Who exercises decision-making power over the country’s direction?

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This article was originally published by Piauí.

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To be sure, the martial execution of Policarpo Quaresma was merely the dramatic consummation of his sad end, not its determining act. As his story unfolds, we are informed that ‘of all the sad things to see in the world, the saddest is madness’. It is once imprisoned, in the aftermath of the Naval Revolta, that Quaresma becomes aware of the bovarism on account of which he had already been accused of madness and interned. The fatherland he coveted had been revealed as a ‘myth’ —  a ‘chimera’, even — by that of an opportunistic sovereign, of the ruling class, and of the ‘man frrom Itamarati’, who had picked out rebellious marines for summary assassination. ‘The end’, then, was the realisation of a fallen ideal.

In the second decade of the twentieth century, amid debates about the very possibility of a Brazilian nation, Lima Barreto’s popular realism would serve as an awkward precursor to the modernist obsession with formation. His social critique more often suggests impasse than immanence, with the formal fragmentation of his literature matching an incommunicability between his characters and their destinies. And this impasse frustrates his own inclusive patriotic ideal. Indeed, the end of Policarpo Quaresma appears to reflect a decisive denouement in Brazilian history: the stillbirth of a modern and unified nation – that is, the loss of a formation that never quite existed. Rapporteur of a very Brazilian melancholia, Lima Barreto composed fragments of a society, casting uncertainty over any singular claim to sovereignty, regardless of authoritarian measures to maintain the state’s monopoly on legal exception.

Little more than a century later, amid a revival of patriotic discourse, Lima Barreto’s writing encourages us to ask: Who is really sovereign in Brazil?

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In mid-August, a month after Donald Trump’s announcement of fifty-percent tariffs on all Brazilian imports, the federal government launched the Sovereign Brazil Plan (Plano Brasil Soberano), citing a need to ‘protect Brazilian exporters and workers’. Among other measures, the government made available R$30 billion in credit, for small and medium-sized businesses in particular. Hardly dependable supporters of PT governments, the Federation of Industries of the State of São Paulo (FIESP) and the Confederation of National Industry (CNI) praised the initiative. But, in relation to comparable programmes for industry, it represented a small investment, which would fall far short of offsetting the impact of the proposed tariffs. As a show of defiance, it nonetheless served a political purpose. Over the coming weeks, Lula’s approval notably increased. On the streets, in a moment of carnivalesque protest, the nation seemed to be back in vogue among political representatives of the left, who called for a reappropriation of Brazilian colours and symbols. It was Eduardo Bolsonaro, in the US, on extended leave from reality, who had now been exposed as a national traitor, having lobbied the US to impose tariffs and sanctions on Brazil. By the end of October, following shrewd Brazilian diplomacy, Trump was wishing Lula a happy birthday and calling him a ‘very vigorous guy’. By the end of November, Trump had suspended tariffs on Brazilian agricultural exports.

Though Trump cited ‘politial persecution’ against Bolsonaro in justification of the tariffs, he clearly had more material concerns. Two days before his announcement, the governments of Brazil and China signed an agreement to explore the viability of a bi-oceanic railway corridor that would facilitate trade between the two countries, via the Port of Chancay, constructed in Peru with Chinese investment. In May, the US Department of State had affirmed that ‘the United States will energetically oppose’ efforts of the Chinese government to exercise greater influence in Latin America. The agreement with China came at the end of a meeting in Brazil of representatives of the BRICS — a group that, later in the month, Trump described as ‘an attack on the dollar’. And though a degree of caution should be exercised with the attribution of a coherent rationality to Trump’s foreign policy, this view of the BRICS seems indicative of an intent behind his entire programme of tariffs: to produce a shock that might create conditions for a renegotiation of the terms of dollar hegemony, amid early indications of a tendency towards fragmentation and diversification in the international monetary system.

