Inter-Regional Dynamics of Markets and Criminal Governance in Fortaleza and Manaus in Comparative Perspective

ABSTRACT

This article discusses how the social roles played by factions constitute a new type of criminal governance that is enforced by armed groups and has led to organizational innovation in prisons in the Brazilian cities of Manaus and Fortaleza. Factions act efficiently to increase their membership and establish their legitimacy. Values and moral orientations, delegation of roles, expansion of access to firearms and financial resources, annexation of territories, expulsion of residents and resistance to police attacks are elements of the local governance of everyday life. We also describe the mechanisms of cooperation and conflict between state and criminal governance.

Keywords:
criminal dynamics; criminal governance; state governance; illegal markets; prison collectives

RESUMO

Neste artigo, discutimos como a ação social contemporânea das “facções” aponta para um novo tipo de governança criminal, por meio de grupos armados, inovando a organização dentro e fora das prisões de Manaus e Fortaleza, no Brasil. Esses coletivos são eficientes para a adesão e o estabelecimento de legitimidade. Assim, valores e orientações morais, delegação de papéis, ampliação do acesso a armas de fogo e recursos financeiros, anexação de territórios, expulsão de moradores e resistência a investidas policiais são elementos da governança local da vida cotidiana. Por fim, descrevemos as maneiras de cooperação e conflito entre as governanças estatais e criminais.

Palavras-chave:
dinâmicas criminais; governança criminal; governança estatal; mercados ilegais; coletivos prisionais

Introduction

This article is the result of fruitful discussions among the authors and dialog with the applied literature on criminal dynamics and criminal governance and is based on ethnographic field research that we carried out in prisons and in the peripheries in the Brazilian states of Amazonas and Ceará. In the midst of our discussions, we identified the relevance of factions in the daily lives of the populations of Amazonas state capital Manaus and Ceará state capital Fortaleza. The Portuguese word for “faction” is facção. The term refers to criminal groups that originated inside prisons in Southeastern Brazil, such as the Comando Vermelho (CV) in Rio de Janeiro and the Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC) in São Paulo. These groups then extended their activities to the streets, in close relationship with illegal markets, mainly drug trafficking, which is important not only for the economic sustenance, but also for the organizational reproduction of these “collectives” (HIRATA and GRILLO, 2017). There is an extensive literature addressing their practices in illegal markets in the prisons and urban peripheries of their states of origin, sometimes presenting divergent narrative elements (BIONDI, 2010; FELTRAN, 2018; MANSO and DIAS, 2018; GRILLO, 2013).

Criminal and state governances collaborate in a complementary and integrated manner (LESSING, 2020). Factions intend to govern people and territories, not exactly to replace the State and its services, but to take advantage of the expansion of public security mechanisms, the hardships of the prison system and the co-management of prisons for the instrumentalization of the State itself. In this article, the material analyzed is the result of fieldwork carried out in prisons and urban peripheries in Amazonas between 2013 and 2018, and in Ceará between 2013 and 2021¹. This being the same period in which criminal groups originating in the Southeast began to expand their activities in order to make a play for control of illegal markets in all Brazilian regions. Our research, both that which is concluded and that which is in progress, has found that the flow and expansion of factions from the Southeast to the North and Northeast took place through the incorporation of the characteristics of the local factions, with the aim not only of ensuring the adherence of new members, but also to gain legitimacy in places where the modus operandi of criminal practices and illegal markets differs from those in Rio and São Paulo. Thus, as the CV and PCC expanded into Fortaleza and Manaus, intensively operating the international drug market, dynamics were instituted that substantially altered the way the factions presented themselves as they assimilated regional criminal characteristics.

The debate about the resistance against the expansion of the CV and the PCC from the Southeast to other regions of the country, mainly to the North and Northeast, exercised by such local criminal collectives as the Família do Norte (FDN) in Amazonas and the Guardiões do Estado (GDE) in Ceará is still quite limited², leaving a field still unexplored when it comes to comparative analyses of the faction dynamics in Amazonas and Ceará. Changes in these dynamics present an analytical challenge to researchers who study the activities of these criminal collectives on an inter-regional scale of international influence, whose modes of governance operate at different scales in urban peripheries and prisons, with alliances and disputes between each other, other factions and the State.

The analytical scope of this article is restricted to some faction dynamics that we consider pertinent for comparative analysis, either due to the way they are commonly presented in our two regions or due to the way they diverge operationally, even if their final objectives converge. In view of the diversity of points in which criminal governance operates, we have focused our comparative analysis on three aspects of such governance: 1) activity in prisons and urban peripheries, 2) markers of power and celebration rituals and 3) and interference in electoral campaigns and relationships with State governance.

In line with the analytical perspective that identifies the connections between and extension of practices in prisons and residential neighborhoods (CUNHA, 2008; GODOI, 2017; MALLART and RUI, 2017; NASCIMENTO and MARQUES, 2019; NASCIMENTO and SIQUEIRA, 2022), we have observed that, in Fortaleza and Manaus, prisons, far from representing immobility to criminal factions, have been prominent spaces in the organization of prison collectives and have played a decisive role in the dynamics of urban peripheries. The formation of collectives/factions with a certain cohesion and in disputes in prison spaces implies an ability to precipitate mobilizations around their ideals, be these collective or not, that expand as increasing incarceration numbers make it possible for factions to impose their agendas on the prison population, the State and civil society.

In response to faction practices in the periphery and prisons, the State has instituted or strengthened militaristic public security policies based on the grand narrative of combating so-called criminal organizations (BARBOSA, 2006; CANDOTTI, MELO and SIQUEIRA, 2017; NASCIMENTO, 2022; CANDOTTI, 2022). In this debate, we must point out that we do not seek to think about the duality between factions and the State, but to reflect on the possible and necessary relationships to understand the representations of violence in which the State and crime appear as protagonists. This concerns documenting the government of populations, sometimes in alignment, sometimes in conflict, and mobilizing interactions between operators of State institutions and operators of crime (FELTRAN, 2011).

