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Fernando Brancoli and Desiree Poets · Security in Context, 2026 Brazilian Elections series
On October 28, 2025, some 2,500 police officers, 32 armored vehicles, 12 demolition vehicles, and two helicopters entered the Alemão and Penha complexes in the North Zone of Rio de Janeiro for what came to be known as the deadliest police raid in the state of Rio’s history. By nightfall, 121 people had been killed in Operation Containment, including four police officers—more than four times the toll of the previous record set in Jacarezinho in 2021. Governor Cláudio Castro labeled the operation a success, claiming it complied with the Supreme Court's instruction, issued six months earlier when it ruled in the trial regarding the "ADPF 635 (Actions for Breach of a Fundamental Precept) of the Favelas," that the state draw up a plan to "recover territories" from criminal control. The operation's primary target, a Comando Vermelho leader, was not captured. Seven months later, on May 28, 2026, the US State Department designated the Comando Vermelho as a terrorist organization, at the request of the family now contesting the presidency on a public security platform. The following sets out, for readers outside Brazil, how the Rio favela known as Maré faces election day on October 4: the impact of state and criminal violence in the neighborhood, what the law now says about it, and what three vocabularies competing to describe it—a community-led popular frame, a state-led federal frame, and an imperialist, US-led frame—would each enable and foreclose.
The place. The Complexo da Maré is a set of sixteen favelas on the northern shore of Guanabara Bay, wedged between the three highways that connect Rio's airport to its center. Roughly 129,000 people live there, more than many Brazilian municipalities. Its territory is divided among three armed groups, two connected to the city’s prison-based factions, Comando Vermelho and Terceiro Comando Puro, and one militia, a police-linked protection racket that now governs much of the city's western zone. Maré was occupied by the Armed Forces from April 2014 to June 2015, in the run-up to the World Cup, under a "pacification" mandate that ended with the troops withdrawn and the factions in place. It was among the targets of the 2018 military-led federal takeover of Rio’s state security, and, since 2017, has been governed by court-ordered safety protocols for police incursions that mandate ambulances on standby and restrict operations during school hours. These protocols were first established under the “ACP da Maré” and later expanded state-wide through the ADPF das Favelas. They are both the result of sustained collective organizing co-led by Redes da Maré, the local NGO founded and directed by Eliana Sousa Silva, our interviewee.
The interviewee: The daughter of migrants from Brazil’s Northeast, Eliana Sousa Silva grew up in the Maré favela of Nova Holanda, became the first woman to preside over its residents' association at 22, completed a doctorate at PUC-Rio, founded Maré's community pre-university course in 1997 (the late city councilor Marielle Franco, brutally assassinated in 2018 by hitmen linked to militias, was among her students), and has spent decades building collective capacity to secure the social and political rights of Maré’s residents. She is also the author of the book Testimonies of Maré.
Accounting for violence. Public Security is one of the central strategic axes of Redes da Maré’s work, alongside Urban and Socio-Environmental Rights; Art, Culture, Memories and Identities; Education; and the Right to Health. As part of its mission, the Right to Public Security axis has monitored and collected data on armed violence and police operations in the neighborhood for over a decade. In March 2026, Redes published the ten-year edition of its Public Security Bulletin. It finds that, between 2016 and 2025, Maré endured 231 police operations that resulted in 160 deaths, along with 1,538 documented rights violations, from torture and illegal detention to the destruction of homes. Schools closed for 163 days over the decade, the equivalent of an academic year; in 2024 alone, health units closed for 14 days and 7,866 medical appointments were cancelled. In 2025, 16 operations were carried out in Maré, eight of which involved helicopters that officers used as a firing platform in four instances. That year, the police killed 12 citizens—armed groups assassinated another 11 residents—while 141 gunshots were recorded. Across the state, the Public Security Institute counted 797 deaths by police intervention in 2025, up 13 percent (from 703) the year before, as overall violent deaths rose by two percent—all of which the institute's director spun as a success, crediting "the effectiveness of crime-fighting strategies." Eliana's summary of the decade was brief: "there is a pattern of violence that repeats itself." The pattern is the point. Each operation is announced as exceptional, yet the series, laid end to end, is the policy.
