INTRODUCTION
In June 2013, Brazilian authorities, activists and researchers witnessed the biggest national mass demonstrations since 1992, when the movement for the impeachment of President Collor de Mello took to the streets across the country. The relatively small protest against the rise of public transportation fares, which started in São Paulo in early June, escalated dramatically. The return of mass demonstrations was surprising due to at least two reasons.
First, the protests broke out in an unprecedented moment of extensive production of social and identity policies led by the Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores – PT) Government, historically allied with popular social movements. The international sporting events were also part of the PT political project to disseminate economic benefits across all regions in the country.1 In addition to the World Cup of 2014 and the 2016 Olympics, Brazil was also the host country of the Confederations Cup (from 15th of June to 30th, 2013),2 a sort of World Cup testevent, whose games took place at the same time as the protests. One of the major themes in the Brazilian demonstrations was precisely the negative impacts of mega-events: public spending, corruption, displacements of populations by infrastructure works, and social control repressive measures of urban groups, such as street vendors and homeless.
Second, mass demonstrations were returning to the Brazilian public space in June 2013 with new configurations of political actors and protest forms.3 On the one hand, there were new generations of autonomist/anarchist/Black Bloc4 and right/far-right groups in addition to the traditional left. On the other hand, there was a problematic combination in the demonstrations—from the public order viewpoint—of different protest strategies: marches and rallies, road and traffic blocking, occupations of buildings, and depredation of heritage.
This article analyzes the intertwining of the public security policy for the mega-events and the State’s responses to the protests. We argue that the occurrence of three international sports mega-events—amid the new protest profile in Brazil—generated resources, opportunities, pressures, and constraints for authorities to enhance repressive strategies of maintaining public order. Transnational security practices and normative frameworks were internalized as part of the requirements of global sports organizations, and police officers were trained in new technologies and policing tactics. These changes were concentrated in the first year of the protests—from the Confederations Cup (June 2013) to the World Cup (July 2014)—and have spurred adaptations and innovations in two axes of social control – formal rules and public order policing.
Our analysis is based on the contentious politics approach, highlighting the relational, processual, and historical dimensions of the relationship between social movements, State, and social control.5 Case studies have documented interactive shifts in the 21st century in modes of making protests and controlling them.6 The 1980s and 1990s were an era of peaceful demonstrations and policing model so-called negotiated management based on dialogue between demonstrators and police officers, low and selective use of force/arrests, and more tolerance to acts of civil disobedience. From the 2000s onwards, transgressive tactics emerging in the anti-globalization protests (direct anarchist action/Black Bloc) and violent forms of political contention emerging from terrorist attacks in 9/11 produced the so-called strategic incapacitation model.7 Based on a conception of risk control, this new repressive control form aims to prevent the protest itself from happening through a combination of tactics, such as widespread surveillance; cross-agency intelligence sharing; tight police control of space where protest occurs; mass arrests, and judicial proceedings; use of fences, barricades, less-lethal weapons; deployment of police paramilitary units equipped with riot gear and specialized equipment in crowd control, as in the United States case, S.W.A.T and the so-called “Darth Vader police.”
These shifts in State response to protests in the last two decades have also been understood as part of broader historical changes in social control and national security policies in democracies. Doctrines and practices of “zero tolerance” initially applied to common crimes, urban violence, and soccer fans had begun to migrate to protest control in the 1980s, aiming at prevention and risk management.8 Since 1990, repressive models of social control have been spreading globally through the international security market, through international forums for training, professional exchanges, and technology fairs bringing together Police, security experts, surveillance systems, equipment, and armaments companies.9 Today, nation-states have at their disposal traditional military forces and new cyber-surveillance technologies capable of undermining civil and political rights without overt repression against dissidents.10
This intersection between social control and national security is also a central issue in the literature on the anthropology of the State, law, citizen security, and the global order addressed in other contributions included in this Dossier.11 From a Brazilian perspective, we aim to contribute to this debate by examining the role of transnational mega-events as a vehicle for the diffusion of repressive models of public order with potential effects on protest politics.
The following section presents our analytical and methodological frameworks. Then, we analytically describe how the political process triggered by demonstrations on the eve of mega-events intertwined public security and protest control policies.
