The Representation and Other Imaginings of Pacification: From Government Speeches to Lived Experiences in Rio de Janeiro's Favelas
Creators: name: Ritter, Juliana de Souza
Publisher: name: The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill University Libraries
Year: 2017

description: In 2008, Rio de Janeiro’s government launched a project to pacify favelas through the
implementation of Pacifying Police Units (UPPs), establishing a continuous military presence in
the lives of its residents. The project required not only physical occupation, but also a vast publicity
campaign of daily commercials, videos of each pacification, and events held within favelas with
top government officials in attendance. Through active constructive discourse, this propaganda
developed a singular image of favelas and their residents: of a place and people that necessitated
pacification.
However, the implementation of the project fell short of its publicized goals. The vastness
of favelas—home to 1.5 million or about 24% of Rio de Janeiro’s population—problematizes
pacification as a ready-made military project that is not tailored to each favela’s needs. While the
UPPs claim within their logo that “the UPP came to stay!” people who live in favelas see
pacification differently, using words like “spoiled” to describe its current state.
After the inaugural year of the UPPs, I was asked to write a fifteen-page research paper on
something that I was passionate about. This was my sophomore year at Chapel Hill High School
and the beginning to my interest in what would be several class assignments, an internship, a
geography capstone paper, and now an honors thesis about the pacification of favelas in Rio de
Janeiro. I have accompanied pacification since 2009 through Brazil’s vast changes such as the
FIFA World Cup, Olympics, impeachment of Dilma Rousseff, and countless corruption scandals.
Within the classroom setting, my focus on pacification was always limited to historical research
and analyses that could be done using data accessible to me and within a semester’s time span.
The development of this project into my thesis allowed me to expand to questions that could be
answered by multiple sources of data.
In this thesis, I examine the current state of the military project and ask: How does the
Brazilian government’s construction of pacification differ from the lived experiences of residents
within pacified favelas? Further, how is the government representing pacification in a way that
makes it palatable to international audiences, the pacifying police, and favela residents
themselves? To answer these questions I will begin by situating pacification within the political
geography literature on territory and power, and outlining how these are expressed in geographies
of militarization and securitization. I then draw on the history of Rio de Janeiro in order to
contextualize favelas and previous tactics of favela removal. Considering both the geographical
concepts and history of pacification, I provide the reader with the tools to follow my discussion of
twenty-five government speeches between 2008 and 2016, as well as five semi-structured
interviews with six favela residents.