The criminal is political: the ‘politics’ of Brazilian drug gangs on film

• In Event: Exclusión y marginalidad en el cine latinoamericano

Abstract

The divide between political and criminal violence is both rigidly policed and strongly contested. While critical criminologists have long seen all crime as ‘political’ to an extent, mainstream media and popular discourse has rarely been as nuanced. Two cases in which the political and the criminal has been blurred is the foundation myths of two of Brazil’s most violent drug gangs, the Comando Vermelho in Rio do Janeiro and the Primeiro Comando do Capital in São Paulo, both of which adopted rhetoric and tactics in some ways inspired by the left-wing militants of the 1960s and 1970s (da Silva Lima: 1991, Amorim: 1993). Research on these organisations has argued that despite their own violence, these organisations have also functioned to control and regulate and even reduce the violence in Brazil’s mega cities often with the complex the complicity of the state (Denyer Willis: 2015, Glenny: 2016).

In this paper I examine popular representations of the politics of trafficking organisations in the films Salve Geral (2006) and Quase Dois Irmãos (2004). In a discursive landscape characterised by sensationalism and misinformation, I argue that the films offer a sophisticated commentary on (i) the challenge the CV and the PCC offer to state sovereignty, (ii) the role they play in the regulation of violence, and (iii) their relationship to the state institutions of control.

Author

• Joey Whitfield, University of Leeds