1. STATE, CYCLES OF CONTENTION AND DIFFUSION OF REPRESSION THROUGH MEGA-EVENTS
Our analytical lens is based on a combination of recent debates about State, political repression, repertoires, and cycles of contention. Protest politics pose challenges to social routines in many ways: first, to institutional rituals for channeling demands, conflicts, and interests (elections and judicial proceedings); second, to urban everyday flows of people, goods, traffic; and third, to symbolic and legal definitions of public order. Then, governments typically respond to protests through political concessions to demands (public policies) and selective or generalized interventions in protest events: repressing and increasing costs of collective action or facilitating and reducing costs of collective action.12 In this sense, states react to protest as governments and as social control agencies (security forces, judicial branches, and courts, prisons) and, therefore, what is formally known as the State, is a heterogeneous strategic field formed by actors inserted in structured arenas by rules and codes of action.13 Then, we use state control of protest to refer to actions/reactions of political, Police, and legal authorities aiming to handle protests. State repression encompasses actions/reactions which aim to constrain, suppress, or prevent protests. They involve multiple arenas, actors, and coercive strategies (physical, penal/legal, intimidation, threat, harassment) and non-coercive (stigmatization, bargaining, co-optation).14
The State control of protest is part of the system of social order. However, it differs from standard forms of coercion and criminal sanctions against common criminality because, mainly in constitutional democracies, there is a delicate and unstable equilibrium between repressive social control and the right to political protest. Then, intervention in demonstrations requires adaptations and innovations of formal rules and policing routines for maintaining public order.
The dynamics of political conflict produce reciprocal shifts in repertoires of action.15 That is to say, the finite and historically available set of strategies, tactics, and performances for citizens to confront authorities (contention repertoire) and for State agents to react to them, we call institutional repertoire. It is composed of the set of strategies and tactics of public order policing (police repertoire) and the set of norms, formal procedures, and institutional practices of law enforcement (legal repertoires).
Cycles of contention are moments in which sequences of escalating public demonstrations – greater frequency and intensity than usual – spread across geographic regions and social sectors and involves new forms of protesting and organizing by activists and new forms of controlling public order by States. They are critical junctures that exacerbate elites’ perception of threats and accelerate political processes through intensive protests and State responses, generating a socio-political environment of mutual learning of protesters and State agents based on the constant evaluation of the effectiveness of strategies and tactics adopted in the course of the conflict.16 In the short term, activists and State agents select and combine strategies and tactics from a relatively stable set of available alternatives to respond to one another; in the long run, new forms of protest and State control are incorporated into local political tradition.
International sporting events are also problematic situations for political authorities and security forces. Compliance with global security requirements is associated with the national states’ ability to control common crime and political protest. On the one hand, public security policies are based on a rhetoric of risks and terrorist threats normally propagated by actors and coalitions of interest groups formed around global mega-events: political authorities of different levels, public security forces, big sponsors, sports organizations, and mass media. Host countries become a route for circulating global public order control repertoires - specific public security rules, laws, and policies - aiming to protect heads of states, authorities, personalities, and the mass of tourists. On the other hand, such events generate a non-routine dynamic of conflict between governments and social movements. Domestic protests emerge against the negative impacts of the infrastructure reforms demanded to host such events, increasing public spending and tightening public security policies. International spotlights are political opportunities both to constrain authorities in the face of global audiences and to reverberate demands and attract supporters in the global arena.
We interpret what happened in Brazil between 2013-2016 as a cycle of contention with frequent and intense demonstrations from June 2013 to President Dilma Rousseff’s impeachment process in 2016. In this period, protests reached national peaks in June 2013, March 2015, and March 2016.17 In this article, our analysis focuses on the protests in São Paulo from June 2013 to June 2014.18 This first year of the Brazilian cycle was crucial for institutional learning in dealing with the return of the masses and new forms of protest on the eve of the World Cup.19 Our data come from primary sources (databases,20 interviews,21 and chronologies of institutional events) and secondary ones (human rights reports, public opinion research, press files on the protests, and case studies).
