Urban mass murders, or chacinas, are part of a context of violence and murders by death squads which have happened in the Pará state, Brazil, at least since the 90s. Among the most recent ones, there is the Belém Metropolitan Area chacina, which occurred in January 20th and 21st, 2017. It was the target of an ostensive news media coverage as much as of intense disputes towards the meaning of what had happened and its consequences. Due to such aspects, this master’s thesis analyzes the configuration of the chacina as a social event in journalistic narratives of newspapers from Pará state, Diário do Pará and O Liberal. Throughout the work, we present event theories and possible articulations between event and narrative as working concepts, emphasizing the role of emplotment in making events of social life. We also deal with the context and problematic fields of the Belém Metropolitan Area chacina in order to present the interpretations under which such events are inscribed. To analyze the narratives from both newspapers, we depart from an approach that is made of two concepts, eventful course and eventful scenes, so to understand how the violent event is configured. We identified three scenic orders throughout the configuration of this event: a) crime scenes; b) political-institutional scenes; and c) scenes of dispute. In Diário do Pará, the chacina is thematized as part of a political conflict between the state management of public security and the various meanings the newspaper proposes based on the deaths and other agents. In O Liberal, the chacina is integrated in a diffuse context of lethal violence or violent deaths, putting a strong emphasis on criminalizing the victims and echoing the state security management’s perspective on the event. Thus, the research findings point to an event that presents the chacina as a) the policeman’s death as well as the other victims’, killed in the Belém Metropolitan Area peripheries, .and b) through the political-institutional consequences that signal to the disputes of meaning in the narratives and by the social and political agents who are made part of them.
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