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 Complex territories, complex circulations
The ‘pacification’ of the Complexo do Alemão
in Rio de Janeiro

Daniel N. Silva, Adriana Facina and Adriana Carvalho Lopes

University of Rio de Janeiro (UNIRIO) / Federal University of Rio
de Janeiro (UFRJ) / Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRRJ)

 The space of circulation is a privileged object for police.

 (Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population)

The Complexo do Alemão, a group of 12 favelas in Rio de Janeiro, attracted the

attention of Brazilian and International corporate media when the police and
the army ‘pacified’ the favelas in 2010. Part of a broader political and economic
project to make Rio de Janeiro ‘safe’ for large-scale events, pacification consists
of seizing back territories from the control of drug dealers by installing perma-
nent police units. This paper focuses on how different discourses on the ‘pacifi-
cation’ of the Alemão simultaneously entextualized and projected trajectories of
reception, interpellation and agency. It also delineates different and competing
communicable maps (Briggs 2007) of these trajectories of signs. While looking
at ethnographic evidence from local reception of mediatized signs and people’s
own communicable maps, it draws attention to major gaps in communicable
constructions of pacification, thus attempting to accentuate some complexities
of Rio’s mainstream pragmatics of circulation.

Keywords: circulation, entextualization, communicability, violence, police,

pragmatics, metapragmatics

1. Introduction

If we accept the linguistic anthropological principle that all speech involves me-
ta-speech, or that all pragmatics presupposes meta-pragmatics, then it is the case
that comprehending any pragmatic phenomenon requires a simultaneous uptake

Pragmatics and Society 6:2 (2015), 175–196. doi 10.1075/ps.6.2.02sil

issn 1878-9714 / e-issn 1878-9722 © John Benjamins Publishing Company
176 Daniel N. Silva, Adriana Facina and Adriana Carvalho Lopes

of the metapragmatic surround (see Silverstein 1993). For instance, Gricean im-
plicatures – a pragmatic phenomenon – function only to the extent that speakers
are supposed to adhere to the Cooperation Principle, a metapragmatic axiom that
is ultimately lodged in human rationality (Grice 1989: 30). The circulation of dis-
courses spreads out across this hybrid pragmatic-metapragmatic terrain.
In this paper, we intend to move beyond the individualistic-intentional
metapragmatic model of communication by entertaining the hypothesis that
meaning emerges as it circulates across different sites, temporalities and scales
of social life. To borrow Briggs’ (2007a, 2007b) metadiscursive notion of com-
municability, texts simultaneously project (pragmatically) and model (metaprag-
matically) trajectories of uptake, agency, and affect in their quasi-microbial
infectiousness in society. Rather than being simply intentional, this process is it-
erative (Derrida 1977) and therefore social. We shall look particularly at different
and often competing communicable models that have emerged regarding recent
modernizing efforts to make Rio de Janeiro “safe” for the 2014 World Cup and the
2016 Olympics. We will draw our attention to the multiple recontextualizations
of pacificação, or ‘pacification’, a set of police practices aimed to “seize back” the
control of spaces that are both the headquarters of drug factions and home to
thousands of honest workers.
As the Introduction to the current Special Issue claims (Silva, this volume),
Western ideologies of language and communication – some of which are embed-
ded in powerful pragmatic theories – portray communication as the linear flow
of information from one carefully bounded intentional individual to another. In
what follows, the subjects involved in our fieldwork in the Complexo do Alemão
(a group of favelas that is home to some 100,000 people, located in the region of
lowest Human Development Index in Rio de Janeiro) will be seen as being im-
pacted by massive Western individualistic ideologies of language and society – an
impact they do not have the resources to sustain. Thus, the Complexo do Alemão
has been a prototypical battlefield in Rio de Janeiro’s efforts to become modern
and “safe” for large-scale events.
This paper is based on the authors’ collective fieldwork in the Complexo do
Alemão. Since January 2012, we have worked together with the Instituto Raízes
em Movimento, a local NGO that fosters initiatives in the fields of revenue gen-
eration, community participation, and human rights. Instituto Raízes em Mo-
vimento promotes several events in which residents, researchers, human rights
activists, and State agents gather to discuss ‘pacification’, infrastructure, public
policies, health care, gender, sexuality, and race relations. The fieldwork comprises
participant observation in the events, interviews with residents and activists, and
close involvement with the NGO members in applying for funds and planning
activities. We have also been conversing with people beyond the Alemão – the

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 Complex territories, complex circulations 177

police, other favela residents, journalists, State officials, urban planners, and so-
cial scientists – in order to query different framings of urban and security changes
in the city.
To understand the complex circulations of discourses across the ‘pacification’
of the Complexo do Alemão, this paper first places the territory within the recent
changes in urbanization and security measures in Rio de Janeiro. Next, it moves
to the rather conflicting circulations of signs about the ‘pacification’ of the Com-
plexo do Alemão as a highly publicized event in the Brazilian and international
media. We then revisit Charles Briggs’ notion of communicability, a textual and
ethnographic concept that will help us understand the overlapping and multi-di-
rectional trajectories of signs regarding both the event itself and the changes it
brought to the favela. We finish by claiming that recontextualizations that accrue
to circulations go beyond power and manipulation; while traveling through mul-
tiple dimensions of social life, they ultimately enact affect.