2. THE OUTBREAK OF THE BRAZILIAN CYCLE AND ANTI-CUP PROTESTS
The return to democracy from 1985 onwards brought back to the Brazilian public space varied forms of making political claims: from peaceful demonstrations, rallies, marches to strikes, assembly, meetings, and disruptive contention forms such as street blockade, occupation of lands and buildings. Nevertheless, although the new constitutional framework guaranteed political and civil liberties, repressive and abusive police practices continued to be part of the public protest scene. Negotiated management of demonstrations was never a reality in Brazil. In 2011, for example, human rights organizations and progressive actors within the justice system publicly denounced police repression against protesters in Sao Paulo and condemned the violent dispersions without prior communication; the abusive use of non-lethal weapons (tear gas, rubber bullets, pepper spray), and the arbitrary detentions.22
The Police reinforced these practices when the Free Fare Movement started in Sao Paulo one more campaign against increasing public transportation fares.23 Demonstrations occurred from the 6th to the 11th of June. They grew each day in the number of participants, extended over hours, and caused huge congestions. Authorities reacted to the first protests with increased police officers on the streets, including riot police. At the 13th of June protest, the use of force reached its peak. The Police searched people and arrested over a hundred protesters and journalists before the demonstration started. Rubber bullet shots were fired, protesters were sieged, chased, and imprisoned. Police repression resulted in 128 wounded and 235 arrested.24
This fourth day of protests changed the dynamics of political contention. The routine police violence against poor and black people moved from urban peripheries to the central areas of the largest and richest city in the country in shocking scenes of attacks against middle-class protesters, journalists, and pedestrians. Attacks and arrests of journalists linked to the two largest newspapers in the country changed the media’s position regarding the protesters: from demanding tough police action and calling to the end of street demonstrations, the newspapers’ coverage started to support the protests.
The police repression on the 13th of June in Sao Paulo triggered the increase of the protests. The number of participants escalated from 3,000 people (the 6th of June) to 65,000 (the 17th of June). In an attempt to placate the explosion of protests, Federal, State, and Municipal authorities announced a set of political concessions – from revocation of the increase in bus fares in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro to federal public policies on health, education, and urban mobility. These responses were not sufficient to contain the national spread of street demonstrations. When protests reached their peak on the 20th of June, 1,25 million people were in the streets of 465 cities across the country.25
The national outbreak of demonstrations in June helped the Anti-Cup campaign to take off. When the mega-event project started to be implemented with the provision of resources and the enactment of the so-called “Cup Law” in 2012, 26 activists started small mobilizations against the downsides of hosting the events.
Local urban movements in the hosting cities of the games built a coalition network, the socalled Popular World Cup Committees (CPC). The June protests amid the Confederations Cup event affected the Anti-Cup campaign´s trajectory in two directions. First, protests against the World Cup spread to the streets in the 12 host cities; an important fact because until June 2013, public demonstration as a contention strategy was used marginally by Anti-Cup activist groups.
Second, the campaign split into two protests networks, autonomists, and the traditional left. The slogan “World Cup for whom? Cup without people, I’m on the street again” 27 guided the public demonstrations of the traditional left organized in the local CPCs, connected nationally by the coalition of Anti-Cup Committees. Street protests aimed to pressure the authorities to negotiate the expansion of urban public policies and repair the “victims of the World Cup legally.”28 The slogan “Without rights, there will be no World Cup” 29 guided the network of small protest groups and movements (autonomists, Black Blocs, and cyber activists). Street demonstrations aimed to block the World Cup games based on a decentralized recruitment model through social media.
After June 2013, the demonstrations did not drag crowds into the streets—as activists expected and as officials feared. From July 2013 to the start of the games in June 2014, protests against the World Cup did not reach more than 5000 participants.30 However, they gained media attention due to scenes of violence with the spread of Black Bloc protests, mainly in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, the two main host cities of the games. The two resilient activism networks – traditional left and autonomist/Black Bloc – sustained the street demonstrations across the most important Brazilian cities.
3. THE NEW POLICY OF PROTEST CONTROL FOR THE WORLD CUP
Since the Confederations Cup games’ opening in Brasilia on the 15th of June, protests became a concern for the Federal Government. Police and demonstrators clashed outside the Mané Garrincha Stadium. The audience booed then-President Dilma Rousseff during her opening speech. Between the 15th of June and the 30th of June, autonomists and Black Blocs also tried to disrupt the Confederations Cup with demonstrations in the vicinity of the stadiums in Fortaleza, Salvador, and Belo Horizonte. Police squads primarily used rubber bullets and tear gas to block protesters’ access to the stadiums.
