In six months time the world’s biggest sporting event will get underway in Rio de Janeiro. Here, Jules Boykoff, author of “Power Games: A Political History of the Olympics” takes a look at the winners and losers in the race for financial, rather than Olympic, gold.

By Jules Boykoff
Rio de Janeiro and Portland, Oregon

When Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff appeared at the Rio 2016 Organizing Committee headquarters brandishing a plaque with her “Ten Commandments of the Rio 2016 Games” – a list of social legacy-oriented good intentions – in November, the cameras dutifully snapped and flashed. The plaque was a gift from Eduardo Paes, the beer-quaffing, English-speaking, mediagenic mayor of Rio, a politician well versed in the art of the photo-op. But with the Games opening in only six months, many of those “commandments” now ring painfully hollow.

This might make Rousseff and Paes Olympic sinners. But as the Games approach, there are also real winners: well-positioned real-estate moguls, construction magnates, and perhaps Paes himself. Meanwhile, ordinary Rio residents are left with only shattered promises, with some even being forcibly displaced to make way for the Games.

These days, very few Cariocas believe the Olympic hype. In 2011, 63% in Rio thought that sports mega-events like the Olympics and 2014 World Cup would bring the city great benefits. By the end of 2015, only 27% shared that illusion.

As with much Olympics-induced public relations, the “10 Commandments” ripple with vapid prattle — one vows to “deliver a better city after the Games,” whatever that means. But some of the promises are quite specific, such as “use private money for the majority of the costs.”

This is relevant because in recent years the Olympics have been unmasked as a fiscal boondoggle, despite five-ring honchos in Rio asserting at every opportunity that taxpayer reais will make up less than half of the overall costs of the Games, with private interests paying the rest. Mayor Paes unswervingly repeats the assertion that private sources are paying for two thirds of the Rio Olympics bill.

But this statistic is extremely misleading. It fails to consider the quiet ways that Rio 2016 shifts public resources into private hands, ginning up large profits for well-connected impresarios with connections.

For starters, Rio 2016 brings enormous tax breaks. One study found that Olympic tax exemptions would be around four times higher than those of the World Cup, where tax breaks were nearly $250 million. In addition, public banks in Brazil are taking on speculative business risks to backstop Olympic projects. Also, local authorities have used the Olympics as a smokescreen to bestow valuable public land to developers at bargain-basement prices.

Nowhere has the transfer of public wealth into private hands been more brazen than in the construction of the Rio 2016 golf course. The Rio Olympics mark the return of golf to the Games after a 112-year hiatus. As was touted in Rio’s original Olympic bid, the metropolis already has two elite golf courses that have staged major tournaments. One of these could have been renovated to meet Olympic standards.

But in an audacious maneuver Mayor Paes decided to locate the golf closer to the Olympic complex in Barra da Tijuca, a wealthy western suburb, even if that meant plunking the course inside the Marapendi Nature Reserve, home to numerous threatened species.

In doing so, Paes teed up a staggering deal for billionaire developer Pasquale Mauro. As long as Mauro paid the bill for the golf course — between $20 and $30 million — he’d also win a contract to build 140 luxury apartments around it.

While the mayor’s office has pointed out the benefits of no public money being used in the construction of the site, these units start at $2 million, with penthouse condominiums pushing upwards of $6 million. It doesn’t take a math whiz to calculate the value of this multi-million dollar sweetheart deal, gift-wrapped by City Hall.

If the Olympics are all about real estate, Exhibit B has to be the Olympic Village. Built by Brazilian construction behemoth Carvalho Hosken, the Village will be converted after the Games into a luxury-housing complex called “Ilha Pura” (“Pure Island”). But Ilha Pura isn’t even an actual, geophysical island.  Carlos Carvalho — founder of Carvalho Hosken and campaign donor to Mayor Paes — explained to The Guardian that the name in fact referred to a “social island,” saying that he wanted to create “a city of the elite, of good taste…For this reason, it needed to be top class housing, not housing for the poor.”

But weren’t Rio’s poor supposed to benefit from the Games? One ‘commandment’ vowed to “Prioritize the neediest areas and the poorest part of the population.” But Rio authorities are acting as if “prioritize” means “prioritize for eviction.”

Since the International Olympic Committee awarded Rio the Games back in 2009, around 77,000 Cariocas have been displaced. “The number is likely much higher, since these are official statistics that traditionally undercount favela residents in all aspects of data collection, much less eviction,” Theresa Williamson, founder of Catalytic Communities, a Rio-based NGO that monitors human-rights issues in favelas, told From Brazil.

“Without the pretext of the Olympic deadline, very few of the evictions undertaken by the Paes administration would have been possible,” she added. “Thanks to the state of exception created by the Games, a small, insular group of people close to the mayor have been making broad decisions during the pre-Olympic period.”

Paes’ office has denied any wrongdoing. “City Hall does not use the instrument of compulsory removal, when families are evicted without prior knowledge or a transition process, and new housing is not offered. In any situation where people have to leave their homes, they only leave with the guarantee of a new home or compensation,” it said in a statement last August.

The experiences of one community, however, tell a rather different story. Vila Autódromo, a small, working-class favela on the edge of the Olympic Park, has found itself in front of the Olympic steamroller. As Rio stretched westward in the 1990s, Mayor Paes, then a young deputy mayor of Barra da Tijuca, alleged the neighborhood was causing environmental and aesthetic damage, and required demolition. He has since led the charge to expel every last resident of Vila Autódromo. In June 2015, efforts by the police to forcibly evict residents even turned violent.

Recently the psychological seesaw has verged on psychological warfare. Authorities have cut the favela’s water and electricity. Residents have experienced out-of-the-blue “lightning evictions” carried out by the Municipal Guard. Even the Polícia de Choque (Rio’s heavily armed and armoured shock troops) have played a part, intimidating locals and erecting a wall so obtrusive it would make Donald Trump proud. Meanwhile, on the other side of fence, Rio Mais, the construction consortium building the Olympic Park, cranks away.

“The Municipal Guard has protected the interests of the Rio Mais consortium against the interests of the population,” Larissa Lacerda, an organizer with the Popular Committee for the World Cup and Olympics in Rio de Janeiro who has worked closely with residents in Vila Autódromo, told From Brazil.

Although Vila Autódromo has been decimated, some families have refused financial compensation and are determined to stay in their homes. “Cruelty in Vila Autódromo has increased day by day, with City Hall doing everything it can to make life there unbearable. Yet a group of residents continues the resistance,” Lacerda explained.

In late November, I attended a cultural festival in Vila Autódromo that doubled as a solidarity rally. A large group —comprised of residents as well as busloads of community allies who traveled from other parts of Rio — assembled at the community’s cultural center, for music, information-sharing, food, and fun.

But even amid the good cheer, latent frustration bubbled up. Throughout Vila Autódromo slogans — photos of which are posted here — were scrawled in spray paint on the standing walls of demolished homes and on the white wall separating the community from the Olympic zone.

Wending through the rubble afforded an appreciation of the community’s grit and creativity in the face of peril. Someone had written “Paes Sem Amor” (“Paes Without Love”) on the wall that separates the community from the Olympic construction zone: a play on the phrase “Paz e Amor” (“Peace and Love”). Another took aim at a certain construction baron with a penchant for social stratification: “Carlos Carvalho, Não Somos Pobre/Você Sim é Pobre” (“We Are Not Poor/Rather, You Are Poor”).

But the predominant slogan around the favela was “Lava Jato Olímpico,” a reference to the widespread corruption scandal gripping Brazil’s political class by the gullet. The fiasco has, quite understandably, gobbled up the media’s collective attention. One side effect is that Operação Lava Jato has deflected attention from the Olympic build-up and all its deficiencies.

In a way, the double-whammy of political and economic crisis has been a blessing for Olympic organizers, allowing their logistical hiccups to fly under the public radar. But as the Games draw closer, more people are pointing out the stark fact that billions are being spent on the Olympics at the same time as social services in Rio are being slashed. Public spending reveals priorities and values. With the Rio Olympics, it is not hard to see who is being prioritized and valued and who is not.

