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.”

Over 30 journalists and bloggers have been murdered in Brazil since 1992, making it a dangerous place for those who speak out against local corruption – especially in the country’s remoter regions. And a culture of impunity means the killers are rarely brought to justice. 

By James Young
Belo Horizonte

In a country like Brazil, where there were more than 52,000 murders in 2014, it is not always easy to identify patterns. Especially in cases such as that of Roberto Lano, murdered in the town of Buriticupu in the northern state of Maranhão just over a week ago, and victim of one of the most typical types of Brazilian homicide – a gunman pulling up on a motorbike, squeezing the trigger, and speeding off into the night.

Or the death of 30-year-old Ítalo Eduardo Diniz Barros, killed in almost identical circumstances in another Maranhão town, Governador Nunes Freire, the Friday before that.

Or even the murder of Israel Gonçalves Silva, shot dead in a stationery store at 7.30 in the morning, again by men on a motorbike, in Lagoa de Itaenga, in the north-eastern state of Pernambuco, on November 10^th. He had just dropped his two young children off at school.

What connects the deaths of Roberto, Ítalo and Israel – or Décio Sá, murdered in São Luís, the capital of Maranhão, in April 2012, or Gleydson Carvalho, shot last August as he presented his radio show in Camocim, Ceará, or any of over thirty other homicides in Brazil since 1992 – is that all were journalists or bloggers, and were apparently killed because the investigative or critical nature of their work had made them some powerful, dangerous enemies.

Ítalo Diniz criticised local authorities on his blog, and had told colleagues that he had often received threats from “mayors and town councillors”, while Lano had also recently attacked local politicians. Israel Gonçalves Silva regularly talked about corruption allegations on his radio show.

Another blogger, 67-year-old Evany José Metzker, was found dead in the countryside of the south-eastern state of Minas Gerais in May this year. His decapitated body showed signs of torture, and according to reports, police believe that the murder was motivated by the journalist’s investigations into child prostitution and drug trafficking.

Many other Brazilian journalists have had to deal with violence, threats, and even imprisonment as part of their work. A report by Brazil’s Associação Nacional de Jornais (National Newspaper Association), quoted in this article in The Guardian, has said that in addition to the killings, 24 journalists have been imprisoned, 33 have been the victims of assault and 59 have received threats since 2008.

Police intimidation and aggression is also an issue. A June 2013 survey by the Associação Brasileira de Jornalismo Investigativo (Brazilian Association of Investigative Journalism) revealed that during the massive month-long street protests of that year, eight journalists were arrested and 52 were beaten across ten of Brazil’s 26 states.

“The killings, particularly coming so close together, are very worrying and we urge authorities in Maranhão to make every effort to get to the bottom of them,” Andrew Downie, the São Paulo-based representative of the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), an independent, non-profit organization, said after the murders of Roberto and Ítalo.

“We ask that they devote the necessary manpower and expertise to finding the culprits and that they conduct their investigations in as open and transparent a manner as possible.”

“Other local bloggers have told the CPJ that threats are a common practice in the region and it is vital that local, state and federal government act together whenever possible to ensure they send the message that threats against the press will not be tolerated and will not go unpunished,” added Downie.

According to the CPJ, at least 16 journalists have been murdered in Brazil in retaliation for their work since 2011. To make matters worse, the killers are rarely brought to justice.

While the murderer of Décio Sá was sentenced to 25 years imprisonment in 2014, and the killers of two other murdered journalists, Walgney Assis Carvalho and Rodrigo Neto, were also recently brought to justice, the CPJ points out that “as with the majority of cases…accountability has extended as far as the gunmen but not the mastermind.”

Brazil ranks 11^th on the organisation’s global Impunity Index, which spotlights nations where “journalists are slain and their killers go free”. That makes the country slightly tougher at dealing with such crimes than Russia, in 10^th position, but less effective than Bangladesh, India and Nigeria.

President Dilma Rousseff has promised to tackle the problem. “The federal government is fully committed to continue fighting against impunity in cases of killed journalists,” she said in a meeting with CPJ representatives in Brasilia in June last year, when she pledged to support legislative efforts to federalize crimes against freedom of expression.

Rousseff’s current political woes, however, mean that the safety of journalists is unlikely to be her struggling government’s top priority at the moment. And in any case, a tougher stance from Brasília against those who murder bloggers and journalists may not prove to be much of a deterrent against the often corrupt local level politicians and pistoleiros that hold sway in the backlands of states such as Maranhão and Pernambuco, where local law enforcement and infrastructure can be lacking.

For now then, it seems Brazilian journalists and bloggers who have the courage to speak out against corruption and wrongdoing in their communities will have to continue looking nervously over their shoulders.

Overcrowded, unsafe, and wracked by sickening levels of violence, Brazil’s prisons were described by a report published last week as a “human rights disaster”. To make matters worse, many inmates have not yet been convicted but must endure months in appalling conditions while they wait for their case to be heard.   

By James Young
Belo Horizonte

If, as Dostoyevsky put it, the degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons, then Brazil would appear to be in a sorry state indeed.

Last week the Human Rights Watch NGO released a report entitled “The State Let Evil Take Over” that described the shocking conditions inside the Curado prison complex (previously known as the Anibal Bruno prison) in Recife, the capital of the north-eastern state of Pernambuco, as well as penitentiaries in Itamaracá, about 45 kilometres away.

“During visits to Pernambuco’s prisons in 2015, a researcher from Human Rights Watch entered a windowless cell without beds, in which 37 men slept on sheets on the floor. Another, which had six cement bunks for 60 men, lacked even enough floor space. A tangle of makeshift hammocks made it difficult to cross the room, and one man was sleeping sitting up, tying himself to the bars of the door so that he wouldn’t slump over onto other men. In that cell, the stench of sweat, faeces and mould was overpowering,” said the report, which was accompanied by a disturbing video, available on YouTube.