A major city in the Brazilian Amazon, in recent years Manaus has seen an increase in armed violence and prison uprisings that culminated in the prison massacre in January 2017 (SIQUEIRA, 2017a), despite the hegemony achieved by one of the factions. As Manaus is an important trade entrepôt, disputes over control of its prison system can be explained by the influence of illegal schemes operating on the border with cocaine-producing countries, notably Colombia and Peru. In Fortaleza, located on the Atlantic coast, the 2016 uprisings (NASCIMENTO and FREITAS, 2019), the attacks on buildings, buses and public and private facilities that took place in 2016, 2017 and 2018 and intensified in 2019 (NASCIMENTO, 2022; NASCIMENTO and SIQUEIRA, 2022), and part of the reprisals for State interventions in prisons have given rise to hypotheses about the importance of the influence of factions, regardless of the struggle for control of international trade routes, illegal markets and money laundering. In other words, far beyond being a market, the peripheries have been regimented by the politics of factions.

Police, factions and homicides

Since the 1950s, the accelerated growth of cities and national societies in Latin America has resulted in improved living conditions and higher life expectancies for populations in general (BRICEÑO-LEÓN, 2007). However, over the last decades, the ease of access to firearms, the low homicide clearance rate, the high rate of impunity, the high numbers of incarcerations and the increasing rates of unemployment and inequality are commonly cited factors in the identification of humanitarian problems in the region. Conflicts between armed groups in Latin American cities must be understood as extending beyond control over illegal markets; it is essential to consider the affective bonds destroyed and rebuilt amid violence in disputed territories, which is important for the defense of identities, information and profitable businesses.

In this context, the feeling of insecurity and fear indicates how urban life in contemporary times can be stressful. This is related to increases in psychosomatic diseases and the fragmentation of social relationships due to social fear in the daily lives of populations (MORAES, 2018). In the case of Brazil, the 2010s were marked by the escalation of an economic and political crisis whose backdrop was the deterioration of living conditions, especially for the middle and lower urban strata, driving new catalyzed demands and the emergence of political actors and social movements dissociated from official politics and, therefore, with different ideological positions.³

The concern with urban violence has provoked a profound change in the life experience of large cities and metropolises, bringing together a series of factors identified as criminal that imprint themselves on everyday life. A process of social accumulation of violence enters the scene (MISSE, 2009) and contributes to the perception of crime not only from the point of view of criminalization codified by the penal system, but from the concrete ways through which social representations and practices are combined in elements of discrimination, i.e., in the reproduction of stereotypes, prejudices, judgments, and conflict resolution by people’s “own hands.” In Manaus, an increase in lynchings by associations organized to combat petty robberies and theft has been observed (CANDOTTI, PINHEIRO and ALVES, 2019). Thus, a set of elements has been configured that, acting together, oppose the formal legal system (i.e., the State) as an intermediary of conflict. The State is seen as overtaken by a society in permanent tension, despite the very notion of crime being a Statist invention.

We perceive the historical character of connections between illegal practices in Amazonas and Ceará (SÁ and AQUINO, 2018; PAIVA, 2019a, 2019b), especially when a faction from the North becomes visibly active in the Northeast, by taking advantage of illegal markets structured by factions whose founders are in prison. From this perspective, in recent decades, Amazonas and Ceará have undergone a series of changes that privilege these experiences and seek to reformulate public security policy settings to take into account human rights, to have a preventive rather than reactive character and to include local residents in community security councils. The new public security plans encourage integrated government activity, the training of police officers in the edicts of community policing, and new perspectives on combating impunity and providing transparency, in a government effort to overcome torture and police violence.

Among the various initiatives, the Cid Gomes government (2007-2015) in Ceará implemented in 2007 the Ronda no Quarteirão program, which sought to provide vehicles to operate in perimeters of 3km each, in addition to publicly providing police vehicle contact phone numbers. Also in 2007, during the term of Governor Eduardo Braga (2006-2009) in Amazonas, the State Public Security Revitalization Plan was launched, marking a discursive adoption of the “humanization” of community-focused public security, with a focus on Manaus. This resulted in the integration of the police forces and the creation of various community policing policies guided by the active participation of the population in the prevention and repression of violence and crime. In this period, the theme of public security acquired considerable media appeal in the states of Amazonas and Ceará. The creation of a positive image was also a strategic policy to combat urban violence and promote “humanization” through community-level activities.

The electoral campaign of Omar Aziz (2010-2014), Braga’s successor, took advantage of the popularity of the theme to unveil the Ronda no Bairro community policing program, similar to the one implemented in Ceará. The program was one of the main showcases of his government. It was first implemented in Manaus in 2011, on an experimental basis. The program was based on the consolidation of the previous government’s community policing policy. Its declared aim was to deepen that program’s objectives by means of a so-called “Public Security Restructuring Program” that encouraged the participation of the population in the prevention and reporting of crimes and the promotion of trust between the population and the police.

Drops in homicide rates and seizures of illegal drugs and weapons were highlighted by the government as positive developments within the scope of these police programs. In this scenario, we find substantial reinforcement in the activities of security forces that seek to operate in a planned way and with the use of new technologies to monitor large urban areas. The Ronda do Quarteirão, and Ronda do Bairro programs served to select new technologies in monitoring zones, and the police approach also had an impact on the monitoring of the population (BRASIL et al., 2011; BRASIL, 2019). The accelerated recruitment of young police officers through the public service examination system, in addition to the integration of Civil and Military police intelligence and community policing activity, had an impact on the increase of “policing productivity,” as measured by recorded crimes, and contributed to accelerating the overcrowding of the state’s prisons, known for their precarious conditions and endemic violence. Even though it was experiencing security crises of its own, the prison structure absorbed the growing demand from the public security area. Figure 1 below shows the evolution of intentional lethal violent crimes (CVLI):

Figure 1:
Intentional lethal violent crimes

As can be seen, the 2010s represented the high-water mark of the CVLI in Amazonas and Ceará, with most incidents occurring in the two state capitals. In prior decades, rates had been low and violent events stood out of the statistical curve. The complexity of disputes over territories and illicit drug markets had increased the lethality of conflicts and consequent incarceration rates. There were also recurring massacres carried out by state agents or factions (PAIVA et al., 2019; PAIVA, BARROS and CAVALCANTE, 2019; CANDOTTI, MELO and SIQUEIRA, 2017; MORAES and SIQUEIRA, 2019). National surveys, such as the Anuário Brasileiro de Segurança Pública, the Atlas da Violência, the Mapa da Violência and research undertaken by the Instituto Igarapé, identified a scenario characterized by high rates of violence against individuals, especially homicide. This fed into the narrative of the press that linked high fatality rates to territorial disputes over the control and sale of drugs in certain territories and the widespread use of firearms in armed conflicts. Violence in Brazilian cities is compared with that observed in war zones.