“Favelas are not always a problem. Favelas can sometimes really be a solution, if you deal with them, if you put public policy inside favelas,” Mayor Paes explained in a slick Ted Talk in 2012. One such “public policy” was Morar Carioca, an ambitious favela upgrade program designed to bring basic infrastructure like paved roads, sewer systems, and improved electricity lines.

In 2010, Paes said that thanks to “Olympic inspiration” the Morar Carioca program would be a lasting legacy of Rio 2016. But by 2014, the program had stagnated and Paes had made a political U-turn, asserting Morar Carioca had absolutely nothing to do with Olympic legacy. The original collaborative spirit of the program has vanished, even if the Morar Carioca label is occasionally trotted out and pinned to public works projects.

If Rio 2016 runs smoothly, Eduardo Paes may be able use his platform as five-ring kingpin to catapult to higher office. Eduardo Cunha, the scandal-wracked Speaker of the lower house of Congress currently being investigated for having millions of dollars reportedly squirreled away in Swiss bank accounts, has anointed Paes as his favored candidate for the 2018 Brazilian presidential election.

The Olympic Games inevitably feature winners and losers on the track, in the pool, and on the velodrome. But Rio 2016 Olympic luminaries vowed to make ordinary Cariocas into winners as well. “Leave a legacy for the entire population of the city,” chirps one of the commandments. With the Games only six months away, this hopeful boast reads like gripping fiction of the cruelest sort.

By James Young
Belo Horizonte

Working at the Car Wash:

In 2015 the sheafs of stodgy political news that take up the front sections of most Brazilian broadsheets finally contained something to interest ordinary readers, as the Federal Police’s Operação Lava Jato (Operation Car Wash) investigation into corruption at giant state-controlled oil company Petrobras dominated the headlines.

The probe into the billion dollar bribes racket has seen the arrest of top executives from a number of Brazil’s leading construction companies, along with several major political figures, including the former treasurer of the governing Worker’s Party, João Vaccari Neto. It has also made a household name of the scheme’s bagman turned informant Alberto Youssef, and earned Newton Ishii, known as O Japa or “The Jap”, a police officer present at many of the arrests, his own carnaval theme tune.

Despite the damage wreaked upon Petrobras and an already reeling economy, many observers have suggested that by bringing down senior business leaders and crooked politicians Operation Car Wash represents proof that Brazil has finally sickened of its seemingly ingrained culture of impunity, and also demonstrates the healthiness of the country’s separation of powers, plus the strength of its judiciary – Lava Jato has brought about the first ever arrest of a sitting Brazilian senator, Delcídio do Amaral.

Cynics, however, would point out that much the same was said around the time of Brazil’s last enormous corruption scandal, 2005/2006’s Mensalão (“Big Monthly Payment”) swindle (and the enormous corruption scandal before that, and the one before that…), and suggest that it will take decades to root out the institutionalised culture of graft that riddles the country’s political framework.  

Protest Songs:

If things were bad in Brazil in 2015, then at least there was no shortage of people willing to speak out against them.  Many of the year’s demonstrations had an anti-government theme – from the panelaço (pot-banging) demonstrations that echoed from the balconies of apartment buildings in August, to the hundreds of thousands that took to the streets in the same month to call for impeachment, an end to corruption, and in some disturbing cases, military intervention.

Critics, meanwhile, dismissed such protesters, who in many cases were drawn from the better-off sections of Brazilian society, as merely reflecting upper middle class self-interest. In response, pro-government supporters took to the streets in smaller, but still significant, numbers in December.

Perhaps more encouraging than such partisan affairs was the #NãoFechaMinhaEscola (“Don’t Close My School”) protest movement in São Paulo, where thousands of students occupied their threatened schools and eventually forced the state government to suspend an educational reform programme that would have meant the closure of hundreds of learning institutions.

There was also what at least one article described as an embryonic “Women’s Spring” movement – a series of public actions in support of women’s rights, built around opposition to proposed law changes that would further hamper Brazil’s already extremely limited access to abortion.

Further highlighting the wrongs of the country’s often unpleasant culture of machismo was the online #MeuPrimeiroAssedio (“My First Harassment”) campaign, where, following the posting of a number of lewd comments about a 12-year-old female contestant on Brazil’s MasterChef Junior TV show, tens of thousands of Brazilian women used social media to recount the first time they had suffered sexual harassment.

Fear and loathing on the internet (and everywhere else):

If social media has allowed many of Brazil’s previously disenfranchised groups to find their voices, it has also given other sectors of society space to share the rather less edifying contents of their minds, and 2015 saw a number of incidents of online racism. Comments such as “I’ll pay you with a banana” and “lend me your hair so I can wash the dishes” were left on the Facebook page of black actress Taís Araújo in November, while TV journalist Maria Julia Coutinho suffered similar abuse in May.

Imbecilic TV comedy show Pânico Na Band, meanwhile, briefly thought it would be acceptable to feature a character known only as The African, played by a “blacked-up” white actor, who spoke only in grunts and shrieks and acted in what the show’s creators appeared to believe constitutes typical “African” behaviour – scratching at parts of his body, tearing at plants and leaves and performing a dance of thanks for the judges of a cooking contest.

Away from the headlines, such high-profile instances of prejudice reflected the reality of life for millions of black and working class Brazilians. The country’s social divisions came to the fore once again in September when, following a number of mob robberies on the city’s beaches, Rio de Janeiro police instigated searches of public buses running from the poorer northern suburbs to the wealthier seafront districts of Zona Sul.

At the same time, local residents set up vigilante groups to deal with the threat. “We’re looking for kids in cheap flip-flops, who look like they haven’t got R$1 in their pockets,” said one of the brave urban warriors. “It’s obvious that they’re here to steal,” said a shop worker from Copacabana. “If they want terror, we’ll give them terror. It’s self-defence.”

The Ballad of Dilma…

The storm clouds of impeachment have arguably been building in Brazil since President Dilma Rousseff narrowly clinched a second term in office back in October 2014, following a surly and spiteful contest. At the time, opposition leader Aécio Neves claimed he had lost not to a political rival but to a “criminal organisation”, while his PSDB party muttered darkly about being the victims of electoral fraud. Rousseff’s foes have been gunning for her and her governing Worker’s Party ever since.

The argument for impeachment often seems to follow one of four strands: (a) we don’t like Dilma very much (Rousseff’s approval rating sank as low as 8% in August) (b) Dilma used to be president of Petrobras (see Operation Car Wash, above) and so must be a crook (c) we don’t like Dilma very much and (d) the government’s pedaladas fiscais, or financial manoeuvres, where transfers to banks responsible for making a number of welfare programme payments are deliberately delayed, making the overall financial situation look rosier (or at least less terrible) than it actually is. Such manoeuvres, say those calling for impeachment, are illegal.

The pro-impeachment movement believe the pedaladas fiscais represent their smoking gun, and proceedings against Rousseff are now underway. The government, meanwhile, say the pedaladas have been common practice since 2000, when the opposition PSDB was in power, while Brazilians who oppose impeachment describe the process as a coup. No one knows how this particular novela will end, but two things are guaranteed – it won’t be short, and it won’t be pretty.

…and Eddie

No pantomime would be complete without a villain, and there have been few shadier politicians in Brazil in 2015 than Eduardo Cunha, dubbed the country’s Frank Underwood by a number of commentators. While Cunha has not (yet) pushed a reporter under a speeding subway train, his skulduggery in other areas seems unbounded.

“In all my time in politics, he’s the most Machiavellian figure,” Ivan Valente, the experienced president of the left wing opposition party PSOL, told The Guardian in an interview in October. “Cunha is a politician who is opportunistic, intelligent, ambitious and corrupt.”

Since being elected Speaker of the Lower House in January, Cunha – whose PMDB party remain, officially at least, Rousseff’s allies – has made it his mission to add to the President’s woes at every turn, leading campaigns to overturn government sponsored legislation or pushing through his own, usually government-unfriendly, bills.

