The study, written by Luiz Ventura of the Department of Economics at Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos in Lima, Peru, is explicitly exploratory and theory-building rather than confirmatory. Rather than testing a predefined hypothesis, it develops an analytical framework through sustained engagement with a single, unusually visible case. Ventura draws on secondary sources including academic literature, institutional reports such as the 2008 parliamentary inquiry into the militias and the Federal Police’s 2023 organized crime task force, and investigative journalism from major national outlets. His central claim is that Rio de Janeiro’s trajectory reveals how criminal organizations, political elites, and segments of the security apparatus have co-governed urban territories through evolving arrangements of coercion, protection, and profit, and that this co-governance is best understood not as corruption in the conventional sense but as a structural reconfiguration of the state itself.

The conceptual core of the paper is an adaptation of Daniel Kaufmann’s State Capture Index, a framework that operationalizes state capture across three dimensions: Corrupt and Captured Rule of Law, which concerns the integrity of the judiciary, legislature, executive, and media; Captured Political Access and Policy, which concerns distortions in policymaking and political participation; and the Capture-Enabling Environment, which covers structural factors such as inequality, informality, and weak governance. The index itself is built from national-level datasets such as V-Dem, the Worldwide Governance Indicators, and the World Inequality Database, producing percentile-ranked scores for more than 170 countries. Ventura does not attempt to replicate these measurements at the subnational level. Instead, he uses the tripartite structure as a conceptual scaffold, identifying functionally equivalent local manifestations of each dimension in Rio de Janeiro’s urban politics.

At the local level, the paper argues, captured rule of law appears as police corruption, selective enforcement, judicial impunity, and violence directed at those who investigate criminal networks. Captured political access manifests through campaign financing by criminal groups, vote-buying, informal protection agreements between politicians and coercive actors, and the penetration of criminal networks into municipal decision-making. The enabling environment consists of structural inequality, high informality, weak regulatory oversight, and territorial governance vacuums that criminal groups fill with alternative systems of authority and rent extraction, often with varying degrees of tolerance or collusion from state actors. The paper stresses that these dimensions are territorially embedded: capture is not uniformly distributed across space but is unevenly produced and contested within specific territories, making it a spatially differentiated process.

The historical narrative that grounds this framework begins with the bicheiros, the operators of the animal game. By the mid-twentieth century they had consolidated a complex organization that went well beyond illegal betting, expanding through the quiet complicity of police and municipal authorities who oscillated between repression and tolerance. Politicians turned to bicheiros for campaign financing and territorial mobilization, while police officers received monthly allowances to look away. During the military dictatorship from 1964 to 1985, this pragmatic tolerance peaked, as authorities prioritized political control over urban law enforcement. Figures such as Castor de Andrade, the gambling boss of Bangu, sponsored samba schools and football clubs, projecting an image of civic patronage that masked a criminal empire. The paper describes this as an embryonic mafiocratic arrangement, a hybrid order in which illicit wealth and political authority were mutually reinforcing.

The turning point came with redemocratization. In 1993, Judge Denise Frossard sentenced fourteen major bicho bosses to prison in what became known as the bicheiros trial, exposing the network’s penetration into politics, law enforcement, and the media. Yet repression did not dismantle the structure; it forced a reorganization. As old leaders were jailed or weakened, their territories and protection networks fragmented, and police officers who had once served the bicheiros began forming their own protection rackets, justified under the rhetoric of combating crime in neglected neighborhoods. From this institutional vacuum emerged the milícias, paramilitary networks initially composed of active and retired police officers and firefighters who presented themselves as defenders of order against drug traffickers. In practice, they replicated and radicalized the logic of the animal game: control of territory, extraction of rents, and political brokerage, but with direct coercive power rather than negotiated tolerance.

The paper documents the scale of this transformation using spatial data from the Mapa Histórico dos Grupos Armados, produced by researchers at Universidade Federal Fluminense and the NGO Fogo Cruzado. Between 2007 and the late 2010s, the total area of the Rio de Janeiro metropolitan region under the control or influence of armed groups more than doubled, from approximately 177 square kilometers to over 430 square kilometers, while the population exposed to these forms of governance rose from roughly 2.5 million to more than 4.2 million people. Militias showed the most pronounced territorial growth, particularly during the 2010s, although their share of territory stabilizes below a majority threshold, with groups such as Comando Vermelho and Terceiro Comando Puro maintaining significant presence. Since around 2019, expansion has plateaued, suggesting a transition from rapid growth toward a stabilized, metropolitan-scale system of armed territorial governance.

Political capture, in Ventura’s account, is the stage at which these territorial configurations articulate with formal political structures. The paper points to the recurrence of legal sanctions, removals, and criminal investigations affecting successive governors of Rio de Janeiro, including the 2017 conviction of former governor Sérgio Cabral in the wake of the Lava Jato investigations, as evidence of a structured pattern of elite competition in which political office functions as an arena for controlling rents. It also cites the 2018 assassination of councilwoman Marielle Franco, executed with professional precision by former police officers later linked to the militia-associated Escritório do Crime, as a paradigmatic case of political violence at the intersection of organized crime, public office, and real-estate interests. Studies of voting geography in militia-dominated areas further suggest a systematic association between territorial presence and electoral outcomes, indicating a direct articulation between coercive control, clientelism, and political representation.

The final piece of the analytical architecture is money laundering, which the paper treats not merely as a concealment technique but as the regulatory bridge between the formal and informal spheres. Ventura describes three interlocking layers: local integration mechanisms such as front businesses and straw owners; professional facilitation by lawyers, accountants, and corporate service providers who mask beneficial ownership; and political protection mechanisms in which state agents shield criminal revenues from scrutiny. In Rio, illicit proceeds have historically flowed through real estate speculation in areas such as Barra da Tijuca and Campo Grande, public contracts and concessions in security, transport, and waste collection, and cash-based neighborhood commerce that finances campaigns and secures protection. Recent investigations suggest the growing use of fintech companies and cryptocurrencies alongside these traditional channels. The paper frames these local applications as interpretive hypotheses warranting further empirical investigation rather than independently verified findings.

The broader significance of the study lies in its reframing of how democracies erode. Mafiocracy, as Ventura defines it, is distinguished from organized crime as such by its focus on institutional authority rather than illicit markets, and from conventional corruption by the direct, coalitional participation of criminal actors in shaping institutional rules rather than using bribery as an external instrument. Crucially, the paper argues that the state is not a neutral container subsequently colonized by criminals; it is born captured, its institutional architecture shaped from the outset by the same elite arrangements that later determine which forms of capture consolidate. The author calls for future research to build subnational indicators consistent with Kaufmann’s structure, combining forensic financial analysis, field interviews, and network mapping to reveal the chokepoints where laundering meets politics. Without systematic ways of observing the nexus between organized crime and governance, the paper warns, the phenomenon risks remaining anecdotal or invisible, and metrics shape visibility. What began with caged animals in a zoo, the study suggests, ended with citizens confined by parallel systems of authority that operate not outside the state but within it.

Subject of Research: State capture and criminal governance by militias and organized crime in Rio de Janeiro

Article Title: From caged animals to caged citizens: mafiocracy and state capture in Rio de Janeiro

Article References: Ventura, L. (2026). From caged animals to caged citizens: mafiocracy and state capture in Rio de Janeiro. Frontiers in Political Science, 8, Article 1872696. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpos.2026.1872696

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fpos.2026.1872696

Keywords: state capture, mafiocracy, organized crime, Rio de Janeiro, militias, jogo do bicho, money laundering, corruption, criminal governance, democratic erosion, Kaufmann State Capture Index, hybrid governance