2. A complex territory

The Complexo do Alemão is a group of 12 favelas in the North of the municipality

of Rio de Janeiro.1 It was named after one of its main favelas, Morro do Alemão (lit.
‘Hill of the German’). Alemão was the nickname of the Polish immigrant Leonard
Kaczmarkiewicz, who came to Rio in 1920 and purchased lands that, upon the
industrialization of nearby areas, were occupied by landless worker and migrant
squatters who constructed their own houses – in a process called autoconstrução
(‘autoconstruction’; Holston 2008) –, giving rise to the present-day community of
Morro do Alemão.
Some 100,000 people live in Complexo do Alemão, one of the most popu-
lous shantytowns in Rio de Janeiro. Over the past two decades, violence and drug
trafficking have been pervasive in the community. In 2007, a turf war between
rival drug factions and the police led to a deadly military raid. In the same year,
a news article in O Globo, Rio’s leading newspaper, was captioned “Complexo do
Alemão, the Carioca Gaza Strip.” In terms of O Globo’s semiotics, the Middle East
and the ‘Carioca Gaza Strip’ (as the favela was called, using the familiar moniker

1. The number of favelas changes depending on the source. We based our number on
Oliveira’s (2011) fieldwork on the Growth Acceleration Program (PAC) in Alemão. The fave-
las are: Morro da Baiana, Morro do Alemão, Itararé/Alvorada, Morro do Adeus, Morro da
Esperança, Matinha, Morro dos Mineiros, Nova Brasília, Palmeiras, Fazendinha, Grota, and
Reservatório de Ramos.

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178 Daniel N. Silva, Adriana Facina and Adriana Carvalho Lopes

for all things Rio: carioca) were iconically and indexically related to each other.2
Iconically, both ‘strips’, Gaza and Carioca, resembled one another as being near
the flow of wealth: respectively affluent Israel and the road leading from Rio Inter-
national Airport to the city’s wealthy areas; indexically, both ‘strips’ found them-
selves to be in the very epicenter of violence. Academic studies, media accounts,
and police reports, in spite of their evidently different pragmatic modes of using
signs and non-identical metapragmatic ideological purposes, have all converged
in considering the Complexo do Alemão one of the most violent places in Brazil
(Barbassa 2010; Oliveira 2011; Barcellos 2013). The Complexo do Alemão is also
known for being the headquarters of the Comando Vermelho or ‘Red Commando’,
one of Rio’s most established armed drug factions.
The community has not been exposed only to risks associated with violence.
The long-standing absence of housing policies for the poor had led to unplanned
occupation of land and the consequent emergence of dangers to the population.
Rio’s rainy seasons are accompanied by the risks of mudslides on hills covered
with irregularly built houses. Autoconstructed houses don’t have proper ventila-
tion and usually have no sewage systems, which, added to inadequate treatment
of garbage, creates the risk of proliferating diseases. Educational, health, and cul-
tural policies are few and far between, if not completely inexistent, and presage
the perils of under-development. Official data from Brazil’s latest census place
the Alemão’s administrative region lowest of all the 32 regions in the city (0.709)
on the Human Development Index (IBGE 2010). The same census estimates that
32% of the region’s inhabitants are jobless. Of the 40.8% of the people who de-
clared they do have a job, almost all work in the service sector and hold positions
for which educational requirements are low, working conditions are bad, and
wages are worse.
Economic growth, however, has brought some changes to the scenario of pre-
cariousness, and made discourses circulate in even more complex directions. In
2007, then President Lula da Silva announced the creation of a giant national
program of investments in infrastructure and human development, known as the
Growth Acceleration Program, or PAC. “I am convinced that in this year we will
turn our big cities into construction sites,” said Lula in 2008 on the weekly radio
show Breakfast with the President. And indeed, in 2008, the Complexo do Alemão
became a construction site for the PAC, with a program that initially invested
US$ 250,000 in the Alemão and promised to build a cable car, linking five of the

2. In Peirce’s classification of signs with respect to their objects, an ‘icon’ is a sign that resem-
bles its object, whereas an ‘index’ is a sign that is affected by its object. A diagram in physics,
for instance, is an icon of the movement of car; a footprint on the sand is caused by a foot and
therefore stands as an index of the foot (Peirce 1932).

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 Complex territories, complex circulations 179

Complexo’s communities, along with other social infrastructures, like schools,

justice units, health clinics, and houses. Economic growth had already given Bra-
zil the opportunity to arrange the 2014 World Cup, and Rio the chance to host the
final match; in addition, in 2009 Rio de Janeiro won the bid for the 2016 Olym-
pics. These modernizing prospects demanded the city to be prepared not only in
terms of infrastructure, but also, principally, in terms of security. The so-called
‘Carioca Gaza Strip’ seemed to need more than just improvements on the former
count. As we suggest in what follows, in the pragmatics of discourse circulation
the only option of the State authorities for handling the headquarters of the Co-
mando Vermelho, in the absence of the Rule of Law, was the urgent creation of a
‘Police State’ (Foucault 1978).
In 2008, Rio’s Municipal Defense Secretary deployed the first Pacifying Police
Unit (UPP) in Morro Santa Marta, a favela located on a hill above the Botafogo
neighborhood, in an affluent southern region of Rio. The UPPs differ in their
methods from most traditional (sporadic, but deadly) police raids in that they are
supposed to “seize back the territories” (UPP 2011) by installing permanent po-
lice units. The UPP project considers as its main goal the removal of the weapons
used in the retail commerce of drugs, rather than eradicating the commerce per
se. José Mariano Beltrame, the Rio de Janeiro State Secretary of Defense, had his
speech on the occasion entextualized by The Guardian as follows:
“We cannot guarantee that we will put an end to drug trafficking nor do we have
the pretension of doing so,” said Beltrame. “[The idea is] to break the paradigm
of territories that are controlled by traffickers with weapons of war. Our concrete
objective is [to ensure] that a citizen can come and go [in a favela] as he pleases,
that public or private services can get in there whenever they want.”
 (Phillips 2010, brackets in the original)

Pragmatically, Beltrame’s words reinforce the UPPs’ main purpose of “seizing

back” the favela and taking the guns out of the reach of the dealers. The metaprag-
matics around his discourse, however, do more. First off, the very fact that the
international media are interested in security measures in Rio attests to the city
being in the global eye. Then, The Guardian’s news correspondent Tom Phillips
extracts Beltrame’s speech from the context and fills in some of its gaps. He adds
the verb ‘to ensure’ to Beltrame’s discourse, thereby ensuring that Beltrame’s pur-
pose, as expressed in the latter’s words and his own will circulate in accordance
with the public opinion that the people’s right to circulation is something that has
to be assured. Later on, we will have more to say about how this (meta)pragmatics
of circulation is undone by the locals. First, however, our discourse must address
the deployment of the UPP in the Alemão.

