Democracy, Thuggery and the Grassroots: Antoine Magarinos Torres and the Unio dos Trabal Page 1 of 16

Nuevo Mundo Mundos

Nuevos

Nouveaux mondes mondes nouveaux - Novo Mundo Mundos Novos - New world New
worlds
Colloques | 2013

Repensando los populismos en Amrica latina (mediados del siglo XX)

BRODWYN FISCHER

Democracy, Thuggery and the

Grassroots: Antoine Magarinos
Torres and the Unio dos
Trabalhadores Favelados in the
Age of Carioca Populism
[10/02/2013]

Rsum

Shantytowns have long been critical to urban popular politics. In Brazil, both phenomena gained
strength from 20th century mass urbanization, and the two have been locked in a relationship of
mutual dependency ever since. Yet given high political stakes it is notoriously difficult to
glimpse the internal dynamics of these informal dependencies: to understand how politicians
used shantytowns to achieve their own political goals, to comprehend frustrated attempts at mass
radicalization, to gain insight into residents' political strategies and the ways in which political
connections could grow on the basis of local thuggery. This paper will analyze these issues by
tracing the story of Antoine Magarinos Torres, a communist lawyer who was a central figure in
Brazils shantytown politics in the 1950s. Admired for his role in founding Brazils first citywide
shantytown federation, Torres later faced charges of land grabbing, violence, and political
manipulation precisely the abuses hed built a career combating. While the accusations were
politically motivated, the case revealed a wide variety of internal shantytown conflicts, ranging
from ethnic and turf disputes to disagreements about the just bases for land claims or local rule
making. Torres political demise did not spell the end of shantytown politics in Rio. But his story

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highlights the difficulty of "community organizing" in places with deep internal divisions and a
long history of political exploitation, and also demonstrates the ways in which politicians eager to
limit the impact of local governance adeptly exploited such fragilities.

Entres dindex
Keywords : Brazil, Rio de Janeiro, shantytowns, local politics, Antoine Magarinos Torres, Unio
dos Trabalhadores Favelados

Texte intgral
1

Grassroots neighborhood activism has often enthralled those seeking to radically reconceptualize democratic citizenship in Brazil. For political activists, urban popular
movements of the 1970s and 80s emerged as an antidote to populist demagoguery and
left wing isolation from the popular masses, two mid-century phenomena widely
blamed for Brazils descent into military rule in 1964. For legal scholars and reformers
on the left and the right grassroots regulatory practices and legal pluralism hold
insurgent promise as a remedy to centuries of disjuncture between law and social
practice, which has helped to make weak citizenship a defining feature of Brazilian
poverty. For many intellectuals, every instance of local organization substantiates a
continuous history of popular agency in the name of perspectives of equality, even in
the face of severe repression and disenfranchisement.1
These visions share a deep optimism about the transformational potential of
democracy and urban social movements. They portray urban grassroots currents as
running in constant opposition to the forces of private power, patronage, concentrated
wealth, social exclusion and institutional violence. As political hope, and political
strategy, such visions serve critical purposes. But when it comes to exploring the
historical dynamics of grassroots organizations, or those movements place in Brazils
political or legal history, such optimistic visions can obscure as much as they illuminate.
Popular organizations, by their very nature, often opposed or subverted established
power structures. But they also emerged within those structures, enduring and
strategizing in a historical context in which organizational survival was not a given and
laws and institutions, however idealized, never monopolized the exercise of power. In
the rough and tumble struggle for urban rights and political self-determination,
neighborhood organizations competed for legitimacy with other visions of social justice
and democratic practice, and often faced violent opposition from within and outside the
established government. Such groups sometimes claimed to serve interests they did not,
or resorted to frankly undemocratic tactics in the service of community or
organizational survival. However uncomfortable, these realities raise important
questions about the dialectical relationship between grassroots organizations and their
political contexts, and about the emancipatory promise of change from below.
It is generally quite difficult for historians to broach such questions through critical
engagement with the internal dynamics of urban popular organizations. Community
groups generally leave sparse paper trails, and politics of memory are especially
complex when historical representations still have enormous bearing on urgent material
issues. Labor historians have sometimes navigated similarly choppy waters, but
historians of urban popular movements what few they are for the most part have
not.2 This essay, taking advantage of an unusually rich documentary cache surrounding
an especially prominent grassroots organization, seeks to carve out an exception. In the
pages that follow, I explore the coexistence of democratic currents and anti-democratic

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practice through a microhistory of one of Brazils most distinctive mid-century

movements a pan-urban favela federation from Rio called the Unio dos
Trabalhadores Favelados (UTF).3 At its height, the UTF was the first organization of its
kind in Brazil, and perhaps in all of South America, and did more to advance grassroots
organization in poor communities than any Brazilian group ever had. At its nadir, the
organization and its chief architect, lawyer Antoine Magarinos Torres, were accused of
the very forms of land grabbing, violence and corruption they had organized to fight
against; these accusations, while never fully proven, eventually helped to destroy the
UTF, if not the communities it had fought for.
The UTFs rise and fall was just one episode among many in the centennial struggle
for land and urban rights among Rio de Janeiros urban poor. The mid-century
iterations of these movements have sometimes confounded students of democracy and
legal pluralism: they contain more social movement than social movements, and
their moments of collective mobilization can appear episodic and ideologically
incoherent. But mid-century struggles over urban land and permanence constituted
meaningful forms of engagement with politics, rights, or democracy for generations of
poor residents in cities across Brazil. In that context, these movements ideological and
institutional awkwardness can provide great insight: this is what grassroots organizing
looked like in mid-20th century Brazil, and even its most contorted manifestations
such as the story I am about to tell open a small window onto the daily practice of
plural law and democracy in a profoundly uncertain political and institutional terrain.