The study painted a gruelling portrait of overcrowding (Curado, which was built to house around 2,000 prisoners, is home to about 7,000), lack of sanitation, disease, sexual and physical violence, and described how criminal gangs controlled large parts of the institutions.

Perhaps most chillingly of all, Human Rights Watch revealed that a large number of the prisoners were pre-trial detainees – in other words, they had been incarcerated while awaiting trial for the crimes of which they had been accused.

Custody hearings, where the accused appears before a judge soon after being arrested, are, says the report, “required under international law but have not — until recently — been provided to detainees in Pernambuco or most other states in Brazil.” According to the organization, “nearly 60 percent of the nearly 32,000 people held in Pernambuco’s prisons have not been convicted of a crime.”

An earlier Human Rights Watch study told how when judges held custody hearings in the state of Maranhão between October 2014 and March 2015, around 60 percent of those arrested were released on the grounds that pre-trial detention was not warranted, compared to 10% when no such hearings took place and judges based their decision solely on police reports. At least in this area there are some signs of progress – Pernambuco began providing custody hearings in August this year.

But that alone is unlikely to save Brazil’s prison system, the horror stories surrounding which are almost too many to mention. There were a reported 62 murders in the Pedrinhas jail in Maranhão in 2013, and in January 2014 a video emerged from the prison showing the decapitated heads and bodies of victims of a gang feud.

There were also reports of the visiting wives, girlfriends and female relatives of prisoners being raped by the leaders of the criminal factions that effectively run large parts of the institution. In May this year the director of the prison, Cláudio Barcelos, was arrested, accused of taking bribes to facilitate escapes.

“The tragedy of Pedrinhas could have been foreseen and could be repeated, at any moment, in other prison complexes with the same problems,” said Lucia Nader, of the Brazilian NGO Conectas, in January 2014.

Prison riots, which often end in fatalities, are alarmingly frequent. A 2013 outbreak of gang warfare in Pedrinhas, which has a long history of violent uprisings, ended with nine fatalities, and a riot in January this year in Curado resulted in three deaths.

Earlier this month a rebellion in the Penitenciária de Teófilo Otoni in Minas Gerais left three prisoners dead while fourteen escaped, and another riot in Governador Valadares in the same state in June saw two deaths. The Minas Gerais government says there is a shortfall of 26,000 places in the state’s prison system.

Nor are precarious safety conditions the sole preserve of the country’s adult prisons. In September five breakouts in the space of eight days from the Fundação CASA young offender institutions in São Paulo saw a total of 117 inmates escape.

And even those outside the prisons cannot take their safety for granted – a few weeks ago 33-year-old Recife resident Ricardo Alves da Silva was brushing his teeth in the garden of his house near the Curado complex when he was shot and killed by a gunshot that came from inside the prison.

According to this Vice article by From Brazil contributor Ben Tavener, Brazil has the world’s fourth-biggest incarcerated population after the United States, China and Russia, with numbers growing by 161 percent from 2000 to 2014 to reach 607,000 prisoners in June last year. At the same time the country’s prison system is designed to hold a maximum of only 376,000.

In such overcrowded conditions, where floor space to sleep on, let alone beds, is often lacking, rehabilitation facilities are usually either limited or non-existent, contributing, along with the pervasive atmosphere of criminality within jails and the social conditions inmates are likely to face upon release, to an estimated recidivism rate of 70%.

Yet the crisis in Brazil’s prison system attracts considerably less political and media outrage than might be expected. President Dilma Rousseff discussed the issue during the 2014 presidential debates, saying that she believed Brazil had to change its entire prison strategy, and that rehabilitating prisoners was absolutely essential. In September a law was introduced that makes the provision of high school level education in prisons a legal requirement.

But at the same time, the powerful “Bullet Caucus” in the Brazilian parliament is pushing for a tougher stance on crime, including lowering the age of criminal responsibility from 18 to 16, which, according to an article by Stephanie Nolen in The Globe and Mail, would add an extra 32,000 people to the prison population in its first year.

It is not all bad news for those who find themselves on the wrong side of Brazilian law, however – provided they have the means to extricate themselves from their situation. Last week 28-year-old business administrator Juliana Cristina da Silva knocked down and killed José Airton and Raimundo Barbosa, city workers who had been painting a cycle lane in the Zona Norte region of São Paulo, while almost three times over the legal alcohol limit. She then fled the scene and was only stopped by witnesses 3 km away.

Following a night at a police station she was released on R$15,000 (U$3,850/£2,500) bail the next day, and will now spend the undoubtedly lengthy wait for her trial at liberty. It was the latest in a long, long list of similar cases in Brazil.

The sentencing of drunk driving fatalities is a controversial issue around the world, and there are obviously differences in the legal status of Juliana’s crime (which is considered homicídio culposo, or manslaughter) and the offences committed by, or the charges awaiting, many of the prisoners in jails like Pedrinhas or Curado.

But at the same time, the right to bail and quickly granted provisional freedom of the former, compared with the denial of human rights and barbarous conditions doled out to the latter, provided a jarring reminder of the sense of inequality that often seems to surrounds the Brazilian justice system.

As an article in Carta Capital magazine entitled “Justice is Rich and White” argues, while such a system appears to automatically assume that the lower-class prisoners in the ruined cells of its overcrowded jails are marginais and bandidos (“thugs and criminals”) when denying them pre-trial hearings and even the most basic living standards, a better-off Brazilian such as Juliana is treated rather like “a good girl who made a mistake”.

That, perhaps, should not come as too much of a surprise, for in doing so Brazil’s penal system merely reflects the divisions that run across the country’s society like deep, jagged scars.

A weekend of mob robberies on Rio’s beaches saw some Zona Sul residents attempt to take the law into their own hands. But the “crime mobs”, the vigilantes, and the social divisions that underpin them are nothing new, as James Young explains. 

