November 11, 2025
Last week, on October 28, the deadliest police operation in the history of Brazil was carried out, launched in the Alemão and Penha complexes, in the north zone of Rio de Janeiro, which left more than 121 dead, 4 of whom were police officers and the rest members of the Comando Vermelho (CV) faction. Although the CV is known for drug trafficking, the objective of this action was not the war on drugs, but to regain control of territories lost by the state to criminal organizations: "We are acting with maximum force and in an integrated manner to make it clear that the state exercises power. The true owners of these territories are the good, hardworking citizens. We will remain firm in the fight against organized crime," said Governor Cláudio Castro.
Currently in Rio de Janeiro - and to a lesser extent in other Brazilian cities - there are geographical areas that the Brazilian state no longer controls, i.e., that the state has lost its monopoly on the use of force. These are places where the powers of the state do not have a constant presence. Often these territories have their borders physically delimited by barricades, which make it difficult for police vehicles to pass. This dispute for territory has been going on for decades and is considered a civil war or a non-international armed conflict, and it occurs because the traffickers have realized that there is a criminal organization much more profitable than theirs and they are trying to imitate it: the traffickers are trying to become a state.
When the state decided to ban the manufacture and trade of some types of drugs that many people want to buy, it didn't prevent anyone from having access to these drugs; it just made this market available to anyone who was willing to challenge the armed thugs and the justice of the state, and in the early 1980s, the CV found out that drug trafficking was much more lucrative than robbing banks and decided to dedicate himself to this field. The authoritarian and impractical idea - not even maximum security American prisons can prevent drug use - of wanting to rule what other adults use has thrown a billionaire market into the hands of criminals. But as large as the number of consumers of cocaine, marijuana, ecstasy and other drugs on the prohibited list is, this number is much lower than the consumers of the internet, fuel, transportation, gas, etc. Former BOPE captain Rodrigo Pimentel explains this change:
"The CV realizes: you pay R$109 per month for internet, you have a territory of 10,000 houses, each house R$109, the CV does a quick calculation and gee, I'm going to take R$1 million a month, 12 million a year, everyone has internet,... This is much more than cocaine and marijuana, I'm going to take this neighborhood."
Pimentel reports that "the CV territorial domain kit involves the internet at R$ 109 and the gas cylinder at R$ 150, R$ 54 more expensive than the gas cylinder purchased". That's exactly what the state does. The state imposes by force of arms a tax not only on the internet and gas, but on all products and services sold in its territory. The state is also characterized by being "a compulsory territorial monopolist of ultimate decision-making (jurisdiction)", and this role is also assumed by traffickers, who impose their own laws and their own justice system, eliminating the sovereignty of the Brazilian state over these territories. Pimentel recognizes that
"This region is no longer Brazil's. Brazil lost sovereignty there. There the laws are the laws of trafficking, the taxes are the taxes of trafficking, which collect tax on any commercial activity. There, the right to come and go belongs to the traffickers, because the drug traffickers have spread hundreds of barricades and prohibit access by Uber, prohibit access by ambulance from SAMU. It's a state within the state."
A state within the state; the conclusion of the former BOPE captain is accurate and alarming because the territories conquered by the drug traffickers become enclaves oppressed by not one, but two states! First of all, it must be said that what most facilitated the emergence of these states within the state is that the original state disarmed its population, making it impossible for law-abiding people to defend themselves from criminals, resulting in an asymmetry of power - "God created men, Col. Colt made them equal, and state gun laws made them different again". In this way, the residents of these areas are doubly robbed and oppressed. At the price of ~R$100 of the gas cylinder throughout the Brazilian territory are already the taxes that the Brazilian state levies. On top of this amount, the residents of the enclaves dominated by the traffickers are also required to pay taxes for their second state, and the price goes to R$154. In addition to imposing its own taxes on top of the taxes levied by the first estate, the second estate also imposes its own rules in the area it dominates, which de facto is its jurisdiction. In this way, many laws of the Brazilian state are nullified in the enclave, and as many of these laws are unjust laws, this grants certain freedoms to the residents of this area. Judge Yedda Christina comments that,
"There are places and for many years that, for example, bailiffs have not gone. So, if I as a judge give a certain order, and it's not a criminal order, it's an order for a person to pay alimony for their children, an order for them to be summoned, for them to appear at a certain place, the bailiff doesn't go, he can't go. He can't go alone, he can't go accompanied by police, he can't go. So you have states where the state doesn't exist, justice doesn't exist."