Favelas: Bellwethers of 20th Century

Democracy?
5

In a certain sense, the history of Brazilian democracy has been inscribed in the
physiognomy of Rio de Janeiros poorest neighborhoods. The scrappy shacks that
comprised Rios earliest hillside favelas were, quite literally, refuges from the First
Republics elitist and draconian urban legal regulations, which marginalized poor
peoples homes in much the same way that the Republics political and legal systems
marginalized the illiterate, the Afro-descendant, the poor, and the unconnected. From
the 1920s forward, with the rise of urban populism, favela shacks multiplied and spread
across the city, but they were still made of secondhand materials and cut off from city
services; their residents were no longer clandestine, and were far from quiescent, but
they remained supplicants in an emerging urban compact that tolerated and profited
from favelas without granting them rights or permanence. In the post-war democracy,
some favela neighborhoods attained a sturdier extralegal countenance: swamps were
filled; alleys gave way to muddy streets, lined by tangled masses of pirated electric
wires; water spigots sometimes saved women and children the hard treks to collect
water in old oilcans; residents constructed houses from more permanent materials.
Almost no one had full rights, to the city or otherwise, but many demanded them, and
residents precarious but real political clout gave them good reason to imagine their
communities extending across generations.4
The military coup of 1964 dashed many such hopes, and the 1960s and early 1970s
saw a number of violent favela expulsions: if the dictatorship had a physical expression
in Rio, it was the wholesale burning of the Praia do Pinto favela, on the shores of the
Lagoa Rodrigo de Freitas in Rios tony South zone, and its eventual replacement by
high-rise apartment buildings destined for military officers.5 But this period was both
restricted and relatively brief: distenso, abertura, and democratization were incarnated

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in the favelas by brick, cinderblock, and glass windows: expensive materials that
proclaimed residents faith in their communities permanence (along with the futility of
less concrete investments in the age of hyperinflation). And in the last decade and a
half, as Brazils democratic governments have sought to wrest control of favela space
from druglords and other private powerbrokers, favela physiognomy has become an
almost cartoonish space of contestation: city officials have sought to urbanize the
comunidades with streets, drainage pipes, cable connections, schools, brightly painted
faades and cable lifts even as graffiti, bullet holes, and ubiquitous consumer goods
associated with drug money have given eloquent testimony to the continued inadequacy
and frequent hypocrisy of such attempts. A hundred and twenty years after the first
favela was named, the physical borders between Rios formal and informal spheres
remain immediately discernible, as apparent as the ubiquitous legal failures and
restrictions on full economic and social citizenship that still challenge the practice of
Brazilian democracy.
The point of this crude geo-historical tour is simple. Mike Davis and others may
present the rise of a planet of slums as a cataclysmic degradation of a supposedly
global urban ideal.6 But, at least in Rio, there is a strong argument to be made for the
favelas as the embodiment of democracys inconstant emergence a wrenching,
century-spanning process involving both heady idealism and a humbling coming-toterms with the historical limitations of Brazils paper republics, wherein most citizens
have had scant access to unrealistic laws and inaccessible rights, and wherein
democratic and legal institutions have engaged in a constant tug-of-war with private
and informal structures of power. The forging of an urban democracy, in this context,
has not entailed creating a system where favelas can be made urban; it has, rather,
required a reframing the urban ideal, in such a way that it incorporates the social
realities that favelas have come to symbolize.
Such reframing arguably began with the favelas very birth, and has crested in recent
decades. But it reached an earlier peak in Brazils postwar Republic (1946-1964). This
period brought rapid political, demographic, and economic shifts in Rio: a few years of
broad political opening, followed by nearly two decades of restricted but highly
competitive electoral politics; intense mobilization of certain sectors of civil society,
from both the right and the left; mass migration from the countryside; rapid
industrialization and expansion of public-sector employment; intense real-estate
speculation; tumultuous contestation of the limits of newly minted legal regimes. In
that context, favela residents tested the power of democratic institutions in myriad
ways, forming neighborhood associations, occupying new public spheres (spatial,
political, and cultural), forcing politicians and parties to bring their demands to the
center of local and national political debate, and claiming civil and property rights in
court in ways that recalled the 19th century freedom suits so critical to abolition.
Throughout these struggles, favela residents and those who sought to represent them
used languages of democracy and rights, grounded in the capacious provisions of
instruments as varied as the idealistic 1946 constitution, the heavily amended 1916 civil
code, and the newly minted criminal and procedural codes. Their many achievements
chiefly the defeat of scores of private eviction attempts and the widespread delegitimization of urban development schemes that aimed to remove favela communities
from Rios cityscape are testimony to favela residents creative appropriation of this
early democratic opening: as I have argued elsewhere, these were the struggles that
rooted favelas in Rios urban landscape, and has ensured their survival on highly valued
lands in the face of fierce private and public opposition.7
As important as it is to recognize those achievements, and the early adherence to
democratic and legalistic struggle that they represent, it is also critical to recognize their

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context, and their limitations. These struggles context was one in which legal and
democratic forms were only some of the vectors through which power operated. Private
structures of patronage and power, often backed up with considerable violence,
competed with and penetrated public institutions, even in Brazils postcard city and
political capital. Civil rights were mostly honored in the breach among the poor and
undocumented, and legal reasoning was only one of the considerations that shaped
judicial decisions regarding property and political freedom. The struggles limitations
were rooted in that reality. The language of law and democracy was only one of the
movements idioms, and their success was often premised on an unholy alliance of
private profiteers, wily politicians, and neighborhood activists (never mutually exclusive
categories). Neighborhood associations claimed to be democratic or representative, but
those claims validity was often in the eyes of the beholder: despite generations of
idealists who have seen virtue in grassroots lawmaking or organic legal pluralism, local
consensus about the composition and aims of neighborhood associations often lasted
scarcely longer than the eviction threats that spawned them, and local organizations
were frequently dominated by ideologues or autocratic profiteers and power grabbers,
many of whom did not hesitate to exercise violence in asserting local control.8 And
while it would be appealing to assert that the favelados achievements during the
postwar period occurred despite these anti-democratic currents, construed as external
to the periods key community movements, such a view would be more idealistic than
accurate. The hard-won permanence of Rios favelas was due in no small part to the fact
that they served a wide range of mutually contradictory interests, and that residents
rarely disturbed that convergence by adhering entirely to any one ideology, party,
political figure, or mechanism of power democratic, legalistic, or otherwise. Therein
lay the movements strength, and also their weakness, their inability ever to inscribe
their neighborhoods into the legal cityscape, or to enjoy the rights, privileges and
obligations that would come with legal recognition and institutional embededness.
In my 2008 book, A Poverty of Rights, I fleshed out this argument, ending my tale of
Rios property wars with an enduring mid-century truce that at once muffled threats of
mass eviction and made it clear that the favelas fates would be governed by political
tolerance rather than legal guarantees. In what remains of this essay, I will explore the
limitations of that truce, and its implications for the relationship between grassroots
favela politics and the language and practice of law-bound democracy. To tell this story,
I will swoop from macro-history to micro-history, recounting spectacular downfall of
the leader and activist generally recognized as the father of the favelas first citywide
federation: lawyer and communist activist Antoine Magarinos Torres.