What the law now says. Three instruments define the legal terrain on which the election is being contested across the favela, and it is worth being precise about them because the campaign is not. The first is the Supreme Court's April 2025 ruling in ADPF 635. In this decision, the court partially approved the state's plan to reduce police lethality,extended the deadline for equipping police officers with body cameras, and ordered the Federal Police to investigate the militias. Crucially, in the clause the governor cited in October, the court ordered the state and municipalities to “recover” areas controlled by armed groups by establishing their own "permanent public presence" through infrastructure, youth programs, and basic services. Six months later, that clause was read from an armored vehicle to launch the fateful Operation Containment. The second is Law 15.358, signed by President Lula in late March 2026. It is known as the "anti-faction" law, which created the offence of domínio social estruturado, or structured social domination, for organizations that impose rules on residents, erect barricades, attack public services, and control territory by intimidation, with heavier sentences for those who integrate, finance, or command them. . It also punishes "preparatory acts": anyone shown to have an "unequivocal purpose" of committing one of these crimes can be sentenced to between half and two-thirds of the full penalty, even if the crime is never carried out—a departure from the general rule of Brazilian criminal law, under which merely preparing a crime is not punishable.. Lula vetoed the clause that would have allowed prosecution without proof of organizational membership. Despite the Brazilian right’s fascination with Nayib Bukele, the law was not modeled on El Salvador; if anything, it was drafted against that model. The government sent its bill to Congress days after Operation Containment, and the opposition rapporteur in the Chamber, Guilherme Derrite—a federal deputy on leave from his post as São Paulo’s security secretary and an open admirer of the Salvadoran approach—first rewrote it to fold the factions into Brazil’s 2016 anti-terrorism law. He retreated after the Federal Police publicly warned of a "risk of regression," and the category that survived was written as an alternative to the terrorism frame rather than a copy of it. It is a Brazilian instrument, produced by a Brazilian legislature during an election year, with immediate effect in Brazilian courts. The third instrument is the US Foreign Terrorist Organization designation of the Comando Vermelho (CV) and the Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC), effective 5 June 2026. It carries American strategic, financial, and diplomatic power yet holds no standing whatsoever in a Brazilian courtroom.
Three vocabularies, from Miami to Nova Holanda. Maré illustrates the asymmetry between the two official vocabularies, the federal and the imperialist, with unusual clarity. Of the three armed groups that operate in its territory, only one is on the American list. When the police launched a mega-operation in Maré on June 10, 2026 to execute 56 arrest warrants, the target was the Terceiro Comando Puro, which Washington never named. The militia, which the Supreme Court singled out for federal investigation, appears on no terrorist list anywhere. The favela lives under both official vocabularies at once and under neither entirely. Whoever wins in October inherits the choice between them: an imperialist category that reaches bank accounts in Miami but not a barricade in Nova Holanda—the improvised barrier of concrete blocks, scrap metal, and burnt-out cars with which armed groups slow police vehicles at a favela’s entrances, and which residents cross on their way to work every morning—and a domestic category that reaches the barricade and, on the evidence of its drafting, the residents behind it. The Bolsonaro campaign has made the imperialist category its own, having requested it themselves; the Lula government has answered with the domestic counterpart, having signed it. Yet neither was written from the favela, and neither asks the question that Redes has been asking for a decade: what does security mean to the people targeted by state and criminal violence? From Maré’s perspective, the answer has been consistent: an ambulance that deploys, a school that opens, a crime scene that is preserved, a police force that is accountable for what it does on a Tuesday morning rather than praised for what it seized. From this popular perspective—the third vocabulary, and the only one written from the favela—security means the collective capacity and popular power to develop and implement policy frameworks that center all of Brazil’s citizens as human beings with political, civil, and human rights. Those are not the terms driving the electoral campaign. Nonetheless, they are the terms on which any policy will ultimately be judged, because the favela is where these vocabularies will be put to the test, and the territory where Brazil’s democracy is conceptualized and practiced.
Security in Context put these questions to Eliana Sousa Silva. The interview, recorded on September 21, 2026, will be published in this series. The vocabulary we accept now will determine the policies that are thinkable later; in Maré, the record of what those policies do has already been kept.
