ANGELS OF DEATH: RELIGIOUS-ARMED CRIMINAL GOVERNANCE AND SYMBOLIC DISPUTES IN THE COMPLEXO DE ISRAEL

Abstract

This article analyses so-called narcopentecostalism as a form of criminal appropriation of religious repertoires in territories subjected to armed domination, taking the Terceiro Comando Puro and the so-called Complexo de Israel, in Rio de Janeiro, as its empirical axis. The research asks how symbols, narratives and Pentecostal languages are mobilised by criminal organisations to produce legitimacy, discipline conduct and eliminate competing symbolic authorities in spaces of low state density. The hypothesis is that the phenomenon should not be reduced either to the individual conversion of traffickers or to the sociological expansion of Pentecostalism in Brazil, but rather understood as a modality of religious-armed criminal governance in which violence, territory, illicit economy and moral meaning-making are articulated within a structure of local domination. Methodologically, this is a qualitative, exploratory and analytical-interpretative study based on bibliographical review, indirect documentary analysis, qualified journalistic sources, recent official data and a controlled historical comparison with the Knights Templar and the Sicilian Cosa Nostra. The theoretical framework mobilises Weber's concept of legitimacy, Foucault's relationship between discourse and power, Bourdieu's symbolic power, Mbembe's necropolitics, critical criminology in Baratta, Garland, Wacquant and Zaffaroni, as well as Camus's notion of the absurd. The findings indicate that the criminal appropriation of religion operates as a technique for governing conduct, converting armed obedience into moral duty, violence into symbolic purification and attacks on Afro-Brazilian religions into a strategy for eliminating competing cosmologies. It is further argued that the parastatal management carried out by organised criminal networks affects a democracy of risks, understood as the unequal distribution of protection, fear and exposure to violence in peripheral territories. The article concludes that confronting this phenomenon requires more than police repression. It demands the reconstruction of state presence, effective protection of religious freedom, territorialised public policies and democratic production of social belonging.