It is plausible that Trump’s tariffs should serve to consolidate channels of trade and finance beyond the control of the US. They certainly contributed to the acceleration of negotiations towards a free-trade agreement between Mercosur and the European Union. But, notwithstanding the Brazilian Central Bank’s investment in public infrastructure for international financial transactions outside of private American payment networks — Visa, American Express, Mastercard, Discover — monetary sovereignty remains a distant hope for the country. As does digital sovereignty, despite Lula’s claims to the contrary. Incipient efforts to create national large language models — such as SoberanIA, under development by the state government of Piauí — are being overtaken by anxiety for Brazilian industry to keep up with any productivity gains enabled by cutting-edge technologies developed elsewhere. To develop ‘sovereign clouds’ for the government and the Caixa Econômica Federal (a large, state-owned bank), Serpro, the national data-processing body, has depended on the stacks of foreign big tech to store data from Brazil’s national health system, its social-security system, its tax system, and other Brazilian institutions. Without the existence of Brazilian tech companies able to compete internationally, implementation of the government’s plans for massive installation of data centres, which it claims will attract up to R$2 trillion in investment, is likely to turn the country into a repository for American and Chinese big tech, while placing strain on its energy and water supplies. Stoking nationalistic instincts, reviving a lapsed political grammar of the Brazilian left, Lula’s assertion of Brazil’s sovereignty thus also exposes limits of the government’s sovereign power – including those set by its own decisions.

Except on occasions when used to justify contraventions of international law, claims to national sovereignty are generally defensive, made in response to the possibility, perception, or pretence of an infringement. ‘We’re also using tariffs to defend our own sovereignty’, Trump told the UN General Assembly in September, without a hint of irony. In his own speech to the General Assembly, Lula situated American tariffs and sanctions against Brazil in the context of a ‘new crossroads’ for multilateralism. ‘Attacks on sovereignty, arbitrary sanctions, and unilateral interventions are becoming the rule’, he affirmed. This affirmation gained significance in January, after American military forces bombed Venezuela and abducted its head of state. If implicating just one or a few states in the imposition of this rule, he nonetheless correctly identified a common experience.

Over the last decade, amid the disintegration of international institutions, there has been a proliferation of appeals to the UN for it to ensure respect for the principle of sovereign equality among member states, established in the second article of its charter. But growing concern for sovereignty is discernible not only in the statements of government representatives. It also finds expression in the promises of English nationalists to ‘take back control’ of their country’s borders, in the resistance of Kapinawá indigenous communities to their dispossession and displacement for the installation of windfarms, in international calls for Palestinian liberation amid a genocidal campaign. As accelerated approximation to the catastrophic horizon of ecological collapse has cast attention towards the essential impermanence of humanity’s relationship to the earth, territorial questions, inextricable from most conceptions of sovereignty, have gained political salience in many parts of the world. Social transformations that have contributed to this have then also made sovereignty the central political concept of the moment, in Brazil and beyond.

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After the disintegration of the Soviet Union undermined the principal material and ideological counterpoint to American power, accelerated globalisation – not least the growing transnational interconnectedness of markets and homogenisation of productive processes, enabled by the internationalisation of capital – led many observers to conclude that the concept of national sovereignty had been exhausted. Now revealed to be an exuberant fancy, the inexorability of cosmopolitan integration in a ‘flattened world’ of individual consumers became the expectation of a burgeoning post-national common-sense – not only in the liberal-democratic heartlands of global capitalism, but also throughout much of its periphery. Neoconservatives, libertarians, and human rights campaigners were united in their enthusiasm for the ascendance of a ‘sovereign individual’. For a new avant-garde of social theorists — Marxians, as well as liberals — any putative transfer of sovereignty ‘downwards’ from the nation-state, necessarily uneven, was being mediated by its transfer ‘upwards’, to supranational institutions of ‘global governance’ and to increasingly deterritorialised forms of capital.

