I recently watched the Brazilian movie Tropa de Elite that everyone's been talking about lately. After having seen it, it's easy to understand why people feel so upset about the subject and according to a Brazilian friend, this is only the tip of the iceberg.

The movie is about BOPE, or Batalhão de Operações Policiais Especiais, an elite group of the Military Police in Rio de Janeiro. It depicts the violent downfall of a decaying Brazil; criminal syndicates rule the towns with drugs and guns, poor people starve while rich people thrive off the corruption and collect whatever's left from the chaos. The State can no longer handle the situation and ends up generating bureaucratic limits that hold the police back to do its job. Nothing works, except BOPE.

At first glimpse, most people will be offended by how this elite force works. It's ruthless and shows no mercy; it tortures children to find information, it executes criminals without arresting them, it uses the system to exploit holes and eliminate top criminals; it's on a war with society, ironically to protect it. Its function is a product of a public security system that has broken down; where the police cannot do anything, BOPE is called in to terminate the threat and secure the area. It lasts for a day, then a new drug lord has taken the place of the old.

BOPE, despite its methods, is a pragmatic force in a decaying civilization. It doesn't make sense to glorify it because few societies would benefit from such violence, but to accept its presence is to understand the situation. In a pluralistic, democratic society where a small elite is parasitizing on a middle class segment that has got no idea what to do except to keep working and play along with the rules, a poor underclass that has got no future, and a confused national identity with a history of a multicultural melting pot that sooner or later is about to explode, there is no easy way to solve problems. Chaos is a fact and to keep things under control, ruthless methods will have to be used.

This is what we learn from all democratic societies that allow political corruption, ethnic conflicts, stupid people to breed and criminality to grow: they slowly regress into war zones. On the public surface it looks to be a charming industrial welfare system, which allows the rich people to demonstrate "against violence" and welcome diversity and liberalism into the scene, but if you scratch it and look underneath, you'll discover the reality; a third world failure.

Can we condemn forces such as BOPE? Realistically, no. However, we must view it in the context of how our societies today are run. When there is no truly unifying aspect within a community, such as ethno-cultural heritage, people join it for other reasons: getting rich, selling drugs, buying products, becoming famous or exercising power. Such a community will gradually grow very unstable and therefore, the State will have to increase consensus on an external level by using power, force and violence. BOPE is such a force and its mission is not to change the system that needs a new design but to finish off the chaos that the system produces. It's like a hamster in a wheel: no matter how fast you run, you always end up in the same position and are forced to repeat the procedure.

As a result, the civil wars in Brazil will most likely continue, probably also grow worse. The root of the problems lie neither in too many criminals nor in ultra-violent military police. Both are inevitable parts of the system and only a complete remake of Brazil as a country will solve that problem. For most people, this realization is either uncomfortable or offending.

It's uncomfortable for the rich and corrupt elite, because it means their practices will have to be terminated. It's offending to the middle class, because it means that they can no longer blame the problems on superficial aspects such as "too much TV," "Americanization" or "drug dealing." We cannot blame BOPE either, nor can we rely upon such forces to hold our modern, pluralistic societies together forever. It's a temporary, although honourable, attempt to fight back against the consequences of an internal evil. Time will tell if we'll ever learn from our mistakes, before more people are killed over nothing.