At the same time, Cunha has been accused of taking millions of dollars in bribes as part of the Petrobras swindle, and of stashing the money in Swiss bank accounts. At least his alleged machinations have lent the often deadening weight of the recent corruption sagas a touch of glamour – Cunha’s wife reportedly used some of her husband’s ill-gotten gains to pay for lessons at Nick Bollettieri’s exclusive tennis academy in Florida.

At the same time, he has attempted to use his authority to accept or reject impeachment petitions to curry favour with both the opposition and the government.

Cunha, an ultra-conservative evangelical Christian who supports the creation of a “Heterosexual Pride Day” in response to what he sees as a growing “gay ideology” in Brazilian society, finally pulled the trigger to initiate impeachment proceedings mere hours after Worker’s Party deputies announced they would support an Ethics Committee investigation into his denials of the existence of the (alleged) Swiss loot.

Despite recently having had to endure the indignity of an early morning police raid at his home, Cunha snorts at suggestions he might step down, as well as the Frank Underwood comparisons. “He’s a thief, a murderer, and a homosexual,” he is reported to have said, “and I’m not”.

Sweet River No More

One of the most distressing sights of the year was the devastated landscape around the town of Mariana in the state of Minas Gerais after millions of gallons of mining waste burst free from a collapsed tailings dam.

At least 15 people are known to have died in the flood, and the ensuing environmental damage is likely to be catastrophic, with the sludge now having flowed down the Rio Doce (“Sweet River”) to reach Brazil’s Atlantic coast. “This is a permanent blow. The cost is irreparable. A lot of life forms are never coming back,” Professor Carlos Machado, a researcher at the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation in Rio de Janeiro, told the LA Times in December.

Describing the dam burst as a natural disaster is misleading, however. This is a tragedy with human hand-prints all over it, with the aftermath revealing both the potential negligence of the mine’s operator, Samarco (a joint venture between the Anglo-Australian mining company BHP Billiton and the Brazilian firm Vale), and the failings of Brazil’s “outdated mining code and decrepit regulatory system”. According to an article in The Daily Telegraph, only 400 of Brazil’s 15,000 mining dams were inspected in 2014.

The environmental news was little better elsewhere – a critical water shortage saw São Paulo suffer long periods of water rationing as the south east of Brazil underwent its worse drought in 80 years, while almost a thousand towns and cities in the dry inland regions of the north east of the country declared a state of emergency because of a lack of water.

The Killing Fields

Police killings in Brazil are hardly a recent development – according to a report by the São Paulo based Brazilian Forum on Public Safety there were 11,197 homicides carried out by police between 2009 and 2013, a rate of six a day. Even so – perhaps it was down to greater media awareness or the ubiquitous presence of cell phones, useful for filming or photographing wrongdoing – the relentless stream of negative headlines involving Brazil’s police forces this year felt unprecedented.

From 10-year-old Eduardo de Jesus Ferreira, who was shot and killed by police in the Complexo do Alemão favela in April (his mother claimed that a policeman standing over her child’s body told her “I might as well kill you, just as I killed your son, because I killed a bandit’s son”) to the five young men slaughtered when their car was sprayed with bullets in the Lagartixa community in the north of the city in November, Rio de Janeiro was the scene of many of the police killings.

The September murder of four young men outside a pizza restaurant in Carapicuíba in Greater São Paulo (a police officer, who claimed the men had mugged his wife, was later arrested and accused of the crimes), and the death of 20-year-old Alisson Campos da Silva, shot and killed by police as he reached for his cell phone – which the officer in question believed was a gun – in Recife earlier this month, shows that Brazil’s police murders, whether in the form of trigger happy cops on duty or extra-curricular vigilante killings, and which invariably seem to involve young working class black or dark-skinned men – are a national, not a local, disgrace.

As the writer and journalist Xico Sá put it when writing about such young men in an essay inspired by the footballer Flávio Caça-Rato (Flávio the Rat Catcher), who grew up in poverty in Recife – “some, like Flávio, escape, thanks to football, funk or rap, but most are lost along the way, little Rat Catchers doomed to a life amidst the human refuse or, worse, ended by the bullets (nothing stray about them) of the police – almost always dead by the time they are 30.”

Once a symbol of growth and rising confidence, the sprawling suburbs outside Brazil’s urban centers are feeling the pinch as the economy nosedives. And there are few places in the country where it is so obvious how out of touch the bickering politicians in Brasilia are with the realities of daily life.

By James Young
Belo Horizonte

Aside from the humdrum backdrop of harrowing, everyday tragedy, three subjects have dominated the headlines in Brazil in recent months – the enormous Petrobras corruption scandal, the country’s economic downturn, and the political game of thrones being played out on a seemingly infinite loop in the capital of Brasilia.

The narratives inevitably intertwine – as Brazil’s very own Frank Underwood, the speaker of the country’s lower house, Eduardo Cunha, wages war on Dilma Rousseff’s struggling government, the Petrobras investigation appears certain to involve many leading political figures, including now Cunha himself, while the acrid climate of squabbling and corruption, coupled with Rousseff’s toxic approval ratings, torpedoes any attempts to keep a seemingly sinking ship afloat.

Observing such events unfold from afar, however, lends a detached, surreal air to proceedings, like watching an episode of House of Cards with the actors replaced by Rousseff, Cunha, former presidential candidate Aécio Neves and the rest. It is often hard to reconcile the self-serving manoeuvres of such hardened players of the jogo do poder (“the power game”) with the tough reality of life in Brazil’s working class bairros.

One such hard-knock neighbourhood is Jordão, tucked behind the airport in the southern periferia of Recife, and home to around 20,000 people. Divided between the municipal authorities of Recife and neighbouring Jaboatão dos Guararapes, Jordão suffers from the familiar problems of many of Brazil’s lower class neighbourhoods, particularly in the nordeste – an unreliable public transport system, low quality housing, limited accessibility to healthcare and schools, an intermittent electricity and water supply, poor sewerage, and high levels of urban violence.

Meanwhile residents do their best to fill the gaps in the services supplied by the government or city council. Ten years ago sisters Raquel and Rozeli Santos opened the Educandário Amara Maurício primary school in a tiny three room building, as neither Recife nor Jaboatão provided a public school for young children in the immediate area. “For years an up and coming local politician financially supported us,” Raquel told me, “making sure that local people knew all about his generosity. Once he was elected, the donations stopped.”

A new building has been constructed with eight classrooms, big enough for 300 children, and now the school survives (barely) on monthly fees of around U$27 per pupil, not enough to pay the ten teachers, all of whom are from the bairro, much more than the minimum monthly wage of U$240. When I visited the school just over a year ago, the yard was filled with jagged bricks left over from the building work, and there was nowhere for the children to play.

Jordão is often affected by water shortages and power cuts. “Some months the electricity is off for a few hours nearly every day,” said Jessica Santos, Rozeli’s daughter, at the time a teacher at the school.

“It feels like we’re forgotten,” said Raquel. “Recife forgets about us and Jaboatão forgets about us.” Drug addiction is a major problem in the neighbourhood, as is lawlessness. “They killed a young boy a few weeks ago,” Raquel said. “He hit someone’s motorbike, just a scrape. Someone pulled out a gun and shot him.” It is not a rare occurrence. Stories such as those of Klébson Gomes da Costa, the ten year old boy hit by a stray bullet during a shootout between police and traficantes (drug dealers) in May 2013, or Taísa Priscila Rodrigues da Cruz, a 20-year-old drug user who was shot and killed a few months later, are common.

In recent years residents of neighbourhoods such as Jordão have seen considerable improvements in quality of life, due to Brazil’s expanded Bolsa Familia welfare system, an increased minimum salary, and overall economic growth. Two years ago I sat in a scruffy bar and watched what seemed like half the bairro make its way to that essential staple of middle class Brazilian life, a plush new gym. It looked like better times lay ahead.

But now the government is introducing austerity measures and the growth has gone into reverse. According to research institute IBGE, the national unemployment rate last month was 6.9%, the highest June rate since 2010. The same study put the jobless level in Recife at 8.8%, although other surveys are even more negative – the Diario de Pernambuco, the oldest newspaper in South America still in circulation, stated that 12.9% of Recife’s workforce was unemployed in March.