AMT and the founding of the Unio dos

trabalhadores Favelados
11

Antoine Magarinos Torres history as a favela leader ended in 1962, amidst sordid
allegations of murder, land-grabbing, and political radicalism. It began, heroically, eight
years earlier, in the favela of Borel, a northern hillside community that was also home to
one of Rios most storied samba schools (Unidos da Tijuca, f. 1931). In early 1954, in the
midst of a turbulent and highly politicized wave of attempted favela evictions, Borels
supposed owner allegedly in cahoots with Rios mayor and local police threatened
to throw Borels 4000 moradores out of their homes. Residents including many who
had resided on the hill for four decades or more -- reacted with typical resourcefulness
and eclecticism. They capitalized on their ties with storied intellectuals and politicians

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from neighboring Tijuca, many of whom had worked in Borel through the church or
through the communist-inspired neighborhood federations that had sprung up around
Rio in the late 1940s. They sent commissions to the press, publicizing their desperation,
their long-term occupation, and the violent illegality of police activities surrounding the
eviction. And, again following in the footsteps of many other favelados, they decided to
hire a lawyer to block the eviction through the courts. Reportedly guided by a Pai de
Santo with whom they had sought spiritual guidance, local residents resolved to seek
out Antoine Magarinos Torres, the 39-year old son of a late, well respected
desembargador and President of Rio de Janeiros Tribunal de Juri.9
Magarinos Torres was already known for his leftist leanings, and there were ample
precedents for his participation: communist lawyers had begun to bring favela property
cases to courts in Rio and Recife as early as the 1920s, and had been heavily involved in
communist favela organizing during the partys brief window of legality in the late
1940s. After meeting in his home with a self-constituted commission of local leaders,
Magarinos Torres energetically took on Borels cause. By early February 1954, he had
filed a criminal complaint in the name of 548 Borel families against local police who had
set out to enforce the eviction order. Weeks later, as many as 1,000 residents marched
with Magarinos Torres to the home of appellate court judge Sady de Gusmo, and a
similar number marched on the National Congress to demand action. The eviction was
postponed, but in the following months Magarinos Torres continued to complain about
police miscreants and to lay the political groundwork for larger scale protest. In early
April, the conflict again erupted: police destroyed more shacks in order to build a road
to the top of the hill, and 500 people marched on the municipal council and federal
congress. Days later, residents staged a pitched battle against workmen hired to lay
down the road, and in its wake they and Magarinos Torres decided to take the struggle a
step further. On April 21, 1954, in front of more than a thousand residents and
numerous politicians, church officials, and labor leaders, Borels leaders announced the
founding of the Unio dos trabalhadores Favelados, or UTF an unprecedented
citywide federation of local associations that aimed to ensure, in Magarinos Torres
hopeful phrase, that not a single favela in Rio will go without its own union.10
Such optimism proved futile in the short term, but the UTF had chosen its moment
well. Borel wasnt the only large carioca favela threatened with violent eviction that
year, and Magarinos Torres and the UTF quickly reached out to leaders in other
communities most prominently Dend, Santa Martha and Morro da Unio
threatened with similarly violent eviction. By the end of the year, more than a dozen
favelas were involved with UTF marches, press campaigns, and vigorous victory
celebrations, and the organization though already heavily identified with the
communist cause was cooperating regularly with sympathetic wings of the Catholic
Church and left-leaning populist politicians.11 Even in a political context where favela
struggles had assumed ever broader political and legal dimensions, the UTF stood out
for its rights-based rhetoric, its legalism, its fiery denunciations of land-grabbing and
private appropriations of public power, and its demands for a permanent, institutional
solution to the favela problem. The UTF never managed to place property titles in the
hands of embattled residents. But it was, along with populist politicians and various
Catholic organizations, critical to the passage of a series of measures that blocked
evictions across Rio: the most important of these, passed by the federal congress in
1956, effectively froze expulsions in all favelas for at least two years.12 Though unevenly
enforced, the law was extended several times, and marked the effective end of an era
when land claimants could expect a smooth profit from selling land out from
underneath Rios largest informal communities: from that point forward, favela land
conflicts were more frequently adjudicated through politics than through the courts.

