On 8 June last year, interior designer Kathlen Romeu, then four months pregnant, was walking with her grandmother on the streets of Complexo de Lins, in the north of Rio de Janeiro, when she was hit in the chest by a rifle shot. Taken in a police car to the hospital, the 24-year-old, along with her unborn child, later died from her injuries. Residents of the favela claim she was shot during a police manoeuvre known as a ‘Trojan horse’, an illegal ambush in which police invade a residence to use it as a point of surprise attack.
Romeu’s is not an isolated case. Police violence in Brazil is notorious, alarming and historic – and by no means accidental. Police repression of drug trafficking in the country has been bloody since the 1980s. Paradoxically, the period of redemocratisation following the end of the military dictatorship in 1985 coincided with a flagrant militarisation of the state's public security policy. This militarised policy’s main target since then has been a supposedly wild and dangerous male figure: the drug trafficker.
By understanding the war on drugs as a confrontation between two warrior masculinities – police and drug traffickers – the actions of the state are governed by a masculine militaristic logic. In this view of public security, the police are the soldiers, charged with the elimination of the enemy and the conquest of territory. Non-military measures of governance are discarded, while the population is required to tolerate authoritarian actions with total disregard for human rights.
