“São Francisco na Maré”: memórias de uma ocupação militar na cidade dos megaeventos

Abstract

This doctoral thesis proposes, based on an ethnographic research carried out by the author, the analysis of the "Operation San Francisco", a military occupation of the district Maré, in Rio de Janeiro, which lasted from April 2014 to June 2015. Maré became, on occasion of this occupation, a privileged space to think of some of the most evident implications of the constitution of the city of Rio de Janeiro as an international capital of mega-events and on the ways in which the Brazilian state manages certain urban spaces and governs its populations. In this way, this research is inserted in a broader discussion that tries to think the recent history of Rio de Janeiro as the target of public policies that revolved around the accomplishment of a set of international mega-events. History that necessarily goes through militarized devices of "pacification" of certain territories, new legal productions and approaches with certain groups and networks of support, especially the religious ones. Through a reflection on militarization as an integral part of the formation of the Brazilian state and the proposal of the concept of a new violent sociability, it seeks, finally, to interpret, from the case of Rio de Janeiro, a set of phenomena that have produced an advance, close to hegemony, of the language of violence.