© 2015. John Benjamins Publishing Company

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180 Daniel N. Silva, Adriana Facina and Adriana Carvalho Lopes

3. The pacification of the Alemão

In O livreiro do Alemão [‘The bookman from the Alemão’], Otavio Jr. (2011)
narrates his growing up in the Complexo do Alemão and his project of fostering
literacy in the community. His book ends with an Epilogue, A libertação (‘The
liberation’):
I was at home thinking about the project of this book when I heard the first shots.
At first, the noise came from far away, but the rising pitch revealed that the bullets
were getting closer. I could no longer concentrate on my work. It was Thursday,
November 25, 2010. I was watching everything on TV, and the sensation I had
was that some crazy director of programming had decided to show a 3-D version
of Tropa de Elite [more or less like ‘The Green Berets’; our insert] instead of the
afternoon soap opera. Dream? Delirium? No, the purest reality. Everything was
happening outside the door of my house. Weapons, soldiers, war tanks coming
up the street, everything within my eyeshot. The news on TV recommended that
no one go outside. And I listened. Two days of anguish. Two days of fear. Two
days without setting foot in the street, rationing the food in the fridge. (…) It was
hard to sleep.
(…) It may seem an exaggeration for those who only saw the news, but I
felt that I was inside the war in Iraq for those two long days. Only someone who
endures war knows what it is. On TV I also saw the Navy’s bulletproof tanks
arriving at the favela. This was the surprise factor that both astonished and intim-
idated the criminals. (Otavio Jr 2011, 76–77; our translation).

This narrative is indexically linked to the military occupation of the Alemão in

November 2010. Violence shapes the very limits of narration: this book on liter-
acy symbolically begins with the 2007 police raids in the favelas – an occasion on
which 19 people were killed in the Alemão – and ends with the 2010 incursion, a
“surprising” raid, in that the Navy and the Army were asked to join forces with the
police in the operation. A week before Otavio Jr. watched the invasion – not out
in the streets but on TV –, members of Comando Vermelho had begun to torch
cars both in the suburbs and in wealthy neighborhoods such as Copacabana and
Ipanema. Along with the news, rumors began to circulate everywhere. Boxes of
over a meter tall were left in Praça Nossa Senhora da Paz, a square in Ipanema;
soon the suspicion was raised that these were bombs. Colonel Mario Sérgio Du-
arte (at the time the head of the military police) narrates that among the police,
rumors went the rounds that “a shipment of 600 kg of dynamite had possibly been
stolen in the South of Brazil and was headed to Rio” (Duarte (2012: 55). None of
these rumors proved to be true, but they enhanced the feeling of turmoil and fear
in the city.

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 Complex territories, complex circulations 181

Sociologists Rodrigues and Siqueira (2012) point out that this type of policing
the favelas isn’t actually a model for public security. It is rather an “experiment,” or
a “set of policing experiences” that would be better understood if one looks at con-
crete practices instead of official documents alone. Rio’s public decree n. 42,787 of
January 6, 2011 – a law that is supposed to define and regulate the UPPs, but was
only published after 13 units had been deployed – stipulates the three stages of
deployment of an UPP. The three steps are: “tactical intervention,” “stabilization”,
and “deployment.” Tactical intervention is conceived “not as confrontation but as
the arresting of criminals and the removal of weapons” (ibid.: 11). The narratives
of Otavio Jr. and Duarte, however, suggest heavy confrontations taking place be-
tween the Police and the Comando Vermelho. The confrontations are enmeshed
in complex connections with the media, public discourses, rumors, and the arts;
thus, Otavio Jr.’s feeling was “was that some crazy director of programming had
decided to show a 3-D version of Tropa de Elite instead of the afternoon soap op-
era.” Moreover, signs dealing with confrontation went far beyond the ‘cease-fire’
imposed by decree of the UPPs, and were then recontextualized as signs of war:
“I felt I was in the Iraq War,” tells the Bookman of the Alemão; “a war was ap-
proaching [therefore we needed] war tanks,” narrates Colonel Duarte (2012: 67–
69); and sociologist Vera Mallaguti (2011: 6) elaborates: “the pacification and
occupation of some favelas in Rio has taken place as a form of war, supported by
the Army, thus imposing police management on the everyday life of the poor.”
The “tactical intervention” in the Alemão did not take place until the 28th of
November, a Sunday morning, when most families could follow the action on TV.
The coverage of Rede Globo, Brazil’s leading TV channel and the owner of the O
Globo newspaper, followed the lines of modern war reports. A Globo journalist,
Priscila, rode into the scene inside one of the tanks, walking a narrow line be-
tween flaunting journalistic standards and exercising the power attributed to the
media in Brazil. Colonel Duarte narrates his astonishment:
I was shocked when I saw Priscila (…) inside the bulletproof tank that would take
me to the top of Morro do Adeus, my command post during the battle.
“What are you doing here, you sneaky rat?” I asked her, between disbelief and
anguish.
“I am going with you, sir”
“Who told you so?”
“Oh, Commander! You wouldn’t leave me out of this, would you?”
 (Duarte 2012: 143; our translation)

The news of the war in Rio spread across multiple sites, like microbes (Briggs
2007a). This pragmatics of circulation turned the wording of the conflict into icons
of transnational similarity to regular battles as well as into indexes of a proximal

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182 Daniel N. Silva, Adriana Facina and Adriana Carvalho Lopes

war. Renata Malkes (2010), writing for O Globo, hastened to compare the occupa-
tion of the Complexo do Alemão to the military interventions in the Middle East,
iterating and expanding the formula “Alemão is the Brazilian Gaza strip” that we
encountered earlier: “If the topography of the Carioca favelas resembles the Shiite
villages in the South of Lebanon, the overpopulation and disorder compare them
to the Gaza Strip” (Malkes 2010). The journalist also interviewed Hanan Grinberg,
a military analyst from Israel, and recirculated his words in a wider context:
Islamic militants such as the Hamas used to break into the houses of civilians in
search of shelter. Many family members ended up dying in this situation. (…) For
the Army, it is hard to distinguish between civilians and armed criminals.
 (Malkes 2010)

