International Journal on Criminology Volume 6, Number 1, Spring 2018 | Page 16

Territorial and Corrosive: The “jogo do bicho” (Animal Game) and Organized Crime in Brazil
The Bicheiros were thus dividing up the territory. Now, anyone who wanted
to manage the animal game or slot machines (and in the 2000s the casinos) had
to get the agreement of the cupola, and then go through the points of sale, the
“banks.” The newcomers also had to pay the godfathers a monthly tax on their
profits. Each region, with its banks, was controlled by a Bicheiro. The animal game
spread throughout the State of Rio, and from there into Brazil’s principal metropolitan
areas.
As telephones became more common, they too became integral to the
trade and were used to make ticket sales. The trust between the population and
the Bicheiros was evidenced by the fact that telephone sales were simply recorded
by the “banker” in a notebook, without any receipts. Running the bicho relied on
reciprocal honesty and trust: the bankers trusted their customers to pay for their
tickets later, and the customers trusted that the bankers would always pay out.
Telephone sales strengthened this bond of trust between all parties.
During the Cold War, the Bicheros experienced real growth. At this time
Latin America was influenced by the United States more than ever. The enemy was
communism. The Brazilian generals, who came to power in a coup d’état, could not
have cared less about the offenses committed by the carioca Bicheiros. Influenced
by the Truman Doctrine and McCarthyism, 22 Brazil’s military sought to tackle the
“red menace” by means of the National Security Doctrine, a repressive state framework
that mostly targeted left-wing opponents. Naturally, the generals, with their
respect for moral standards, work, and the rule of law, could not ignore the animal
game. However, the repression of the game by the forces of law and order was of
secondary importance.
22 After the Second World War and the Cold War, hemispheric security became an anticommunist
alliance, based on “containment.” Two USA laws sealed the pact between the United
States and Latin America: the Mutual Defense Assistance Act (1949) and the Mutual Security
Act (1951). Thereafter, experts and military hardware flooded in, and Latin American officers
and non-commissioned officers learnt what a “modern army” was. According to Father José
Comblin, the National Security Doctrine, fundamental to the Latin American dictatorships of
the 1970s and 1980s, sprang from the fusion of three streams of thought:
1) A geopolitical ideology of national socialism. Written works by Latin American generals have
titles that are very similar to works by theoreticians of Nazi expansion such as Karl Haushofer and
Rudolph Kjellen.
2) An ideology of anti-subversion developed by the French army—the first to confront this new kind
of war—in Indochina and Algeria.
3) An ideology of homeland security established by the Pentagon in 1947. In their foundational
thinking and core concepts—homeland security, subversion, the enemy from within, international
communism, the nation in peril—these Latin American strategies take their inspiration from
McCarthyite legislation in the USA, buttressed by US experiences in Vietnam, as well as from the
“counterrevolutionary warfare” that took place in Latin America after the victory of the Cuban
revolution.
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