Adapting to survive

: the evolution of factions and gangs in Rio de Janeiro

Abstract

This thesis aims at explaining why state repression of gangs in Rio de Janeiro has been unsuccessful so far. These groups have existed for decades, clashing several times with police forces and causing consistently high murder rates. Since at least the 1990s, they have achieved extensive and visible dominance of economically disadvantaged neighbourhoods. Authorities have carried out multiple attempts at repressing them, including an expensive project of community policing. Yet, gangs have survived and carried on their activities to this day. This thesis seeks to explain their continuing resilience by focusing on the change over time of these groups. To do so, the thesis advances an evolutionary and ecological study of the gangs and factions operating in Rio, drawing inspiration from the main concepts in the fields of evolutionary theory. The thesis then describes how these non-state armed groups changed (or remained stable) over time in their dependence on territories, relations, and members. This work shows that changes in territoriality had a domino effect on the relations and members traits. In the 1980s, the ‘Red Command’ criminal group forsake an early attempt at achieving dominance over prisons in favour of a push to attain hegemony over the drug dealing points in some of the city’s favelas. The divided attention implicit in this choice allowed however for the subsequent fragmentation of the prison system among different groups, thus facilitating the fragmentation of factions more broadly. The individual gangs then had to cope with constant and often brutal police repression by ensuring non-hostility from the security forces through transactions and by undergoing an unconscious, unplanned adaptation in their use of human capital that made them resilient to police operations. This thesis describes these wide changes by reconstructing group history through news sources, the secondary literature, and fieldwork data (in particular, interviews with high-ranking police officers).

Date of Award	1 Jan 2021
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	King's College London
Supervisor	David Betz (Supervisor) & Neville Bolt (Supervisor)