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The UTF aimed to build a permanent political constituency from these struggles, and
is recalled in heroic terms today as the predecessor of all of Rios pan-favela
organizations. But both the organization and its leader quickly faced and also perhaps
came to embody the complications and contradictions of Brazils postwar democracy.
On the one hand, the UTF struggled to maintain unique relevance in an atmosphere
where partially due to the UTFs own efforts -- favela defense had been widely
adopted by political moderates (and demagogues of all stripes). In the late 1950s,
centrist populist politicians stepped in to defend favela permanence, and the Catholic
Church led by widely respected Bishop Hlder Cmara -- cooperated with the federal
government to create a massive organization called the Cruzada So Sebastio,
explicitly dedicated to the on-site upgrading of certain favela communities. By the early
1960s, another government group the SERFHA, led by sociologist Jos Arthur Rios
had emerged in open competition with the UTF, organizing local resident associations
in more than 75 communities and proclaiming a philosophy of local organization and
self-help that took much of the wind from the UTFs sails. As these organizations gained
prominence, clear political rifts emerged among the groups that had united behind the
1956 struggles. Magarinos Torres ran unsuccessfully for municipal office in 1958, and
both he and his followers assumed a more strident political stance, denouncing
competing church and governmental organizations for corruption and inefficacy.
At the same time local politicians and police officials used their considerable capacity
for political repression to marginalize both Magarinos Torres and the UTF in the name
of anti-communism. In 1957, political police launched an inquiry into the subversive
activities of the UTF and its leaders from Borel. In 1958, the same year in which
Magarinos stood unsuccessfully for election to the municipal council, a power struggle
erupted in a small north-zone favela called Mata Machado (or Vila Cachoeira) between a
UTF- affiliated neighborhood association, local police (who were, residents claimed,
working in conjunction with a local landgrabber), and church and city officials who were
seeking to install outposts in the community. The conflict turned violent in early May;
police and church and city authorities accused Magarinos Torres and the local UTF of
desecrating a cross and damaging municipal property, and UTF members accused
officials of collusion with land grabbers, violence and destruction of private property.
Magarinos Torres was eventually arrested along with several other UTF members and
taken to the nearby 17th Police District. News of the arrest spread like wildfire, and a
huge, angry crowd assembled outside of the police station, made up mainly of favela
residents from Borel and Mata Machado.13 Magarinos Torres was eventually let go
thanks to the intervention of prominent politicians and friends in the legal profession
but the Mata Machado/Vila Cachoeira association was shut down and the Magarinos
Torres lost the right to practice law until Brazils National Bar Association brought a
criminal accusation against the mayor for illegal interference.14 Shortly thereafter,
political police tarred Magarinos Torres as a specialist in agitation among the federal
districts favelas, and files were opened on virtually every other UTF leader who had
ever signed a petition or attended a rally.15 By 1960, thanks in good part to a virulently
anti-communist press campaign supported by the UTFs erstwhile allies from Church
and social service circles -- Magarinos Torres reputation had taken a beating. One of
the most respected favela studies ever published -- written in part by Jos Arthur Rios,
who led SERFHA, one of the most progressive government favela agencies -characterized Magarinos Torres as a local tyrant who practiced the very forms of
exploitation he denounced, calling him an authentic villain from an epic western....16
Even in these circumstances, Magarinos Torres retained extraordinary loyalty among
Borel residents, and continued to seek political office and take on the defense of
additional favela communities. But the stage was set for a final confrontation in March

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of 1962, this time in the seaside favela of Mar, and in circumstances that involved
murder. Here, Magarinos Torres would face the usually litany of evils, which he had by
then become expert in enumerating: land-grabbing, populist jockeying, political
repression, police violence and local thuggery. This time, however, there was a twist: a
significant local faction turned those accusations right back on Magarinos Torres, in the
process calling into question everything that he and the UTF claimed to stand for, and
exposing as no other case did the deep contradictions of community activism in a
context of continued political repression and competing vectors of power.

Democracy in the Mar?

17

18

19

I should say from the start that it is virtually impossible to sort out the truth in this
case, either from the hundreds of pages of police documents and press articles that it
generated, or from local residents modern recollections, which tend to reproduce
earlier fissures.17 Two distinct and artfully constructed story lines emerge, involving
radically different visions of rights, rules, representation, and power not to mention
wildly varying versions of the cases basic facts. Either could be a wholesale lie; more
likely, both are partially untrue. But in their webs of truths and untruths, both accounts
shed light on the suspicion, corruption, and insecurity that surrounded both
institutional and grassroots forms of democratic practice in mid-20th century Brazil.
This much we know for certain: on March 11, 1962, a man named Eufrsio Severino
da Silva was murdered by Jos Vasconcelos with three gunshots, following a
confrontation between the two in the part of the Mar complex now known as the
Parque Unio. The murder followed nearly a year of escalating tensions between
community members over issues of land, money, ideology, and organization,
complicated considerably by outside intervention by local and political police, the
governmental favela agency (SERFHA), church officials, the UTF, and politicians
ranging from local vote bundlers to socialist and communist deputies to Rio Governor
Carlos Lacerda. Such struggles had been carried out partially through legal and
democratic channels: a civil suit, a long string of formal criminal complaints, public
meetings, formal incorporation of the neighborhood association, petitions,
demonstrations, appeals to the press. Interlaced with such legalistic and democratic
tactics was brute violence, probably on both sides: shack burnings, illegal searches and
seizures, harassment, threats and, finally, Eufrsios murder, which spurred two
criminal accusations against Magarinos Torres and his local allies one for land
grabbing, another for involvement in the murder and catapulted the case to citywide
attention.
The version that dominated both press coverage and initial police reports cast
Magarinos Torres as one of the most villainous double crossers in the storied history of
carioca land-grabbing. The assassin Jos Vasconcelos dubbed Z Russo, perhaps for
his supposed communist loyalty emerged as a mere capanga (armed henchman) for
Magarinos Torres, whom the press characterized as head of a group of clever crooks
who form a veritable gang in order to exploit families of poor workers.18 Considerably
embellished by sympathetic papers some of which based their stories directly on
police press releases19 the backbone of this story could be found in a long string of
depositions recorded in Rios 19th police delegation. These witnesses characterized
themselves as humble outsiders, who had come to Mar like favela residents
throughout Rio in search of a little bit of land on which to stake an urban existence.
Street vendors, drivers, construction workers, federal employees, and single mothers all

