Security & Strategic Review - August 2019

Public security experts and sociologists fear that the hard-line security approach adopted by Rio de Janeiro’s state governor, Wilson Witzel, is encouraging violence and emboldening criminal organisations whose modus operandi depends on spreading terror. Yet police have also been cracking down on the ‘milícias’, the paramilitary vigilante groups which control disaffected areas of metropolitan Rio de Janeiro to such an extent that they have sometimes been described as a ‘parallel state’ [SSR-19-04].