Part of this statistic is Edilson Alves da Silva, a 36-year-old mechanic and factory worker. Edilson lives with his wife Elma and her daughter in a typically cramped Jordão house, with an imposing metal front door protecting a small bedroom, living room and kitchen. Another bedroom has been fashioned from a lean-to by the front entrance, and a tiny bathroom takes up one corner of the kitchen.

For the last eight years Edilson was part of the production line in a factory that makes the tin-foil plates used to hold quentinhas – the take-away lunches that are so popular in Brazil. His and Elma’s salary put the family firmly in the heart of the country’s swelling “new” middle class – Classe C and D, one of the groups that has suffered most during Brazil’s economic troubles.

Last October, just as campaigning in Brazil’s presidential elections entered its final straight, Edilson was made redundant, along with a number of his colleagues. “I think the company saw that the crisis was on the way,” he says. “When I lost my job I thought I’d find another one easily, but it hasn’t turned out that way. I’ve had around 20 interviews, but every time there’s a line of people like me looking for work.”

After working all his life, Edilson says it is difficult to get used to being unemployed. “It’s hard to survive, but at least my wife is working. My redundancy money was gone after three months – I wish the crisis had ended so quickly. Prices keep going up (some reports have put inflation at 8.47% over the last 12 months, but the price of many goods has increased at a considerably faster rate) which means what little money we have doesn’t go far.”

Edilson says he sees the results of Brazil’s economic woes everywhere he goes in Jordão. “There are lots of people standing around in the street, doing nothing, at 10 o’clock in the morning. They’re tired of going out every day delivering their CVs, having interviews, and not getting hired.”

Like many of his countrymen, he is scathing of the politicians’ attempts to solve Brazil’s problems, and their apparently greater interest in the jogo do poder.

“My hopes for the future are in the hands of the vultures in Brasilia,” he says. “The business leaders and politicians are supposed to have the influence and knowledge to find a way out of the situation. Those down below don’t have that option. All we can do is sit and wait.”

Why do ‘pro-government’ protesters battle cops, while pro-impeachment protesters hug them? Which team are these guys on, again? A guide to the current crisis

Vincent Bevins
São Paulo

I just spent a month away from Brazil, which served to remind me of just how inscrutable the struggles currently rocking this country are to foreign observers. They may know that things are not as rosy as they were a few years ago, or that “the government” has messed up or is in trouble. But the contours of the battles are extremely blurry.

For example. Last week, protesters clashed violently with police outside Congress in Brasília during a demonstration against a new legislative project (pictured above). A few days later, on Sunday, a much larger group of protesters, some of whom smiled and posed for selfies with heavily armed cops, cheerfully filled streets around the country,

It is indicative of the topsy-turvy world that crisis-ridden Brazil has entered that the bloody demonstrators battling cops were the ‘pro-government’ protesters, while the cheerful, carnavalesque crowds were calling for the president to be impeachment and her party to be demolished.

That’s because “the government” is not just one government these days, and a number of players (some even less scrupulous than the others) are currently engaged in a fight for its future.

So who are they? What do they want? What are their chances?

The government, part 1 (executive)

President Dilma Rousseff, of the left-leaning Workers’ Party (PT), was re-elected in October and began her second term in January.

The PT has controlled the Presidency since Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva took over in 2003. By any global standard, Lula’s time in power was good for Brazil. Buoyed by high prices for its commodities, the economy surged forward, and moderate social programs helped roughly 40 million people rise from poverty into the “new middle class.” He left office with record levels of support.

Dilma, former left-wing guerrilla and Lula’s hand-picked successor, took over in 2011 and enjoyed widespread support for a while. But the commodity boom ended and the economy slowed down amid mistakes made by Dilma’s government. Then the June 2013 protests happened, and so did the World Cup, which only turned out pretty well in contrast to the mess it was expected to be, and because Brazilians were polite enough to keep their rage about wasteful spending to themselves while the foreign fans were here.

By the 2014 election, Dilma had lost much of the goodwill Lula had bestowed to her. She barely beat out opponent Aécio Neves (PSDB) by frantically appealing to the working poor and middle-class leftists, denying many of the economic problems the country faced and promising what we all knew she couldn’t deliver in the short term.

She won, promptly installed a Finance Minister that her core supporters (and probably she herself) consider ‘neoliberal,’ who embarked on a series of painful adjustments as the dire economic straits Brazil finds itself in became exceedingly obvious. For the first time since 2003, regular people’s lives not only stopped improving, but in some cases, began to get worse. And all the while, since the middle of last year, it slowly emerged that the Federal Police have built a credible case that the state-run oil company, Petrobras, funneled billions of dollars to huge construction companies, who then passed some of the bribes on to political parties.

The government, part 2 (legislative)

If Brazil were a monarchy, that would be it. Rousseff would be “the government.” But Brazil is a loose federal republic with a staggering 28 parties active in its two legislative houses, and 26 state governors who each control their own police forces.

Much of Lula’s success was attributable to his ability to cobble together an unlikely coalition of parties and economic actors and thus keep the party going. This group has included right-wing parties, major figures Lula used to bitterly oppose, one president already impeached for corruption, and big parties who may not believe in much, other than the spoils of power.

Maintaining this kind of a coalition is a lot easier if you have Lula’s charisma and political capital. It’s even easier if you have so much money flowing in that you can make everyone in the country richer at the same time.

Dilma has none of this at the moment, and it’s all falling apart.

Amidst the chaos and political weakness of the first few months of Dilma’s second term, the PT lost control of Congress. The “catch-all, pork loving” PMDB has gained control of the Presidency of both houses and is openly rebelling against Dilma. Eduardo Cunha, an evangelical Christian, has been especially combative. Contributors to this blog have made it pretty clear who these guys are. It is not only that have they taken advantage of Dilma’s weakness. They are also reportedly furious that both of their Congressional leaders, Renan Calheiros and Cunha, have been named in the investigation into the Petrobras corruption scandal.

Recently, they have been pushing a bill that allows for more companies to treat employees as contractors. The PT hates this law, and so do the left-wing and union protesters that marched against it last week in Brasília. That’s who battled cops in Brasília last week, decked out in red. They support “the government” (Dilma) against right-wing threats, but despise Cunha and company.

Many people want Neves and the PSDB in power. Many, but less than before, want Dilma’s PT to hold on and thrive. But few people will tell you they love these guys.

The protesters, 2015 edition (green and yellow)

On Sunday, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets around the country to denounce Dilma and call for her impeachment. This was less than they mustered a month earlier, but this group and its demands are not going away.

These protesters want Dilma gone, now, and mostly hate the PT passionately. A small minority call outright for military intervention. Anecdotally speaking, these people have not felt represented by the PT government in years, and their anger has exploded further since the October election. Studies suggest they are wealthier and whiter than average Brazilians, and that they are most likely to take their cues from Brazil’s most right-wing major publication.

According to this study, they also hold some strange beliefs. A majority said they think the PT “wants to impose a communist regime in Brazil.” The Economist recently called them a “Tropical tea party.” They are usually law and order voters, which explains why some of them embrace the police that terrify many poor Brazilians and traditional protest groups.

But it is not enough to just wave one’s hands, and say that Brazil has always had a small but powerful right-wing section of the elite, that they never liked the PT anyways and hold views that many English-language readers would find bizarre. That may describe some of the core demonstrators who are actually in the streets. But it’s also important to recognize why they’ve been able to step into the spotlight now, and that many regular people are sympathetic to their broader demands.

Another recent poll made very difficult reading for the PT. Datafolha reported that 63% of respondents support an impeachment process against President Rousseff. And 3/4 of respondents said they supported the recent protests around the country.

This must include many people that voted for her. And it’s not hard to see what explains this swing. Things have gotten worse.

Social movements, unions, and the left (protesters in red)

But it’s not just the rich, white, and conservative that are upset. Many of the core supporters of the PT project had hoped that Dilma would follow up on her left-wing campaign with a shift to the left. She did not. They were doubly mortified to see the country fall into the hands of her former conservative allies in Congress, who have been eager to push an agenda they consider homophobic and a serious threat to labor rights.

