: I was also born poor, the daughter of parents who didn’t even finish primary school, but they never stole to support or educate me. So what am I? A complete idiot for having studied, for waking up every day at six in the morning to work, for spending nearly two hours in traffic every day without robbing anyone? I really am an idiot, no question! (Ana, November 2013).
Ana’s irony in calling herself a “complete idiot” made clear her discomfort not only with the public impact surrounding the circumstances of Amarildo’s death but also with claims that “traffickers” were “victims of society.” In such cases, she would refer to her parents, who had little formal education, held jobs considered menial and poorly paid, yet they had not turned to crime. Citing the example of her parents allowed her to challenge arguments that downplayed the responsibility of “traffickers” and their choices. She also referred to her own life history. Her efforts to study, pursue a university degree while supporting herself through work demonstrated, in her view, that poverty was no excuse for turning to “crime.”
The three women
In this section, we take a closer look at Maria, Ana and Nathalia – their personal trajectories and the dialogue with them over the course of field research. At the time, all three women lived in the Pavão-Pavãozinho favela. Maria is the mother of the other two women. The first meeting with them took place in 2001, during the initial fieldwork in the favela, when Maria was just over 40 years old. We first met her inside a chapel of the Catholic Church in the favela and, later that same week, we was invited to visit her home. Thereafter, we began to visit her regularly. Despite her natural scepticism and understandable initial reluctance to discuss sensitive topics, over time, we grew close.
Maria was born in the Brazilian state of Ceará. Coming from a poor family, she moved to Rio de Janeiro at a young age in search of better living conditions. On her arrival in the city, she met João, her future husband, also from Ceará. After marrying, the two lived for a short time in a neighbourhood some distance from Copacabana. Following this initial period, they decided to move to Pavão-Pavãozinho, close to João’s place of work, where they rented a ramshackle dwelling in the favela. Later, they bought a plot of land in the favela and built their own home. Constructed initially out of wood, the house had just one bathroom and a single room where they slept and cooked. Over the years, the house was rebuilt in brick with two bedrooms, a living room, a bathroom and a kitchen. Subsequently, they added another floor to the structure, where they built two more bedrooms. João initially worked in construction before settling into a job as a doorman. Maria was employed in domestic work for middle-class families in Copacabana, a service she left when she became pregnant with Ana. Years later, their second daughter, Nathalia, was born. When I met Maria, she was no longer living with João. They had separated a few months earlier and João had moved to Rocinha – the same favela where Amarildo was tortured and later killed. Maria and her daughters remained in Pavão-Pavãozinho.
Ana is Maria’s eldest daughter. In 2001, then just over 20 years old, she was living with her mother, had completed high school and was working as a shop assistant in Copacabana. Because of her job, she was typically in the favela only at night or on the weekends. At that time, she was not studying but said she wanted to go to college (
Nathalia is Maria’s other daughter. Her opinions and life trajectory were similar to those of her older sister. In 2001, at 16 years old, she was living with her mother and sister, attended high school, and did not work. Years later, she moved into a residence that her mother had built above the family’s original house. By 2013, she was working at the same company and attending the same private university as her sister. Nathalia’s relationship with the space where she lived and with her neighbours was also similar to Ana’s. She too expressed a desire to leave the favela – provided she could remain close to the Copacabana area – and was critical of the
These three women shared similar views on many topics. They feared and resented the
These opinions bore a direct relationship to their remarks about the public reporting of the circumstances surrounding Amarildo’s death. Moreover, all three women had the same response to cases involving people close to them who had been or were involved in drug trafficking. Ana once commented, for example, that she had spent years trying to persuade a childhood friend to leave the
Senses of justice and rights in Rio’s favelas
How should we interpret the reactions and discourses of the three women? One possible interpretation takes us to discussions about the social production of indifference. These studies explore the processes by which collectives, repeatedly subjected to widespread human rights violations, come to naturalize deaths, torture and other forms of violence experienced daily. Scheper-Hughes (1992) calls this process the
Another line of interpretation maintains that reactions of indifference represent an effort on the part of residents of poor areas to gain some control over the violence to which they are exposed. Hence, the constant invocation of categories such as “decent person” (
Certainly, these two interpretive frameworks cannot be ignored. In our view, however, they are insufficient to explain the prevalence of the categories and their meanings, since there is another dimension involved in their usage that cannot be reduced to strategies for controlling violence. Our interpretation takes a different course. Maria, Nathalia and Ana’s critiques of the “Amarildo case” express senses of justice and conceptions of rights shared by many other interlocutors over the years. These senses become particularly relevant when they narrated and reflected on their everyday experiences.