The importance of public security in the states analyzed here can be seen in the funds made available by the government to the state security secretariats. The Secretariat of Public Security and Social Defense of Ceará had a budget of BRL 3,315,252,780.30 in 2020. In the same period, the Secretariat of Public Security of Amazonas had a budget of BRL 2,117,345,104.72. The volume of investments has grown over the years but does not seem to have had immediate effects, as can be seen in Figure 1, which depicts in the official CVLI records, highlighting 2017 as the most lethal year and indicating that other factors must be considered in assessing the general aspect of violence in the two states.

At first, these events are played down by the government and the press as crimes committed by people without the full status of recognition as citizens, who are labeled as involved in crime-therefore, their deaths are not interpreted as worthy of mourning (BUTLER, 2017). This is an argument justified by an alleged adherence to crime, indicating the perversity of the stigmatization of a socially vulnerable portion of the population. In the case of Fortaleza, in its deadliest year, 2017, many commentators argued that most murders were committed by individuals linked to factions and involved with illicit drugs, summing them up to the “settling of scores between bandits” (PAIVA, 2019a; PAIVA, BARROS and CAVALCANTE, 2019). In Manaus, there was an increase in violent crimes in which firearms were used. These were reported as more “score-settling” among drug traffickers, the deaths of whom were described using callous euphemisms that implied they are of no real import.

All these scenarios collaborate to increase the numbers related to rates of violence-here understood “as the use of force, or the threat of using it” (FELTRAN, 2011, p. 15)-in Brazil as a whole and in Ceará and Amazonas in particular, as well as to the production of a latent and pulsating sense of insecurity in social life. However, increases or decreases in indicators of violence do not always concern the authority of the State or the efficiency of public security or criminal justice policies. César Barreira (2004) suggests that the ability of a civil government to maintain the feeling of “public peace” can be evaluated by the popular imagination as a measure of legitimacy. These elements call into question the legitimacy of the state monopoly on violence and the governmental reaction to impose efficiency in the establishment of institutional government procedures (ADORNO, 2002).

Max Weber's political theory of domination (2008, 2016), states that the adherence and obedience of the dominated to guidelines of moral and political conduct are determined by belief in legitimacy. The meaning of politics resides in the combined efforts of a community to participate in or share power, reserving to the particular political type of the State the legitimacy of the “right” to use violence and physical coercion in a given territory, without excluding more “irrational” types of justification to explain obedience. In this aspect, as factions are non-state actors, we can question whether the social activities of factions in the neighborhoods of Fortaleza and Manaus enable them to exercise physical coercion with authority, in other words, that there exists a kind of legitimate use of violence that can be imposed on a regular basis in the governance of everyday life in such neighborhoods.

Politics, armed groups and peripheries

Scrutinizing the Weberian theoretical key of domination and its legitimacy, we wish to emphasize that illegal markets move enough human and financial resources to suppose that the State needs to live with and share the political governance of large populations with criminal actors, including within its own institutions, as in the case of prisons. Far from signifying an absence of State power, shared governance is part of urban life at the beginning of the 21st century, as indicated by various ethnographies on crime and life in urban peripheries (AQUINO and HIRATA, 2018). The success and effectiveness of factions indicate that statism and para-statism can be taken advantage of by criminal groups that intend to co-manage civilian populations (SIQUEIRA, 2017b; DIAS and BRITO, 2017). Faced with the paradigm of confronting crime, in a relational way, the State’s confrontation with crime, be it intense or mild, may rely on criminal governance and thus admit a certain level of collaboration. In this scenario, words and information are important and go far beyond armed force, as the use of war as a rhetorical weapon for the control of prisons and urban territories is effectively mobilized by the moral and political communities of the State and factions in their various manifestations as associative fictions (MANSO and DIAS, 2018; MORAES, 2018; NASCIMENTO and FREITAS, 2019; SIQUEIRA and PAIVA, 2019; LESSING and WILLIS, 2019; NASCIMENTO, 2022).

On the other hand, a non-Weberian duopoly effect of violence is suggested (LESSING, 2020). The duopoly offers attributes in a different form of governance. Criminal governance has unique characteristics in relation to similar concepts, as it does not seem to propose the replacement of the establishment by another political form of government. Criminal and state governance are largely integrated and complementary. Criminal governance strengthens itself in places where the State is not present but where strong State action is, such as prisons and urban peripheries. Criminalization is a state invention and criminal organizations are structured in a complementary way, as a certain tolerance or collaboration may be possible. This calls into question the available repertoires for the dispute over the government of populations in Brazil.

In the specific case of the interested political use of factions, public security was elevated to a status that was always insufficient and had to be reformed, due to successive crises in the face of failures to achieve the objectives of pacifying society through government programs. This perception has fed into the discourse of combat and war that legitimizes the motto of focused, visible or discovered faction activities. This demonstrates how the fragmentation of power operates, to the point where non-State armed collectives intend to establish criminal-type governance. We will certainly find important variations of this phenomenon due to faction fragmentation, as in the cases of Manaus and Fortaleza, vis-à-vis a legal-political apparatus and permanent coercion to dispose of resources for the exercise of continuous and recognized sovereignty in the territories, in other words, jurisprudence in the cities, neighborhoods, peripheries and prisons.

The obvious connection between politics and public security becomes more evident during elections. In recent years, the press has explored the attempts of some factions to influence the electoral process. There are multiple indications that the control of prisons and residential areas in the peripheral and central neighborhoods of cities is an important step for armed collectives to seriously consider the government of people. In Manaus, a striking example was that of the FDN, which, according to the report on the “La Muralla” police operation (POLÍCIA FEDERAL, 2016), after violently imposing control over Amazonian prisons and participating in de facto co-management, considered interfering in the gubernatorial election, after being strengthened by the numerous bargains made with the consent of state officials at various levels. Reforms of common spaces and changes in the architecture of cells and prison environments paid for unofficially was a commonplace, as were the provision of individual and collective advantages. The main asset at the negotiating table was the FDN’s alleged capacity to prohibit violence inside prisons, which has the effect of reducing political criticism of a government that might otherwise be incapable of curbing violence during elections.

