This article analyses the political status of mothers whose children have been killed by members of the Brazilian military police and armed forces in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro in the course of the ‘war against drugs’. These mothers bear witness to the reality of state interference in the lives of their families. The loss of a child interrupts their intimate affective bonds and temporal linkages between the past, present and future, thereby requiring a resignification of the meaning and temporality of their lives. The war waged by the state and the mothers’ struggle for justice gives rise to a social dynamic that positions these mothers in a reordering of space and a redefinition of time, creating a spatio-temporal existence of pain, despair and hope.