On the eve of the World Cup and the 2014 presidential elections, protests were not only a problem for local governments. They threatened the mega-events, as a Worker’s Party accomplishment and Rousseff’s re-election plan. The Brazilian government’s performance in preparing the event was criticized by the national and international press and FIFA itself. The threat of boycotting the games –“There will not be a Cup” – combined with problems of pace and quality of the constructions and services for the World Cup was widely publicized. Jérôme Valcke, FIFA’s general secretary, made up the counter-slogan “Of course there will be a World Cup” to calm sponsors, tourists, football teams, and authorities from other countries. At the same time, he publicly criticized the protests, demanded the use of the Army in the security of football stadiums, and threatened to withdraw the 2014 World Cup from the country if the federal government was unable to contain the protests during the games.31
The challenge for local and federal governments was to contain protests without escalating the use of force. After the 13th of June, the Sao Paulo’s State government prohibited using rubber bullets and Shock Troops in protests.32 Police officers recognized the backlash effect of the widespread use of force and the difficulties of reconciling political pressure to contain protests with the lack of training to deal with mass demonstrations and Black Bloc groups. Furthermore, human rights activists and organizations formed a coalition against the repressive responses of the Brazilian government, combining strategies such as the legal defense of protesters in police stations and courts, litigation, and international denunciations of human rights violations. Between 2013 and 2014, in response to activists and human-rights organizations’ complaints, the United Nations and the Organization of American States demanded measures from the Brazilian government to contain the Police.33
Internal and external pressures were crucial to change the protest control policy through two strategies: the national coordination of social control organizations (security forces and judicial system) and adaptations and innovations of institutional repertoires (legal and policing).
The national coordination of a public order control policy started with the national pact between the Justice Ministry, the General Director of the Federal Police, and the Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro Secretaries of Public Security publicly celebrated in October 2013. This coordinated effort took place on different fronts: the formation of an intelligence group with members of the federal, military, and civil Police to investigate the Black Bloc movement’s modus operandi; the creation of operational groups between the Public Prosecutors Office and Civil Police Chiefs; the creation of a group of expert lawyers to assist the executive in the formulation of bills to be proposed aiming at the criminal hardening for acts against public and private property and violent acts against police officers; and the creation of a unified protocol of conducts for the state police forces. Policing in the World Cup host cities was reinforced with the availability of 10,000 elite police officers from the National Force and the cooperation of the Brazilian Intelligence Agency (ABIN), the Federal Police, and state police bodies. Fasttrack courts were created in the host cities to respond 24 hours on duty to robberies, homicides, public order disturbances, and acts of violence in protests.
What we see from this moment on is a change in the dynamics of protest control. The first reactive and violent model of response to protests, conducted by isolated local police forces, gave way to a more comprehensive national policy. First, this new strategy involved coordinated actions of state agencies in a flow of control between the streets (policing), the parliament (new laws), and the judicial system (criminal proceedings). Second, the Police adopted preventive policing through new technologies and tactical innovations in demonstrations management.
4. BETWEEN PUBLIC SECURITY AND PROTEST CONTROL POLICIES: ADAPTATIONS AND INNOVATIONS
The standard package of obligations imposed by FIFA to host countries provides demands for public order policing so that the events take place peacefully, without damages to the wide range of national and international investors. In the Brazilian case, these requirements became more pressing with the outbreak of the 2013 street protests. This situation catalyzed a series of changes in the legal apparatus and institutional policing practices of military and civil Police. Some changes were transitory - such as the provisions of the World Cup Law - but others have been permanently integrated into the Brazilian legal system, such as a new repressive regime to deal with “organized crime” and terrorism. Unlike the transitory measures, these innovations integrated the general framework of criminal law tools to be applied to control common crime and protests.