The contexts in which the categories “criminals,” “drug traffickers,” “decent people,” and “workers” were invoked, the way they seemed to be articulated with expressions of indignation, demonstrations of indifference, and the meanings attributed to them, all point to the prevalence of a framework that links differentiated status attributions based on identity criteria with specific expectations and demands for unequal distribution of forms of treatment. In other words, it is a formulation that conceives rights as privileges of moral types residing in the favelas – a prerogative of “decent people.”
The interpretation of indifference toward the abuses and crimes committed by police officers, as well as the negative reactions to the public repercussion of Amarildo’s murder, seems more promising when we consider the moralities shared by the three women. Here, the aforementioned categories played a central role. Let us return to the statements of Nathalia and Ana. The understanding expressed by the two women in 2013 resembled what was observed during fieldwork conducted over the years. In general terms,
These emic categories are readily identifiable in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas (Zaluar 1985, Ceccheto, Muniz and Monteiro 2020, Kant de Lima 1995, Machado da Silva 2008, Cardoso and Lemos 2022, Cardoso 2014, Cardoso 2017). Although these categories cannot be assumed in an essentialized or static manner, they carry a profound moral weight and play a significant role in the construction of local identities. In the opposition between “worker” (
The attribution of moral value to the distinction between “decent people/workers” and “criminals” – positioning the former as morally superior to the latter – is fundamental to the sense of justice and rights in this context. It is through this distinction that demands for the unequal distribution of forms of treatment are sustained, framed locally as a right. In this formulation, being the recipient of these forms of treatment, deemed appropriate, was seen as a prerogative of “decent people.” Conversely, their denial was experienced as a form of
Seen from this perspective, we can understand why the idea that individuals are in control of their own trajectories and responsible for their own choices is important to the three women. Denying this notion would call into question the assumption of moral superiority of “decent people/workers” and subvert the foundations of their convictions. Unsurprisingly, claims about external factors beyond individual motivations that could justify the trajectories of “criminals,” or even the territorial dimensions of the process of criminal subjection of these individuals, were seen as unwarranted. Any attempt to explain these trajectories through the structural imperatives of a socioeconomic kind was considered unsubstantiable.
This formulation of justice, which frames rights as the privilege of specific moral types, also operates in parallel with a process of dehumanization (Freire 2010). The interplay between the senses of justice highlighted in this article and the regime of dehumanization sustains a moral framework that conceives certain persons as
Authors have used this term to analyse violence within the prison system (Lemos 2019, Lemos and Cardoso 2022, 2023a, 2023b). Here, we suggest that
It is precisely in the discrediting of statements and denunciations that the connection to the notion of
At the time, publicization of the circumstances surrounding the murder also sparked a parallel public debate about the structural socioeconomic factors involved in the recruitment of favela residents into “drug trafficking.” Discussion focused on the correlation between the existence of these groups and the lack of opportunities for the city’s impoverished populations. These were arguments that, from the perspective of the three women, diluted the personal responsibility of those involved in criminal activities. This debate intensified the level of exasperation felt by Maria, Ana and Nathalia. They refused to accept this kind of argument, vehemently opposing the idea itself and those who defended it. Calling themselves “perfect idiots” or expressing disgust captured with precision the impact on them of any statements relativizing the agency of individuals over their own choices and trajectories. Not coincidentally, Nathalia and Ana drew on the life trajectories of their parents, as well as their own, to substantiate their point of view.
The final straw for the three women were the mobilizations for the “We’re All Amarildo” campaign with music shows and the circulation of videos on social networking sites to raise funds and pressure for an inquiry. From the women’s perspective, these mobilizations were entirely unjustified. Why such concern for the fate of one individual who, in their view, was a “criminal,” when the appropriate reaction in such cases would be indifference or, at most, discreet disapproval? Devoting so much energy and mobilizing so many resources to punish those responsible for Amarildo’s murder was perceived by the trio as an inappropriate response.
We can conjecture that the widespread media attention given to Amarildo’s death and the activities of the “We’re All Amarildo” campaign provoked such a negative reaction from Maria, Nathalia and Ana because these initiatives had the potential to destabilize the foundations on which these three women identified themselves as “decent people,” as well as the grounds for their expectations of differentiated treatment. After all, if everyone deserves to have their rights respected, irrespective of their choices and allegiances, what value would there be in an individual who has chosen “hard work” over joining the “crime” world? In this sense, the “We’re All Amarildo” movement represented a threat to the foundations of local conceptions of justice and rights, as well as to the very identity of these three women.
The reach of this framework of justice is so pervasive that the same emic categories, with the same meanings, used by the Military Police communications sector, by those responsible for investigating the murder, and by Maria, Nathalia and Ana were also invoked by Amarildo’s family, his lawyer and the organizers of the “We’re All Amarildo” campaign. In their public statements, lawyers and family members insisted that Amarildo was a family man and a “worker,” with no involvement in local drug trafficking, to support their demands for justice. The same applied toe representatives of the “We’re All Amarildo” movement in their public statements and organized events, a direct contrast to the police’s communication strategy, suggesting that both sides were engaged in a dispute for public opinion, seeking to influence whether Amarildo was perceived as a “criminal” or a “worker.” After all, this perception would ultimately shape the public repercussion of the case. In our view, this is yet another indication of the centrality of this framework that conceives certain rights as privileges associated with specific moral categories – where identifying a person’s moral status precedes and determines whether or not a violation of someone’s rights is recognized.