By James Young
Belo Horizonte

Despite the start of the summer season and the giant Rock in Rio music festival drawing flocks of foreign and domestic tourists to Rio de Janeiro, the beaches of the Cidade Maravilhosa were reportedly quieter than usual this weekend.

Perhaps it was because of the overcast weather. More likely and more troublingly, however, it was due to the events of the weekend before. Then, images of gangs of shirtless young men, swarming across the sands of Ipanema, Arpoador and Copacabana, stealing cell phones, cameras, jewellery and wallets, were beamed across the country. In total 61 people, many of whom were minors, were apprehended.

Following the chaos, the police brought forward the start of its Operação Verão (“Operation Summer”) stop and search operation for buses coming in from the periferia (Rio’s distant, working class suburbs) with over a thousand police officers and social workers manning 17 check points on the main access routes to the beach neighbourhoods this weekend.

With many of those involved in the robberies below the age of legal responsibility, the authorities are keen to stress the social care aspect of their operation. “What the police were trying to do was related to the vulnerability of the individuals. If a minor leaves home, 30 or 40 km from the beach, dressed in just his bathing suit, with no bus fare or money for food or drink, then this person, in my humble opinion, is in a situation of risk,” Rio de Janeiro Security Secretary José Mariano Beltrame told Brazilian TV.

Nonetheless, the idea of stopping and searching thousands of largely poor, generally dark-skinned Cariocas from the Zona Norte suburbs as they attempted to access the more affluent tourist areas of Zona Sul was a troubling reminder of the financial and social abyss that separates Brazil’s haves and have nots.

Some, including Eufrasia Souza, Coordinator for the Defence of the Rights of Children and Adolescents of Rio’s Public Defender Service, have criticised the idea of detaining people who have committed no apparent crime, and talked of a “social apartheid“.

While an expanded welfare system, economic and social development and an increased minimum wage mean much progress has been made towards greater equality in Brazil in recent years, Rio’s beach wars seemed like an echo of the problems and prejudices of the past.

Os Pobres Vão Á Praia (“The Poor Go to the Beach”), a documentary broadcast on the TV Manchete (“Headline TV”) channel in the 1990s, showed the unvarnished reality of what it was like to make the long journey from Rio’s poor outer suburbs to the beaches of Zona Sul – complete with often rowdy passengers surfing on top, or climbing in through the windows, of heaving buses.

More compelling viewing than the discomfort of the journey (accompanied by the song Nós Vamos Invadir Sua Praia (“We’re Going to Invade Your Beach”) by the band Ultraje a Rigor), however, is the reaction of the better-heeled Brazilians in the documentary.

“They’re uneducated, you can’t take people out of…the swamp and take them to Copacabana. I can’t be around people who have no education…You have to charge entry…you can’t put someone well-dressed from Ipanema, someone educated…and put them in the middle of people who aren’t educated, who are rude, who are going to eat farofa and chicken…you’d die of disgust, it’s horrible,” says one appalled young woman. “It’s horrific that they’re from my country…they’re not Brazilians, they’re a sub-race,” she continues, as the words scenes of explicit prejudice flash on the screen.

The Poor Go to the Beach was reposted on YouTube on 27^th September, a few days after the beaches of Rio had been invaded once again, albeit at times in a more criminal, violent fashion. “You can see that nothing has changed in Rio. We made programmes about arrastões (“crime mobs”), the war between the classes, all these phenomena, the battle against the drugs trade, police corruption. Some people think that all this started today, but it’s been like this for dozens of years and the documentary shows that,” said Nelson Hoineff, the director of the Documento Especial series, of which the programme was part.

But the arrastões were perhaps not even the most troubling story of Rio’s violent weekend. That came later in the afternoon, when reports emerged of groups of men, mainly from Zona Sul gyms and combat/martial arts clubs, forming vigilante gangs and going off in search of the enemy – namely young men or boys from the poorer suburbs.

“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 vigilantes. “It’s obvious that they’re here to steal,” said another, Antônio, a shop worker from Copacabana. “If they want terror, we’ll give them terror. It’s self-defence.” On at least one bus, passengers were forced to smash a window to escape the justiceiros (“vigilantes” in English – interestingly, the word vigilante in Portuguese usually means security guard).

Such vigilante action has becoming alarmingly common in Brazil in recent years – or else it has always been there, but has simply become more visible in the smartphone and internet era. In February last year a 15-year-old boy was beaten, stripped naked and chained to a post in the Flamengo neighbourhood of Rio, while 29-year-old Cledenilson Pereira da Silva, suspected of robbing a local bar, was also stripped naked and tied to a lamppost before being beaten to death in São Luis in the northern state of Maranhão in July this year. Similar incidents have been registered in other parts of the country, from the state of Espirito Santo, adjacent to Rio de Janeiro, to Piauí in the north-east.

Such actions reflect many of the issues that trouble Brazilian society – the fear that one may become a victim of crime, in a country where there are over 50,000 murders a year; the loathing of criminals and, by association, the social groups from which it is assumed they come; and the sense of both impotence and rage that stems from the inability of the police or government to do anything about the problem.

The culture of justiceiros has sparked much debate. “It’s shocking to see a scene as deplorable as this in 2014. It’s barbaric. If he’s a criminal, arrest him,” said Rio resident Yvonne Bezerra de Mello, who found the boy chained to the lamppost in Flamengo last year.

Many have taken a different stance, however, including Rachel Sheherazade, the anchor of the “SBT Brasil” news programme on one of Brazil’s biggest TV networks. “This counter-attack is what I call the collective self-defence of a society without a government, against a state of violence without limit. And for the human rights defenders who took pity on the little thief chained to the post, I launch a campaign: do yourself and Brazil a favour – adopt a criminal.” The comments sections of articles about such cases, meanwhile, are inevitably filled with Bandido bom é bandido morto style messages – “the only good bandit is a dead bandit”.