4.1 Adaptations in legal apparatus and police inquiry34
The concerted reaction prompted by the coalition of federal and local authorities involved passing new legislation related directly and indirectly to protest control. Legislative activism35 resulted in new municipal and State laws directly related to the protest practices, for example, the prohibition of using masks in public demonstrations. Other changes did not specifically target protesters but would be adapted to integrate the government strategy for public order control. Such is the case of three federal bills approved in response to the critical juncture, the Criminal Organizations Act, the law expanding the scope of Law-and-Order Guarantee Operations, and the Anti-terrorist Act.
a) The Criminal Organizations Act
The Criminal Organizations Act was the first federal law approved in August 2013. By providing harsher treatment and more intrusive investigative tools to prosecute the so-called criminal organizations, the law was decisive in the strategic adaptation of institutional routines for controlling common crime to the criminal control of civil disobedience. After enacting the law, investigative procedures were opened simultaneously in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro to investigate the newly defined “criminal organization Black Bloc”.36 They received the nicknames of “Black Bloc Inquiry”, “End of the World Inquiry” and “Mother-Inquiry” because they brought together police reports and minor investigations that had been opened separately in police stations in both cities. Based on the assumption that the Black Bloc was a criminal organization (instead of its actual nature as a diffuse gathering of protesters acting individually), circumstantial occurrences of depredation and violence would constitute only the most visible facet of the association of individuals aiming at the deliberate practice of crime.
While the homologous case in Rio de Janeiro resulted in convictions, the “Black Bloc Investigation” in Sao Paulo did not result in any criminal charges. The case did not gain traction, for the fragility of attempts to define Black Bloc protesters as a case of a criminal organization. Nevertheless, during its long run, between November 2013 and September 2015, the “Black Bloc Investigation” processed more than 300 people, interrogating them in police precincts and allowed the widespread use of surveillance. The legal construction of the Black Bloc as a criminal organization became a tool of control and intimidation of protesters, which allowed the expansion of protest control from the streets to the criminal justice system.
b) Expansion of Scope of Law-and-Order Guarantee Operations (GLO)
The negotiated transition process from the military dictatorship to the civilian government in Brazil did not wholly exclude the possibility of domestic participation of the Armed Forces in public security. The 1988 Brazilian Constitution authorizes them in exceptional interventions to guarantee law and order. They should be authorized by the President and justified as necessary to preserve the public order and the safety of people and property in situations of exhaustion of regular public security actions. Mega international events have been per se the most common situation of GLOs missions (followed by Police strikes and urban violence), contributing to the militarization of order control. However, the return of mass protests in Brazil triggered a new regulation, approved in 2014, that expressly establishes the possibility of using the Armed Forces to control urban disturbances and protests.37
c) The Anti-terrorism Act
As we have already mentioned, the attack on the Twin Towers generated a hardening of criminal law responses against terrorism that spilled over to the control of domestic protests. After 9/11, the United Nations adopted resolutions condemning terrorism and urging member States to fight it.38 Member countries of the Organization of American States, among them Brazil, adopted in 2002 the Inter-American Convention Against Terrorism, which commits parties to adopt the necessary measures to prevent, punish, and eliminate terrorism39. The Financial Action Task Force (GAFI/FATF)40 incorporated the funding of terrorism in its agenda and urged its members to criminalize terrorism and terrorism financing.41 Brazil had already been under pressure to adopt anti-terrorism legislation for more than a decade.42 Anti-terrorist bills have been proposed and discussed in Congress but had never gained traction. The Workers’ Party Government, historically allied with popular social movements, resisted for many years to adopt this type of legislation, even in the face of significant international pressure,43 being sensitive to the concerns that the law could be used to repress social movements.44
After the outbreak of the June 2013 protests, Senate Bill of Law 449/2013, proposing an anti-terrorist act, was presented by a Joint Committee created by the Presidents of the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies, expressly motivated by “the approach of events of the size of the World Cup and the 2016 Olympics”. Uncommon to other anti-terror legislation, this bill describes a form of terrorism, the “terrorism against things,” defining it as the act of causing widespread panic by damaging an essential good or service, such as power stations, train lines, hospitals, schools, and stadiums45. It is a clear reference to the Black Bloc direct action repertoire.
In early 2014, motivated by the death of a journalist hit by fireworks during a demonstration against the tariff increase in Rio de Janeiro, the Senate requested the examination of Bill 499/2013. While this proposal was never voted on by the plenary, it came to signal that the critical juncture on top of the international pressure provoked a radical change in the Worker’s Party government position. Through its Ministries of Justice and Finance, Dilma Rousseff’s Government presented in 2015 their Anti-terrorism bill. The law was approved on the eve of the 2016 Olympics in Rio. It punishes with up to 30 years in prison those who “provoke social or generalized terror” but tries to address the social movement’s concerns by explicitly acknowledging that social movements and political organizations should be excluded from the definition of terrorism. Nevertheless, the open and generic wording of the legal provisions still allows for different interpretations, especially those that try to differentiate between legitimate and illegitimate forms of protest, a disjunction largely mobilized by authorities, including those within the justice system, during protests.
