International Journal on Criminology Volume 7, Number 2, Spring 2020 | Page 90

The Brazilian Army in the Fight Against Crime
tary training manual, which endeavors to clarify the constitutional principle of the
guarantee of law and order: “This principle authorizes the armed forces to ensure
effective respect of the law, rights, and duties in the legal order in force by assuming,
on the decision of the President of the Republic, central responsibility for
maintaining public security when the instruments of preservation of public order
defined by article 144 of the Constitution have been exhausted” (EB20-MF-10.101
2014: 3–4). 2 Bearing in mind that the constitution provides that the army should
only be an ancillary force in the fight against crime and organized crime, it is reasonable
to raise questions about the role, in practice, of the Armed Forces in these
types of operation.
Guarantee of Law and Order (GLO) Operations
Referring to the directives contained in the official publication of the Brazilian
Army cited above, it is possible to precisely define the circumstances in
which it can trigger a GLO operation: first of all, there must be a serious
threat to public order or the security of persons and goods; next, a situation of
insufficient resources must be established. Insufficient resources should be understood
as those of the “ordinary” police forces, whose main duty is public order.
Next, let us consider the process of triggering a GLO operation.
The starting point is a crisis situation, for example an explosion of urban
violence that the local security forces do not have or no longer have the capacity
to control. These local forces are the Civil Police and the Military Police,
which, it can be recalled, are under the authority of the governor of the state
concerned, and which form the first line of defense against criminal activities.
At any time, the state governor has the authority to declare that the police forces
are unavailable, nonexistent, or insufficient to fulfill their duty of re-establishing
public order in the face of the wave of violence imagined in our scenario. By means
of an official request addressed to the President of the Republic, the governor has
the right to solicit the help of the federal government to resolve the crisis.
The usual first response of the federal government will be to dispatch the
National Public Security Force in order to support the police forces of the state in
crisis. If this reserve force is not capable of resolving the situation, the President of
the Republic may then, by decree, trigger a deployment of the armed forces within
the framework of the GLO, in a clearly defined region and usually for a short
duration.
Here are some recent examples of the use of the Brazilian Army within the
framework of the GLO:
2 Translator’s note: Unless otherwise stated, all translations of cited foreign language material in this
article are our own.
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