The police and press narrative states that tactical agreements to avoid violence led to the empowerment of alleged FDN prison leaders. Thus, we can assume that the dispute over the duopoly of violence configures an important objective condition for the political capital of the factions. For example, in Amazonas, after years of violent riots and escapes that resulted in a deadly elimination struggle between the FDN and the PCC, maintaining peace within the prison system became an important political matter in the 2014 elections. Believing in the idea that there would be a government of at least 100,000 people in Amazonas alone, the FDN took the opportunity to ask for such improvements in prisons as the renovations of the sports and leisure facilities, the end of the maximum-security wings⁴, and demanded the definitive extermination of prisoners opposed to the FDN who were held separately from the rest of the prison population. A pact involving the surrender of “bandits” with the intention of preventing police violence was encouraged. In other words, the faction defined its terms of co-management by negotiating supposed electoral support and sought to discourage the police from killing faction members involved in the drug trade. Bargaining chips were important. It was important for politicians to maintain peace in prisons during elections to reinforce the population’s sense of security. Police and criminals define the conflict situation as “work” regulated by previously defined rules. Thus, the FDN could achieve much more by maintaining a sense of security than by destabilizing it.

Furthermore, the perverse boldness of cooperation between criminal and state governance enabled the FDN to launch various proxy candidacies for Legislative and Executive branch roles. The hidden participation of the FDN in the 2014 and 2016 elections was apparently an example of planned symbiosis between the State and the FDN that ended up being stymied by the Federal police intelligence services and courts. Initially, a civil inquiry was launched by the Amazonas Public Prosecutor in response to the José Melo government (2014-2017) being accused of acting in collusion with the FDN-but it was shelved in early 2020 due to a lack of evidence. In May 2017, Governor Melo’s election was annulled by the Higher Electoral Court (TSE) on suspicion of vote-buying in the 2014 election. That same year, Melo was arrested on suspicion of corruption, racketeering and money laundering in a scheme that diverted public health funds-charges without any connection with the FDN. He was held for a period in the Centro de Detenção Provisória Masculino II, a prison unit that he himself had opened shortly before and which, as of 2018, was dominated by the CV do Amazonas (CV-AM) and was soon to become the scene of conflicts and mass escapes.

For purposes of analysis, we will briefly discuss the emblematic events that brought to light the peculiar transformations in the most recent link between politics and public security. To do so, we will consider the 2010s, when Brazilian society presented its claims in an ambivalent way, demonstrating that apparent peace and public order concealed a malaise in Brazilian cities and their institutions. The last decade has been marked by political and bureaucratic conflicts resulting in the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff. This marked the end of domestic and foreign policy cycle that had previously been positively regarded (OLIVEIRA, PENNAFORTE and MARTINS, 2018).

Brazil’s democratic constitution of 1988 recognized social and political rights and should have marked the transition from a military to a civilian regime. It should also have depoliticized the military and seen its roles limited to the constitutional duties of providing domestic and foreign security. However, the control of the armed forces over Brazil’s military and civilian police forces has been continuously reinforced through legislation providing the armed forces with a role in the control of domestic public security during crises. An important example has been the recurrent use of so-called “Law of Order Guarantee” (GLO) operations, as provided for by Art. 142 of the Federal Constitution and authorized by the Presidency of the Republic by temporarily transferring police powers to the armed forces. This device has been used frequently, in major events or in cases of the collapse of federal security forces.

Since 1997,⁵ the use of the Brazilian Army for policing purposes has been on the increase-and it started with the police going on strike. Despite the constitutional provision, accountability where powers are abused is a problem of the legal framework surrounding the limits and procedures of military police activities (MUNIZ and PROENÇA JÚNIOR, 2007).⁶ Police and firefighters’ strikes are constitutionally prohibited because the armed forces engage in activities that are proper to the national security monopoly of the State. This prohibition is confirmed by the military statutes. In the last decade, however, police and firefighter “mutinies” became so common that in a law was promulgated in 2017 (Law No. 13,293/2016) to grant amnesties to police and firefighters from mutinous movements in 19 states and the Federal District. The amnesty allows the police and firefighter corps to go on strike to obtain better work conditions without facing any risk of imprisonment.

In the recent political histories of Ceará and Amazonas, we can see several movements of paralysis in the area of public security, marking a decade of military police mutinies and worsening homicide rates, in which the armed forces were used to make political use of disaffected soldiers. Between December 29, 2011, and January 4, 2012, the Ceará police and firefighters refused to undertake policing duties and blocked the use of police vehicles. This resulted in a wave of fear in cities throughout the state, an increase in homicides, and the transfer of public security duties to the 10th Military Region (the Army, the Air Force and the National Public Security Force). Participants if note included officers from the Ronda no Quarteirão program and the elite Comando de Policiamento de Rondas e Ações Intensivas e Ostensivas.⁷ The aftermath of the mutiny benefited Military Police captain Wagner Gomes, considered one of the leaders of the police movement, who succeeding in capitalizing on the event by becoming the most voted-for city councilor in Fortaleza in 2014 (with 44,655 votes) and then the most voted-for Congressman in the history of Ceará in the 2016 elections (with 194,239 votes).

Since 2014, Amazonas has registered an increase in strikes and riots by the military police and firefighters. This is marked by the greater autonomy of mobilization of police groups that act independently of their associations and are recognized by the public authorities as representatives of the members of their groups. On April 27, 2014, negotiations with associations legitimized by the State were unable to stop a strike that claims the adherence of 70% of police officers for 12 hours and sought to speed up the promotion process. The police assembly took place in the parking lot of Arena da Amazônia, a stadium built for the 2014 FIFA World Cup. Between 2015 and 2019, partial stoppages of hundreds of military and civilian police were recorded multiple times. These actions sought pressure the authorities to improve working conditions.

In our view, increased incarceration and more confrontational policing cannot be totally dissociated from State policies vis-à-vis non-state armed actors, including para-statal death squads, especially in the social context that supports taking a hard line against crime.⁸ In recent years, symbolic disputes have been instrumentalized by an armed right-wing that has catalyzed anxieties and the deterioration of trust in public order to propose armed violence as a political solution to the conflicts in Brazilian society. Jair Bolsonaro’s 2018 campaign brought together a radical defender of Brazil’s civil-military dictatorship and a representative of that part of the military that is interested in the governance of the State interested in the political conduct of the New Republic (i.e., Hamilton Mourão), which won the presidential election with 55.13% (57,797,847) of valid votes in the runoff vote. This ended the cycle of four consecutive victories of the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT) and reinforced institutional support for the employment of military staff in the management of the federal government. In this context, the politicization of the military and their families, as well as the networks of the security forces, produced an effective discourse expressed in the many votes cast for the 73 police and military personnel who were elected to public office, in what was popularly called the “Bolsonarista wave,” a rearticulation of the conservative right.