Rio’s beach justiceiros, meanwhile, are nothing new. “S”, a 45-year-old Copacabana resident and former Brazilian jiu-jitsu fighter, described the situation in the 1990s to Vice Brazil. “If there was an arrastão, we’d retaliate, and obviously we’d kick their asses, because the kids from the periferia couldn’t handle a team of 20 or 30 trained fighters. But we weren’t vigilantes. It was self-defence.” The name for such fighters at the time, according to Vice, was “pit-boy”.

The economic divisions, fear and loathing of social classes other than one’s own, “crime mobs” and vigilantes that underpin and surround Rio’s beach violence, then, are nothing new. While Brazil has made some progress towards a more equal society in recent years, it seems there is still a long way to go.

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.”

One officer speaks out about death squads and a public backlash against a police system they know is broken. Above, the Folha cover photo which helped to spur on Brazil’s June protests. 

Of all the complex and sometimes contradictory consequences of the demonstrations in Brazil since June, the clearest lesson may have been that the country’s police forces are woefully lacking. Obviously clueless as to how to deal with protesters, widely and credibly accused of  torture and summary executions in poor neighborhoods, and terrifying to behold, it seems the military police are simply not to be trusted. At least, that’s what 70% of Brazilians think, according to a recent poll.

Lieutenant Colonel Adilson Paes de Souza, who worked as a military cop for 28 years, completed a master’s degree in human rights, and is now launching a book, gave an interview this week in which he issued a harsh indictment of the current system. “If on one hand we have a [system that’s] proven to be ineffective, and on the other hand we have proven brutality, something has to change.”

Below are translated excerpts from the interview with Folha.

Folha – What is behind the violent protests against the PM [policia militar] seen recently in São Paulo and Rio?

Adilson Paes de Souza – A large part of society is saying: This model we have in place is not effective. And they’re saying this in a violent way. Society has no one else to turn to. I’m not saying that violence is a legitimate way to respond to [police] violence, but that it may be the only way to be heard and noticed.

How can a good-natured guy leave Military Police training and then become a murderer in a death squad?

I interviewed soldiers involved in death squads. They don’t believe in the system. They ask themselves: why am I going to take this person into prison to the Civil Police if they’ll be immediately released after paying a bribe? “I risk myself, take him in, and he is freed?” They decide to arrest, accuse, sentence, and kill.

How do these police officers deal with murder?

Murdering those on society’s margins is seen as an important part of their job. They’ve come to declare that if they aren’t allowed to kill, they wouldn’t be able to work. That’s the logic of the National Security doctrine, according to which we’re dealing with enemies. And on the battlefield, you have to annihilate the enemy.

How does it come to this?

[Those accused of murder] said that before they were imprisoned they were seen as examples of good police officers. Front line guys. “I was awarded officer of the month. I won a medal,” I heard one say. And, all of a sudden, they’re in jail. They didn’t get it.

Are you saying they were encouraged to be violent?

If they didn’t openly say, “You can kill and I’ll take care of you, I’ll cover you,” then there was some kind of indirect encouragement, there were awards for police violence. But the government doesn’t admit this.

A lot of social organizations defend the demilitarization of the PM. What do you think of this?

It’s a theme that leads to strong reactions. The facts prove that the current security model doesn’t work anymore. Data from the Secretary of Public Security show that only three out of 100 investigations of violent crimes lead to sentencing. On the other hand, the Military Police killed more people in five years than all North American police forces combined. If on one hand we have a [system that’s] proven to be ineffective, and on the other hand we have proven brutality, something has to change.

Minister Gilberto Carvalho says that the “black blocs” have to be understood and studied. What’s your opinion?

They have to be understood, yes. That doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t be punished. But what brings a group of people to get together and practice this type of action? Might it be that by not providing the basic social rights enshrined in the Constitution, the State has helped these groups to arise?

Brazil-watchers have all seen that protests exploded into violence last night, and that the police handled the situation horribly and perhaps even maliciously, over-reacting, letting the situation get out of control, and committing shocking acts of violence.

None of that is actually in dispute anymore. Claire Rigby described the tension and fear last night excellently on this blog. Mayor Haddad now says the night was marked by ‘police violence’ and Brazil Justice Minister went as far to call it ‘extreme police violence.’ Investigations are underway.

What I want to do is try to think about where the protests come from, what they mean, and what they could mean for the future. It can be easy to overestimate the importance of the protest’s ‘leadership’ or the people on the ground, and far too easy to connect the phenomena primarily to the other big headlines in Brazil at the moment – slowing growth, inflation, crime, Dilma, etc.

Very briefly, I think a better explanation is that a small group of committed activists have tapped into an issue most Paulistanos can get behind them on (poor public services, especially public transportation, and now, the police), and that the combination of a new middle class and a new generation of students mean more people feel empowered to make demands on the state. Even before last night’s debacle, a small majority of Paulistanos supported the protests.

The other more obvious lesson is that the São Paulo military police have no idea how to deal with protests. But first, a quick history of a very unexpected clash.

Movimento Passe Livre

The “Free Pass Movement” or “No fare movement” is a relatively radical group, heavy on students, that has long been staging protests demanding that all public transportation be free. In a country like Brazil, this in itself strikes me as Utopian at best, and absolute nonsense at worst. Unless we achieve some kind of anarcho-communist golden future, someone will have to pay for the buses and trains, and it makes sense that those who use them should pay more than those who don’t.

It’s clear by the page’s aesthetics that there are some extreme elements to the group, and this video shows they’ve long liked to get right to direct action tactics, being willing to shut down the metro last year for a cause few had heard of at the time. I’m not making a judgment on this strategy one way or another at the moment, but this is surely a long way from the more generally supported protest movement we have now.

Then, last week, the bus fare here rose from 3 reais to 3.20, and they organized protests specifically against that rise. Their slogan was the not-so-flexible “If the fare doesn’t come down, we’ll shut the city down.” At the time, I personally wasn’t very sympathetic to this.

On Tuesday, those protests got out of hand, the police seemed to have lost total control, property was destroyed and people, including officers, were hurt.

