Introduction

1 March 2017, Wednesday, residents of Santana, a slum in the Sapopemba district in the city of Sao Paulo, were following their daily routine. Soccer night, Corinthians and Brusque were competing for the Brazilian Cup. A group of young people are hanging out at a well-known corner, on a street that marks the border between the ‘asfalto’ and the ‘favela’. Everything was quite normal until the sound of gunshots made that night atypical. These happenings would change some residents’ lives forever and would become a milestone in the recent history of social movements in that neighbourhood.

The very negative outcome was one young man murdered (Rogério2), another seriously injured, and the suspicion that it had been an execution carried out by police officers who were not wearing uniforms and were driving regular civilian cars. The shooters didn't try to hide their faces: “The two men came openly, walking … into the favela and then they [shooters] executed him [one of the young guys],” Beatriz, an important district leader, tells us. “It was like a movie,” describes Fabio, a teenager who knew the victim and accompanied us during the fieldwork. Then the ‘movie’, registered by security cameras installed in nearby properties, goes on showing neighbours running to see what had happened, the mother's desperation and the arrival of other men who identified themselves as members of the Forensic Services, collecting the bullet cases that were scattered on the street after the shooting.

Our research in the east side of Sao Paulo began a few days after this fact and, given our research subject, that is, collective responses to violence and local social action, the case of Rogério's death was always brought up in conversation and interviews with residents. Some mentioned a big mobilization that had stopped an important avenue in the district the day after the homicide. Others added that it was an injustice that the young man had been killed this way, even though he was not ‘involved’ in crime anymore. Others were concerned about the physical integrity of the survivor. However, in general everyone had an opinion on what happened that March night and to how it unfolded an important social mobilization in the neighbourhood.