ABSTRACT
Safety and security for citizens to go about their daily lives is one of the greatest challenges facing Brazil in the post-dictatorship period, and second only to economic motives for both voting decisions and for fuelling emigration. The meagre resources made available at state and municipal level for public security in Brazil are channelled much less into protecting vulnerable groups such as children, women, the LGBTQ community and those living in deprived areas, and more on combatting armed gangs who are involved in drug trafficking. So much so that, despite referencing homicide, feminicide, violence against women and the security of the nation’s borders in its national public security policy, 1 public security in Brazil to all intents and purposes means waging an “internal war” against organised and heavily armed gangs who deal in drugs. The battlefield on which this war is waged is more often than not the favelas and poor neighbourhoods of Brazil’s large cities, to the point that for many, especially those living outside of these poor neighbourhoods, the enemy within is synonymous with both the favela and the favelado (the favela resident). The language and images disseminated to the greater public are of civil war, and as we will explore in this chapter, along with TV and increasingly social media, films have played a key role in shaping the public’s perception of this internal war in the twenty-first century. No two films have had more of an impact on the public’s understanding of and relationship to public security than José Padilha’s box-office smash hits Tropa de elite (Elite Squad, 2007) and Tropa de elite: O inimigo agora é outro (Elite Squad: The Enemy Within, 2010)