The response from the media and the police was uniform. These people are vandals and need to be taken care of. Both of São Paulo’s main newspapers called for a police crackdown, and police promised one. This was not a good sign, and I was worried.

The issue

But the thing is, there are few things Paulistanos agree on more than the obvious fact that transportation is a nightmare, and has not seen improvements commensurate with the rise in demand and incomes here over the last decade. In a city with many problems, getting back and forth can be one of the biggest.

This was now a specific issue that lots of people could get behind. Twenty centavos is nothing for most, yes, but:

1. It was the symbolic last straw for many 2. Lots of others said they wouldn’t mind price hikes if the services actually improved and 3. For lots of Brazilians, 6.40 a day on bus fare is a lot of money. If you make minimum wage (755 a month) and take two buses a day, that means you’re spending a whopping 26 per cent of your income just on getting around. Brazil has come forward a lot in the last decade, but the little man still always gets screwed. But maybe now he’s more willing to stand up for himself.

Asking for free transport is a bit unrealistic, but asking for better and more accessible public transportation seems a no-brainer. Even though survey respondents said they generally thought the protesters went too far, most supported the protests themselves. It seems the media may have gotten something else wrong. Lots of people really don’t like the police here. In 2012 the PM were credibly accused, many times, of brutal executions in the city’s poor periphery, and plenty were not inclined to see Tuesday’s clashes just as acts of one-sided vandalism.

The protest

At least, there was enough of those combined elements to get 5,000 people together last night. It was a mix of left-wing groups, regular citizens in favor of better transportation, those protesting police violence (and not just from Tuesday) and a small minority of some masked anarchist types that were obviously bent on making trouble, which they did.

5000 is not very many in a city of nearly 20 million. And quite a few of these people would have been protesting no matter what. But until the police started firing, people in nearby buildings or stuck in traffic were just as likely to express solidarity with the crowds as they were to complain.

Of course, I do not discount the notion that a general malaise stemming from the fear of inflation, less optimism about the economy, and perhaps even an uptick in crime have made people more likely to revolt or support a revolt. More directly, people last night complained about investments in the World Cup and Olympics while public services for Brazilians lag.

But as I said on this radio show today, perhaps counter-intuitively, I think this has to do as much with economic growth in the last decade as it does with stagnation in the last year. Sociologists have argued that the new ‘middle class,’ long excluded entirely from economic or political participation, have been becoming consumers over the last decade, and that a realization of consumer rights may lead to demanding their full rights as citizens.

Of course, a lot of these kids were left-wing students, not exactly the working poor. But this is also a new generation. These kids have grown up with no memories of the repressive dictatorship, and for 10 years have been under an openly progressive government that is supposed to be responsive to their demands. Public services should be getting better. So a small group of them wasn’t afraid to go ask for it, and they got lucky, tapping a nerve with the public. And the police probably helped their cause last night. We’ll see Monday what happens, when the next protest takes place.

Post-script 1: Politics and the Press

Just as background: The mayor of São Paulo is newly elected Fernando Haddad, of Dilma’s left-leaning Worker’s Party. He is in charge of the buses. The governor, Geraldo Alckmin, is  from the opposition PSDB, to the right of center, and is in charge of the police, the metro and trains. As I’ve said before, almost all of the major press here leans in Alckmin’s direction. Keep all of this in mind as it unravels.

Post-script 2: Turkey

Last night I tweeted that the crowds had chanted “The love is over, Turkey is right here” as they were tear gassed. This was re-tweeted about a billion more times than I expected, to the point that people in Turkey are now reaching out to me about the situation here. I suppose the parallels are clear: protesters tear gassed who had been dismissed by the media at first as vandals. They seemed be saying: why does our press/government praise them over there, but when we do it here, it’s not allowed?

But I want to make clear that I personally think there are far more differences between the two cases than similarities. The national government here is still extremely popular, and most of the protesters are broadly on Dilma’s side. This is a much more specific protest. But if protesters in Brazil and Turkey want to reach out to each other, that’s up to them.

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Claire Rigby describes the nightmare scenes she lived through in last night’s protest, as well as a society grappling with the idea of protest itself. Above, Folha’s own Giuliana Vallone, shot in the face with a rubber bullet.

By Claire Rigby

I took my press card to the demonstration in São Paulo last night, seeing a row of people handcuffed on the TV as I left, and hearing news of mass arrests before the demonstration had even begun. I thought if I got into trouble, it might just help. I needn’t have taken it: it wouldn’t have helped.

As I left the house, a reporter from the magazine Carta Capital had already been arrested arbitrarily along with dozens of other people. By the end of the night, the fourth in a series of escalating protests over an increase in public transport fares here in Brazil, around 200 people had been arrested and dozens of people injured by police, who shot repeatedly and indiscriminately into the peacefully protesting crowd with smoke bombs, tear gas and rubber bullets, chasing protesters through the streets for miles, and striking fear and loathing into those who witnessed their actions. Among the injured were 7 journalists from this newspaper, Folha de S.Paulo, two of whom were shot in the face with rubber bullets. And me. I was shot in the hand with a canister of either smoke or teargas at Praça Roosevelt, minutes after joining the demonstration. (My eye-witness account of police brutality and bullying of protestors is below.)

In the wake of a week of fierce debate in São Paulo, in workplaces, homes, cafés, bars and on Facebook, following Tuesday night’s demonstrations, which ended in disorder and clashes with police on Avenida Paulista, the story that quickly unfolded last night was one of reckless, unprovoked police violence against peaceful demonstrators. It has caused widespread revolt, further polarising the already vehement debate taking place here on the rightness or wrongness of taking to the streets, who is entitled to do it, on whose behalf protesters act, and what they are entitled to do when they get there.