In much smaller numbers, they took to the streets yesterday, alongside fast food workers, to protest this new direction. These guys come from the traditional left, and have traditionally clashed with police at times.

And while they bitterly oppose the other group of protesters, accusing them of being golpistas, they are also an outgrowth of real discontent with the status quo. They would argue that to tackle the very real popularity problems the Datafolha survey revealed, the PT should return to its left-wing roots.

It’s also notable that Brazilians, perhaps fed up with the system in general, have been quite eager to support all kinds of protests recently. In 2013, a remarkable 89% supported the protests started by an anarchist-leaning student group after they exploded into wider demands for better public services and an end to corruption.

Who will triumph? (pure speculation)

Marxists and free-market liberals alike sometimes make the mistake of thinking that if things just get bad enough, a solution they like will appear. The radical left looks to 1917, and liberals look to 1989, as evidence of this. But what happens more often is that things just sort of muddle along, in a dispiriting and crappy way, with no easy way out.

While admitting that anything could happen, I’ll venture three possibilities for the next few years. The first is that the political and legal circumstances change, and Dilma is actually impeached. For now, this seems unlikely, but it is possible. In any case, it would only be a victory for the yellow-green protesters in that it would be a blow to the PT. Their preferred representatives would be extremely unlikely to take over. Another possibility is that the PT manages to retake control of the situation, getting the economy back on track and moving into a position in Congress where it can satisfy some of its core supporters. This road looks very difficult from here.

But more likely, in my opinion, is that Dilma will remain weak for the near future, with Minister Levy managing to do enough with the economy to avert disaster, but unable to unleash the country’s full potential, while a rudderless Congress is taken in a new and sometimes strange direction.

Not very exciting, I know. But those are the battle lines for now.

Not long ago, Dilma Rousseff and Maria das Graças Foster were widely praised as the new faces of Latin America. Now, the billion-dollar corruption scandal has finally brought down Petrobras CEO Maria das Graças Foster (above). She had to go. But with President Dilma Rousseff also against the wall, 2015 is shaping up to be very difficult for the region’s few female leaders. 

By Nathan Walters

After months of speculation and some high-profile back-and-forth, Maria das Gracas Foster, Petrobras chief executive since 2012, resigned on Tuesday along with five other directors. The news sent Petrobras stock prices soaring; the rebound made up for losses that came last week after the company released unaudited and incomplete statements.

Investors are right to want new leadership at the company, which is facing serious problems on all fronts. Dilma Rousseff, who is close to Foster, likely did all she could to stave off the CEO’s departure.

But what should we make of news that former Brazilian president Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva was reportedly pressuring Rousseff to accept Foster’s resignation (which is said to have already been thrice offered and thrice refused). It’s no secret Lula may be thinking of staging a comeback in 2018. But is former guerrilla Rousseff not her own woman? The leader of Brazil?

In 2012, closer to the height of the euphoria surrounding Brazil, Foster had been appointed not only because as a Petrobras lifer (rumored to bleed green and yellow [and not on account of exposure to fracking fluid]) she had the technical chops, but because she could be a symbol of the country’s economic and social progress.

Brazil is well known for its machismo, and the storybook ascent of a female who had pulled herself out of very real poverty to become the leader of the country’s most important company was a loud retort to all those who claimed Brazil’s gender relations were antiquated.

At the same time, Mr. Eike Batista, the white son of Brazilian privilege, was creating his own “up by his own bootstraps” myth, which was also peddled around the country in response to claims that it lacked a culture of entrepreneurship. The legend was as inflated as OGX’s prospects, and both eventually collapsed.

Foster’s arrival at the top belied very real gender equality issues in Brazil the same way Barack Obama’s ascent distorted the reality of race relations in the U.S. At a time when people were complaining that Brazil was applying a new paint job, rather than going through a process of fundamental change, Foster was the brightest coat on the market.

Though an icon for the company and the country’s quick development in economic and social issues, Foster was also given the reigns in an attempt to steer the company away from the good ol’ boy culture that created the conditions for all of the corruption that is alleged to have happened…starting long before she took over.

Foster was faced with tough decisions left over after the departure of previous CEO Jose Sergio Gabrielli. The well-connected Gabrielli  exited when Petrobras image was near its strongest, though there were a host of problems waiting to be uncovered.

Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff is another classic figure of the same type – a donna, in Brazil’s patriarchal vocabulary, a firm woman who would get the house in order. Like Foster, she has been counted on to fix problems that were partially caused by men.

In the public’s mind, Foster failed to complete her task—though efficiency programs introduced during her time at the head of the firm produced some real results — and must be jettisoned to make way for the next leader, like another white male. The same fate awaits Rousseff in 2018, if not even before.

Female directors in Brazil account for a paltry 7%, on par with Argentina but well below the Colombia and Peru. Since July 2014, “the number of women CEOs in the Global 500 has dropped from 17 to 14. Non-American CEOs, like Foster, have led the exodus,” according to Fortune magazine. But Foster’s directorship was even more spectacular because it was an oil company, an industry not known for its minority leaders. The importance of her position was not limited to Brazil, but was an accomplishment celebrated around the world.

Nearby, in Argentina, President Cristina Kirchner has problems of her own.

Foster’s legacy may not fare well. She may have failed to quell the chaos unleashed by very necessary investigations into shady dealings at Petrobras, but, based on information disclosed thus far, did not engage in dealings herself.

In a time like this, when the market gods require a sacrifice, everyone must go. There is a long list of heads that could, and may still, roll for what’s allegedly transpired. Foster may be the big name that will calm the hysteria in the short-term, but it’s unlikely to fix a much bigger problem that has dogged Brazil for ages.

Next week, Cariocas will don a Gracas Foster-inspired Carnaval mask, which have been flying off the shelves as the Petrolão heats up. An honor, or that’s how it was sold when a mask of Joaquim Barbosa, the Afro-Brazilian supreme court judge of Mensalão fame, was the must-have mask of 2012. Foster may be reduced to a Carnaval novelty, but let’s hope the change she represented for women does not go the same way she went.

A gruesome video recently released is only one example of a penitentiary system often dominated by medieval conditions and shocking violence, Dom Phillips reports, and quasi-feudal political arrangements in the state of Maranhão have done little to improve the system there.

By Dom Phillips

It cannot have been an easy decision for this newspaper to publish a gruesome cell-phone video in which Brazilian prisoners paraded the decapitated bodies of three gang rivals.

But the video put both the crisis at the Pedrinhas prison on the outskirts of São Luís, and the government of Maranhão state where the prison is situated, under the spotlight.

The video is extremely graphic and should be watched with extreme caution.

It was one of a series of revelations spilling out of the Pedrinhas prison, where 60 prisoners were murdered in 2013, and another two have already been killed this year. Two gangs battle for control of the prison.

The release of the video was heavily criticised by the Maranhão state government, but the shock tactic worked. The United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights demanded an investigation.

“We regret having to once again express concern at the dire state of prisons in Brazil and urge the authorities to take immediate action to restore order in Pedrinhas prison and other prisons throughout the country,” the UN said in a statement.

Brazil’s National Council of Justice, the CNJ, reported December 23 that a visit by Judge Douglas de Melo Martins had found that intimate visits from wives and girlfriends were taking place in communal cells. Partners and relatives of prisoners were being sexually abused by gang members during visits in order to keep their relatives alive, Martins said.

Groups of 250-300 slept together. Individual cells no longer functioned because bars had been removed, and Judge Martins said he was advised not to enter some areas of the prison because it would not be safe as gang leaders had not given permission.

In short, Pedrinhas prison was no longer under the control of the Maranhão state government.

The crisis is not new – 13 were killed in a rebellion at the prison in October last year, at which point the state declared a ‘Situation of Emergency’ and brought in the National Force – a police shock troop.

In early December another four died in another rebellion, during which the three decapitations took place. Another 18 had died in a rebellion in 2010.

Police entered and took control of the prison on December 27. Days later, there was a wave of what the authorities said were retaliatory attacks, and four buses were set on fire, burning six-year-old Ana Clara Sousa to death. Brazil’s Justice Minister José Cardozo was sent to Maranhão amid talk of federal intervention.

