Shedding Light on Criminal Territorial Control (with Vinicius Peçanha, Ana Paula Pellegrino, Ramón Chaves, Mathias Lusquiños) 

Organized criminal groups (OCGs) have controlled large portions of Rio de Janeiro’s territory for decades. Despite the centrality of this phenomenon to the city’s security landscape, systematic data on where these groups operate and how they affect civilian life remain scarce. To address this gap, we partnered with Light–Rio de Janeiro’s electricity company–to construct a dataset that maps territorial control exerted by criminal groups and evaluates their influence on private service provision. By leveraging the company’s extensive operational capacity–its workforce is deployed daily across virtually all Rio’s metropolitan area—we aim to generate a detailed, high-frequency dataset on territorial control by criminal organizations. 

Athletes for Peace: Exploring the Role of Sports and Emotional Skills in Preventing Youth Violence in Brazil’s Favelas (with Julia Guerra and Lelys Dinarte-Diaz) 

Militarized policing strategies to combat high homicide and violent crime rates are common across the developing world. While empirical evidence on the effectiveness of militarized policing in Latin America is weak—the only randomized militarized policing intervention, in Cali, Colombia, showed no crime reduction effects (Blair and Weintraub 2023a) – we still understand little about how militarized patrols are deployed throughout the region, whether they are effective, and what their secondary consequences might be. In cooperation with the Ceará government, we will conduct two quasi-experimental impact evaluations of RAIO patrols. The first exploits the rollout of RAIO bases across Ceará’s 184 municipalities. The second uses high-frequency GPS data from RAIO patrols within Fortaleza and leverages plausibly exogenous variation in exposure to those patrols to assess whether RAIO patrols decrease crime. A citizen survey of nearly 3,000 respondents – including embedded s the military, and the police.  This project aims to assess the impact of Athletes for Peace program, a sports-based and social-emotional learning (SEL) intervention targeting youth violence and crime reduction in Maré, an area of Brazil marked by the presence of armed criminal groups. In partnership with Fight for Peace, the pilot will test school-based recruitment strategies and assess the feasibility of survey instruments and new data tools to measure outcomes such as emotional regulation, mental health, and peer dynamics in a challenging security context. Additionally, the study will evaluate the availability and quality of administrative records for tracking long-term impacts and develop a monitoring platform to collect data on costs and implementation fidelity. Insights from this pilot will shape the full randomized evaluation in 2026, providing critical evidence for NGOs and policymakers in Brazil on effective strategies to address youth violence and crime in the short and long-run.

Financial Support: JPAL.

Violence, State Action, and the Disruption of Public Services (with Vinicius Pecanha, Julia Guerra, Sophia Medeiros, Rudi Rocha, Christopher Millett and Thomas Hone)

Violence in cities often reflects competition for territorial control between non-state armed groups and state security forces. These environments generate recurrent, spatially concentrated episodes of armed confrontation that can disrupt everyday life. We study how these episodes of violence affect the functioning of essential public service – health primary care. Exploiting within-clinic variation in exposure, we estimate the short-term effects of nearby violent events on healthcare delivery. Months with repeated violent events near a clinic are associated with a 7–8% reduction in total procedures. At the daily level, exposure to a violent event leads to an 11.7% decline in scheduled appointments on the same day, with no evidence of anticipatory or lagged effects. These disruptions are concentrated in lower-income areas and are driven primarily by police operations, while estimates for drug-related shootings are smaller and less precise. Our findings show that both state and non-state violence can disrupt routine access to essential services, generating acute but localized interruptions in care.