Militianization / Milicianização: Dark Innovation at the State-Crime Frontier

In the early 1980s, an innovation in the organizational technology of crime, born in the dungeons of Brazil’s military dictatorship, spread beyond prison walls and transformed Rio de Janeiro. Comando Vermelho was Brazil’s first facção, known as a comando, in Rio de Janeiro—a kind of sophisticated, prison-based criminal network whose collective capacity quickly eliminated or subsumed the autonomous donos (bosses) who then ruled over Rio’s favela communities and the illicit markets centered there. The CV’s initial hegemony soon gave way to internecine conflicts with rival factions and open confrontation with state forces that still continue. But the faction model—the splitting up of Rio’s favela territory among a handful of prison-based groups—proved incredibly resilient. This research focuses on factionalized states like Amazonas, Ceará, and Rio Grande do Norte, which have given a new appreciation of the transformational power that criminal technologies have on innovation—namely, of milícias.