Cardozo met with governor Roseana Sarney, who is currently in her fourth term. Roseana is the daughter of Brazil’s former president, senate president and senator for nearby Amapá José Sarney, whose family has exercised a powerful political influence in Maranhão since he first became governor in 1966.

José Sarney is seen in Brazil as an old-style ‘colonel’ – one of a dying breed of rich and powerful landowner politicians who for centuries ruled big chunks of Brazil like their own personal fiefdoms. Roseana is seen has having carried on the family tradition.

As this Folha story reported, as the prison crisis heated up, Roseana’s administration opened a tender to feed her and her family for this year, at a cost of Real 1 million ($425,000) to the state. On the list: 80 kilos of fresh lobster, one and a half tons of prawns, and eight flavours of ice cream.

When José Sarney became governor of Maranhão in 1966 he promised to fight poverty and violence. 48 years later, the state is still the second poorest in Brazil, the government lost control of a prison despite repeated warnings, and the São Luís murder rate grew 460% from 2000-2013, according to this Estado de S.Paulo story.

Vote buying is common in the state “which has been run as a fiefdom by a handful of privileged families for as long as anyone can remember”, the Guardian said.

Both father and daughter Sarney have survived sleaze scandals. In 2008, a series of secret Senate decisions called the ‘secret acts’ rocked the senate under Sarney, then senate president, but he survived. In August last year, Brazil’s prosecutor general requested Roseana be removed from their jobs in an ongoing case related to her election in 2010http://frombrazil.blogfolha.uol.com.br/.

Roseana’s government attacked Judge Martins and his report for “untruths.”

It said that there had been no complaints of rape of prisoners’ partners or relatives. A video attached to the Martins report in which a man has his leg skinned had in fact been circulating on the internet for over two years, it said, which cast doubt over the whole report’s credibility.

Judge Martins had been advised not to enter parts of the prison because it was Christmas and he could embarrass family members, not because gang leaders had forbidden him too, the government said. Martins had, the Maranhão government claimed, only taken his “untruths” public to “aggravate further the situation in the prison units of the state in a clear attempt to discredit measures that had already been determined by the government”. No official reports of sexual abuse had been made.

This is how Roseana Sarney and her father deal with criticism – anything negative said about them is an attack on the state, not on those who run it. But they are right about one thing: the prison crisis does not just affect Maranhão, but the whole country. There are 563,700 people in prison in Brazil, but capacity for just 363,500. Conditions are frequently medieval: overcrowding, prison rebellions, murders, and gang control – these are national problems. Maranhão is just that bit worse.

On January 2, another prisoner was found dead in Pedrinhas, the state said. Josivaldo Pinheiro Lindoso, 35, was found with signs of strangulation. He had only just been recaptured after escaping from prison in 2012, while serving a six year stretch.

Lindoso had been allowed home for Christmas and never went back. Like intimate visits, holiday trips home are another surreal reality of the Brazilian prison system. Criminals frequently fail to return. Knowing what horrors might await them at jail like Pedrinhas, this is hardly a surprise.

Corruption isn’t mostly about politicians. In its present form, it means that powerful companies dominate Brazil. Above, what corruption looks like.

In Brazil, one simple image of corruption is often dominant:  some politician, usually an overweight middle-aged man, grabs money from the public coffers, stuffs it into a big sack, and takes off to spend it in Miami or some tacky São Paulo nightclub. The politician gets rich, and the taxpayer gets poorer.

But this is an overwhelmingly one-sided view of what corruption is, as an excellent column from Kenneth Maxwell points out, and neglects the larger role that hugely profitable companies play in the schemes in order to screw over the Brazilian people.

[Este texto foi traduzido em Novembro de 2014. Para ler em Português, clique aqui.]

Corruption in its concrete form these days involves actors in the private sector, “free market” players, paying off public officials to avoid regulation, taxes, or get away with exploiting consumers, workers, and the public. These corporations are getting more out of it than the politicians, or they wouldn’t be doing it.

The recent spate of scandals to emerge – much bigger than the “mensalão” case dominating the country’s media for a decade – confirms this model of corruption. The R$500m “ISS Mafia” scandal allegedly involved public officials delivering favors in return for big payouts from construction companies and banks. The “Trensalão” involved foreign companies forming a cartel in a bid to provide horrid public transportation in São Paulo. And if we find out, as expected, that this World Cup was riddled with corruption, it will have been construction companies paying off politicians, who then allowed the corporations to get rich, trample on health and safety guidelines, perhaps leading to deaths, and maybe – just maybe – embarrass the country as they drag  their feet on stadium deadlines.

The simple rules of the market are proof that the private sector gets more out of this than the fat-cat politicians. Since these companies are maximizing profits, they wouldn’t be paying the bribes if they didn’t get more in return. The politician is the tool, or the part of the state dominated by economic power, and the company is the real winner.

Though slightly more complicated than a comic-book villain politician raiding the public purse, this is how corruption really affects our daily lives. If you want to see evidence of corruption in São Paulo, you can take a look at Paulo Maluf‘s bank accounts, sure. Or you can just walk around the city, and take in what it feels like to be in an urban environment where every square inch of public space was sold off to build a high-rise apartment building, where public transportation is an insult, and where you constantly are invited into one more godawful shopping mall.

This is not because some politician got rich. It’s because some corporation got to walk all over the city in exchange for a payout.

Or check your phone bill and your bank statement, and see how much you got screwed this time. Try calling them up, and see how eager they are to help. In this case, we have no evidence of direct ‘corruption’, but they do break all kinds of laws, and get away with it.

Of course, in “advanced” democracies like the United States, the “corruption” of the state works through legal channels. Corporations give untold sums to political campaigns, and the rest of us are left wondering afterwards if perhaps that will influence the way we are governed. But at the very least, this process is relatively transparent.

In Brazil, there is an ideological consequence to the over-simplified view of corruption, and it serves to reinforce a view that has been common amongst certain policymakers and undergraduate economics students since the 1980s. That is: that the state is bad, it always messes up or steals, and we need to get rid of it wherever possible. But looking at corruption in its real form could lead to something closer to the opposite conclusion. The government we vote for and pay taxes to can easily be dominated by private companies, who then go on to dominate us. We need the government to be strong, reliable, and responsive,  so they can hold the companies back.

After months of conflict, some in Congress (above) proposed a surprising bill to limit Supreme Court powers. It was quickly laughed aside, but we do still have an interesting fight over Brazil’s messy democracy on our hands.

A battle has been heating up between two branches of Brazil’s government. So far, it’s culminated in legislative leaders delivering a very “tough response” to the Supreme Court and criticizing its “intrusion” into Congressional matters.

Some in Congress wanted to claw back powers they think the Supreme Court is taking advantage of, after the Court became involved with two big pieces of legislation, one on political parties and the other dealing with oil royalties.

Of course, this is not an ideal fight to have. But it’s more interesting than the normal squabbling that goes on in Brasília or any other capital city. There are legitimate problems to be resolved on both sides, in addition to the standard political points to be scored.

Ostensibly, this is all about a bill to make it tougher to form new political parties in a country which already has 15 of them tied up in a very messy coalition system. Sounds sensible. But the rivalry started long before this.

Last year, the Supreme Court stepped up in a big way to condemn high-level ruling party politicians involved in the “mensalão” corruption scandal. This was a shock to a culture of impunity long dominant in Brazil. Anti-corruption campaigners rejoiced, as did all of the right, and all of the press. But much of the governing Worker’s Party (PT) thought they had been unfairly targeted by an alliance between the Court and right-wing press to come down hard on them and ignore the (ample) corruption on the other side of the aisle.

Then the Supreme Court got involved in the dispute over what to do with the profits from Brazil’s pre-salt oil reserves. A large coalition in Congress wants all the proceeds to go to education, but producing states Espirito Santo and Rio argue the money is theirs, and that they need it.