Through their recirculation into Malkes’ news article, Grinberg’s words place the
Comando Vermelho and the Alemão dwellers in an iconic resemblance to Hamas
and the Palestinians.
Furthermore, the “hardship” that the (Israeli?) army, according to Grinberg
had in differentiating between civilians and criminals would be iterated in the
Alemão composer Raphael Calazans’ narrative to which we return in our conclu-
sion. Iterability, according to Derrida (1977) repeats signs, but at the same time
implies a break with past contexts; below we shall listen to the polyphonic voices
of O Globo and Calazans as they construe different, and indeed competing, com-
municable models of military blindness.
A month later, Farah and Azevedo (2010) would recirculate (by actually lift-
ing them out of Wikileaks) the words of US Consul General Dennis Hearne, a for-
mer political adviser to the commanding US general in Afghanistan. According
to Hearne, “the Favela Pacification Program deploys counter-insurgency strate-
gies similar to Iraq and Afghanistan.” The authors sealed the newspaper’s ‘politics
of truth’ by adding, to Hearne’s stretch of discourse: “O Globo will be one out of
seven newspapers in the world to publish exclusive content from the ‘Cablegate’”
(Farah & Azevedo 2010). Not only the economy of sports in Rio had become
transnational, but also its “war” against armed drug dealers.
Whereas for the Alemão residents, the deployment of the UPP either “was
the change from one owner [the dealers] to another [the police]” (as noted by
Christina, a 23-year old from the Grota favela), or “the rearrangement of forces in
the favela” (according to Alemão activist Alan Brum Pinheiro), in the media and
state epic narratives, the military occupation represented an icon of nationality.
O Globo labeled the images of black men being expelled from the Alemão to the
nearby Vila Cruzeiro as “expulsion of criminals,” and (in its pragmatics of circula-
tion) had them pictured together with images of policemen arriving carrying the
Brazilian flag, accompany its headline: “The Redemption of Alemão”.

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 Complex territories, complex circulations 183

Overall, a metapragmatics of consent framed the hegemonic, communicable

models of pacification. According to Duarte (2012: 133), the “neurotransmitters
of our collective brain awoke the synapses of national union,” casting his ‘politics
of truth’ in some inexact biomedical syntax. His book is an attempt at touting
the consensual opinion held by the police, the military, anthropologists, jour-
nalists, and the Governor that war was unavoidable. For O Globo, even Christ
the Redeemer agreed with this ‘declaration’ of war: its cartoonist Chico Caruso
portrayed Jesus as wearing a BOPE, the Special Operations Battalion, uniform.
Malaguti ironically comments that she didn’t “hear any Christians complaining,
let alone the evangelical politicians” (2011: 8). Two years later, in her first con-
cert in Rio, even Lady Gaga would wear a black t-shirt with the lettering ‘UPP’
stamped on in white.
In principle, as Calazans notes (pers. comm.), “having the police around is
better than having no police.” However, beyond agreeing to his commonsensical
idea that “some police are necessary,” we may ask why the affluent and tourist ar-
eas “require a less repressive aesthetics of policing” (Duarte 2012: 18), while poor
areas are supposed to have the police as the basic, if not only, form of rule. The
fundamental question that Malaguti addresses to herself and to the public opin-
ion is: Why, instead of a democratic State presence, “where citizens can enjoy
their potential or a joyful sociability with different others in constructing collec-
tive networks of support and care” (2011: 5–6), was the managing the circulation
of people and their well-being in the favelas transferred to the police? Why did the
State’s efforts to modernize the favelas consist in deploying not the Rule of Law,
but a Rule of Police?
Foucault (1978) traces the genealogy of the new system of governing human
lives, the ‘Police State’, back to the end of the sixteenth century; the term itself he
found in the utopian political treatise La monarchie aristodémocratique, by Louis
Turquet de Mayerne (1611). The police were conceived of as a plastic institu-
tion, one that “gives ornament, form, and splendor to the city” (Mayerne, cited in
Foucault 1978: 409). For Mayerne and his contemporaries, the police were both the
(plastic) “art of governing” and the exercise of policing itself (Foucault 1978: 414).
This police model consisted of ruling people’s activity’s by preventing idle-
ness. Policing was a ‘plastic’ art (or activity) inasmuch as it would shape men, by
giving them an education or occupation, and making them circulate along the
lines set out by the state. And one of the main concerns of police was precisely cir-
culation. By ‘circulation’, Foucault meant not only the space of circulation of goods
and people, from roads to rivers, but also the “set of regulations, constraints, and
limits, or the facilities and encouragements that will allow the circulation of men
and things in the kingdom and possibly beyond its borders” (1978: 420). Interest-
ingly, the police ought to regulate circulation and therefore assure the possibility

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184 Daniel N. Silva, Adriana Facina and Adriana Carvalho Lopes

of ‘communication’: “The coexistence and communication of men with each oth-

er is ultimately the domain that must be covered by the Polizeiwissenschaft [police
science] and the institution of police” (Foucault 1978: 420).
This anthropological model of police is an early form of the modern biopo-
litical power: Policing as such is “the set of interventions and means that ensure
that living, better than just coexisting, will be effectively useful to the constitution
and development of the state’s forces” (Foucault 1978: 421). Although Foucault
claims that this form of police has a different meaning from today (ibid.: 408), he
claims elsewhere that the Polizeistaat is “administrative modernity par excellence”
(ibid.: 416). As anachronistic as it may seem, this ‘Police State’ is at the very ba-
sis of the ‘pacification’ in Rio. Our fieldwork has found evidence that the police
(or police-like regulations) are shaping people’s living, from public transportation
(e.g. the Alemão cable car stations play classical music, which is different from the
situation in wealthier areas, where one hears no music in the metro), to people’s
conduct (the police told one of our team members that she was not allowed to
board the cable car with an ice cream, whereas one finds no such law enforce-
ment on the metro), to circulation (Foucault’s and his French police’s imperative
‘Circulez!’ is reflected in the ‘circulando!’, ‘circulating!’ of the Rio police jargon – a
regular command at the same time telling people not to gather in public areas and
reminding them that idleness is not welcome).