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converged on a tale that would have been f all too familiar to anyone who knew anything
about the quotidian workings of Rios quickly expanding favelas.
The clearest distillation of this story appeared in the police deposition of Joo
Alexandrino da Silva, a northeastern migrant, skilled construction worker for SERFHA,
and cousin of the murdered Eufrsio. Alexandrino, as he is called in most witness
testimony, arrived in Mar a year or two before the conflicts started, when the area was
little but swampland and no one interfered with anyone else. When rumors of a
SERFHA-led expulsion began to circulate, one of the residents decided to call on
Magarinos Torres, based on his reputation as a powerful friend of threatened favelas.
Magarinos Torres accepted the charge, setting up a neighborhood organization, renaming the area the Bairro Operrio Desembargador Magarinos Torres (after his
father), and collecting money that he said would cover court fees and neighborhood
improvements.
Soon thereafter, however, some residents began to smell a rat. Chief among them was
Joo Alexandrino, who was by then president of the local association, and collected all
of its fees. In Alexandrinos retelling he had initially paid and collected the fees without
question, trusting that Magarinos Torres was using the funds to defend local land claims
and urbanize a favela initially entirely destitute of water, drainage, electricity, schools,
or roads. As the months went by, however, Magarinos Torres raised the fees, charging
as much as 40,000 cruzeiros as an entry fee, in addition to a monthly charge of
CR$1000. The promised improvements never materialized. Magarinos began to
demand that new residents be registered voters, and that they go along with his
political activities, imposing increasingly violent penalties expulsions, shack
burnings, beatings on those who violated his terms. When Joo Alexandrino began to
question those activities leaving the local association, seeking a personal audience
with Governor Carlos Lacerda to report the crimes and circulating a petition against
Magarinos Torres that would eventually become the foundation for the police landgrabbing inquiry Magarinos Torres began a series of steadily escalating threats
against Alexandrino and his family, which culminated in his cousins assassination. By
the time of the inquiry, Alexandrino was, he said, in hiding, and terrified that Magarinos
Torres and his henchmen would exact revenge from his wife and seven children, who
still lived in the favela.20
Alone, Alexandrinos story might have elicited considerable skepticism: how could
Magarinos, a champion of favelado rights, and an heir of a prominent legal family, stoop
to actions that could have been lifted from a breathless account of backward
Northeastern banditry? But more than two-dozen witnesses corroborated his story, with
a series of consistent and convincing details. Many converged on the routine practices
through which new residents were accepted into the community. Any new supplicant
would speak first to a local association representative (first Alexandrino, later with a
migrant from Minas Gerais named Jandira Santos da Costa), who would explain to
them the initial occupation fee, and upon its initial oral acceptance collect a deposit
and send the supplicant to Magarinos Torres house in Tijuca. At Magarinos Torres
house, on Friday evenings or Saturday mornings, supplicants waited for an audience
with the man who, they were told, had the unique ability to grant them access to Mares
public land. These interviews, when successful, ended with the new resident signing a
registration document (the contents of which some could not read), paying an everescalating entry price, and promising to pay a monthly fee of 1000 Cruzeiros. According
to many witnesses, Magarinos was heartless with those who were not registered voters,
or who lacked the entry fee, or who worked for the police or the federal government.21
One single mother recounted an especially harrowing and perhaps far-fetched -audience in which she, child in arms, begged Magarinos Torres to excuse her from the

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fees, as the money she earned as a seamstress was barely enough to live on; in response,
she claimed that Magarinos Torres said that she had a crippled child and couldnt
confront the police, I need strong men, to confront the police with revolvers and
machine guns!22 Magarinos Torres reaction to those who refused to pay, or could not
do so, was more brutal still: witnesses recalled him as a dictator, always surrounded
by armed men, who would expel residents, burn shacks to the ground, and spew death
threats against any who crossed his ever-escalating demands for money and fees.23
Under the rule of Magarinos Torres and his gang, witnesses claimed, residents lived
under a reign of terror, forced to hand over 35% of any profit from local economic
activities, compelled to attend periodic political rallies, and never seeing any of the
fantastic local improvements that Magarinos Torres had promised.
The authenticity or evil genius of these dozens of tales was relatively simple.
Although narratives of spontaneous settlement and organic self-regulation were already
common in mid-20th century Rio, and while some favelas certainly enjoyed some
version of authentic local self-governance, most favelas in Rio functioned precisely in
the way that Magarinos enemies described. Powerful, prominent men (and occasionally
women) frequently lay claim to public land in Rio, and sold or rented it to favela
residents as their own. They often had local allies many as poor as the neighbors they
exploited -- who manned their financial operations and help to authenticate false land
claims. These people did create local associations, they did administer local services
denied residents by Brazils democratic government, and they were often critical in
the intricate political negotiation and theater that kept favelas from being swept from
the face of Rios cityscape. They often entered politics, and projected both high-minded
rhetoric that pitted deserving workers against corrupt officials or other land-grabbers,
and promised eventual rights, to both land and city. They very often grounded their
practices in a kind of parallel legalism, insisting that lands be demarcated, documents
signed, authorizations properly given.24 And these so-called grileiros exercised
frequent violence just like their rural counterparts -- burning shacks, beating up
dissidents or competitors, even murdering when necessary.25 The local associations that
such strongmen created often used democratic language and mechanisms, and even
mimicked formal legal practice: but they were anything but the organic, pluralistic,
democratic associations idealized by the UTF. In one of the cases greatest ironies, the
hypocrisy and exploitation that Magarinos Torres was accused of would have been
familiar to outsiders precisely because communist activists first through the party,
and later most prominently through the UTF itself -- had blazed a trail toward a politics
in which denunciations of such strongmen were a lynchpin of any campaign for favela
justice.26 If the denunciations of Magarinos Torres were true, he was just the latest in a
long line of hypocritical heroes who exploited local communities in the name of their
salvation and made a mockery of grassroots organization. If false, they had been
concocted with an eye to plot worthy of a cunning political thriller.

Through the Looking-Glass

24

It took some time for another, equally fantastic and compelling tale to come to public
light. In the weeks after the murder, Magarinos Torres lay relatively low, making only
sporadic public statements and acting as legal counsel for the Vasconcelos and other
suspects in the murder case. In mid-March, he headed delegation of Mar residents that
set out to tell his side of the story to an unsympathetic press; the expedition, which
included women and children, just as most UTF delegations had in the 1950s, resulted
in a disastrously negative article, in which one delegation member allegedly told the