Yesterday, the Supreme Court suspended a legislative project that would make it harder to form new political parties. This is a complicated one. On the one hand, almost everyone agrees the current system is overly complex, and that politicians jump too often from party to new party for personal gain. On the other, this bill looked like it was aimed directly at people like popular environmentalist Marina Silva, who forced the 2010 presidential campaign into a run-off and is currently forming a new party. The bill would have very obviously been good for President Dilma, who is likely to win in 2014 anyways.

The response of a few PT congressmen to the Supreme Court’s move was, in political terms, the nuclear option. A small group put forward a project for amending the constitution to make some Court discussions need Congressional approval. This was shocking, but quickly rejected by the press and Congressional leaders.

But many in the legislature remain deeply upset with the Court.

“Just as we never influence the Court’s decisions, we don’t accept that the Judiciary influences the Court’s decisions. We consider this an invasion,” said Senate President Renan Calheiros.

The bill that dominated headlines today was never going to pass. But we should be watching closely what comes of this. Brazilian politics is rarely so confrontational.

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Photo Vincent Bevins

Death squads within São Paulo’s military police are widely suspected of mass killings and extra-judicial executions in poor neighborhoods on the city’s outskirts. Above, police inspect the scene of a bloodbath in Jardim Rosana that six of their colleagues are now accused of carrying out. 

By Claire Rigby

With a grim tally of almost 100 police officers murdered in 2012, news stories of off-duty cops being ambushed and killed continued to send ripples of fear through São Paulo as 2012 ended and the new year began. But the start of 2013 has also been marred by the continuation of a different epidemic of executions and mass killings – chacinas, or slaughters – of civilians, in which all too frequently, police officers are suspected or directly implicated.

Last Thursday (24 January), it was announced that six military police officers (‘PMs’) were under arrest, accused of having taken part in a massacre that took place on 4 January in the working-class neighbourhood of Jardim Rosana, district of Campo Limpo. In the attack, around 14 gunmen (and perhaps at least one gunwoman – one of the officers arrested is female) poured from three cars into a simple corner bar, firing dozens of shots that left seven dead and two wounded.

The killing was widely billed in the Brazilian press – ominously, resignedly – as the ‘first massacre of the year’, while hundreds of friends, family and local residents took to the streets of the neighbourhood, deep in the endless sprawl of south São Paulo, on 14 January to protest the killings and the spate of chacinas and apparent executions that has accelerated since October last year.

Small, heartfelt demonstrations for peace and an end to the violence are all too frequent in São Paulo. But this time, for the first time in the recent round of killings, someone relatively well known was among the dead: Laércio de Souza Grimas, aka DJ Lah, a former collaborator of the legendary Mano Brown of Racionais MC’s, Brazil’s most influential rapper. DJ Lah, a 33-year-old father of four, was a member of the band Conexão do Morro, whose melodic rap narrates the story of violence in the favelas from a first-hand point of view, and whose videos offer a glimpse of life in São Paulo’s poor periphery. (Listen on Radio UOL.) And far from pop-a-cap-in-your-ass gangster posturing, many of the band’s lyrics are suffused with fear and loathing of police brutality, harassment and murder.

‘Crooks like them are murderers in grey uniforms,’ go the words to the song ‘Click Cleck Bang’: ‘rats and more rats circulating in the favela. They’re the ones who push it, they’re the ones who shoot. Pray you survive.’

Youtube – Click Cleck Bang

Police under suspicion

Suspicion of police involvement in many of the 24 chacinas that took place in São Paulo in 2012, only one of which was solved, is widespread. At a meeting held on Thursday afternoon at Parque Santo Dias in Capão Redondo (a district just beyond Campo Limpo), to air public grievances triggered by the Jardim Rosana murders, there seemed to be little doubt in anyone’s mind as to who was behind this and many other unexplained murders. Speaker after speaker railed against police violence against the young, poor and black of São Paulo’s vast perifería – the city’s outlying neighbourhoods and favelas.

Even one of the elected officials present at the meeting – billed as a ‘public audience’, and also attended by Rogério Sottili, São Paulo’s Secretary for Human Rights, and Gabriel Medina, the city government’s Youth Coordinator – concurred with the assumption of state-perpetrated violence. Netinho de Paula, SP’s charismatic Secretary for the Promotion of Racial Equality, said, ‘The military police has always killed a disproportionate number of the perifería‘s young, black poor. I say that with confidence, since an actual PM commander has given an order that black and dark-skinned [youngsters] should be stopped and searched. That’s a result of the way the PM thinks, it always has been, and nothing has changed. That’s how I lost my brother and many of my friends.’ The Secretary’s brother was murdered in 1993. ‘My life changed completely when he was killed,’ said de Paula at the meeting, which was streamed live on #posTV, and is available for viewing in its entirety here.

Also at the meeting was Francisco José Carvalho Magalhães (see photo below), the father of Pedro Thiago Souza Magalhães, a young man shot dead on 14 October. ‘He went out to pick up a pen drive for his college work,’ said Francisco. ‘But he ended up dead, at 3 o’clock on a Sunday afternoon, with seven bullets in his back.’ Aged 20, Thiago was studying administration at the Centro Universitário Anhanguera, and had worked at Band News, and at the Instituto Tomie Ohtake. He was in the street outside a bar in Jardim das Belezas, close to Jardim Rosana, when three hooded men got out of a car and started shooting, killing two and wounding two.

Does his father suspect the police? ‘I can’t open my mouth and say that. We have suspicions. But I don’t have proof, and people tell me, don’t say it, especially after what happened [the chacina in Jardim Rosana on 4 January]. I’ve still got four other children to bring up.’

Magalhães plans to return with his family to the state of Piauí, from which he migrated to São Paulo 18 years ago. Asked what he hoped for, he said, ‘I’d like a response from the government. They wrote on the report that my son was a bandido, but he was not a bandido. They don’t even know who my son was. They said he had a police record, but it’s a lie. They say that without even knowing who the person was to try and shift the focus of the investigation.’

Doraci Mariano, president of the Jardim Rosana Residents’ Association, was 50m from the bar on the night of the massacre in which DJ Lah and six others died. ‘It’s a normal local bar,’ he says, ‘where people just call in for a beer, or a soft drink. Working people.’

He heard the shots at 11:20pm. ‘There were a lot of shots. It sounded like there was a war going on. There was instant panic: family members rushing to the bar, saying such-and-such was in there. The police wouldn’t let anyone in – nobody could get close or get inside the bar to help the people.’ Were they military police? ‘Yes. They arrived very quickly, about three minutes after the shooting. The civil police came a few minutes later. The PMs pulled down the shutter on the bar and nobody could get close until the civil police arrived and opened the bar.’ Who do you think was responsible? ‘People think it was an extermination group.’

Death squads

Extra-judicial killings, many claim, are a specialty of SP’s military police, carried out by ‘extermination groups’: death squads formed by officers. And although no explanation at all is by far the most likely outcome of a suspicious murder – as is the case for the family of Pedro Thiago Souza Magalhães, and of countless others – on the other hand, occasional news filters through of officers being investigated on suspicion of carrying out executions.

On 14 January, four PMs were arrested and accused of executing a 16-year-old boy they had apprehended for robbing the house of a taxi driver. Witnesses reported seeing them take the boy, crying for help, to a piece of wasteland in the neighbourhood of Cidade A. E. Carvalho and shoot him. The officers claim the boy died in a shootout.

And in November 2012, an alleged execution was filmed by a neighbour and later broadcast on the TV programme Fantástico. The film shows four police officers dragging a man, a 25-year old builders’ assistant named Paulo Batista do Nascimento, out of his house. As a shot is then fired, the person doing the filming hides. According to the police version, Nascimento escaped police custody and, following a car chase in which shots were fired, was later discovered dead in an alley. The five officers involved were all arrested and accused of the execution. Nascimento’s house was directly opposite the bar in which DJ Lah and his companions were murdered two months later, and there has been speculation that it might have been DJ Lah who filmed, or who was suspected by the police as having filmed, Nascimento’s execution.

