On Tuesday, 26 January 2011, Rio de Janeiro initiated the largest anti-piracy operation in its history, and among the largest in the history of Brazil, with the shutdown of the Uruguaiana Camelódromo (street vendors’ market) in the busy city center, or Centro. More than 150 members of the civil police arrived at the market at 5 a.m. that morning, entered it, and ensured nobody was inside. Afterward, they encircled the entire structure with chains, all before any of the vendors opened their stalls at regular business hours.

By 9 a.m. I was there to witness a more bustling scene than normal at this high traffic urban market. Uruguaiana was cordoned off, with many of the stall owners milling about just outside the building, watching in panic as a panoply of vaguely official looking people rifled through their stalls. City workers in bright red shirts prevented access to anybody on the outside, while the various arms of Rio de Janeiro's police milled around indolently. Among the regular gallery of police, two organizations stood out. The first, the Delegacia de Repressão aos Crimes de Propriedade Imaterial (DRCPIM) or the intellectual property crimes division of the Rio police, had set up trucks in the center of market, alongside the second curious visitor, the Receita Federal, the federal institution in charge of collecting taxes and other revenues, including customs duties.

The events of 26 January at Uruguaiana represented a dramatic change in the relationship between property and “being Brazilian” that accompanied the shift from the Lula regime to that of his successor, Dilma Rousseff, under the same political party. These shifts, painted in larger strokes, show a country straining under its growth and reacting to international pressure in new configurations. Below I examine how these shifts have changed public space and piracy in Rio de Janeiro. I suggest that piracy stands in as a continuous process and discourse – not merely an act – that creates a cultural space involving specific actors, limits, times, and places. It does this against the assumptions of a meritocratic and flatly interconnected world, sans boundaries, that typically accompanies a state's entry inclusion into the respectable world order, such as Brazil's recent anointment into the BRIC group. As the Brazilian public forays into a new world of capital, clashing public spheres come into play.