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26

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reporter hed been forced to come along and Magarinos was portrayed as a
megalomaniacal, hot-tempered autocrat.27 In late April, however, in the wake of a spate
of additional police complaints, Magarinos and his local allies finally mounted a public
fight, first launching a counter-complaint in the 19th police district against massive
police, church, and governmental corruption, and then testifying to the same effect in
the land-grabbing case in which he stood accused. Finally, in July, after being indicted
in the murder case, Magarinos Torres launched a calumnia suit against newspapers that
had depicted him unfavorably, thus gaining by law the right to air his version of the
story in the pages of those same newspapers.28
For anyone eager to believe in the heroic struggles pioneered by the UTF, Magarinos
Torres recounting is balm to the soul, the righting of the police cases sinister funhouse
distortion of grassroots organizing. According to Magarinos Torres, the whole case
really began in the early 1950s, when then-president Getlio Vargas a group of residents
permission to settle in the area. After living in Mar for longer than the ten years
necessary to establish possessory rights, in April of 1961 residents suddenly found
themselves threatened by a corrupt and sinister eviction scheme. No less a figure than
Clemente Mariani son-in-law of Governor Carlos Lacerda had decided that he
wanted to turn Mars lands into a for-profit factory for the industrialization of the
citys garbage, presumably an early version of industrial recycling. Lacerda, famously
wily, had begun to move to grant his son and law the lands, first sending police from the
State Highway department to serve residents with eviction notices, and then involving
SERFHA in the corrupt scheme. It was at this point that residents appealed to
Magarinos Torres, who quickly verified that the State had no claim to the lands they
were, he said, terras da marinha, and thus under federal jurisdiction and entered a
possessory injunction in the 8th Vara da Fazenda Pblica. The conflict escalated from
there: police shock troops appeared in November, knocking down eight homes,
including that of a widow with four children; and marginals began to appear in the
favela with the aim of intimidating locals and convincing them to desist from the legal
struggle. Residents complained to the 19th police delegacy, but were told by the delegate
that Rios police chief had told him not to act on any of their complaints and to refer
everything to the political police: orders regarding the matter were coming straight from
the Governors office.
In the face of such corruption of public institutions, Magarinos Torres did what he
had advocated in countless other favelas: he urged residents to form a local association,
so as better to defend themselves. The association took responsibility for making a
voluntary collection to defray court fees and improve local conditions, installing a
school named after another judge who had been sympathetic to favela land claims in
the UTFs heyday as well as a medical post, water piping, landfill for streets, and all of
the infrastructure for household electricity (though the latter was blocked for political
reasons by the state electric service). Magarinos Torres was emphatic in stating that he
never asked anyone to pay beyond his or her means. The association also took it upon
itself to vet potential new residents, both to ensure their moral character and
importantly -- to ensure that they were orderly workers, not marginals introduced by
Lacerda, and that they would recognize the land claims of the areas original occupants.
The fruit of these efforts, Magarinos claimed, was a self-sustaining proletarian
neighborhood that as such -- was profoundly threatening to the governmental and
church apparatus charged with favela policy in Rio. Terrified that this self-help would
put them to shame and wanting to continue to live from the industry of protecting
favela residents -- the very prominent leaders of abundantly funded agencies like
SERFHA, the Cruzada So Sebastio, and the Fundao Leo XIII (the oldest churchstate favela agency) had joined forces with Lacerda and a series of grileiros whom

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Magarinos Torres had crossed in the 1950s. Together, they sought to discredit the UTF,
defame Magarinos Torres and evict or intimidate his followers. They attempted to
convince innocent residents that it would be better to leave the neighborhood and
accept alternate housing, threatened to remove the settlement altogether, invaded
homes, and launched a torrent of false land-grabbing accusations against Magarinos
and his followers. When that failed, they employed outright violence, sending police to
invade homes, arrest neighborhood leaders, and beat Magarinos Torres allies. They
also bribed Alexandrino, who had in any case already been expelled from the
association for stealing money, and induced him to fill the neighborhood with thugs
who threatened physical harm to residents unwilling to denounce the UTF. It was in
that context at a point when the police had attempted to take over a UTF building and
Magarinos Torres had come to lead a mass protest against the occupation-- that a
struggle had broken out between Jos Vasconcelos and Eufrsio Severino da Silva:
Eufrsio, insulting and baiting Jos, had threatened him with a knife, and Jos had
killed in self defense. All of the false accusations that had followed were simply the
culmination of this sinister and long-standing campaign to defeat Magarinos, the UTF,
and the grassroots, self-help form of urbanization and governance that they had
pioneered.
Could this spectacular series of accusations have been true? Despite obvious police
partiality, a smattering of witnesses supported various aspects of it, particularly those
having to do with the purpose of local funds collection and Magarinos Torres
willingness to forego the fees for the poorest favelados. Even hostile newspapers
conceded that local Mar residents seemed to be split in their opinion of Magarinos
Torres and the UTF. Police logbooks recorded a flurry of Magarinos Torres complaints,
several of which are contained in police archives, but none ever resulted in an actual
inquiry, as they technically should have. Police violence would hardly have been
unusual in the favelas, where cooperation between land-grabbers, their political allies,
and police was legendary. However fantastical accusations against SERFHA and the
Cruzada So Sebastio might have seemed, these were agencies with anti-communist
origins, and institutional interests in controlling favela policy. Their leaders, Jose
Arthur Rios and Hlder Cmara, were widely respected, and even revered, but they were
also deeply committed to a form of Catholic humanism that was scarcely compatible
with Magarinos Torres strident communism, and both envisioned a comprehensive
favela policy that left scant room for wildcat urbanization. And, finally, Carlos Lacerda
a virulent anti-communist who made no bones about his opinion that Magarinos Torres
was part of the red menace had already become famous for his cunning and theatrical
use of intrigue, violence and sensation, as well as for his willingness to marry private
profit and public power.29 Magarinos Torres narrative just like that mounted against
him was entirely compatible with widespread suspicions about the workings of public
power and the ways in which democratic or legalistic forms could be easily inhabited by
corrupt and vicious private powerbrokers.

Truth, Lies and Democratic Currents

29

We cant know which of these stories contains more truth, or if either contains much.
The judicial process sheds no light on the matter, or at least none that hasnt been
snuffed out by time and lost paper. Magarinos Torres accusations against Lacerda and
others were eventually thrown out, on the argument that they were absurd; the
accusations against him never resulted in a conviction, though the reasons are lost along
with the court cases that held them. The UTF limped along in a weakened form for a few