4.2 Innovations in policing repertoires
The three international sporting events were for Brazilian authorities a political opportunity to upgrade the public security infrastructure and policy and change the image of urban and Police violence in large cities, especially in Rio de Janeiro.
Indeed, the government’s concerns about public order control during the mega-events were not unfounded. In 2004, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) rejected the candidacy of Rio de Janeiro for the Olympics, arguing that lack of infrastructure and the lethal clashes between Police and organized crime in slum-populated areas of the city represented a major threat to the mega-event46. Therefore, when setting up the security system for the 2014 World Cup, government security agencies classified social and political threats to mega-events into four priority levels47. The lowest level was common crime outside the urban areas of the World Cup activities (Level 1) and crimes in the vicinity of stadiums (Level 2). Public order control gained more complexity with threatening situations that could involve momentary interruptions of the tournament. In that case, political or religious events near stadiums were treated as security problems (Level 3). And the highest level was threats of terrorist actions (Level 4).
Although protests were predicted as a high priority in scale, it was only after June 2013 that they gain centrality for investments in technology and police training. The innovations triggered by the mega-events in policing strategies encompassed institutional design, surveillance, equipment, techniques, and training.
a) Institutional design: integration
The Brazilian security policy for the World Cup combined institutional integration with upgrading technological and tactical infrastructure for controlling public order. By creating the Extraordinary Secretariat for Major Events (SESGE) in 2011, under the command of the Ministry of Justice, the government articulated the security policy for the mega-event in the 12 host cities. The policy included purchasing equipment, acquisition of technology, and training of military and civil Police48. It was up to the Federal Police to coordinate the acquisition of hightech security equipment for surveillance like cameras and drones – and develop a security plan with the military and civil Police in each host city.
At the local level, the Integrated Command and Control Centers (CICC), dedicated to coordinating security forces and intelligence services, appeared as the main institutional and technical innovation in all host cities. The CICCs brought together local and federal security forces and foreign police commissions in the same effort to build surveillance capacities. Equipped with a state-of-the-art monitoring technology, CICCs were installed near strategic places like stadiums, hotels, the FIFA Fan Fest (where franchise party events during the World Cup took place), airports, and escorts of delegations.49
b) New technologies, Weaponry, and Equipment
Between 2011-2012, SESGE made investments in public security material and infrastructure, mainly targeting terrorism threats and common crime in the stadiums’ vicinities.
The CICCs were equipped with a package that included “safe rooms,” mobile surveillance devices – vehicles and special vehicles equipped with cameras – as well as audio and listening devices and aerial equipment with visual recognition50 (infrared sensors, electro-optical sensors, surveillance drones, and sound detection equipment). The Federal Government also equipped the Brazilian Army with new heavy armaments and anti-aircraft artillery51. As a whole, however, the most innovative investment in the preceding years was in surveillance systems for national security strategies in the host cities. Initially, the priority of public security policy was to form a permanent infrastructure to be incorporated into the national security system and not to use federal funds for state police routine operations (radios, lethal and non-lethal weapons, or Personal Protective Equipment). However, facing the protests, the Federal Government expanded investment priorities acquiring 2,691 Special Non-Lethal Operational Kits for delivery to host cities. Nicknamed the “Cup Kit” by the press, it consisted of anti-bomb robots, special suits (anti-fragmentation), anti-terrorism drones, and robots used to control civil unrest. In addition to the kits, the federal government purchased 8,374 tear gas grenades and 48,000 pepper sprays. The city of Sao Paulo received most of the kits, as it was where the biggest clashes between protesters and Police were expected in 2014.52
c) Training
Since 2012, the police forces had been being trained for the World Cup and the 2016 Olympics. Based on an extensive cooperation program with the US government, the courses and workshops addressed both issues related to the public image of the Police (social perceptions and journalistic coverage of public security actions) and technical issues of policing (operational planning, crowd management, and control, civil disturbances, use of less-lethal weapons, collection of data and images of people through new technologies (internet, cell phones, drones), among others.53