To be sure, it is not difficult to identify instances during the long 1990s (extending from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the financial crash of 2008) in which governments, particularly on the periphery of the world-economy, conceded state prerogatives to the interests of foreign capital. In Brazil, in 1995, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, recently sworn into the presidency, sent a PEC to Congress proposing the revocation of Article 171 of the Federal Constitution, which had differentiated between national and foreign companies and had permitted preferential treatment of the former. Hardly the most zealous of advocates for globalisation, Cardoso nonetheless accepted the terms it offered Brazil, trying in this way, as political scientist José Luis Fiori observed at the time, to make of the national bourgeoisie a ‘junior and dependent partner’ of global capitalism. Cardoso’s critics on the left often presented this posture as detrimental to national sovereignty. In an article for Folha de São Paulo in 1997,economist Maria da Conceição Tavares recognised that, driven by the hegemonic interests of the US, globalisation placed pressure on states to ‘totally submit to the “liberalising” tendencies of international financial capital’. It implied ‘a relative loss of autonomy for the majority of national states’. However, she affirmed that this should not be taken as an indication of a ‘waning of the nation-state as such’. ‘On the contrary’, she argued, ‘all the logic of the movement of globalisation, since its origin, has the character of predatory competition and of patrimonialist speculation, which can only be contained and regulated by new forms of renovation and reinforcement of the mechanisms of intervention of national states’. If globalisation had not brought about an end of the nation-state, then, it had transformed the exercise of national sovereignty.

That sovereignty had been not terminally undermined but rather refashioned was the conclusion of the more subtle analyses of this period. But the debates about sovereignty and globalisation themselves were far from conclusive, not least because they were characterised by a lack of conceptual precision. Mostly concerned with international questions, they drew on those aspects of the canonical modern theories of sovereignty that addressed the nation-state’s outward, defensive, and reciprocal exercise of sovereignty — what is often called ‘Westphalian sovereignty’ (in reference to the norm of non-interference that followed from the Peace of Westphalia in 1648). They rarely addressed tensions intrinsic to sovereignty as a concept.

The exercise of sovereignty ‘outwards’ from the nation-state bears necessary relation to its ‘inward’ exercise, to an absolute and non-transferable decision-making power within a delimited jurisdiction, over the suspension of its laws and the establishment of states of exception. Moreover, already in early-modern European conceptions of sovereignty — the most acclaimed being those developed by Jean Bodin, Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke — the investment of these attributes in a monocratic sovereign constitutionally demanded the consent of a populus. That is, in a modern republic, the sovereignty of government would depend upon a popular sovereignty that it would nonetheless keep in check. Although, like Hobbes and Locke before him, Jean-Jacques Rousseau explained this relation with reference to a ‘social contract’, he granted a primacy to popular sovereignty through his theorisation of a ‘general will’. It is on account of this that he became associated with the open secret of modernity: that political decision ultimately rests with the people. Once revealed by revolutionary sparks in Lexington, Paris, and Saint-Domingue, in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, it would henceforth often be obscured — by dictatorship, by ideology, by capitalism’s mute compulsions — but never fully concealed.

The sovereign individual who emerged in the period of high-globalisation was not a figure of popular sovereignty, not the modern subject — who, by now, had long been killed off by philosophers, if not by History itself. It was then an international renewal of ‘populisms’, as well as a reassertion of national government, that seemed to indicate ‘the end of the end of sovereignty’, in the years following the financial crisis of 2008. At first glance, the dissolution of erstwhile social pacts and nascent challenges to American hegemony — connected consequences of globalisation — seemed to expose modern tensions between popular sovereignty and national-state sovereignty, while demonstrating the enduring relevance of both. But, from Cairo to Kiev, São Paulo to Santiago, the agents of ambiguous revolt against ruling classes in this period struggled to articulate a common political substance, as if conditioned by anomie, even in their desire for change. And if the idea of states asserting greater control over their borders and even over their national economies gained political currency, their powers were often curtailed by legacies of previous decades, by the legal order that had sustained neoliberalism’s regime of accumulation, as well as its material effects on government.