4. Competing communicable constructions

Debra Spitulnik (1997) presents an insightful ethnography of mass media activity

in Zambia, and explains how the mass media create “reference points” for the
circulation of linguistic forms and discourses. Corporate media in Brazil – espe-
cially Rede Globo, the most powerful media enterprise in the country – have been
active in creating these reference points with regard to changes in the economic
situation and increased security measures in Rio, a prototypical Brazilian city,
in addition to being the Globo headquarters. In the pacification of the Alemão,
O Globo went from the construction of narratives that requested the public to
adhere to the pragmatics of an Iraq-style war, to publishing ongoing news and
TV coverage on the success of the PAC and UPPs, to the creation of its main soap
opera in 2013, Salve Jorge, a transnational narrative taking place in Istanbul and
the Complexo do Alemão. With the support of the Turkish government – which
donated 1,000 kg of meat to the Complexo do Alemão, “causing a strange, long
line on donation day,” as Calazans told us –, Salve Jorge is performed by Brazilian
artists who move from the Globo studios in Barra da Tijuca, an upper middle class
neighborhood, to the sprawling alleyways of the Alemão, and to the bridges and

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 Complex territories, complex circulations 185

historic sites of Istanbul, on a journey between indexical realism, caricature, and

political construction and affects.
As long as the media ‘reference points’ are not static, but travel as fast as do the
economic and security changes, interpellating multiple sites of discourse circula-
tion has shaped our understanding of how mass media and other discourses – “as
ongoing, high-status, public communication forms” (Spitulnik 1997: 162) – per-
form, to borrow Austin’s term (1962), the very referents they claim to represent.
Ethnography has taught us to complexify the ‘social magic’ of the mediated and
other corporate or hegemonic discourses on political change in the Alemão and
in Rio. As Butler (1997) reminds us, the multiple recontextualizations of a per-
formative speech act allow for gaps between different instances of use, spaces that
ultimately enable resignification or social change (see Goldstein, this issue). In
this section, we intend to interact more closely with local narratives, themselves
hybrid and multiple.
Interaction in discourse (by speaking and listening) requires a great deal of
ethnographic and discursive vigilance. Briggs’ concept of ‘cartographies of com-
municability’ has inspired our mapping of the reception of, resistance to, and con-
testation with respect to, highly commodified media forms. Needless to say, such
local narratives are given little or no space in mainstream accounts.
Briggs (2007b: 332) puns on the notion of ‘communicability’ not only as ability
“to communicate readily and be understood transparently”, but also as the “mi-
crobes’ capacity to spread”, as in ‘communicable’ diseases. Like ‘communicable’
viruses, discourses infectiously disseminate modes of listening, reading, and posi-
tioning oneself vis-à-vis the politics of trust and truth that texts project. The idea of
communicability depends largely on what Silverstein (1993) has called the ‘prag-
matic-metapragmatic nexus’. Even earlier, Silverstein (1979) had observed that the
utterance of every sign is at once an instance of use and a regimentation of such
use. For instance, a speaker’s conventional use of the pronouns tu/vous in French
or você/o senhor/a senhora in Portuguese simultaneously indexes ‘knowledge,’
‘deference,’ ‘respect,’ and ‘adequacy’: tu and você are used to address an interlocutor
who is of the same, or close in, age or occupies the same hierarchical level, whereas
vous or o senhor/a senhora are used when speaking to someone who is unknown,
older, or hierarchically superior. In other words, the speaker is both projecting an
ideological mode of reception (a trajectory) and retrospectively regimenting or re-
iterating the social field from which the norms of use stem and to which they re-
turn as confirmation, sedimentation, or change (in an overlapping trajectory).3 As

3. For reasons of space, this comment on the linguistic-ideological reinvention of society is

just a brief sketch. (For a more careful discussion, see Silverstein 1979; Schieffelin et al. 1998;
Bauman & Briggs 2003; Blommaert 2005; Reinhardt, this issue).

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186 Daniel N. Silva, Adriana Facina and Adriana Carvalho Lopes

long as communicability is pragmatic, “texts project specific, unique cartographies

of their own locations in the movement of discourse” (Briggs 2007b: 332; emphasis
added). Insofar as communicability is metapragmatic, the stories that texts tell
“are stories about stories,” revolving around themselves “to tell stories of their own
origins,” thereby modeling or regimenting their own trajectory (Briggs 2007b: 324).
The notion of communicability is an appropriate metaphor for imagining
how text are received. Communicable cartographies, writes Briggs (2007: 556),
“create positions that confer different degrees of access, agency, and power, recruit
people to occupy them, and invite them to construct practices of self-making in
their terms.” Although communicable maps are conceived as modes of interpella-
tion, based on “material and institutional inequalities,” the response to such maps
can subvert the very logic that drew the maps’ boundaries in the first place. In
our fieldwork, local responses to hegemonic ways of positioning the Alemão res-
idents are pervasive. As Briggs claims, while receiving a text, “people can accept
the communicable cartography it projects (…) treat it critically or parodically, or
invoke alternative cartographies” (2007b: 556).