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more years, especially in Borel, where Magarinos Torres has been memorialized as a
hero for several generations.30 But in the early 1960s, the UTF was eclipsed by the
SERFHA-sponsored associations and by a newer, more collaborationist favela
federation called the FAFEG; these, in their turn, were driven virtually underground
after 1968, only to return with renewed vitality during the distenso. The Bairro
Operrio Desembargador Magarinos Torres didnt lose its lands, but it did change its
name; now the Parque Unio, it is both the most populous and the most
infrastructurally sound of all of the favelas in the so-called complexo do Mar. Residents
still remember that the initial land demarcation was carried out by a lawyer, but when
Magarinos Torres is remembered buy name it is frequently as a violent grileiro.31
Magarinos Torres became increasingly radicalized in the years after the Mar
accusations, traveling to Bolvia during the early years of Brazils dictatorship and dying
suddenly a few years later.
Even with such scant resolution, however, these stories reveal a great deal about the
courses of democratic currents, both local and institutional, in mid-century Rio de
Janeiro. The bleakest upshot is that neither grassroots neighborhood organizations nor
the mechanisms of legally bound, democratic government were entirely credible
interlocutors in the favelas complex and contentious political struggles. Both versions
of this story fantastical as they might have seemed in many other contexts could
have been true, because they reflected a lived experience in which grassroots power
structures were rarely democratic or only democratic and formal democratic and
legal institutions were widely believed to be corrupt, repressive, and infiltrated by
private power networks. In this sense, this would seem to be a story that goes against
the grain of any belief in Latin Americas democratic roots, pointing toward the
weakness of Brazils democratic tradition rather than its strength.
There is, however, another reading. One of the great curiosities of this case is the
degree to which it was propelled by democratic and pluralistic ideologies and practices,
even when these didnt prevail. The cases rhetoric, on either side, uniformly favored the
well-being of the favelados and recognized their generic right to safety, security, and a
bit of ground upon which to build a house: all of those assumptions had been
constructed thanks to the postwar democratic opening, and the space it gave favelados
to jockey for recognition in the public arena. That same democratic opening had
produced the intense institutional competition for favelado representation that drove
alliances throughout the case. Elements on both sides, moreover, believed that law and
democratic institutions could intervene on the side of justice. Magarinos Torres entire
strategy, in the UTF and in the particular case of the Mar, was centered on the notion
that it was possible to achieve something through democratic and institutional means;
he may not have believed that the police would rule in his favor, but he did have faith in
judges, and certainly trusted in the power of calling public institutions to account in the
public sphere. And figures like Hlder Cmara and Jos Arthur Rios probably honestly
believed that their institutions were a more legitimate and democratic response to the
favela problem than the kind of spontaneous local organizations that Magarinos Torres
advocated: such organizations, from their perspective, had no protections against
thuggery and profiteering, and circumvented institutions intended to examine such
issues from the perspective of the public good.
Perhaps more importantly, while one might logically conclude that either sides use of
democratic language and practice was simply base cynicism, carried out in the service of
anti-democratic ends, one could just as easily conceive of that relationship in reverse.
Quite probably, at least some of the actors on both sides justified their use of antidemocratic means police violence, gang thuggery, the burning of shacks, the violent
expulsion of single residents or whole communities, alliance with corrupt police or

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politicians by the belief that they were working for the eventual triumph of social
justice and democratic self determination. If Magarinos insisted on being surrounded
by armed gangs and expelling policemen from Mar, it may have been because he had
been persecuted by police and could not trust them to protect his physical integrity or
the communitys rights. If he employed his own capangas to exclude his enemies, it
may have been for the well-being of the legitimate community; if he favored the land
rights of older residents and denied the same to newer arrivals, perhaps it was because
he believed that those older residents had earned their rights and the newcomers sought
to undermine them. Similarly, if Jos Arthur Rios and Hlder Cmara allied themselves
with corrupt politicians and policemen to defeat Magarinos Torres, it might have been
because those were the powerful people available to rid the city of a figure they saw as a
corrupt land-grabber or radical communist, a mortal threat to the self-determination of
the very groups he claimed to represent.
It is quite possible, in short, that some of the actors in these tales were simultaneously
sincere believers in ideals of democracy and parties to the worst kind of anti-democratic
practices. They lived in a historical context where the language, ideals, and tools of
democracy were omnipresent, but where democracys institutional assurances were very
weak. Neither daily survival nor political progress were conceivable without recourse to
other sorts of power, regulation, and authority, either at the grassroots or at the seat of
institutional power. If the dueling tales of the Mar murder suggest anything, it is that
we will be hard-pressed to understand the workings of Brazilian democracy then or
now without careful consideration of the interplay between democratic ideas and
practices and the fragmented hegemony of law and democratic institutions.

Notes

1 For orientation in the extensive literature on the emancipatory possibilities of grassroots

lawmaking and legal pluralism see, especially, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, The Law of the
Oppressed, Law and Society Review 12:1 (1977), p. 5-126. and Sociologia na primeira pessoa:
fazendo pesquisa nas favelas do Rio de Janeiro, Revista da Ordem dos Advogados do Brasil, 49,
p. 39-79 ; Antonio Carlos Wolkmer, Pluralismo jurdico: fundamentos de uma nova cultura do
direito, So Paulo: Alfa-mega, 2001 and Pluralismo jurdico: os novos caminhos da
contemporaneidade, So Paulo: Saraiva, 2011; Marcos Augusto Maliska, Pluralismo jurdico e
direito moderno: notas para pensar a racionalidade jurdica na modernidade, Curitiba: Juru,
2001; James Holston, Insurgent Citizenship: Disjunctions of Democracy and Modernity in
Brazil, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008. A partly convergent and highly influential
neoliberal formulation is Hernando de Sotos The Other Path, New York: Basic Books, 2002.
2 Sociologists of plural law in the context of drug trafficking (notably Desmond Arias and Alba
Zaluar) have faced these questions, but these events are too recent to have attracted historians
attention).

3 For an idealized insiders view of the UTF, see Manoel Gomes, As lutas do povo do Borel, Rio de
Janeiro: Edies Muro, 1980. For an insightful academic account, see Nsia Trinidade Vernica
Lima, O movimento de favelados do Rio de Janeiro: polticas do Estado e lutas sociais. MA diss,
IUPERJ, 1989. For an insightful recent study on the memory and representation of the UTF, see
Mauro Amoroso, Caminhos do lembrar: a construo e os usos polticos da memria no morro
do Borel. For discussion of the UTF in the context of other favela struggles, see Brodwyn Fischer,
A Poverty of Rights, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008, ch. 8.
4 On the history of Rios favelas, see Fischer, Poverty; Rafael Soares Gonalves, Les favelas de Rio
de Janeiro: histoire et droit, XIXe et XX sicles, Paris: lHarmattan, 2010; Maria Lais Pereira da
Silva, Favelas cariocas, 1930-1960, Rio de Janeiro: Contraponto, 2005; Maurcio de Almeida
Abreu, "Reconstruindo uma histria esquecida: origem e expanso inicial das favelas do Rio de
Janeiro," Espao e debates 37 (1994).

