Late last year mysterious trucks started dumping industrial waste

at a precolonial archaeological site in Duque de Caxias, an

industrial city of 900,000 people some 24km (15 miles) north of
Rio de Janeiro. Environmental activists thought they knew who
was behind it. Over the past decade, their battle to protect local
nature reserves and the poor people who live near them has
become a battle against criminal groups known as militias.

Prosecutors say that from the mid-1990s these groups, often

made up of rogue police officers, started snatching swampy
federal land. They filled it with dirt and sold the lots to families,
mostly poor migrants from other states. In São Bento, a
neighbourhood in the city, a hill overlooks thousands of identical
tin-roofed shacks. “The militias control all of it,” says an activist.
For a fee, they provide transport, water, cooking gas, cable
television and internet. But they also flaunt heavy weapons, run
extortion rackets and threaten to kill anyone who opposes them.

According to an investigation last year by g1, a Brazilian news

site, militias control 348 square kilometres of land—roughly a
quarter of the Rio de Janeiro metropolitan region. That territory
is home to 2m people. Unlike drug-traffickers, who also control
plenty of neighbourhoods in Rio, militias have close connections
to the state. “They’re untouchable by the law because they
themselves are the law,” says José Cláudio Souza Alves, of the
Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro. As a congressman, Jair
Bolsonaro, Brazil’s populist president, defended militias, though
he is more careful now. “Where the militia is paid, there is no
violence,” he claimed last year.
Violence and politics have long been intertwined in Rio de
Janeiro. In the 1950s a federal deputy from Duque de Caxias
prowled around with a German machinegun. A film in 1986
romanticised his life, but historians pin several dozen violent
crimes on him, including at least one murder. Brazil’s military
dictatorship, which fell in 1985, used police death squads to kill
political opponents (some of whom were urban guerrillas) and
other unwanted people.
Militias evolved out of citizen-led vigilante groups that emerged
in the 1990s to tackle drug gangs, says Mr Alves. Today they are
de facto mafias. They thrive in the power vacuum of Rio’s
peripheries, offering what Mr Alves calls “false security”. They are
popular with politicians thanks to their talent for getting out the
vote. Police officers among their members help them to thwart
investigations. Their political ties help them to filch public
money.

In 2007 Marcelo Freixo, then a state congressman from the left-

wing Socialism and Liberty Party (psol), proposed a parliamentary
commission to investigate militias. But it was not until 2008,
after militiamen kidnapped and tortured two journalists and
their driver, that politicians agreed to the inquiry. After months
of testimony, the commission released a 282-page report that
accused 226 people of having militia connections, including
police and army officers and city and state politicians. Most were
eventually jailed.

Those who avoided prison and worse—25 of those named in the

report have since been murdered—shifted their strategy to
become less brazen and more enterprising, often outsourcing
violence. Duque de Caxias is among Brazil’s richest
municipalities thanks to its oil refinery, chemical industry and
position on the highway. That makes it an attractive market for
what Gabriel Ferrando of the state police’s organised-crime unit
(draco) calls the militias’ “power project”. They have “an absurd
capacity to adapt”, he says.

By contrast, the authorities are weak. A federal judge was

murdered in another part of Greater Rio in 2011. A police
delegation sent in February to investigate land-grabbing in
Duque de Caxias concluded that officers could not do their work
without risking their lives. According to Julio José Araujo Junior,
a federal prosecutor, “our goal, frankly, is not to resolve the
situation but to keep it from getting worse.”

To prosecutors’ consternation, the mayor’s office has sought to

issue titles for irregularly occupied federal land. “It’s precisely
this stamp of approval that the militias seek,” says Mr Araujo.
Locals say that after several low-lying areas in São Bento were
declared uninhabitable and 300 families were promised
apartments in a government housing project, militia members
distributed the flats among families from another area, and then
extorted money.

In 2016, when he was a federal congressman, the mayor of Duque

de Caxias, Washington Reis, was fined by the supreme court for
cutting down trees in a nature reserve in order to build an illegal
housing development. He appears in Facebook photos with
Chiquinho Grandão, a city councilman accused by prosecutors in
2010 of leading an extermination squad responsible for some 50
murders. Both deny militia connections. Mr Grandão laments the
waste-dumping and land-grabbing in São Bento, but blames it on
the mayor’s office. He says he has “never heard about militias”
there. The mayor’s office argues that giving out titles deters
illegal construction.

Militias in Duque de Caxias have also been accused of stealing

sand (for building work) and petrol from government pipelines.
On April 26th a leak from an illegal tap left a nine-year-old girl
with third-degree burns; she died in hospital. Militias in some
places hold auctions where drug gangs bid for the right to sell
their wares on militia turf. In Nova Iguaçu, a city that borders
Duque de Caxias, militiamen recently started extorting money
from taxi drivers. The drivers were already paying off drug
dealers and corrupt cops. “So who do you report it to?” one
driver asks.

The government’s plans may end up strengthening militias.

Sérgio Moro, the justice minister, has introduced a bill that
would shield from prosecution police who kill criminals because
of “excusable fear, surprise or intense emotion”. Mr Bolsonaro
has expanded the right to own and carry guns, suggesting people
need them to protect themselves from criminals. “We’re
returning to the origin myth that fuelled the militias,” says
Tarcísio Motta, the leader of psol in Rio’s city council.
However, the militias’ links with Mr Bolsonaro’s government
may provoke a backlash. There was an outcry after the murder in
March last year of Marielle Franco, a city councilwoman
from psol. In March two former cops were arrested for her
murder and accused of belonging to a militia in Rio’s West Zone.
One lived in the same condo as Mr Bolsonaro; his daughter had
dated the president’s son. Another of Mr Bolsonaro’s sons, Flávio,
a senator from Rio, employed the wife and mother of a fugitive
police officer accused of leading the same militia. Flávio and the
aide who hired them are under investigation for money
laundering, involving real estate deals. On May 29th President
Bolsonaro’s wife’s uncle was arrested on suspicion of ties to an
allegedly land-grabbing militia near Brasília. All deny
wrongdoing.

Mr Ferrando of draco admits that militias were “not a priority” in

the past. Now, he says, police, prosecutors and regulatory
agencies will use lessons from Brazil’s Lava Jato anti-corruption
investigations to attack the militias’ economic activities. This
“follow the money” strategy will be put to the test in Muzema, a
favela in Rio’s West Zone where two apartment buildings
collapsed in April, killing 24 people. The illegal properties had
been built by the militia thought to be responsible for Ms
Franco’s murder. In the days after the tragedy, relatives watched
as firefighters pulled bodies from the rubble. The sound of their
pneumatic drills blended with those at new construction sites all
around.