Criminalized Democracy: The Electoral Impact of Rio de Janeiro’s Drug Gangs

• In Event: Armed Groups and Elections

Abstract

For more than three decades, drug trafficking gangs have monopolized violence in hundreds of favelas across the Rio de Janeiro’s sprawling urban landscape. In these neighborhoods, gangs dominate local politics by offering cooperative parties and politicians unfettered access to favela voters in their territories during election campaigns. Although this type of electoral fraud is well-documented in numerous scholarly works, there has been little systematic investigation into the nature of these collaborative arrangements or their electoral impact. This article aims to fill this gap by building on more than five years of combined fieldwork that involved significant ethnographic and interview data collection. We also leverage the gradual implementation of Rio’s flagship public security program, the Unidades de Polícia Pacificadora (UPPs), and the state’s reassertion of its monopoly of violence in more than 250 favela territories from 2008 to 2014, to investigate the impact of gang territorial control on municipal-level elections.

Author

• Juan Albarracin Dierolf, Universidad Icesi