The Brazilian protests intensified the transnational exchanges between State police and security forces from countries, especially those with experience dealing with major events, radical political groups, and terrorist threats, such as Germany, Spain, United Kingdom and United States. The US Embassy offered a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) “improvement course” on “Disorder Containment” to state governments. From January to May 2014, FBI teams from Chicago and Los Angeles circulated in eight of the twelve host cities.54
Repressive innovations in street policing tactics began to be used in January 2014 when a new wave of Anti-World Cup protests sparked. They were based on preventive tactics to avoid direct contention with protesters and the excessive use of less-lethal weapons. The Police used a special suit, which the press nicknamed “Robocop,” improving the security of the police officer against rockets and stones thrown during clashes with protesters. The Sao Paulo police created the so-called “Ninja Platoon” or “Troop of Arms,” a special detachment with police officers trained in martial arts, such as jiu-jitsu, for incapacitation of violent individuals. Another important innovation was the use of the internationally known Kettling.55 The tactic consists of organizing a large contingent of police officers in a circle or corridor to confine demonstrators, preventing their spillover outside the area bounded by the police cordon. Kettling in Anti-Cup protests in Sao Paulo meant a decrease in confrontation and overt violence against protesters, but a heavy control of the public space.
The Military Police’s tactical innovations on the streets were coupled with legal measures to amplify state power and expand protest control beyond the streets. The civil Police learned to monitor social networks of activists56 and strategically used the Black Bloc police inquiry to empty the streets by summoning indicted activists to testify on days set for demonstrations. Judicial decisions in response to habeas corpus or court cases proposed by Public Defenders or cause lawyers supported, for example, the tactics of immobilizing protesters, the use of Kettling, and rubber bullets.57
CONCLUSION
The synchronicity between the outbreak of a cycle of contention and the occurrence of mega-events created a critical juncture in Brazil, with effects on protest movements and dynamics of public order control. The sequence of sports mega-events was at the same time an opportunity for protesters to expand and sustain their campaign and a source of international and national pressure to Brazilian authorities to guarantee order control, not only from FIFA but also from investors.
What can we learn from the Brazilian case? First, while contentious politics studies have associated the global diffusion of new repressive repertoires with transnational social movements (anti-globalization and terrorism), we show that international sporting events are also important vehicles for circulating security models. Mega-events are per se global-local events, being a conjunction of different and often conflicting sets of interests (national and international), from the private and public sector and the top and the base of the social order.
Second, in critical junctures, the actions and decisions of social control organizations are limited by the strategic decisions of elected governments. The Federal Government was decisive for the national coordination of state actions between the streets (policing), the parliament (new laws), and the judicial system (criminal proceedings). A national law and order pact involving authorities from different state branches advanced a two-pronged strategy through changes in the legal apparatus and modernization of protest policing techniques and equipment, spurring innovations in repressive forms of protest control. This concatenated plan for controlling the Anti-Cup protests opened the opportunity to internalize the so-called “strategic incapacitation” repertoire based on the selective and coordinated use of repressive strategies by different State arenas and agents.
Third, repressive innovations coexist with local institutional trajectories and political traditions. In the Brazilian case, the new strategies and tactics for the control of protests coexist with old/traditional problems of democratic deficits in public security policies, such as the double militarization (Military Police and GLOs) and the limited accountability of the Brazilian Police either in ostensive policing (Military Police on the streets) or in the discretionary use of police inquiries by the Civil Police.
Sports mega-events drove the expansion of the repressive repertoire available to Brazilian authorities, combining new and old strategies and practices, not only to be used against common crime but also as a means to control mass demonstrations.
These changes allowed the migration of zero tolerance doctrines and practices - articulated in the fight against criminal organizations and terrorism - to the field of protest control, shrinking the space for political participation. Furthermore, they can quickly become mechanisms of political persecution in new populist regimes with autocratic tendencies, as has been happening in Brazil under Jair Bolsonaro. His government has constantly threatened to use the Armed Forces in public demonstrations and attempts to broaden the definition of terrorism to encompass more radical forms of protest, such as the occupation of lands and buildings and damage to public/private properties.