If sovereignty has returned, then, it is not in its conventional, modern mode. The notion that sovereignty is absolute in a modern republic has depended on a form of state able to combine centralised lawmaking and law-preserving powers with the maintenance of national territorial and economic integrity. But, by and large, this is not the form that exists today — at least in capitalist democracies. As a regime of risk, enabled by the deregulation of finance and the precarious informalisation of labour, neoliberalism has depended not on a small state, but on a juridically activist state that can serve as guarantor for accumulation. However, generating unprecedented debt, it has also emptied state capacities, under the pretext of maintaining fiscal responsibility and unfettering private enterprise. And so states have progressively subcontracted core functions. In Europe, public systems of health, education, and transport, products of bygone social-democratic governments, have palpably disintegrated. On capitalism’s periphery — in Brazil, in South Africa, in Lebanon — the unmaking of incipient welfare states has often appeared as a mere sideshow to the sanguinary effects of the decentralisation of state monopolies on legitimate violence. Meanwhile, the freer flow (licit and illicit) of commodities, people, and capital across borders has weakened states’ territorial dominion. Over time, then, neoliberalism has undermined its own political ballasts: ‘dedevelopmental states’ now increasingly lack the material capacities, and the authority, to sustain neoliberal regimes. And, within capitalist democracies, this is intensifying tensions between economic and political logics of government, contributing to recurrent crises of hegemony, as well as greater unpredictability in inter-state relations and diminished investment in international institutions.

It is in this context that there has been a dispersion and relativisation of claims to sovereignty. And Brazil provides an insightful case study, Rio de Janeiro being its most notorious laboratory of social fracture.

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Despite hopes that it might create conditions for a more inclusive national project, the democratisation of Brazilian politics, and the neoliberal reforms it facilitated, exposed and accelerated the fragmentation of sovereign control of national territory. In the decades since, this has provided further permission for mining, agribusiness, and construction companies to establish de facto fiefdoms, disregarding land and environmental regulations with impunity. But a more novel result has been the growing power of formally criminal organisations — of drug traffickers and urban milícias, most notably, but also of illegal prospectors and ‘agromilícias’ — that, through territorial control, establish their own permanent exceptions to legal order. Exploiting a lack of economic democratisation to build their social legitimacy, these groups do not act in dispute for the state, but in contestation of its legal impingement on their own economic activity — the sale of illicit goods, asset appropriation, and extortion. Nor is this contestation pursued in distinction from the state. On the contrary, to differing degrees, they have expanded their power through political networks and institutions of the state.

Sociologist José Claúdio Souza Alvez, a pioneering researcher of organised crime in the Baixada Fluminense, has long argued that the milícias of Rio de Janeiro are not parallel to the state, they are the state. Yet, though state functionaries play a significant role in their activities, either through direct integration within their ranks, or through transaction and cooperation, the milícias maintain a certain organisational autonomy. Over the last decade or so, the commercial enterprise of milícias in the state of Rio has become barely distinguishable from that of recognised trafficking organisations, such as the Red Command (Comando Vermelho, Rio’s largest drug faction), with the former increasingly involved in the drug trade and the latter involved in coercive land and property speculation. More than their particular interactions with state officials — which, of course, are often lethal — what makes both formations ‘factions of the state’, as well as ‘factions of the market’, is their contribution to the contemporary reproduction of state sovereignty.

Under advanced industrial capitalism, the state sovereign’s monopoly on law and monopoly on violence were essential prerogatives of stable government. But the mediation of society depended on economic devices, as well as, to a lesser degree, ideology. Compulsion on workers to sell their labour-power served as the primary, everyday means of containing social antagonism and moderating popular sovereignty, while different forms of welfare maintained those surplus populations waiting in the wings of the formal economy. This was never quite the reality of Brazil, where, less fully developed, such economic devices explicitly integrated forms of coercion carried over from slavery. But with the massive expansion of precarious informality in the job market throughout the neoliberal period, the mediating force of labour declined. Televised violence, exercised with general discrimination, against poor, black, peripheral populations, thus became the primary mechanism of social control.

