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Stephan Lanz
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Urbanization under fire During the disintegration process of the military dictatorship, the residents associations experienced a boom of foundations. Starting at the end of the 1970s, critical activists, dissenting from their co-opted umbrella organization, now called "Faferi", agitated against clientelism and state tutelage. At first usually under the protection of grassroots parishes, they demanded their civil rights and raised the political awareness in their communities. Prevalent were communitarian ideologems that advocated local identities, grassroots organization forms and an autonomous position vis-à-vis the state and political parties (Zaluar 1998). Influenced by Manuel Castells' concept of "urban social movement" (1977) (see Lanz, Capillaries …), leftist intellectuals began debating the potential of critical residents associations for a democratic renewal of Brazil - and usually overestimated this potential drastically. The former "Quadra" architect Carlos N. F. dos Santos, on the other hand, stressed the defensive character of these neighbourhood organizations that had pragmatic aims which seldom went beyond concrete factual issues (Happe 2002: 246ff). Clientelistic barter trading once more gained the upper hand, this time for good, over political demands starting in the mid-1980s, not least because the leftist-populist PDT of Governor Brizola abused local activists as cabos eleitorais. In the 1990s, at the latest, many residents associations mutated into informal "mini-prefectures" (Alvito 2001) because the authorities used them as cooperation partners for their urbanization programmes. They increasingly defined themselves via the acquisition and distribution of public resources, something which put them in a powerful position. This also opened the door for corruption. Grassroots structures often degenerated into bureaucracies for the technical implementation of government programmes. At the same time, many activists were sucked into the machinery of the local government: "When I took a look around everyone had a job", is how the activist José Martins remembers the recruitment of "community agents" (agentes comunitários) (2003). This new form of state cooptation led to competition between favelas and activists for state resources; it "depoliticized" their actions and "pulverized" joint positions vis-à-vis the state (Machado da Silva 2002: 232). But also beyond that, the residents associations lost their character as political actors in the struggle for the civil rights of the favelados. The drug gangs, who became stronger and formed a paramilitary force parallel to the police in the 1990s, played a pivotal role in this. To protect their territorial interests in the favelas they began putting forward their own candidates for the residents associations, which found themselves increasingly trapped between the violence of the police and that of the gangs who instrumentalized them and forcefully broke their resistance - up to the murder of numerous activists (see Souza in this volume). The originally participatory act of elections to the associations was now dominated by a "culture of fear" (Zaluar 1998: 212); the associations lost their "identity of struggle, political pressure and mobilization" (Pandolfi / Grynszpan 2002: 253). The phenomenon of violence is not least the direct result of the military dictatorship that had destroyed a budding political integration of the favelados and made them permanently dependent on legal as well as illegal, clientelistic networks: In their capacity as patrons, politicians and drug barons are interchangeable, as it were. Since the associations have no legal means at their disposal to collect local "taxes" - e.g. for self-administrated infrastructures - or to provide public security, residents started to accept drug gangs interfering and maintaining "order". As regards the force of the police, both interests directly overlap. Based on the example of Acari, Marcos Alvito stresses that the relationship between residents associations and drug gangs has become alarmingly institutionalized. In one case the residents pay a monthly "tax" to the dominating gang that in turn maintains cleanliness and order; in another case the mafia builds swimming pools or a headquarters for the association. The inhabitants view this rather critically: When the police in their battle against the drug gangs occupied a settlement and blocked their power supply, they immediately stopped paying their monthly contributions to their associations who maintained close ties to the drug baron (Alvito 2001: 153). Violence is fuelled by the absence and the lacking legitimacy of the state (Baumann Burgos 1998: 44f) and promotes the repeated, strong revival of clientelism: Since clever community leaders negotiate with all sides over the highest material exchange value for "their" votes, politicians often seek exclusive access to the favelas by striking deals with the drug gangs. In such cases concrete murder threats bring the campaigns of potential competitors to a halt (Leeds 1998: 255). Other candidates prefer those local "presidents" with the closest ties to the drug gangs as their cabos eleitorais, because they simply expect a greater authority from them to enforce the negotiated election deal (Alvito 2001: 138f). The clientelistic dependency of the favelados in earlier times has been replaced by a sort of reciprocity: Only he who does "favours" prior to the election usually wins the political barter trade. The associations are never mere front men, so to speak, of gangs and politicians - as such they would not be of much use to them. Instead, within a broad continuum of possible positions, they possess a scope of action that usually depends on the personal authority of their president. On principle, according to Marcos Alvito, president and drug boss resemble each other in structural terms insofar as they both present themselves as virile machos whose power is symbolized, among other things, by the "possession of women" (ibid.: 145). In this respect, many of today's residents associations bear pre-democratic traits: Their presidents grasp them as organs belonging to them, and the residents, too, identify the associations via their donos, as they tend to tellingly call the chiefs: In some cases the associations themselves reveal mafia-like structures. For example, in Rio das Pedras, the most recent large favela erected parallel to the noble quarters of Barra da Tijuca, there is no drug mafia, but a residents association maintaining an informal secret police and forcefully preventing drug consumption and trade. Here, the committee which is apparently involved in favela-internal real-estate speculation governs "with an iron hand" (Baumann Burgos 2002a: 55); it is the authoritarian regime of an informal, parallel authority controlling the development of the settlement in each and every detail. Moreover, its conservative moral policies define the inclusion and exclusion of certain groups of residents - with the threat of force it evicts drug users from the favela (Moutinho 2002), for example. Beyond the decline of the residents associations as political actors (Souza 2000: 165ff), there is hardly a collective identity as "favelado" that could represent a social movement anymore. This is not least due to the rapid spreading of Pentecostal sects that splits the comunidades along religious lines, as Alba Zaluar points out, and creates "a complex articulation between the political and religious" (1998: 223ff). Within the context of the drug complex, the lacking legality of the favelas is met with collapsing moral values: Many favelados suddenly find themselves caught in an irresolvable tangle between corrupt state organs and violent drug gangs and thus in a situation in which categories of a legitimate social order are completely blurred. Especially religious ideologems that make a clear distinction between good and evil and are based on the revival experience of a cleansing catharsis appear to stand for the alternative of a reliable order here. The Pentecostal sects preach the self-contained community of a domestic, familiar and manageable world caring for itself at a distance to a dirty reality - thus fragmenting what remains of the favelado as a political subject.(5)
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