Images and testimonies of police beating and firing on demonstrators; of people kneeling in the street, hands up in supplication, then being fired on at close range; and of bloodstained and bruised protestors and passersby (a Tumblr page has been set up to register injuries), tell the story of a night of mayhem – not at the hands of the protestors, but at the hands of the military police. Giuliana Vallone, a Folha reporter, was shot in the face with a rubber bullet, as was another reporter, Fábio Braga. A hairdresser, Valdenice de Brito, who witnessed Vallone being shot on Rua Augusta said, “She told me that I should get out of there because of the tumult, and just as she said it, a police officer looked at her and cowardly shot her.”

“People should be protesting against corruption or out demonstrating against violent crime – these are all troublemakers/vandals/students/iPhone-owners/unionists. It’s only a 20¢ rise,” is a fairly representative sample of the “against” refrains I’ve heard over and over this week regarding the fare hike protests, generally voiced loudest by those who can measure their salaries in multiple minimum wages – a common way of comparing levels of income here. But the disproportionately high cost of public transport even before the price rise (from R$3 to R$3.20), felt most keenly by the millions of workers who live in São Paulo’s vast periphery, is a source of shame and frustration even for well-off Paulistanos when they choose to consider it.

Journeys to work of two to three hours are commonplace, in packed and outdated buses; and for workers earning the minimum wage (R$755 in São Paulo, against R$678 elsewhere) or close to it, the cost of getting to work and back can account for more than a quarter of their income.

Yet the protests, organized by a non-affiliated single-issue group, Passe Livre São Paulo, have been about far more than the price of a bus fare, even if, as the debate continues to rage and as hundreds and thousands of articles and posts are published and devoured on blogs, sites and social media, the arguments and indeed, the movement, are still being articulated. The extremely high cost of living in SP is a frequent and growing complaint, coupled with anger at the quality of public transport and public services. Multiply that by frustration with the system’s endemic corruption, exasperation with the political class, and perhaps deep down, a recognition that the immense gap in income between the poor and the well-off in Brazil creates scandalous, unsustainable levels of inequality.

An apparently in-built reluctance to protest here in Brazil is also being called into question: Can people take to the streets, and even win concessions? Do you have to be a minimum-wage worker, forced to spend 4-6 hours a day on buses and paying through the nose for it, to be outraged by that?

By late last night, the city’s mayor, Fernando Haddad, was talking about a “possible excessive use of force” by the police, and promising an investigation. Along with thousands of others, I witnessed and experienced it first hand and was shocked by the nature of the sudden, indiscriminate and prolonged attacks on the crowd by the military police (see my testimony, below). “Historically unprepared to deal with dissent and opposition and untrained to meet the demands of a democratic society,” as my colleague Andrew Downie wrote last night, MPs are also accused of carrying out executions and acting in the form of death squads. I wrote about that here on From Brazil in January. Many have called for the disbandment of the service, created during the dictatorship.

The protests, mirrored in cities all over Brazil, including large demonstrations in Rio and Porto Alegre amongst others, have grown rapidly, and in SP, another, even bigger protest is expected on Monday night. It feels like a tipping-point moment that has subverted a frequent observation amongst foreigners living here: the glaring absence of protests and demonstrations, and the discrepancy between the scale of Brazil’s social inequality, and class antagonism. Accustomed to cordial interaction and minimal conflict – stemming, many Brazilians will tell you, from a long dictatorship and before that, master–slave social relations that never really went away – protest isn’t the done thing here. More common is an uncomfortable shrug, and a “Fazer o que?”, a “Muita calma nessa hora”, or even a “Vai dar tudo certo.” (What can you do? Everybody calm down. It’ll all work out in the end.) And at the other end of the same spectrum, “Troublemakers. Provocateurs. Vandals. They got what was coming to them.”

An epidemic of Facebook shares of images and texts from Taksim Square, Istanbul were satirised by a reader, writing in the Letters page of Folha de S.Paulo yesterday, who compared the newspaper headline’s characterising of the previous protests as “vandalism”, while classifying the Taksim square movement as “resistance”. Indeed, both Folha and its rival, Estado de S.Paulo, ran leaders supporting firm action on the part of the police in advance of the demonstration, and have often caricatured the mainly peaceful demonstrations as “vandalism”, whereas only a tiny minority carry out acts of vandalism, as I saw last night.

Distasteful as it might be to some, and frightening as it might be to witness, there’s a price to be paid for living in a free, peaceful society. For some, it’s the minor inconvenience caused by mass street protests on their way home from work. For others, or for the same people at different times, it involves taking to the streets in acts of civil disobedience, risking repression and possibly arrest, arbitrary or otherwise. But for still others, it means giving the police free rein to stamp out protest and the possibility of protest with a dose of state terror, and perhaps even a dash of wistful nostalgia for the good old days of the dictatorship.

As Rogério Leão Zagallo, a prosecutor and professor of law at SP’s prestigious Mackenzie University, put it last Thursday night, posting on his personal Facebook while he was stuck in traffic for two hours due to the protests, “Please, somebody inform the [military police] shock troops that this region comes under my jurisdiction, and that if they kill these sons of bitches I will bury the inquiry. … Oh, for the days when this kind of problem could be resolved with a round of rubber bullets in the back.” Zagallo got that wish, or part of it, but is reported to have been relieved of his duties at Mackenzie.

*****************************

AT THE PROTEST LAST NIGHT – MY ACCOUNT

Arriving at Praça Roosevelt in downtown São Paulo at 7.20pm last night, I joined the back end of a large, peaceful march that had started at the Teatro Municipal, and was now spanning most of the wide Rua da Consolação, moving up the road in the direction of Avenida Paulista. As I walked into the crowd, I could see teargas or smoke bombs rising at the head of the march, uphill, and I heard gas cannisters being fired with bangs that sounded like small bombs. On the steps overlooking the street from the square, two girls in black, with their faces covered, were spray painting the steps – “R$3.20 NÃO.” Just then, some 200 demonstrators who were standing on those steps at the bottom of the square, observing the march, moved into the street, joining the thousands-strong crowd, part of which had begun to turn and move back towards Avenida Ipiranga, in the direction from which it had come.