In the same elections, Ceará and Amazonas reflected the political situation. Elected in the first round for the second government in Ceará, the well-evaluated center-left PT politician, Camilo Santana, emphasized violence and public security as the main problems to be faced at the state and national levels and highlighted the Ronda de Ações Intensivas e Ostensivas (Raio) program as the main armed combat response. In 2019, another government action corresponding to the strategic use of combat was the creation of the Secretaria de Administração Penitenciária do Estado do Ceará. This marked the transition from justice to punishment as a response based on the institutional strengthening of the criminal police and a military conception of penitentiary affairs in conflict with factions. The new type of management was rehearsed in a state intervention in the prison system during the events of the 2016 prison security guards’ strike. This previous enmity spurred generalized bus burning attacks, attacks on police stations and the destruction of surveillance cameras as a response by factions working together to the hardening of conditions in the Ceará prison system from 2019 onwards. The Manaus electorate registered 65.72% of valid votes in favor of Bolsonaro and elected a governor from one of Bolsonaro’s support base parties, the newcomer Wilson Lima, who had made a career in police programs on local television.

Thus, a new context of enmity between statism and factions emerges. The CV, in particular, presents political positions more significantly in the peripheries of Fortaleza. In some areas of Ceará, the CV sought to exercise influence in elections by vetoing the electoral choices of rightwing residents by threatening to kill them. To this end, threats were disseminated by the press in reports with photos of graffiti demanding that people not vote for the enemy, without indicating who the preferred options would be. This veto was directed towards the politicians in favor of arms. This was a representation of the antagonism of Manicheism that polarizes social life into authoritarian views. Both the CV and the right-wing downplay the harms of violence and extermination as redemptive and virtuous resources for resolving social conflicts.

Following Weber’s lead, coercion and force drive the affections of people who assimilate sufficient authority to impose their worldview and their way of governing populations. As Lessing (2020) notes, the relationship between the State and crime can assume a perverse conception that results in a type of collaboration of interested exchanges of humanitarian consequences. Comparatively, criminal governance varies in areas of Fortaleza and Manaus that are under faction control. There are varied degrees of imposition of local jurisprudence. In many cases, territorial control can be residual, symbolic or incipient for the establishment of governance. Faction activities depend on the available resources and the extent to which they are present-which is sometimes only evident at night. Police response and coping capacity is an important factor in determining whether criminal groups act in an overt or covert/discreet manner. Legitimacy and the use of force can be observed much more in sporadic events rather than properly constituting the ability to determine the use of coercion and force to impose faction jurisprudence or even a duopoly of violence.

The tendency towards incarceration

Data from the National Prison Monitoring Bank (BNMP) of the National Council of Justice (CNJ) estimate that in 2021 there were 909,325 people deprived of their liberty in Brazil, of which 859,891 were men and 49,434 were women. This is the third largest prison population in the world, behind only China (approximately 1,600,000 people) and the USA (approximately 2,100,000 people). For the same year, the Brazilian inhabitant population was estimated at approximately 211 million people. The incarceration rate is approximately 431 people per 100,000. These numbers express the explosion of the prison population as one of the central issues for the understanding of contemporary problems related to the most evident influence of the prison system on urban centers due to the connections between neighborhoods and prisons.

The political line of penal intensification and expansion of criminal types with provision for deprivation of liberty (SERRA, 2013; SERRA and SOUZA, 2017; DIAS, 2017), to a certain extent, reinforces the legitimacy of the State monopoly on the use of force by improving security, control techniques and the forms and procedures of the penitentiary routine. Furthermore, the incipient integration of standardized procedures in Brazilian prisons configures specificities and limits for the institutionalized implementation of prison systems in Brazil’s states (LOURENÇO, 2017).

In Manaus and Fortaleza, there are several indications that before the territorial establishment of the factions, the geographic location and the infrastructure of ports and airports placed these cities in illegal markets as international entrepôts. Similarly, both cities are home to prison systems in which governments are seeking reforms to resolve the consequences of the lack of control resulting from the escalation of the chronic crisis of public security in the states of Amazonas and Ceará. This importance has been shown by the creation of specific secretariats for penitentiary matters as government reactions to the capacity of collaborative networks between factions, increasingly committed to the control of prison units, neighborhoods and peripheral territories.

Despite having smaller prison systems than São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro or Minas Gerais, Ceará and Amazonas publish weekly statistical bulletins with data on the population deprived of its liberty on their online government portals.⁹ Based on the analysis and comparison of these bulletins, we chose to present a historical series starting from 2010:

Figure 2:
Evolution of the prison population

As can be seen, fluctuations in the consolidated numbers for each year do not have a relevant impact on the trend line for the growth of the prison population. Over the decade considered, we found a similarity with the trend of increasing homicides.¹⁰ On the other hand, criminal justice has undergone innovations in recent years, and despite the advances in alternatives to imprisonment and conditional release, the executive, judicial and legislative branches of government have institutionalized the expansion of the number of criminalized forms of conduct, the duration of sentences and the various obstacles to sentence progression (GODOI, 2017). Thus, while overcrowding and degrading conditions of incarceration justify reforms in the prison system, violent disputes between factions have reinforced the notion of the prison system as a strategic issue for public security and, in the Brazilian case, an area strongly marked by military control-and not just by the police.

The reform policies of the penitentiary administration, focused on increasing vacancies and training aimed at the dignity of the human person, were obliterated by disputes between factions in the prisons of Fortaleza and Manaus. This shows the complexity of the phenomenon. The factions took advantage of the prisons to spread and definitively transform the ways in which crime is committed, attributing value to people who identified themselves as “bandits” (PAIVA, 2019a). In Manaus, in the 2000s, the factions were already known in the city’s peripheries and prisons through the bosses of crime. However, it was only in 2012 that the press reported to the general public about the formation of an alleged crime consortium, an embryonic version of the FDN, that sought to oppose the advance of the PCC in Amazonas. In Fortaleza, the dynamics of factions first appeared significantly in 2014, in the context of violent disputes over the domination of overcrowded prisons and the control of parts of illegal markets throughout Ceará.