4.1 Circles of memory

In a focus group organized at Instituto Raízes em Movimento, some elderly people

gathered to collectively think about ‘memory’ by telling narratives of their own
arrival in the favela. Maria, a 65-year-old resident from Itararé, told us that on her
way to the meeting, a friend of hers who had heard that the event would be filmed
wondered whether Maria would appear on TV Globo. Maria replied that if she
had been told that Globo sponsored the meeting, she wouldn’t have come. “I don’t
like the way the soap opera shows the Alemão, and I came here because I knew
that it’s not for TV,” Maria told us. Like any story, Maria’s narrative is embedded
in a social context, as represented by the boundaries imposed on the dissonant
voices from Instituto Raízes em Movimento, which is known in the community
for its left-wing engagement. As Bakhtin (1952: 92) has argued, “[e]very utterance
must be regarded primarily as a response to the preceding utterances of the given
sphere.” While we cannot extend Maria’s point of view to the whole favela, her
comment is nevertheless an index of discontent, in the given sphere of dissonance
and discontent with the role of television broadcasting and its economic interests
in the community.

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 Complex territories, complex circulations 187

In the same group, we learned about the formation of the Chapa Azul (‘Blue
List’)4 movement among young residents who gathered to demand their civic
rights during the Brazilian dictatorship period [1964–1985]:

Sergio We were all young, 13 to 14 years old, when the Chapa Azul was creat-
ed. The people from Chapa Azul were against one Orico, from Morro
do Alemão, who exploited people’s access to electricity. He had a wire
from Light,5 and he would exploit the whole favela, together with his
brother. He also took advantage of water distribution. He had a pump
and sold water to a few people. Then the Chapa Azul was formed as the
opposition to those who were exploiting the community [‘comunidade’],
just so everyone in the community could have water and light. Chapa
Azul ended up gathering some 60 people, who requested water from
CEDAE,6 and electricity from Light. After the end of the dictatorship
and the return of the political exiles, Leonel Brizola won the election for
governor and we got water.
[He lists the name of some members; people in the group add other names]
Sergio And it was a lot of people, and we got water right into our homes. And
then/
Marize  /But then did you get water everyday? Were there any problems with
the distribution?
Sergio Yeah, but the very fact that we had some water was wonderful
Marize No, no I didn’t mean/
Sergio  /Just to conclude what happened. We ended up get-
ting water and light into our homes, but before that (…), although we
were young and there was no school, there were these university stu-
dents from other areas. The dictators persecuted them, but they came
to teach us. Even though we were young, and weak and hungry, these
people helped us learn.
Marize Oh, they came here.
Sergio Yes, they came, they were persecuted, some were jailed, and others were
killed.
Marize Were they part of an institution, or they came on their own?
Sergio They came on their own, as volunteers. They taught us how to think,
how to organize ourselves. From their teaching we formed Chapa Azul,
and we could fight for water, for electricity.

4. A take-off on the name of the favela (Morro Azul).

5. An electricity provider.
6. A water company.

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188 Daniel N. Silva, Adriana Facina and Adriana Carvalho Lopes

Sergio and other participants had been asked to respond to the question, “How was
the infrastructure when you arrived here?” To use Silverstein’s terms (1993: 38),
Sergio is projecting the “indexical here-and-now” – or better, the “here-and-
then,” namely water and electricity distribution in the past – into a communicable
model that maps out the fight for human rights, and the asymmetry of forces in
the favela, Brazil’s former military dictatorship, the critical acquisition of literacy,
and community work (a point we shall return to below).
This interaction was between individuals from different backgrounds, as was
the very formation of Chapa Azul and the forging of the term ‘comunidade’ or
community, which we will also discuss below. The above excerpt, entextualized
here as an interactional text, unfolds in Sergio’s dialogue with Marize, a researcher
from Fiocruz Research Foundation. His metapragmatic delineation of how the
text should be received is briefly put on hold by the first question that Marize
asks – “did you get water everyday?” – which seems to convey a middle class
inference that Sergio immediately rejects: “the very fact that we had some wa-
ter was wonderful.” Marize then tries to project the propositional content of her
question (e.g. she didn’t mean to imply that there was not enough water) in an-
other direction, whereupon Sergio jumps straight to his conclusion, elaborating
on the intercultural exchange with the university students. Marize’s subsequent
interactional moves serve to help him describe the young university students who
fostered critical literacy in the Alemão.

4.2 Collective work and community

A sense of collective work or community emanates from Sergio’s communicable

map. By fighting against people who were taking advantage of the community,
Chapa Azul aimed to make sure “everyone in the comunidade could have water
and electricity.” We found ethnographic evidence that the idea of ‘community’,
though brought to the favelas from the outside, is at play in the residents’ everyday
practices of solidarity and social agency. Anthropologist Carlos Santos (1981) tells
an interesting origin story of the early circulation of comunidade among the in-
habitants of Brás de Pina, Morro Azul, and Catumbi. In studying local resistance
to the state removal of squatters in the 1960s, Santos maps the collective mobili-
zation of favela residents and their internal conflicts. In Morro Azul, located on
a hill above the upper middle class Flamengo neighborhood, the resistance was
led by an authoritarian priest, who forged the concept of an artificial community,
trying to unify something that was heterogeneous from the outset; in this case,
the very idea of comunidade was an abstract concept. Yet, despite the conflicts
and fragmentations that opposed inhabitants from areas with better or worse

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 Complex territories, complex circulations 189

infrastructure, in moments of crisis everyone worked together. The idea of co-

munidade, Santos concludes, could only exist within critical episodes. When the
crisis was over, everyday life in the favela would revert to the dream of possessing
property in the same way as the elites.
We find a similar internal conflict among the favela residents in Sergio’s ac-
count (Orico’s exploitation of water and electricity). The idea of community em-
bodied in Chapa Azul also arose at a critical moment (the need to defeat Orico
and to resist the negligence of dictatorship). Nevertheless, the notion of comu-
nidade, at least as we entextualize it here, is more than something that occurs
in conflictive and critical episodes; it is intercultural. Notwithstanding potential
ideological differences among the university students, the authoritarian priest,
and the authors of the present study, the concept of comunidade can arise from
ordinary and heterogeneous practices, some of which are very individualistic, and
then be framed into more egalitarian terms.
In another focus group at the Instituto, younger residents gathered to watch
the documentary film Depois rola o mocotó [‘Then we’ll eat bone marrow’], made
by Debora Herszenhut and Jefferson Oliveira (2012). The movie portrays the prac-
tice of “bater a laje” or building a new level on top of a house as a rooftop terrace
or room. In the movie, while male neighbors blend cement with sand and water
to make concrete, female neighbors mix the ingredients of mocotó or bone mar-
row. The laje construction is recontextualized as a ‘party’, where neighbors ‘raise’ a
house and cook in solidarity. Upon seeing the image, Fabiana and Mauricio posi-
tioned themselves vis-à-vis this ideological construction as follows:

Debora The laje is extremely important for life in the favela. I was born in the
Favela da Rocinha. There the laje is a space of economic value. You can
build yourself another floor and rent it. You can also throw a party, sun-
bathe.
Mauricio It’s a space for community [espaço comunitário].
Fabiana It’s a space for community. The laje is a space for community, where you
can fly a kite, you can gossip with your neighbor.
Mauricio When you put people in apartments, you make bubbles.
Fabiana Right
Mauricio You confine people inside bubbles and give no access to that communal
place, to that community involvement.

Debora and Mauricio engaged in a cooperative conversation that interactionally

“made, remade, transformed, reformed” (Silverstein 1993: 38) the meanings of co-
munidade in the movie they had just seen. Debora is from Rocinha and sees some
aspects of her life experience replicated in the movie. Mauricio, who is from the

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190 Daniel N. Silva, Adriana Facina and Adriana Carvalho Lopes

lower middle class neighborhood of Penha, downgrades the individualistic life of

people living in apartments or “bubbles”, which prevents “access to community
involvement.”
In his childhood, movie director Jefferson Oliveira, who was born in Grota,
joined Cinema Nosso, an NGO directed by Fernando Meirelles and Katia Lundt,
the directors of the movie City of God. Jefferson acted in City of God, and later
became a film director himself. Depois rola o mocotó is at once an indexical sign of
life in the Alemão and a synecdoche of Jefferson’s long journey. His intercultural
journey to the NGO and to global cinema was later recycled into a documentary.
Favela residents regarded the documentary as a ‘replication’ (Urban 1996) instead
of a ‘response,’ as seems also to be the case with Globo’s Salve Jorge.
In considering the relationship between the ‘original’ and the ‘copy,’ the re-
sulting text is regarded as a replication when the original discourse is “copied,”
and as a response when the source text is “reacted to” (Urban 1996: 23). Beyond
the arrangement of signs in both activities, what is at stake in replication and
response is the social relationship between originators and copiers and their
linguistic-­ideological views (Urban 1996: 27–35), both ultimately determining
how interactants evaluate the resulting discourse as replication or response. Grota
resident Marcelo sums up his opinion: “This movie is almost my entire life. Ev-
erything that was shown on screen I’ve lived. Tiles flying, people throwing stones
at my house, the lack of shelter when the laje was built. I’ve lived everything.”
Marcelo considers the movie to be a replication of his life – the very original
discourse being replicated. In talking to people in the Alemão, we found out that
they consider Salve Jorge to be a ‘response’ to the original discourse ‘life in the
favela’. As Calazans puts it (pers.comm.):
It is so unrealistic the way the favela is portrayed on TV. The soap opera shows
people dancing to funk music7 on the streets, with no police around. But actually
funk has been censored since pacification. And the police beat people for abso-
lutely no reason.

Calazans and other favela residents have thus devised communicable cartogra-
phies that compete with mainstream ones. We will now discuss how a journalist
who worked for a major newspaper during the pacification of the Alemão re-
sponded to the dominant communicable constructions of pacification.

7. Funk Carioca, or Rio de Janeiro Funk, is a popular music style in Brazil. It is produced and
consumed mainly by the youth of the favelas. Different from funk music elsewhere in the world,
Funk Carioca is the result of intense processes of appropriation, transformation and national-
ization of the rhythms of Black-Soul Culture, one of the most transnational youth expressions
of the African Diaspora.

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 Complex territories, complex circulations 191

4.3 The ‘redemption’ of the Alemão

As we saw in the preceding section, mainstream media have sold their depiction
of ‘pacification’ in the Alemão as the factual replication of its very reality. When
the army and the police invaded the community, inhabitants were portrayed as
“applauding” the operation and happy that they would no longer be in the hands
of drug dealers. “Freedom, freedom, spread your wings over us all” are the samba
lyrics that O Globo cited from an anonymous note that a reporter supposedly
received from a local (G1 2010). In the note, an anonymous dweller thanks “the
heroes who came to free us.” The TV news presented a facsimile of the folded
note, in a politically shaped voice that travels from Vila Cruzeiro (“Comunidade
Vila Cruzeiro” signs the note) to the whole nation (“this nation blessed by God”).
While presenting the note as the thing in itself, O Globo resorts to a metaphysics
of presence (Derrida 2001 [1967]), thereby portraying its recontextualizations of
text and talk as truth itself.
We have shown this piece of news to some of the local inhabitants. Gilmar,
who is from Vila Cruzeiro, commented: “We actually hung white flags out of our
homes. But we didn’t mean freedom. We meant ‘please, stop the killing’”. Teresa,8
who covered the ‘pacification’ for a major Brazilian newspaper, told us that she
was puzzled about the way the media depicted the occupation:
After a day of work in the field, I would come home and watch TV. While watch-
ing the news I thought I wasn’t in the same place those journalists were. But we
were together. The media decide how to approach the subject. There’s no neutral-
ity. I mean, you choose your focus, right?