In November, the outgoing delegado-geral of the civil police force, Marcos Carneiro Lima, told journalists that there is considerable evidence for the existence and activity of military police ‘extermination’ groups, referring in particular to cases in which murder victims’ criminal records had been examined shortly before their deaths. He said, ‘When people hear that eight murders have been committed over a short period of time in a small geographic area, they know something is going on. Criminals are cowards. They kill, then leave the area – they don’t kill and keep killing. They don’t kill then collect the spent cartridge cases to conceal evidence.

Concealing the evidence

A chilling account of the internal structure of extermination groups within the PM, written by the journalist Tatiana Merlino and published in the magazine Caros Amigos in September, details the bullying and even torture rife within the military police, to ensure participation in illegal violence and murder. Using testimonies from a sergeant in the PM and a civil police officer, the article explains the structure of the death squads, brought into action when it has not been possible to arrange a ‘resistance’ murder.

The anonymous sources explain how murder scenes are subsequently interfered with: ‘The important thing,’ says the account, ‘is to adulterate the scene of the crime.’ Bullet casings are quickly collected by a follow-up member of the group’ (in the Jardim Rosana killing, a black Corsa drew up and its occupants gathered up bullet casings, leaving some behind, nevertheless, that led civil police to the 37th Battalion of the military police, and to the officers now suspected of having taken part in the massacre). The article goes on, ‘when necessary, a small quantity of drugs and an untraceable weapon are placed in the victim’s hand to justify the homicide. Sometimes, a cell phone is planted on the victim.’

If possible, the victim is taken to hospital even if he is dead, in a further attempt to destroy crime scene evidence. In apparent confirmation of that problem, last week, a decree prohibited São Paulo police officers from giving first aid or moving the injured victims of crime, ordering them to wait instead for the ambulance service.

What is to be done?

At the meeting in Capão Redondo on Thursday, proposals included the urgent need to generate and maintain detailed information on the cases of every person killed in chacinas or suspected executions, demanding autopsy reports and police data and collating evidence given by families and neighbours. Other speakers called for the impeachment of state governor Geraldo Alckmin. Alckmin has suggested that reporting of SP’s high rates of violent death is overhyped, and could be partly attributed to its large population.

A number of speakers stressed the need for cultural, educational and sporting opportunities in the perifería, and Rogério Sotilli, City Hall’s new Secretary for Human Rights, echoed those proposals, saying, ‘We need to bring policies to these areas that develop culture and valorize citizenship, the individual culture of the community.’

But elevating the investigation of suspected death-squad murders to high priority would also be an obvious step in the same direction, since in the absence of credible action against it, the inevitable conclusion drawn in the affected neighbourhoods is that this kind of violence is tolerated, if not promoted, by the Brazilian state – a state, it bears mentioning, that has no legal death penalty. There can be little doubt that news of the arrests of the six officers suspected of involvement in the Jardim Rosana murders – news that came shortly after the public meeting on Thursday – provides some level of relief to the families, friends and neighbours of the dead, not to mention the community at large.

It might also help if the sense of palpable outrage felt in poor communities were shared city-wide in São Paulo, where a deeply entrenched kind of social apartheid can work to make such deaths seem abstract, happening very far away – or worse, somehow justifiable; and where news items on the violent deaths of victims of robberies appear to have more lasting impact than do the deaths of favela-dwellers. The names and faces of the former become familiar in the days following a new tragedy, while more often than not, images of chacina victims are anonymous-looking corpses, lying dead on badly paved streets. (A notable exception is a gallery created on Globo.com’s G1 website, featuring the faces and profiles of each of the 345 people killed in the bloody month of October – here.)

As the former delegado-geral, Carneiro Lima, put it a candid set of comments as he made way for his successor, ‘Why don’t we have any massacres in [the upscale neighbourhood of] Jardins? Why is it so easy to kill the poor today in the periphery? Because there exists a large section of society that thinks that to do so is to kill the outlaw of tomorrow. It’s a prejudiced view held by society itself that assumes such killings to be legitimate actions. They are not legitimate.’

Photos by Claire Rigby, except main image.

Joaquim Barbosa, the new authority in Brazilian justice.
Mensalão, The PCC, and Caso Bruno – the messy reality of Brazil’s justice system has dominated news recently. Despite obvious problems, some things seem to be improving.

Last week, the Brazilian Minister of Justice said he would rather die than do time in the Brazilian prison system. José Eduardo Cardozo called jail conditions “medieval” and said that “Those that commit small crimes end up coming out major criminals.”

This is a startling admission for any major public figure, and echoes what a local judge told us earlier this year. But since then the issue of prisons has moved to the front and center of Brazilian news. First, because some of the highest-ranking officials in President Lula’s administration may actually be jailed for corruption, in a development many see as very positive for the country. Second, because São Paulo seems to find itself in the grips of a deadly war between police and the PCC, a criminal gang born in the country’s jails. And third, because the grisly details around the trial of a famous footballer have dominated headlines again.

Mensalão – We got news last week that the high-level politicians involved in the 2003-2004 vote-buying scandal may actually go to jail. That includes José Dirceu, Chief of Staff during Lula’s first presidency. This has been seven years in the making and the surprisingly tough justice handed down by the Supreme Court has delighted those who have been pressing the case (including much of the media), and has made Justice Joaquim Barbosa a hero to much of the country. He has been named the first black head of the Supreme Court.

Here’s how it worked: high-level politicians have been convicted of using public funds to pay legislators big monthly sums (thus, “mensalão”) to vote along with the ruling coalition. Corruption of this type in the country was not new, of course. Folha famously published reports that Fernando Henrique Cardoso’s bid for re-election relied on bought votes.

In private conversations, a couple of PT supporters have recently expressed a fascinating, counter-intuitive take on the affair: they believe that Dirceu and others were right to do what they did, and that it is good for the country that they are punished. In this reading they condemned to be sacrificial lambs.

I am paraphrasing heavily:

Everyone knows that without a stable coalition your government falls apart immediately. In the long run it was worth paying those men, who were basically extorting the state, 10,000 dollars a month in order to keep a government in power that managed to pull 40 million people out of poverty and put Brazil on the global stage. The alternative would have been to take on the existing corrupt power structure in Brasília, and probably lose.

But it’s good if that that kind of deal-making is no longer tolerated and if the Supreme Court has a chance to send that message now, the crooks in Brasília will be less able to do things their way in the future.**

That this seemingly contradictory position (Good for Dirceu! Send Dirceu to jail!) is a possible, even understandable one, is testament to the bizarre workings of Brazilian politics until recently. Now that Dirceu has been sentenced, there is much hope things are getting better. And as for the PT, being dragged through this scandal didn’t hurt it too much in this year’s elections.

But the possibility of a well-to-do, respected public figure having to set foot inside a terrifying Brazilian prison isn’t the only thing bringing jails to the center of attention. That’s also where the PCC was born.

War in São Paulo

This year, it seems war has erupted between the Military Police and the PCC, São Paulo’s dominant criminal gang. The Primeiro Comando da Capital is suspected of killing at least 90 police officers, which has either generated, or taken place against, a surge in violence.

The PCC burst into the consciousness of middle-class Brazil in 2006, when they coordinated a wave of attacks on police and brought the city to a standstill. The widely accepted explanation for the attacks was a conflict over conditions in São Paulo’s prisons. We’re not quite sure how, but a five-year peace was established between police and the gang that fell apart earlier this year. More continue to die as the city waits and hopes for some meaningful solution to the conflict. Little is known for sure as to what is really behind it.

This is a terrible war and a huge step in the wrong direction. But those of us living in central São Paulo haven’t felt so directly affected (that dubious honor goes, as always, to the poor living on the outskirts), and all things considered, things are still much better than they were not so long ago in South America’s largest city.

Caso Bruno

A famous footballer reportedly murders his pregnant lover and feeds her body to dogs. It’s a case custom-made to be splashed across the headlines. He is now being tried. If he is convicted, he’ll also find out just how the Brazilian justice system works on the inside. That’s one place where things are likely just as bad as ever.

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*This is NOT the official position of the Worker’s Party or any high-level PT operative.

**And another curious thing I heard: “There are two kinds of corruption. Stealing from the state to line your pockets, or being forced to deal with crooks to achieve social or political goals. At least the PT was involved in the second rather than the first.”