According to the police narrative, the federal penitentiary system, inaugurated in 2006, was the stage for the dissemination of faction politics among people in positions of command and leadership in the crime movement in Brazil’s various regions. This hypothesis needs to be put into context, as it can otherwise lead a fatalism that circumscribes the experience of the social and cultural impact of the emergence of factions. In this context, copies and improvements of statutes and slogans enshrined by the CV and the PCC were disseminated inside and outside the prisons of Manaus and Fortaleza, influencing the emergence of collectives such as the FDN and the GDE. Therefore, the emergence of criminal commands and collectives became important to compete for control of illegal markets. This movement involved the cooperation of people spread across different prisons in the state and federal prison systems, including police groups and state officials.

In fact, prisoners becoming faction members provoked reactions and changes in the institutional procedures and daily life of prisons as the factions were strengthened within and outside them by the blurring of the borders that connect prisons to neighborhoods and cities (NASCIMENTO and SIQUEIRA, 2022). In 2015, Amazonas created a “State Secretariat for Penitentiary Administration” (Seap) and removed control over penitentiary matters from the judiciary and responsibility for human rights from the Executive branch. This action was carried out after more than a year of the hegemony of the FDN in prisons, thanks to its ability to impose reactions and threats within prison units, forcing the State to transfer prisoners linked to the PCC to “Safe” wings in 2013. This form of segregation indicated sufficient power to negotiate prison policies with government officials concerned about escalating violence and media attention to the chronic prison crisis.

In this case, for example, the prison units became known for the order imposed by so-called “jail sheriffs.” These prison personalities organized prison factions through violence and at times catalyzed demands for improvements in conditions. Historically, prisons have been the frequent sites of uprisings used as a means of demanding improvements or eliminating enemies (with no claims made of the government). The factions have promoted this tendency as a means of uniting prison factions, regardless of spatial proximity, by rallying reactions in different prisons. The backdrop to this consists of poor conditions and endemic violence, each highlighted as pertinent reforms are made. Within the Judiciary, in September 2015, the allegation of non-compliance with a fundamental precept number 347 (ADPF 347) cited the exponential growth of prison populations and continuous the violations of fundamental rights in Brazilian prisons, which was recognized as an unconstitutional state of affairs (ECI) by the Federal Supreme Court (STF). In the same year, a bloody uprising in the Complexo do Curado prison, in Pernambuco state, precipitated the establishment by the federal legislature of a Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry (CPI) of the Prison System, resulting in the recommendation that custody hearings take place¹¹.

In Manaus and Fortaleza, the establishment of criminal faction governance strengthened networks of cooperation inside and outside prisons, focusing on movements by members in prisons and in cities. This type of policy is variable based on the context in and outside prison as configured by faction members. However, its capabilities were expressed in the security crises in the prisons that resulted in deaths, riots and prison guards’ strikes. As shown in Figure 2, prison populations tend to increase, new staff are hired, and new prisons are opened. Gradually, factions occupied spaces to consolidate criminal governance within prisons, coordinating their interests despite efforts to neutralize their members.

These crises resulted in the division of prisons by factions as a security measure to avoid massacres. This reinforced faction governance in prisons. To this day, prison governance is seen as important even by prisoners who are not faction affiliated, since a prisoner’s neighborhood of origin can associate him or her with allied or enemy territory. In other words, most prisoners are, in a way, subjected to criminal governance that is intended to be interconnected inside and outside prisons through the annexation of neighborhoods and cities. It has become common to make references to the fact that prisons are managed by the State and also by the CV or the GDE, and that mixing people from antagonistic territories is to be avoided, as in Ceará prisons until 2019. As a practical effect, the membership and empowerment of armed groups in non-prison contexts associated with factions lead to the consideration of territorial control and even the establishment of forms of criminal governance affectively linked to the destinies and sufferings of the faction members incarcerated in prisons. These connections have potentiated waves of attacks against the State that aimed to make State control of the prison system more flexible. However, in 2019, in the political context of military response around rhetoric of “war against organized crime,” this cycle is seen in high tension, resulting in the implementation of a police and military vision within the prison system and the assimilation of strategies of tactical intervention and confrontation experienced by the “Integrated Penitentiary Intervention Force” (FIPI).

In Manaus, ongoing conflicts (riots, riots and mass escapes) between 2012 and 2013 resulted in the hegemony of the FDN in prisons, impacting their empowerment to negotiate their interests directly with the state of Amazonas, notably in respect of the prison administration. Similarly to Ceará, the collapse of the prison system was intensified by the low state capacity to maintain regularity in penitentiary security, locally outsourced to companies with high financial costs and low-cost and low-skilled labor, unable to establish the hegemony of the state order in prisons. Therefore, there was effectively a collaboration on the part of state authorities with the local faction in the name of peace and an end to violence in prisons, which was weakened by the 2017 prison massacres in Amazonas.

Markers of power and consequences for the urban population

Barreira (2008) says that the themes of power and violence inspire an intriguing variety of interpretations in the social sciences. Sociological studies on human collectivities and moralities make it possible to understand multiple realities that imply the analytical exercise of version/truth, especially in matters involving great suffering, moral appeal and social judgment (Ibid., p. 37). Foucault (2011) described how the capillary mechanics of power over individuals “reaches their bodies, comes to be inserted in their gestures, their attitudes, their speech, their learning, their daily life” (p. 131), thereby inserting the exercise of power into the social body. A clear case for the object of this article, the use of signs, rituals of celebration and moral codes to consecrate mottos, brands and easily identifiable signs of appreciation of belonging to a movement or family. In this way, affective and visual identity works as a marker of power and ritual of celebration for members and in their relationship with non-members.

The symbolic effectiveness of factions resides to a certain extent in the institution of celebration rituals and in the markers of power used by their members, easily recognized by non-members, revealing the scope of the reproduction of signs and symbols associated with them. If clandestineness and secrecy were important for the phase of expansion of factions in prisons and outskirts of cities, with the wide adherence to criminal collectives today, there is no longer the need for concealment to definitively privilege the presence of factions in control or the criminal governance of certain territories. This feat also has the quality of a transcendent “movement” (BIONDI, 2018).

