Bruno
Conversations with a Brazilian Drug Dealer
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2804513 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Paul Gootenberg (Stony Brook University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2016 |
| Volume | 96 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 768-769 |
| Publication date | 2016-11-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Hispanic American Historical Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0018-2168 • E-ISSN: 1527-1900 |
| Publisher | Duke University Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1215/00182168-3678129 |
| OpenAlex | W2535017243 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 5 |
This is not a book of history but an outstanding ethnography that may stir up historical thinking. What if—we might ask our own motley archival sources—we were privy to our ideal informant from the past firsthand, a subaltern at that, and able to craft from that an empathetic experiential account beyond just biographical testimony? This is what Robert Gay, a sociologist of Brazil, has successfully done in his extended conversations with “Bruno”—a low-level Brazilian drug dealer, inmate, and inside expert on the Comando Vermelho (CV), the dominant drug gang at work in Rio de Janeiro's favelas and prison labyrinth over the last three decades.Historical suggestions abound. Gay lets Bruno open and fill out each chronological recollection of his criminal and carceral past. But at the end of each chapter Gay appends a lucid afterword (i.e., about border smuggling in Brazil, cocaine trafficking, human rights in the evolving Brazilian prison complex, gang turf wars) to contextualize and historicize Bruno's story. This unusual structure foregrounds Bruno's perspective without making naive or forced claims of authenticity. The book also reveals how little we know about the history of people involved in drug activities, as prisoners, or in gangs in Brazil, even now with the small army of ethnographers (anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists) engaging their present lives and predicaments. Priceless kernels of history surface here: for example, who knew that it was Marxist political prisoners of the 1960s Brazilian military dictatorship who first organized criminals in the Ilha Grande prison and passed on their complex disciplinary codes and cell structures to the more common thugs around them, who went on to form by the late 1970s tougher, smarter organizations like the CV. Policing policies of segregating gang leaders only reinforced their power and reach on the outside, particularly in winning control of emerging favela drug networks. Their legacy today—as the CV and its rival groups fanned across the prison archipelago and deep into Rio's favelas—might be termed the dictatorship of the lumpenproletariat.The book is based on 14 months of interviews with Bruno, originally from Recife, whom Gay first met through his informant Lucía, the protagonist of one of Gay's earlier favela studies. About a third of the book chronicles Bruno's brief career as a drug dealer and the other two-thirds his daily, sometimes harrowing experiences of the 1990s shunting between varied old and newer prisons of Rio state's Ilha Grande and Bangu penal complexes. Bruno begins smuggling drugs while in the navy, stationed at Corumbá along the Brazilian-Bolivian border, ferrying cocaine overland to Rio slums. Plot spoilers be damned: once imprisoned in 1991, Bruno rises, rather by accident, into an outspoken local leader of the CV. However, factional disputes, prison massacres, and power struggles make Bruno's life even more precarious. A miraculous survivor after eight years inside, Bruno richly details prison conditions and daily life, the organizational habitus of the gangs, his escape attempts, everyday violence, prison education, and his relationships to guards, officials, and lovers.Brazil, like the United States, today faces its own incarceration crisis and the inevitable blowback of brutally overcrowded jails, linked in Brazil's case to its surging drug consumption, its punitive drug laws, social inequality, and the geopolitical side effects of the US drug war in the Andes. Shifting policing strategies, such as prisoner segregation, decriminalizing drug possession, or the proactive Unidades de Polícia Pacificadora occupation of slums, have mostly backfired, as Gay shows. This gripping book is a superb entry point into the maze of Brazilian prisons and, hopefully, a spur to more systematic historical research into the country's current dilemmas with prisons, drugs, and gangs
Art · Craft · Criminology · Democracy · Dictatorship · Ethnography · Humanities · Media studies · Political science · Politics · Prison · Sociology · Subaltern · Visual arts · Anthropology · Crime, Illicit Activities, and Governance · Gender Studies · History · Law
| Unique citing works | 5 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,56 |
| Citation span | 2017 - 2025 (9) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 3 |