In Rio, as advocated by local politicians — the Bolsonaro and Brazão families, but also the current mayor, Eduardo Paes — the milícia effectively became state contractors for the execution of this violence. But so, in fact, did the drug traffickers, unsuspecting martyrs of the spectacularised state. With Rio’s criminal organisations taking on this role, popular sovereignty has been not only moderated, but also sublimated, by their violence; their own relative autonomy a potential, but contained, threat ‘from below’ to the sovereignty of the state. Here, then, is a paradox of the contemporary exercise of state sovereignty: its very reproduction has come to depend upon its distribution and dilution.

To those who advocate a greater state presence in Rio’s embattled favelas, like Rodrigo Pimentel, former captain of the BOPE (the special forces of the military police) and co-author of Tropa de Elite, recognition of the state’s reincorporation of parastate sovereigns poses a cautionary response: the fragmentary organisation of the mediating execution of violence is the contemporary form of the state — a racket, arguably more brazen even than that associated with twentieth-century fascism by Frankfurt-School theorists; Rio’s favelas suffer not primarily from a lack, but from an excess of the contemporary state; for the state to provide their residents with the security, services, and opportunities for which so many struggle, it would need to be structurally transformed.

The dispersion of claims to sovereignty has not resulted in its ‘waning’ or ‘death’, as some contemporary theorists have proposed. Rather, it reflects an excess. In Rio today, local sovereigns — absolute in their respective territories, if regularly contested — govern by exception. Without a regulatory state able to reclaim its constitutive monopolies, the apparent sum of new sovereign powers amounts to more than the sovereignty to which the state could previously lay claim. A similar ‘excess of sovereignty’ is now evident in the inter-state system, with the establishment of more local exceptions to the erstwhile order of global governance.

Of course, sovereignty is not subject to strict quantification. And the indefinite and unfixed relation of its exercise to its ideal form gives it an illusory character. A symbolic discourse, ultimately sustained by appropriation of the material means for executive decision, it is, as proposed by political theorist Wendy Brown, a ‘potent material fiction’. But it then reconfigures the imagination — and, indeed, the ‘myth’ — of national community, of fatherland. If the fragmented fatherland that appears in the writing of Lima Barreto reflects an essentially Brazilian fracture, the modern expectation of a unitary form of government suggested the possibility of an authoritarian imposition of nationhood, if not the viability of its social construction. Now that the form of the state — fragmented, explicitly contradictory — has come to mimic that of society, the discourse of a ‘sovereign Brazil’ has become more difficult to sustain.

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In late October, the political discussion of sovereignty, which in recent months had centred on the government’s response to Trump’s tariffs, was given new impetus and direction. At 5am on a Tuesday morning, with streets already abuzz with the transit of workers, the state government of Rio de Janeiro initiated ‘Operation Containment’, targeting the Red Command across the Northern Zone, but focusing in particular on the Alemão and Penha favela complexes. It would have been an unexceptional Tuesday of police operations, but for the scale. 2,500 policemen were mobilised. Five of them died. They killed another 117 people – none of whom were among those named in the 100 arrest warrants issued by the police. It was the most lethal police operation in the state’s history. ‘Except for the loss of police life, the rest of the operation was a success’, blustered Cláudio Castro, state governor since 2021, responsible for three of the next four most lethal police operations.

Eight months earlier, Castro had delivered a report to the American embassy. Developed by his secretary for public security, apparently at the request of Flávio Bolsonaro, it made the case for the Red Command to be classified according to the ‘the criteria established by the US authorities for ecnomic sanctions, terrorist designations, and the blocking of assets’. Then, in May, Flávio discussed the report’s recommendation with a member of a US delegation to Brazil led by the State Department’s sanctions coordinator. On the same day, his brother, Eduardo, claimed to have done so too, during a visit to the White House. Four days later, Castro met with officials from the US Drug Enforcement Administration in New York.