In this way, we can consider that factions cannot be reduced by the economic issue and, despite the significant profits from illegal markets in Latin America, there are affective dimensions that can also include territorial defense and their own criminal governance jurisprudence (BRICEÑO-LEÓN, CAMARDIEL and PERDOMO, 2019). Thus, we assume that the joining of factions by young people in vulnerable situations was consolidated in this social universe permeated by these myths of origin and ritualized forms of belonging. We found several examples of these situations, as in the case of the display of high-end products as an element of representation of power and demarcation of getting rich quick, despite the risks. These risks indicate the electrifying and meaningful intentionality of belonging to a faction, mixing rational and irrational motivations.

Markers of power, material fortune, and interdictions for uninitiated people are valued by factions. In Fortaleza, gold necklaces and rings with Templar symbols were associated with the top of the GDE hierarchy. In its heyday, the FDN had, as a family, several rituals of celebration and reverence for its supposed leaders, being notorious in Manaus the massive burning of fireworks to commemorate anniversaries and important events. In Fortaleza, fireworks appear associated with the conquest or retaking of a territory, as well as with the death of a rival. In both cases, the rituals of celebration of festivities occur widely in different situations, i.e., publicly at popular festivals or in a more discreet way outside urban centers, such as at beach houses or places where luxury consumption and exhibition of weapons, drinks and drugs are part of a set of appreciations of individual and collective achievements. Several reports from interlocutors who are members of factions state that, in the period of the “pacification of factions,” in 2016, in addition to the celebrations of the civilian population rejoicing in the possibility of decreasing intentional violent deaths of young people, brothers, cousins, children and grandchildren, restricted-entry parties took place for celebrations among people who are members or, in some way, sympathizers of the faction movement.

In the cities compared here, we find situations that concern the way in which criminal governance effectively establishes signs to delimit its territorial presence and impose a type of local security, such as the prohibition of robberies. It is evident that even in places with a low ostensible presence of faction members, even though there are graffiti prohibiting robberies, that there are reports to the effect that thieves commit robberies in antagonistic/rival territories. In addition to graffiti, disputes and demarcations of territories also appear in people’s own bodies and language, such as the use of certain types of haircuts or hair colors, gestural manners and linguistic terms, sets of uses and inventions in the territories that were made explicit/imposed in Manaus and Fortaleza as daily requirements for faction members and non-members. In recent years, just as prisons are closed institutions into and from which ingress and egress are regulated through checkpoints of government power (PADOVANI, 2019), the criminal governance of factions emulates this type of control in the peripheries by carrying out, in territories with a high presence, cell phone file checks, contact control, ingress and egress control, as at checkpoints where faction members identify people who display signs of the antagonistic group-a reality found in Manaus and Fortaleza. Thus, summary executions have been committed because of photographs, haircuts or even flaws in eyebrows, highlighting the use of cruelty and femicides, especially in Fortaleza.

Factions use acronyms in graffiti, tattoos on the bodies of members and beatbox songs. The symbols of the CV, the PCC, the FDN and the GDE are popular and simple. To cite one example, the CV is known as “2” and its domains as “Tudo 2” as opposed to the “3” of the GDE, also known as 745-which represents the ordinal position of the letters of the three initials in the alphabet. Sectarianism is such that in “2” territories it is recommended not to use the number “3” but rather “2 + 1” to avoid any kind of connection with the mortal enemy of local criminal governance-this imposition is directed to members and non-members. As a way of reacting to and disputing territorial domain in Fortaleza in the affective field, the security forces promote the military occupation of territories considered critical, by installing mobile bases and police structures. It is noteworthy that the police actively engages in the painting phrases on walls that are attributed to factions-in these cases, it calls itself “Tudo 4.” This is a signal used by the police to communicate who is in charge to the factions and the civilian population. This gives rise to a dispute over signs of local domination between factions and the State.

Thus, State and non-State armed groups impose routines that directly affect the civilian populations of urban centers, as community areas or essential public services are transformed into territories of exception and armed violence. In addition to massacres as a political expression of inter-faction conflicts (PAIVA, BARROS and CAVALCANTE, 2019; PAIVA et al., 2019), in Fortaleza, in particular, a humanitarian crisis is underway, with hundreds of people displaced by the violent imposition of factions. Initially considered by the command of Ceará’s public security to be a localized problem, from 2016 onwards the phenomenon has become increasingly relevant. In 2017, the press reported the confiscation of houses and the expulsion of residents after the case of a 59-year-old merchant from the Grande Jangurussu neighborhood who was cruelly killed after being tortured in a precarious shack. Sectarianism is so valued that it affects people who collaborate with the police or even members of the security forces who may live in territories controlled by non-state armed groups.

In general, the government response occurs at different levels. Firstly, with the police reinforcements to guarantee the removal of personal belongings of expelled people, revealing the impossibility of achieving permanence. Then, government agencies and the Judiciary provide assistance for the protection and humanitarian care of displaced people. The humanitarian consequences have become a social problem of unknown dimensions, as it means that displaced people lose their homes, their community ties, jobs, access to school, as well as being affected by serious psychological problems. In Fortaleza, the category of urban displacement started to be used once new actors became involved in the public security crisis, as is the case of the installation of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in 2018. Furthermore, the phenomenon is partially recognized by the public authorities, despite inter-institutional efforts to learn to deal with the issue.¹²

The participation of military and civilian police in summary executions in Amazonas is nothing new. Famous cases of civil police death squads have been widely known of since the 1980s. More recently, executions have tended to take place for three reasons: revenge against police executions, corrupt police activities in illegal markets and confrontations with factions. To cite recent examples widely publicized in the press, in 2018 a robbery at a lottery agency, which resulted in FDN members being taken hostage, ended with the execution of four robbers by elite civil police forces. The action was broadcast live by the press. In 2019, in the most lethal action by the police, 17 members of a faction were executed by the Amazonas Military Police (PMAM). In 2020, after the deaths of two police officers, five people were reported to have been killed and three missing. The reports were made in the town of Nova Olinda do Norte. In 2021, in the border town of Tabatinga, after the execution of a police sergeant, seven people were found dead, at least three being signs of torture. According to PMAM interlocutors, critics of police actions make it difficult for police work to be done to combat crime, which indicates that revenge is seen as part of this work.

Finally, in an unprecedented way, Amazonas was the scene of attacks in series initiated by the CV-AM in response to the extermination and extortion of members by the security forces. This demonstrates that the CV-AM has a greater willingness to fight than the former FDN, indicating that its behavior closer to the reality of Ceará. The attacks began on June 6, 2021, and hit at least nine Amazonian cities, targeting public buildings, police stations, buses and other targets. Massacres committed by the police, some classified as acts of resistance, become frequent and, at the time of the attacks, the collapse of public security mobilized the FNSP.