Being in a different place than the other journalists probably suggests having an
altogether different communicable model. Teresa drew our attention to how me-
diatization – that is, the entanglement of mediation and commoditization (Agha
2011) – worked in this particular event. In Teresa’s terms, the media is part of a
“market”. During her undergraduate studies, she used to think that newspapers
“were above suspicion,” but in her later life as a professional, “the myth was de-
stroyed.” After working in different mass media companies and in different power
centers – like Brasília, São Paulo and Rio – Teresa “changed [her] point of view.
It’s an industry like any other. [She] used to place a halo around it. The media have
to be lucrative.”
As for the headlines “society thanks the police” and “the population applauds,”
she responded:

8. We changed the name of some subjects in order to avoid institutional or political risks.

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192 Daniel N. Silva, Adriana Facina and Adriana Carvalho Lopes

I honestly didn’t see any joy. While talking to the locals, I realized they were
worried about being bothered by the police. Some people were concerned that
the police would enter their houses and steal things or mess with everything. The
police’s logic was not ‘you are innocent until proven guilty,’ but ‘you are guilty
until proven innocent.’ I saw only one person applauding the police, and he in-
trigued me. I think I’ve just seen the same guy in a different context, when that
cameraman died while filming a shooting.

Teresa fills in some gaps between the recontextualizations of mass mediation. She
questions the scalar jump, from one person applauding to the “population ap-
plauding.” She further doubts whether the applauder was really a local or some-
one “who likes attention.” It appears that the same person was crying elsewhere
at a journalist’s funeral. Indeed, Teresa complicated the seemingly natural flow
of information in O Globo’s and other corporate media accounts of pacification
in the Alemão. As she told us elsewhere, “O Globo loves the UPP.” The legitima-
tion of the police state in the favelas is therefore supported by mediatized forms
that turn the entangled interests of the economy, of the police, and of those who
want changes in politics into a linear and transparent trajectory of “truth” and
“objectivity.”

5. Final remarks, or a further assignment?

A “revolutionary practice” is how Calazans frames the experience of living in a

favela:
The existence of the favela is so ‘impossible’ that living there is, in itself, a rev-
olutionary practice. In creating the favela, people subverted the capitalist right
to property. The residents did not respect the privatization of essential rights. If
the state doesn’t offer water, people open gatos de água [illegal, unpaid-for con-
nections to running water]. And they also make music and poetry in spite of the
overwhelming burdens of daily life.  (pers. comm.)

This music composer, who has had the chance to join other regimes of entextu-
alization such as the university (“a space I don’t like,” he confesses), recontextual-
izes the very experience of living in a zone of abandonment as a “revolution.” On
the very day we interviewed him, outside the Morro de Adeus cable car station,
first, two drug dealers on a motorcycle and then the police came to watch us. The
dealers filmed us with a cell phone, and then called someone, saying “tá limpo”
[‘they’re clean’]. The police were less discreet than the dealers, and drove by us
many times. It took us some time to recover from our fear and bewilderment. Our
circulation – or rather our lack of circulation insofar as we were standing still,

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 Complex territories, complex circulations 193

having a meeting within the police state – conflicted with the models, acceptable
to both the criminals and the police, of how words and people should circulate in
times of ‘pacification’, when the forces in the favela have been rearranged.
Returning to the interview, we inquired about Calazans’ art. “How can my
art spring from the abstract?” he asked himself and our communicable models,
pointing out the very tangible experiences that inform his work. Living in the
favela, he said, you could meet death just around the corner. Before UPP, during
the occasional police raids, there were high chances that the police would shoot
young men they found in the street, particularly if they were black. The Rio po-
lice’s ideological constructions of race – likened to those current in Israel, as we
have seen above – construe discerning between criminals and regular residents
as “impossible”. At one time, Calazans was walking down the hilly alleyways of
the Alemão, when firecrackers signaled to the dealers and other inhabitants that a
caveirão, or heavily fortified military grade police tank, was coming up the slope.
“I was dead”, he said. “When you look up, you see the fireworks and the boys
running away; when you look down, you see the caveirão approaching.” Calazans
hastened to add, “living and dying in the favela are not very far apart”. He went on
to ask how his music could “spring from thin air if I live here?”
This poignant narrative, like many others that we’ve been listening to and
recirculating here and elsewhere, is a life story that complicates the intricate re-
lationships that subjects maintain using signs. In portraying his lyrics and mili-
tancy as stemming from a long chain of multiple (and often violent) limits to the
circulation of signs and people in the Alemão, Calazans offers an account that is
at once a story of political commitment and a meta-story of how people attach
to – or are affected by – the other and the other’s stories.
To bring this paper to a close, we would like to emphasize the following.
While traveling through the multiple dimensions of social life, meaning enacts
affect. Subjects bind to one another and to signs based on the social process of
adhering to certain constructions of the circulation of discourse. Circulation,
therefore, goes beyond manipulation and power; circulation ultimately tells us
something about our fundamental attachment to signs and to people.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Elizabeth Lewis, Juliana Barbassa, and Viviane Veras for
their insightful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. Any remaining mistakes
are our own. This study was partially funded by a Rio de Janeiro Research Foun-
dation (FAPERJ) grant for human sciences research.

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194 Daniel N. Silva, Adriana Facina and Adriana Carvalho Lopes

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About the authors

Daniel N. Silva is a Professor of Linguistics at the University of Rio de Janeiro (UNIRIO). He
has published in the fields of linguistic pragmatics and linguistic anthropology. His latest book,
Pragmática da violência: o Nordeste na mídia brasileira [‘Pragmatics of Violence: the Nordeste
in the Brazilian Media’], explores the relationship between language, violence, and social life in
Contemporary Brazil.
Adriana Facina is Professor of Anthropology in the Museu Nacional at the Federal University
of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ). She has researched urban experience and artistic creation, along with
literacy and the cultural industry in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro.
(adriana.facina2@gmail.com)
Adriana Carvalho Lopes is Professor of Linguistics in the Multidisciplinary Center of Educa-
tion at the Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRRJ). She has been doing ethnograph-
ic work with the subaltern youths of Rio de Janeiro since 2004.
(adrianaclopes14@gmail.com)

© 2015. John Benjamins Publishing Company

All rights reserved
196 Daniel N. Silva, Adriana Facina and Adriana Carvalho Lopes

Address for correspondence

Daniel N. Silva
Escola de Letras
Av. Pasteur, 436 – Urca
Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil
22290-255
dnsfortal@gmail.com

© 2015. John Benjamins Publishing Company

All rights reserved