The designation of Brazilian organisations as terrorists by the US would not only imply an imposition of economic sanctions on Brazilian banks and businesses connected to them. It would also possibly facilitate American military incursions into Brazilian waters and territory. The campaign orchestrated by Flávio Bolsonaro then gained further significance when, in early September, the US began bombing small boats in Venezuelan waters under the pretext of combatting ‘narcoterrorists’. On 23 October, Flávio reposted on X a video published by American Defence Secretary Peter Hegseth showing a small boat being destroyed by a drone. ‘How envious!’ he wrote. ‘I heard there are boats like this here in Rio de Janeiro, in Guanabara Bay, flooding Brazil with drugs. Wouldn’t you like to spend a few months here helping us fight these terrorist organisations?’

Six days later, in the immediate aftermath of the bloody operation in Rio, Cláudio Castro, and other bolsonarista politicians, referred to those murdered by police as ‘narcoterrorists’. This term was also deployed in reference to Brazilian factions by members of the Argentine government of Javier Milei, which had just been bailed out by the US, with a currency swap of $20bn. On 5 December, the Trump administration confirmed the implication of its identification of terrorists in Latin America, publishing a new national security strategy prioritising military activity in the Western Hemisphere. And it was not long before this promise materialised with the most brazen affront to national sovereignty in the Americas this century. That neither Trump, nor the lackeys in his government and in the leadership of allied governments were worried about constructed a pretext for the invasion of Venezuela demonstrates the direct threat the US poses to Brazil, as well as other countries in the region.

This sequence of events duly elicited from the federal government, and its allies, reaffirmation of its defence of national sovereignty. In early November, the leader of the PT in the House of Deputies, Lindbergh Farias, filed a request for the STF to investigate Castro for a ‘threat against sovereignty espionage’. Justice Minister Ricardo Lewandowski also suggested that the designation of Brazilian organisations as narcoterrorists violated national sovereignty. Again, the possibility of identifying the bolsonarista right with foreign intrigue was political opportune. And it might be, as suggested by Fernando Barros e Silva (with a nod to Roberto Schwarz), that, in Brazil, narcoterrorism would be a ‘delinquency out of place’. But, once summoned, its spectre nonetheless posed questions about the state’s internal dominion that would not be readily dismissed through invocations of sovereignty against foreign interference.

Two days after the operation, Rodrigo Pimentel was interviewed by CNN Brasil. In between sips from a mug bearing the image of a skull — the centrepiece of the insignia of the BOPE — he argued that the state government was engaged not in a ‘police operation’, but in a ‘war operation’. ‘Lewandowski hasn’t woken up to this’, he noted. There is now a substantial body of testimony from members of the BOPE and the CORE, the special forces of Rio’s civil police, detailing their preparation for warfare, including through the fomentation of a sense of duty to the nation. In 2010, after a large joint operation in the Alemão Complex involving the civil, military, and federal police forces, as well as the armed forces, members of the BOPE hoisted the national flag at the top of the cable car line that descends through the favela.

‘For God’s sake, the name of this is terrorism’, Pimentel insisted during the interview, referring to previous attacks by Rio’s factions on schools, on a shopping centre, and on the Palácio da Guanabara. ‘Essa atividade não tem razão econômica… isso é para colocar o Estado de joelhos… isso é uma afronta à soberania nacional’. The ex-captain came up obviously short here, in so far as it is from the pursuit of enrichment, not of a political ideal of society, that the challenge of the factions to the state is derived. Yet, while providing sophistical pretext for an intensification of the violence deployed by Cláudio Castro, he also identified a contradiction in the federal government’s claim to national sovereignty that, for all their cynicism, políticos bolsonaristas had been incapable of effectively exposing.