In this context, Manaus is currently going through new waves of homicides and massacres between existing factions and the emergence of new ones, notably the Cartel do Norte (CDN), supposedly formed by remnants of the FDN and which allegedly enjoys support from the Terceiro Comando Puro (TCP) and the PCC in Amazonas to oppose CV-AM. Obviously, these events in the compared cities affect the urban population directly affected by the scenario of violence promoted by the explosive and authoritarian relationship of State governance and criminal governance.

Final considerations

Brazilian prisons are a heterogeneous set of penitentiary devices with regional disparities in their administration policies. Only more recently have public policies aimed at the institutional integration of prison routines to react to the escalation of the security crisis. For decades, Brazil’s states improvised their policies in the face of a public security in frank expansion of its militarized bias. The rise and decline of community police programs, investment in police activities in places considered critical, use of technological resources, cooperation between police officers (national and international) and the fight against “organized crime” in the peripheries definitively embrace prisons as devices integrated into public safety.

In contrast to the years of improvement of public security and the criminal legal system, empirical data show that the increase in the prison population facilitated the conditions for the co-management of prisons between the State and factions, replacing the old order based on small prison factions and overcoming them by bringing multiple prisons under faction rule. However, in the wake of violence due to disputes over prison control, this cooperation was not enough to prevent prison massacres and attacks against government power that gradually pressured the bureaucratic field for changes in State faction management policies and police efforts to neutralize the overflowing capacity of the prison system.

During our research, we could see the factions fighting among themselves for control of illegal markets and protection networks, standardizing them based on their own values and moral orientations, delegating functions, defining roles in the system they impose, expanding access to firearms and resources, annexing territories, expelling residents who are targets of suspicion, resisting police onslaughts and creating their own elements of local governance. The evidence makes it clear that this resulted in the possibility of criminal governance within neighborhoods, and innovative ways of organizing drug trafficking inside and outside prisons. On the other hand, this governance is not always ostensibly established, as it depends on the presence of its members in the territories in question. In both cases, in Fortaleza and Manaus, illegal markets are characterized by differentiated quality due to the rise of factions, because faction have the ability to gain both members and a certain legitimacy in the peripheries and prisons of the two cities.

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• 1
  The fieldwork carried out through participant observation in urban peripheries and prisons, interviews with security agents, prison managers, faction members and non-members, prisoners’ family members, members of anti-incarceration social movements and discussions with researchers on the subject all support the discussions presented in this article. Ítalo Barbosa Lima Siqueira undertook fieldwork from 2013 to 2018 in prisons and the urban peripheries of the Metropolitan Region of Manaus (RMM) and since 2019 has been doing fieldwork in Ceará. Francisco Elionardo de Melo Nascimento has been engaged in fieldwork in Ceará since 2013 and enjoys the privileged position of being both a researcher and a police officer. Suiany Silva de Moraes undertakes ethnographic research on crime and illegal markets in Fortaleza.
• 2
  The criminal dynamics in the North and Northeast of Brazil have aroused the interest of researchers, giving rise to new analyses of the way criminal groups operate in these regions. In the research set developed and in progress, the recent dossier organized by Rodrigues et al. (2022) and published in Revista Tomo is a pioneering work in this regard and makes for indispensable reading.
• 3
  In 2013, Fortaleza was the scene of the middle-class movement “Fortaleza Apavorada,” which organized a march attended by more than two thousand people who made diffuse claims about public safety. The saturation of urban life gave rise to a locally unprecedented middle class protest movement, shortly before the mega-demonstrations in June that year, which brought to light the malaise experienced in all Brazilian cities.
• 4
  These maximum-security wings are supposedly safe sites for inmates marked for death.
• 5
  In 1997, the Minas Gerais Military Police mutinied following the death of a police corporal. The movement spread to 19 states, including Ceará and Amazonas.
• 6
  In 2014, the Ministry of Defense published a Law-and-Order Guarantee Manual that sought to remedy the lack of legal certainty by setting out the legal framework, procedures and routines [of the police and firefighting corps]. It was also intended to be used as a training resource for the military vis-à-vis cases where it had to take on a policing role. As Muniz and Proença Júnior (2006) point out, the lack of transparency about police procedures is an important dilemma for the social and political construction of public security within evolving democratic frameworks.
• 7
  In 2015, in Ceará, the Ronda no Quarteirão program lost importance after the interinstitutional launch of the Pacto por um Ceará Pacífico program focused on reducing crime and homicides and on a technical approach to “Citizen Security.” The program’s effects were unknown until the following year, when Ceará was the scene of violent events that resulted in a prison guards’ strike that followed the federal mobilization of a Penitentiary Intervention Task Force. The Task Force was given the mission of bringing under control the prisons where inter-faction battles over territorial hegemony had broken out. The prison guards’ strike lasted less than 24 hours, thanks to the conclusion of an agreement on pay agreement and the transfers to prisoners allegedly linked to factions to prisons where members of the same faction were held.
• 8
  “Resistance acts” are police killings justified by the concept of legitimate self-defense. Live and let kill, the necropolitics of killable lives, locates the black population in a punitive circuit in which prisons produce a population that is expendable and whose pain and suffering are unworthy of recognition (MBEMBE, 2016; MALLART and GODOI, 2017).
• 9
  In Ceará, the SAP online portal publishes data that is updated monthly. In Amazonas, the information is published on the portal of the Governmental Information System of Amazonas (E-Siga).
• 10
  The month of December was chosen to delimit the number of persons deprived of liberty for each sample year, excluding 2021 with data from the first semester.
• 11
  The first legislative investigation of the Prison System took place in 1976, with repercussions for the Penal Execution Law (LEP) of 1984. In 1993, in the wake of the Carandiru massacre (1992), a CPI recommended the creation of the National Penitentiary Fund (Funpen) in the following year. After the PCC’s waves of attacks in 2006, a new Prison System CPI was established in 2008.
• 12
  The Public Defender’s Office of the State of Ceará estimates that at least 600 people have been displaced by armed violence in the state. Rachel Viana (2019) has analyzed how urban violence affects vulnerable women and brings up the category of internally displaced persons as a mobility vector in Ceará.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  12 Sept 2022
• Date of issue
  2022

History

• Received
  20 Sept 2021
• Accepted
  27 Jan 2022