International Journal on Criminology Volume 6, Number 1, Spring 2018 | Page 12

Territorial and Corrosive: The “jogo do bicho” (Animal Game) and Organized Crime in Brazil
The criminologist’s role is to provide society with the tools to identify threats
to its development and preservation, and to supply analyses that challenge a blinkered,
change-resistant approach. 8 Bringing together historical data, theoretical
analysis, crime news and court reports, this study will look at the whole picture in
order to improve our understanding of the Bicheiros, and the direct and indirect
damage they do to the carioca community and Brazilian society in general.
1—HISTORY AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE ANIMAL GAME
Invention of the Animal Game
The invention of the animal game (jogo do bicho) goes back to 1892, not long
after the opening of the zoo in what was then the country’s capital, Rio de
Janeiro. 9 The creation of new leisure facilities was part of a wider project of
modernization and renewal in the Brazilian capital. One of the project’s aims was
to cope with the massive influx of immigrants at the end of the nineteenth century,
but it was also seeking to position this new tropical capital as one of the world’s
great capital cities.
The mayor of Rio de Janeiro, Francisco Pereira Passos, is attributed with the
idea of modernizing the city. He had visited Paris on many occasions and decided
to instigate works to remodel Rio, emulating Haussmann’s regeneration of Paris
during the Second French Empire. The carioca mayor’s office hoped that this project
would make Rio de Janeiro equal to the great European metropolises.
It was Baron João Batista de Vieira Drummond—known as Baron de
Drummond—a member of the carioca aristocracy, who was responsible for creating
a zoo in 1884 in the Vila Isabel neighborhood. To finance the operation and
upkeep of his new attraction, the Baron came up with a lottery for the zoo’s visitors
on an animal theme, with tickets costing a few coins. Each entrance ticket was
stamped with the image of an animal, chosen from a list of twenty-five (the same
list that is used today). At the end of the day, the zoo drew lots and the winner took
home cash worth twenty times the cost of the entry ticket.
According to the Brazilian historian Felipe Santos Magalhães, 10 the first
draw took place on July 3, 1892, when twenty-three visitors, whose tickets bore
the stamp of the winning animal (the ostrich) won the prize. But the original purpose
of the lottery was quickly distorted: it was bringing in large sums of money
for Baron de Drummond and became the zoo’s principal activity. Before long,
the public were only interested in zoo tickets because they enabled participation
8 Alain Bauer and Xavier Raufer, La face noire de la mondialisation (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2009).
9 Rio de Janeiro was the capital of Brazil from 1763 to 1960, by which time the President of the
Republic, Juscelino Kubitschek, had built a new capital city in the center of the country in
order to encourage migration to the interior.
10 Felipe Santos Magalhães, “Ganhou Leva...Do vale o impresso ao vale o escrito. Uma História
Social do Jogo do Bicho no Rio de Janeiro (1890–1960).” (PhD diss., Universidade Federal do
Rio de Janeiro, 2005).
9