Moments later, I heard a series of explosions, very close, and the running began. I looked back over the heads of the people nearest me, and saw plumes of gas rising from canisters as they hit the road, 10 metres away. I could smell and taste the teargas and saw people covering their nose and mouths as they ran. I covered mine too. To cries of “Calma,” and “Don’t run, be careful,” the packed crowd was forced up into the square (Praça Roosevelt), into a bottleneck escape route complicated by pedestrian walkways that snake back and forth. Hands reached down, pulling people up over the rails. Gas, close behind and more canisters being fired. People trying not to panic, helping each other, but running, trying not to push.

I ran up a flight of steps to one side of the walkways, and up into the main part of the square. Making my way to the railing to one side of the running crowd, past groups of friends grasping at each other’s hands, trying to stay together as they ran, I found a vantage point and stopped to look back and try and understand the scene behind me: cannisters of gas still being fired in showers of sparks, plumes of gas rising, and people still running. I noticed a line of police officers, in helmets and riot gear, just below the railing and about 20 metres away from me. As I leaned over the railing, trying to see up Rua da Consolação, I felt a sudden hard impact smash against my hand, against a large silver ring I was wearing, and saw a small shower of sparks explode above me. I looked down and saw a black smear across my knuckles, and realised I had been clipped in the hand by a cannister of gas, leaving my knuckle bruised, black and red, and swollen. I feel almost certain I must have been fired upon on purpose, exposed, leaning over, absorbed in looking this way and that.

Up until this point, to my knowledge, the demonstration had been entirely peaceful.

I made my way across the square and onto Rua Augusta, where more gas was being fired, forcing groups of people this way and that, and splitting the crowd into smaller and smaller parts. Some people who had inhaled teargas called for vinegar to pour onto scarves and inhale, in an attempt to counter the effects. Someone in an apartment building overhead dropped a large bag of water onto the heads of a group of people standing near me. The police fired again and again, teargas floating towards us, and charged with motorbikes to push people down Martinho Prado and into the back streets between Augusta and 9 de Julho. For the next hour, I walked along street after street with the demonstrators, on my own but staying close to a group of first 100, then 50, then 25, then 20, as we were repeatedly charged from behind and scattered.

Time after time and apparently no matter how small the group, the police chased us, charging up on us and keeping us running, first with a column of about 7 powerful motorbikes, riding up onto the pavement and weaving between cars, forcing people to scatter. Bars and businesses we passed were rolling down their blinds quickly. At Praça Quatorze-Bis, an ugly traffic intersection below the 9 de Julho flyover, I started walking up towards the neighbourhood of Bixiga, still in a group of around 25 demonstrators, when a convoy of about five 4×4 police vehicles zoomed up behind us with an almighty vrooom, pulling up alongside us suddenly. Helmeted police leapt out, wading towards us and shoving people, pushing one boy up against the wall, corralling the group. I managed to slip between two officers and away as one snatched something from the boy’s hand, pushing him backwards and indicating he had to turn out his pockets. Further up the hill, now down to about 10-15 stragglers, they kept on coming, and as we turned into Rua Itapeva, they jumped out of the cars again and started firing cannisters of gas or smoke (the latter known as “bombas de efeito moral”- I’m translating that as shock and awe bombs, or morale-draining bombs).

Exhausted and coughing from the running and the smoke, I looked for a doorway or alley to take shelter in, but SP doors and alleys are well protected, sealed off with railings and blinds. I saw an open gate and ran inside, hiding behind a bush and watching the police march past, uphill, followed by the cars.

Making my way home up Rua Pamplona and over Avenida Paulista, I saw more police charges, saw groups of protestors regrouping and chanting the chant of the evening, “Sem violência!” (no violence), and saw and heard more gas and smoke bombs. I was caught up in a charge one more time as I walked down Rua Pamplona. The tweets I sent during the course of the night are here.

Unfortunately, I spent much of last week in Santa Maria, covering the nightclub fire that took the lives of so many young people. I say unfortunately not only because of the deeply horrific nature of the ordeal for everyone involved, but also because this is the worst kind of journalism, both to practice and to observe. In a tragic, singular event like this one, there is little for the media to do but react, and some of its ugliest characteristics spring to life.

Personally, I wrote four stories on the fire for the Los Angeles Times. One quick post for the website on the breaking story and what may have caused the fire, then a next-day front page piece telling the story of the tragedy:

Fire survivors recall deadly chaos in Brazil club

Then a story on the arrests of two club owners and two band members, and a final feature on the lessons many in the country were choosing to draw from the tragedy:

Brazil rethinks its rule-breaking attitude after club fire

It was a lot. I think we did a good job, and those articles, I think, give a good overview of the week.

But I was extremely lucky to be able to do it how I wanted. More generally, a problem with this kind of an event is that there is so much interest, but so little to say. This predicament is especially stark for the huge swarm of international journalists who parachuted into the small, devastated college and military town with vans and camera crews.

At first, like many in the small town, I was taken aback at the scale of the reaction around the world. Later, it made sense, but more on that later.

So once all these journalists were in Santa Maria, what were these people supposed to do?

I think in many ways, this event was similar to the Newtown massacre, especially as it relates to media coverage. And that goes for all tragic events that take place in the span of a few minutes. A few hours after the fire stopped, the story was over. The event took place, and there was nothing more.

Accounts of what happened were inevitably going to come out, as the survivors gradually told their stories to authorities and the press, when they were ready, and as the authorities shared the details of the investigation. There is not much space for aggressive journalism here, and it can indeed be quite harmful.

But you have all these people in town, and all this demand back at the editorial offices around the world. So they need to find something to shoot, to report, to say, and they have an incentive to make the story as “good” (read: sensational and emotional) as possible, as soon as possible. And as a result, many ended up getting things wrong.