In other words, residents of these territories get rid of the criminal law of alimony, a law that destroys the family, promoting the increase in the number of children out of permanent marital locks and leads to the kidnapping and imprisonment of hundreds of thousands of men per year in Brazil. The judge also reports that "you can't get in to find out if that child went to school or not, because he's missing," that is, residents are also free from the authoritarian oppression of Brazil's mandatory school attendance law, which forces all children in their territory to be physically present for seven hours a day in their centers of ideological and cultural indoctrination.
Another benefit for the inhabitants of these parallel states within the Brazilian state is that the factions that command these areas provide services that the government has arrogated to itself, but provide very poorly or simply do not provide them at all. Claudio Piuma, the Gaucho, former general of the CV, explains that
"The ideology [of the Comando Vermelho] was to do what the state did not do. It was taking care of the favelas, not letting anyone steal anyone, no one mistreating anyone, not demean anyone. If you were to rob someone, don't demean anyone. Even if he was rich, he could be whatever. If he demean, death was decreed, because it was not accepted that he was demean as a human being."
And, as Alessandro Vissacro, a specialist in public security, says, being "a 100% informal justice system, almost always very brutal, but agile, credible, predictable and effective - everything that the justice offered by the state cannot be", these enclaves are really safe from occasional thieves, a pressing problem in the rest of the Brazilian territory. Some of the chiefs of these territories see themselves as public administrators, such as Peixão, from the Third Command, a rival faction of the CV, which in addition to security, takes care of urban cleaning, imposes evangelical Christianity as the official religion (prohibiting all others) and is said that he even built a bridge that the mayor of Rio de Janeiro, Eduardo Paes, promised and did not build. Vissacro describes that these groups combine techniques of coercion and co-optation to act directly and indirectly on the local population, and from there they basically develop four axes of effort:
"The first is the imposition of the normative system. The second is resource control; It's water, it's electricity, it's the internet, it's gas, it's alternative transportation. The third is the creation of true zones of silence, within which they silence dissenting voices and promote their hegemonic narrative. Four is the redefinition or establishment of a culturally and socially acceptable standard of behavior. In this way they are able to impose the normative system at the local level and according to something that is called competitive control theory; whoever imposes the normative system has effective control."
It is interesting to note something that apparently never crossed the expert's mind, namely that these four axes of effort apply to the modern state. The state, obviously, (1) imposes its normative system, its laws; (2) controls all resources with fees, regulations, and prohibitions; (3) imposes a law of silence through censorship, punishing everything from those who tell jokes and deny the Jewish holocaust to lies (slander and defamation laws), silences dissenting voices by curtailing freedom of expression and thought, and promotes hegemonic narratives through the control of the media (concessions, regulations and large advertising budgets) and by the state media themselves; and (4) redefines behaviors through social engineering with, for example, sin taxes.
Vissacro attempts to differentiate the two entities by grounding the legitimacy of the state in its orientation towards the promotion of the "common good," but this is such a spurious concept that it can also be and is used by the CV and any other faction. In fact, all three theoretical justifications of the state can be applied to these territories dominated by these armed thugs. The most common justification used by legal positivists is that "might" that makes "right", so a gang with rifles can impose itself on a smaller area in the same way that a state army can dominate a large territory. The second common foundation of states is the theory of the social contract, a hypothetical contract that never existed and was never signed by anyone, a theory so fraudulent that it has the same validity whether used by a president or a drug dealer, that is, none. And the third justification is the utilitarian one, which bases the legitimacy of the state on the establishment of rules that aim at the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people, but as there is no interpersonal comparison of happiness/utility, this theory is nothing more than pure intellectual fraud and any group of thieves can claim to be maximizing social utility in the same way that a state claims.
The only thing that really differentiates the foundations of the Brazilian state from the enclaves of the factions is the perception of legitimacy of its inhabitants. Both the armed forces of the state and the marginal gangs are a tiny minority of the populations of their territories, but while the gangs are seen by most residents as what they really are, i.e., criminals, the state, which is also nothing more than a gang of criminals, is considered legitimate by the majority of its subjects. This makes the life of the factions much more difficult, as they need to maintain their power mostly through the effective force of arms. However, in their efforts to become states they also copy the state in this. That is why they seek to perform functions demanded by the public - which the state has granted itself as a monopolist, but is absent - ranging from security and cleanliness discussed above, to the distribution of toys and food baskets, and, on these grounds, there is a percentage of residents who support the local rulers.
