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This paper is about the irregular war in Rio de Janeiro regarding its rules and dynamics, its links with local politics and transnational business, as well as the actors' subjective meanings, part of the ethnographic data gathered over years. My approach has been to interact with many actors during long periods of time using multiple sources of data to adjoin clues and contradictions provided by the various agents interviewed. I followed the precepts developed by Gluckman and Buroway on the extended case method, adapting it to the violent social contexts in the favelas of Rio emphasizing conflicts and diversity within them. The analysis bears also statistical and historical material. In 1980, I found a new neighborhood organization: drug-dealing gangs engaged in turf wars. In them, a kind of male identity was the crux of the matter to understand the subjective meanings and the ethos not revealed on the surface of everyday experience. Some youngsters, who plunged in violence and crime, interiorized the warrior ethos or violent practices, becoming their own executioners by killing each other with increasing cruelty justified by the warfare. This altered completely not only the local balance of power but the sociability between neighbors in such areas.

This article discusses how primary social bonds, which constitute sociability, or the lifeworld, or day-to-day experience of what is taken for granted, are influenced, dominated or even colonized by economic and politico-institutional systems. It focuses on how the theory of transnational network-organized crime is important to understand the lives of the poorest young inhabitants of the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. It explores the politico-economic associations and cultural interpenetrations between professionalized crime and local politics; the connections between illegal and legal commerce, the transitions between deviance and the conventional world; the links between the economic system, with the power structure that accompanies illicit activity, and the lifeworld of small vendors, their families and neighbours.

O artigo discute dois paradoxos e um enigma que se desenvolveram no país durante as últimas décadas: o processo de democratização iniciado em 1978, que foi acompanhado por aumento espetacular da criminalidade; uma nação que foi construída pelos ideais da cordialidade e da conciliação mudados recentemente para os mecanismos da vingança pessoal e impulsos agressivos incontroláveis, visto que nem o perdão nem a pacificação foram discutidos publicamente no término do regime militar. Por fim, o enigma de uma violência brutal entre homens jovens que afetou muito pouco as mulheres e outras categorias de idade. Ao contrário dos conflitos étnicos que atingem a todos, no Brasil são os homicídios cometidos entre homens jovens que cresceram várias vezes nos anos 1980 e 1990. A fim de compreender isso, são utilizadas quatro dimensões: o contexto internacional do tráfico de drogas e de armas de fogo; a importância e os limites das explicações macrossociais sobre a criminalidade violenta que interage com os mecanismos transnacionais do crime organizado; a inércia institucional que explica a ineficácia do sistema de justiça; os processos microssociais ou as formações subjetivas sobre a concepção de masculinidade em suas relações com a exibição de força, dinheiro e armas de fogo. ; The article discusses two paradoxes and one enigma that have developed in this country during the last decades: a process of democratisation that started in 1978 coming forward with increasing criminality rates, especially homicide; a nation constituted on the idea of cordiality and conciliation that changed recently its dominant ideas and developed vengeance mechanisms and uncontrollable aggressive behaviour for there was never a public discussion of pacification and forgiveness; the enigma of a fierce violence among men, mainly young men has affected women comparatively much less. This suggests a model of violence dissimilar to the model present in ethnic conflicts where everybody is victim. To understand them, I have used four dimensions: the international context related to drug and gun trafficking, the institutional inertia that explains the malfunctioning of the justice system; the importance and limits of macro social explanations for violent criminality, such as poverty and social exclusion; the necessary look at micro social processes concerning subjective formations on masculinity linked to exhibition of force, money and guns.

L'article porte sur les paradoxes et les conflits qui, depuis la restauration de la démocratie au Brésil, au début des années 1980, résultent de l'action menée au niveau local par les nouvelles formations politiques, de la montée d'un type de criminalité relativement neuf au Brésil (le crime organisé autour du trafic de la drogue) et du rôle assumé par l'Église catholique et par les groupements religieux apparus dans la mouvance néopentecôtiste. Les interactions entre les acteurs sociaux associés à ces diverses tendances se résolvent par des formes de peur dont il faut tenir compte pour comprendre les réactions des habitants des favelas de Rio de Janeiro, ainsi que des citoyens d'autres villes brésiliennes, à l'égard de la politique locale. L'auteure dépeint les pièges de l'idéologie communautaire mise de l'avant par les partis d'opposition et par certains catholiques de gauche (notamment le renforcement de la tendance à l'isolement et au repli qu'elle était censée combattre) et le difficile avènement des institutions démocratiques dans un contexte de rivalité entre dénominations religieuses (chose nouvelle au Brésil) et de présence armée des trafiquants de drogue au sein des quartiers populaires.

The purpose of this article is to discuss the connections between drug trafficking and poverty, with particular reference to the various official institutional mechanisms that impact on these connections. It presents the findings of field research done in three districts of the city of Rio de Janeiro between 1998 and 2000 and an interpretation of the findings of a survey conducted on the functioning of the justice system in Campinas and Rio de Janeiro between 1993 and 1998 in respect of drug‐related crime. The results are provided in the form of statistical data (compiled on the basis of investigations and judicial cases recorded in the Livro do Tombo of the various criminal courts), interpret‐ations derived from reading 364 case files of trials in 1991 and the results of interviews given by judges, lawyers, public defenders, prosecutors, and prisoners in the two cities.

The aim of this paper is to understand the connections between poverty & drug traffic at the retail level, approaching the devices that provoked economic, social, & political changes in poor neighborhoods in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Although one should bear in mind the historical background of the economic, social, & political changes in which violence & drug traffic thrive, the paper focuses on the data obtained in several fieldwork researches, mainly 1997-2000. Data on crimes & social indicators are interpreted in light of the ethnographical material about the styles of drug use & trafficking in three different districts: Copacabana, in the richest zone of the city; Tijuca, in a predominantly middle-class area; & Madureira, in a predominantly poor section. It describes how young favelados are attracted to the dangers & virility ethos of a certain style of drug dealing in which many lose their lives. 1 Photograph, 12 References. Adapted from the source document.