The basements of misdemeanor

In Os porões da contravenção , Aloy Jupiara and Chico Otavio unravel the historical and macabre relationship between the animal game and the military dictatorship.

The jogo do bicho (animal game) began as a strategy created by Baron Drummond to increase visitors to his zoo in Vila Isabel, Rio de Janeiro, in the late 19th century. Gambling soon spread to street corners and, as it spread, infiltrated the state apparatus, imposing itself through violence and corruption.

The romantic image of the neighborhood gambling system conceals an organization with mafia-like qualities, a business model, intricate schemes and planning, cash flow, and territorial division. Its professionalization was refined in the 1960s, taking advantage of the oppression of the lethal authoritarian machine assembled by the generals to annihilate the fallacy of the communist threat looming over Brazil. In exchange for protection and impunity, the illegal gambling bosses helped persecute the regime's enemies and used the pillars of military hierarchy and discipline to organize and expand their influence until they became one of the largest criminal structures in the country. It became established at the end of the bloodiest period of the dictatorship, in the 1970s and 1980s, offering the weakened military the power project they believed they had asked for and infiltrating two of the country's greatest passions: soccer and Carnival.

Its main characters, Anísio, capo of Beija-Flor, Castor de Andrade, the benefactor of Mocidade Independente, and Captain Guimarães, a soldier and torturer in the dictatorship's dungeons, grew up and appeared (not without much bloodshed) in the terribly favorable environment of this partnership.

In "The Porons of Contravention ," Aloy Jupiara and Chico Otavio recreate the fauna of terror in which the bookmakers sought the arms that would guarantee them security, territory, and organization. And they go far beyond exposing—which in itself would represent a journalistic milestone—the maneuvers through which the regime not only protected, but also enabled and even encouraged, the sustainable development of organized crime in Rio de Janeiro and, consequently, in Brazil.