In addition to the CV, there are other factions that are disputing the control of territories with the state, such as the Terceiro Comando Puro and the Amigos dos Amigos, but most of the enclaves are dominated by Militias, which are armed gangs that did not necessarily originate from drug trafficking, but that saw the opportunity for much greater profit by practicing the extortion practiced by the state through weapons. All these groups are involved in constant war conflicts against the state and against each other, making the lives of the residents a living hell. Rapper Oruam, son of one of the leaders of the CV, went to social media to vent about the operation that killed more than a hundred members of his father's faction and made a statement that contains an inescapable truth. He said :
"Society likes to see blood and it uses the bandit as the biggest villain to hide the real bandits who are in big mansions, who pay the whole government not to be seen. Crime, man, he's not just in the favela. Crime is in the government, crime is in the Congress, crime is in Brasilia. And the favelado is just a reflection of society."
The Brazilian state is currently governed by a president who is an ex-convict sentenced for billionaire corruption schemes and a supreme judge internationally recognized as a criminal violator of human rights, and all the elected former governors of Rio de Janeiro have already been imprisoned. However, even if all rulers were saints and had never been corrupted and strictly followed state legislation, the government would still be the gang of thieves writ large that it is. The favela traffickers who organize themselves into armed gangs to exploit people are really a reflection of the society of criminals we live in.
They see the extortions on a colossal scale practiced by the state and consistently decide to copy it at the local level. They look at the housing concentrations in which they live and see in each shack a profitable source of exploitation, just as the state looks at aerial images of its cities and sees in every floor of buildings and every roof of houses an inexhaustible source of victims to be extorted by the Property Tax; the state is effectively the owner of all the properties in its territory and charges rent for people to be able to live in their own houses. The state sees in every head that lives in its territory a target that will be taxed on everything it buys, everything it sells, everything it earns, everything it produces, everything it invests, everything it does. The state controls how, when, who, and what can enter its area. The state determines what the terms of your marriage contract will be, how you should educate your children, and how and to whom your inheritance should be passed upon your death. The state tells you what you can and can't eat and what medicines and drugs you can and can't use. The state decrees what the labor relations are between you and your employer and how much he will pay you, and of this amount he takes almost half. All of this is only a portion of all the crimes that the state commits against its subjects, and on top of all that, the state still compels all the inhabitants of its territory to use their own currency, a counterfeit money on which it will still steal the equivalent of almost 96% in 110 years of all their wealth, that is, the favela residents armed with rifles are just crawling in the enterprise of becoming a state.
Commenting on the actions of the armed groups that dominate thousands of square kilometers of Brazil, the governor of São Paulo, Tarcísio de Freitas said:
"When these organizations do not allow citizens to have a normal life, impose what they have to buy, where they go to buy gas, establish territorial domination, these organizations act like terrorist organizations."
Tarcísio just forgot to take into account that the organization he commands does all this in a stratospherically larger dimension, imposing what, where and how he will buy everything and preventing the citizen from having a normal life - and during the covid dictatorship they imposed a New Normal decreeing house arrest for everyone, prohibiting work, even preventing people from breathing freely. That is, he considers, by logical implication, that the state is a mega terrorist organization.
Nevertheless, an opinion poll conducted after the police operation showed that 87% of favela residents approved of it, that is, they are fed up with carrying two states on their backs and submitting to two rulers and prefer to stay with only one, no matter how monstrous it may be. But the choice should not be between being dominated by a semi-literate trade unionist or a semi-literate drug dealer, by a despotic supreme judge or by a despotic militiaman with a rifle. The option should not be to submit to one or another criminal organization, but to rid society of all these criminals. As Hans-Hermann Hoppe puts it, this is actually the only valid option that exists:
"With the answers of legal positivists, social contract theorists and utilitarians all rejected as fundamentally flawed, however popular they may be, the only remaining answer, then, comes from the old, pre-modern intellectual tradition of natural law and natural rights."