“There isn’t gang here, there’s ‘facção’”: The social transformations of crime in Fortaleza, Brasil

Abstract

This paper discusses the social transformation process of crime in Fortaleza’s peripheries through the constitution of criminal collectives known as “facções”. It evidences how gangs and drug trafficking groups offered objective conditions to the process of joining these collectives which, among other circumstances, affected the forms of crime in the City. The research was developed in a dynamic of qualitative and multisituated investigation, articulating press material, interviews and conversations in the light of a comprehensive perspective of the senses and the relations within the studied phenomenon. It considers the multiple social effects of violence in circumstances created by criminal collectives that are facing each other and seek to exert power of government over populations with which they share certain social sufferings. The paper also demonstrates a change in the scale of violence and interference of people who commit crimes with torture, expulsion and slaughter involving men and women. It concludes that the “facções” created dynamics of government that result in forms of domination and subjection of the poorpopulation in Fortaleza, Brazil.