Denying that Castro had asked the federal government for support ahead of the operation, Lewandowski also announced a partnership with the state government to establish an ‘emergency office’ to combat organised crime. Over the following weeks, political discussion of ‘anti-faction’ legal measures intensified a dispute between state governments and the union over powers of decision in response to drug trafficking, which would in principle be federalised should factions be formally associated with terrorism. (It had been the PT government of Dilma Rousseff that had introduced anti-terror legislation in 2016, albeit under pressure from its opposition.) Demonstrating the political character of sovereignty discourse, Lula then seemed to neutralise the plotting of bolsonaristas by himself inviting Trump to help Brazil in combatting organised crime, particularly by clamping down on its financial activity.

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The PT and its fiercest opposition on the far right rarely encounter one another on the same political terrain, the former generally pursuing its goals through well-behaved participation in liberal-democratic institutions, the latter merely scrambling through these institutions like checkpoints in a warzone. But they are not in dispute over the exercise of different forms of sovereignty. Rather, they are in dispute over the implementation of different models for the management of the same regime of distributed sovereignty. In Rio, under this regime, any violence of the state exercised against the violence of the factions benefits the milícias, which, having recently ceded territory for the first time in many years, are even alleged to have lobbied Rio’s police forces to conduct a large operation against the Red Command. This is a regime of violence – a regime in which violence has come to play a central social function. And yet, individual acts of violence often recall Brazil’s bloody history.

In the hours after police withdrew from the Alemão and Penha complexes, members of those communities climbed the Serra da Misericordia, a hill range that divides the two. They encountered dozens of bodies, discarded by the state, many with signs of torture. An aerial photo of the bodies lined up in São Lucas Sqaure, in the Penha. Complex, provided perhaps the most poignant representation to date of the contemporary excess of sovereignty in Brazil. Reports circulated that a teenage boy had been found decapitated, his head hanging from a tree. ‘I think it’s unlikely’, affirmed Rodrigo Pimentel during a popular podcast, when asked for his view on the veracity of these reports. Shortly afterwards, a forensic investigation indicated that the boy, Yago Ravel Rodrigues Rosário, who had just recently joined the Red Command, had had his head cut off less than five minutes after being shot, while still alive. During an interview in November, the boy’s mother noted that ‘ele era só um menino… estava naquela fase de não escutar os pais’.

The trauma of his participation in the massacre of rebels haunted Policarpo Quaresma prior to his own sad end. Mostly black and brown, like those now killed by the police forces of Rio, the rebels, in reality, were victims of Brazil’s regime of sovereignty. That their cause was undoubtedly more virtuous than that of the traffickers who are the fodder of today’s state says more about changes in this regime than it does about changes in the virtue of summary state massacres. While the forces of Floriano Peixoto were putting down the Naval Revolt in Rio, he was also sending troops to Rio Grande do Sul to support Júlio de Castilho in suppressing the Federalist Revolution, which came to be known as the War of Decapitation, on account of the widespread practice of decapitation.

Though Lima Barreto presents his reader with a unitary, absolute sovereign, he also provides illustration of an essential social fragmentation. Today, the Brazilian state too manifestly exists as a contradictory assortment of fragments. It is, then, only from a social composition – the organisation of the many Brazils through forms of mediation that privilege life and freedom, compelled by popular sovereignties – rather than a singular ‘formation’, that a state capable of a more beneficent kind of presence in its marginalised communities is conceivable.  But in the cracks of Brazil’s social fracture have also grown movements of the dispossessed – of precarious and racialised workers, of indigenous communities, and self-emancipated slaves – focused not on transformation of the state, but on the creation of viable autonomies from it. Claiming collective rights to land, food, water, and energy, they articulate popular sovereignties outside the modern social contract. In part, a late product of the sad end symbolised by the death of Policarpo Quaresma, might they be agents of a new beginning?