5 On the remoes see Lcia do Prado Valladares, Passa-se uma casa: anlase do programa de
remoo de favelas do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro: Zahar, 1978; Janice Perlman, The Myth of
Marginality, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980.

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6 Mike Davis, Planet of Slums, New York: Verso, 2006.

7 For a more detailed explication of these developments, see Fischer, especially chapters two and
eight.
8 For an idealistic view see, especially, Boaventura de Souza Santos, op cit, and James Holston,
op. cit.
9 Nsia Trinidade Lima, O Movimento, p. 106.

10 Para combater a misria e a grilagem, Imprensa Popular, April 22, 1954.

11 By the end of 1956, Rios political police had already identified the UTF as a communist front,
although they admitted that it also involved people of boa f. See APERJ, Pol Pol,
Administrao 1y, note from MJNI, Departamento Federal de Segurana Pblica to the Diviso de
Polcia Poltica e Social, December 27, 1956.
12 Lei 2875/56

13 Crco ao Distrito: Priso do Advogado Provoca Sucessivos Tumultos na Tijuca, ltima Hora,
2 May, 1958;Aliaram-se o grileiro e a prefeitura contra o advogado e a favelada, Imprensa
Popular, 3 May, 1958. See also the semi-complete record of the police investigation: APERJ, Pol
Pol, Inquritos 17, Delegacia de Segurana Social Inquerito 189/58.
14 Queixa-Crime contra o Prefeito Negro de Lima, Ordem dos Advogados na Defesa do Lder
dos Operrios Favelados, ltima Hora, 12 May, 1958.

15 APERJ, Pol Pol, Administrao 1Y, Dossi do DFSP, Diviso da Polcia Poltica e Social, Servio
de Informaes, Unio dos trabalhadores Favelados, letter to Chefe do Servio de Informaes
da DPS, in ref. to protocolo 7700/1958.
16 SAGMACS, 1960, p. 4.

17 Mauro Amoroso and Rafael Soares Gonalves, Memria hagiogrfica e movimentos sociais
urbanos: a militncia poltica de Antoine de Magarinos Torres nas favelas cariocas, in Anais do
XI Encontro Regional Sudeste de Histria Oral, So Paulo: ABHO, 2011.

18 Gang operava no conto do barraco, A Noite, March 13, 1962. See also Magarinos cria regime
de terror nas favelas, Tribuna da Imprensa, 24-25 March, 1962.
19 See Advogado Autor Intelectual do Assassinato do Favelado, A Noite, July 27, 1962.
20 APERJ, Pol Pol, InquritosTestimony of Joo Alexandrino da Silva, March 3, 1962.

21 See, especially, the testimony of northeastern migrant and comerciante Francisco Fernandes
Filgueiras, from March 20, 1962;
22 Testimony of Maria Jos Cordeiro Rodrigues, April 9, 1962.

23 Dictator reference from northeastern migrant and self-employed worker Antonio Leondio
dos Santos, March 19, 1962.
24 Boaventura de Souza Santos, The Law of the Oppressed, op. cit.

25 For examples, see cases of Emiliano Turano and Jorge Chediac, discussed in Fischer, Poverty,
ch. 7.

26 The first such public accusations seem to have surfaced in legal cases in Recife in the late
1920s, and were publicized in Recifes municipal elections of 1935. They became central to
Recifes pioneering anti-mocambo campaigns in the late 1930s. They surfaced in novelistic form
in both Rio and Recife in the mid-30s, and became dominant tropes in the press and politics of
both cities during the epic favela and mocambo struggles of the 1940s, 50s, and 60s. Novels
include A.C. Chagas Ribeiro, Mocambos, Recife: Mozart, 1935; Lucio Cardoso, Salgueiro, Rio de
Janeiro: Jos Olympio, 1935. On Recife, see Zlia de Oliveira Gominho, Veneza americana x
mucambpolis: o Estado Novo na cidade do Recife (dcadas de 30 e 40). Recife: Cepe, 1998;
Fischer The Politics of Race and Social Inequality in Recife, ms. Currently under review at
CSSH.
27 Mar: Favelados acusam o advogado de comunista, A Noite, 14 March, 1962.

28 My summary of Magarinos Torres version of events is largely drawn from three sources: the
first is the police investigation into land grabbing brought against Magarinos Torres and others,
located in the APERJ, Pol Pol, Inqueritos 17, Delegacia de Segurana Social Inquerito no. 8162.
The second is Magarinos Torres complaint against corruption, APERJ, Pol Pol, Geral 87, Dossie
12. The last is the press release published under the headline Advogado Autor Intelectual do
Assassinato do Favelado, ltima Hora, July 24, 1962.
29 For Lacerdas comments on Magarinos Torres, given in the early stages of the Mar
controversy in relation to another matter, see Lacerdas memorandum to Jos Artur Rios, 17

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Julho, 1961, in Lacerdas archives at the Universidade de Braslia, PO.03, Dossi Gabinete
Correspondncias, 1960, Cx. 155.

30 See Aperj, Pol Pol, Geral 89, police report originated by Aristofanes Monteiro de Souza; also
Manoel Gomes, As Lutas do Povo do Borel.
31 Amoroso and Gonalves, op. cit..

Pour citer cet article

Rfrence lectronique

Brodwyn Fischer, Democracy, Thuggery and the Grassroots: Antoine Magarinos Torres and the
Unio dos Trabalhadores Favelados in the Age of Carioca Populism , Nuevo Mundo Mundos
Nuevos [En ligne], Colloques, mis en ligne le 10 fvrier 2013, consult le 15 aot 2016. URL :
http://nuevomundo.revues.org/64840 ; DOI : 10.4000/nuevomundo.64840

Auteur

Brodwyn Fischer
Northwestern University

Droits dauteur
Nuevo mundo mundos nuevos est mis disposition selon les termes de la licence Creative
Commons Attribution - Pas d'Utilisation Commerciale - Pas de Modification 4.0 International.

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