Conclusion
In this article, we set out to demonstrate that Maria, Nathalia and Ana’s indignant reactions to the public commotion surrounding Amarildo’s death and the “We’re All Amarildo” movement express local senses of justice and conceptions of rights. We then problematized the nature of this formulation, examining how it is articulated with the critiques and negative reactions, connected to feelings of devaluation, disregard for their identities and the frustration of their expectations and demands for forms of treatment they perceive as their prerogative. In this ethnographic context, perceptions of what is just and of rights are linked to differentiated status attributions based on identity criteria and expectations of an unequal distribution of forms of treatment. Individual rights and the need for their observance thus depend on prior recognition of the social identity of the people involved and are prerogatives of certain social types living in the favelas.
These formulations resonate with conceptions of rights and expectations of treatment in other contemporary Brazilian contexts, as explored by Cardoso de Oliveira (2022, 2020b, 2018a), Kant de Lima (1995, 2023) and Lemos and Cardoso (2023a, 2023b, 2021). In his work in this area, Cardoso de Oliveira has drawn attention to the tensions between two conceptions of equality in Brazil: the first advocates for uniform treatment, aligning more closely with modern principles of citizenship, while the second consists of unequal treatment of unequal groups or individuals (Cardoso de Oliveira 2018b). The disparity in treatment within the public sphere reveals a dimension key to understanding citizenship in Brazil: the differential attribution of social status within public institutions and civil society, which can legitimize the denial of dignity to certain sectors of the population. In this sense, as Cardoso de Oliveira (2018b) demonstrates, the differentiated access to rights and the expectations of unequal treatment in the civic world are frequently based on the evocation of particular identities and statuses – whether to claim privileges or to deny access to rights (Cardoso de Oliveira 2022).
Still on the topic of the conceptions of justice prevalent in different contexts in Brazil, Kant de Lima refers to the “Brazilian legal paradox” in the phenomenon whereby “an egalitarian constitutional order is applied unequally” (Kant de Lima 1995, 1). In so doing, he emphasizes how rights and privileges are distributed unequally according to the status of those involved in a socially hierarchical structure. This inequality is also expressed in the different forms of social control employed according to the social status of the individuals concerned. Especially in the case of minorities and the most disadvantaged segments of the Brazilian population – black people, indigenous peoples, traditional populations, women, residents of urban peripheries, and so on – social control is exercised coercively through moral, physical and institutional violence, including taking the lives of the people involved. For Kant de Lima and Cardoso de Oliveira (2023), one of the consequences of this mode of conflict management, related to perceptions of unequal treatment, is the reproduction of differentiation strategies “among peers so that, by distinguishing themselves from those similar to them, they can ascend to higher social strata” (Cardoso de Oliveira 2023, 11).
The discourses of Nathalia, Maria and Ana express notions of equality that are indissociable from an idea of justice and rights to which they adhere and that shape their interpretations of the events narrated in this article. What seems to us especially pernicious in this context is that this arrangement involves the naturalization of violence against individuals who are not recognized as bearing an acceptable social status or identity – those who do not share the same status of equality as “decent people” (
TN: In Brazil, the Military Police, organized in a hierarchical military structure, are responsible for ostensive policing, including maintaining public order and crime prevention. After suspects are arrested, cases are handed over to the Civil Police, responsible for criminal investigation and case building for prosecution.
The Pacifying Police Unit (UPP) is an initiative of the Rio de Janeiro State Secretariat of Public Security. One of its stated objectives is to dismantle the territorial control of organized groups involved in the trade of illicit drugs, known as factions. The Rocinha UPP was inaugurated on 20 September 2012. For more on the UPPs, see: Borges
Subsequently, twelve police officers were convicted of torture, murder, concealment of a corpse and procedural fraud in what became known as the “Amarildo case.” Amarildo's remains have still not been found. In 2014, the Rio de Janeiro Court of Justice declared the presumed death of the Rocinha resident. In 2023, the Superior Court of Justice increased the sentences of the police officers convicted for Amarildo's death.
Throughout the article, the discourses of interlocutors will be set in quotation marks. Emic categories will appear in italics.
Source: https://www.facebook.com/notes/marisa-monte/conheça-o-projeto-somos-todos-amarildo/ 696826620349597 (last accessed 29 June 2024).
The Pavão-Pavãozinho favela is relatively close to the Rocinha favela, both of them located in the South Zone of Rio de Janeiro city.
The term “