So, three things to clean up:

1. Don’t blame security

I saw no evidence that the security guards stopped people from leaving for more than the few seconds it took them to realize there was a fire. With the pay-as-you-leave comanda system that is ubiquitous in Brazilian clubs, this was inevitable. Of the many, many errors that led to the tragedy, there is probably no reason to believe the staff committed one more. Survivors who were helped by security guards to escape to safety said they were bothered by the way the men had been painted in the media.

2. Much of the media is aggressive and exploitative

It’s indescribably heartbreaking to watch people shoving a camera into the face of a mother who has just found out she has lost a child. It’s irresponsible harassment to repeatedly call teenage survivors and grieving relatives, over and over, day after day, demanding they give an interview. But that’s exactly what students were saying happened to them. Does the world really need to know how sad they are, right now?

And to aggressive and exploitative, add ridiculous.

One could not create a more farcical scene than a queue of camera crews standing in front of the scene of the fire, waiting to put their man or woman with a microphone in front of it to shoot a 90 second clip. “I’m here at the scene of the…” etc. Some crews flew all the way across the world just to get that shot – their very own semi-famous news personality standing in front of the charred, stinking nightclub, reading a quick description of what happened. That was the only thing they did.

A friend of mine who is a freelance cameraman in São Paulo was contracted by an international TV station, and he told me how extremely disillusioned he was with the process. “It’s just very bad taste,” he says, referring to trying to get as much pain on camera as possible. And then the shot in front of the club. And that’s it.

3. It’s not primarily a story about Brazil

Then, the media needed a lesson. My fourth and final article was on the way the country came together to try to turn the horrible loss into something positive in the future, to find lessons to be learned to improve Brazil and turn it into a more civil society. I am very glad this discussion has come about, and I really do think things will improve here.

But you can’t work backwards from this. The inverse is not true. This fire will change Brazil, yes, but you can’t in any meaningful way say that anything about Brazil really caused this fire. It was not a national event. It was local and global.

In my time, I’ve been in bars in clubs in LA, London, and Berlin where the safety precautions were just as bad or worse as anything in Santa Maria.

Yes. Many, many, small and avoidable and tragically stupid errors led to wholesale loss of life.  And yes. Most should never have been allowed to happen, and should not be allowed to in the future.

But is that what caught the world’s attention? Did the world care about the rules broken? I would argue not. What captured the world’s imagination, in the worst way possible, is the scene.

A room full of young people, drinking at some silly college party with some silly band, and all of a sudden, because of some (it seems) totally unforeseen mix-up, there is worry, then panic and desperation, then death everywhere. That is a horribly, deeply terrifying story – and not because it could have been avoided, but because these kinds of things could happen at any time. It’s a reminder of the fact that we humans are not around forever and are very rarely fully aware of the risks around us.

Yes. Horrible mistakes led to this accident. But if you were to try to make a list of the main threats to the safety of those students a week before the accident, no one would have put this in the top ten.

And if you and I try to make a list, right now, of all the unknown and unseen dangers around us, we will of course fail miserably. That’s just the mystery and tragedy of the human situation. And there’s not much more to say.

Follow @Vinncent

Images above: The night vigil march in Santa Maria, one of the most intense and difficult scenes I’ve ever seen.

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.

This year, the country didn’t deliver on everything international observers thought the country had promised, but Brazil still remains one of the 21st century’s most remarkable success stories. 2013 could be decisive.

For those paying attention to Brazil headlines, 2012 was mostly a bad year. For some, it was enough to re-evaluate the status as an emerging power that the country has euphorically held for years now.

The economy barely grew, and government involvement in the economy has surprised some international investors. The ruling Worker’s Party was dragged through the mud repeatedly as the Supreme Court handed down sentence after sentence for a vote-buying scandal from Lula’s first term. The PCC returned to the scene in São Paulo, and a small-scale war broke out between police and the gang. New laws dismayed environmentalists concerned for the Amazon.

But Brazil still remains one of the most remarkable success stories of the 21st century. This is true for a few simple reasons. 40 million people have risen out of poverty, and inequality has decreased. Despite the slowdown, unemployment is at record lows, and wages have continued to rise. Perhaps most importantly, we saw last week that President Dilma has an eye-popping 78 percent approval rating.

In short, the vast majority of the population support the way the country is being run, people are better off than ever, and society is more just. It’s important to remember that this is the whole point of economic growth and democracy in the first place. The results are there. We shouldn’t confuse means with ends, as is so easy to do when we journalists get caught up in the latest GDP numbers, or scandal.

Even some of the the year’s worst stories have a positive flip-side. As ugly as the corruption trial was, many believe that the tough sentences handed down to high-level politicians could signal an end to political impunity in the country. And despite the tragedy of a spike in violence in São Paulo’s periphery, the state’s murder rate is still much lower than it was a few years ago.

When Brazilians and observers (justifiably) complain about the country at the moment, a little context can be uplifting. What has the world been going through for the last 12 years, especially since 2007? How many countries in the world can you point to with: rising standards of living, reduced inequality, and widespread, long-lasting contentment with leadership? This is certainly not how things feel in my native California, or in Europe. And all of this in an open, liberal democracy? I can’t think of many examples.

But of course, nothing guarantees this will continue, and 2013 could be a decisive year. We can’t expect wages to rise forever without economic growth returning, and so the world will be holding their breath until it does, as expected next year.  But if instead there is more stagnation, or more of what the international community sees as state meddling in the economy, international investors could finally give up and concentrate on countries like Mexico or Colombia. And it’s hard to imagine how the PT would be seen by the people if any of the party’s social gains were reversed.

I personally don’t think either of those doom scenarios will come to pass. We’ll see. But for now, here are some of the bad, the good, and the interesting stories from 2012.

These are summaries – click the links for more in-depth info.

The bad

Corruption –

We watched all year as high-level politician after high-level politician was brought down for the ‘mensalão’ scandal from 2003, and a new hero of the opposition (and anti-corruption movements) was born in the form of Joaquim Barbosa (pictured above).

Violence –

War broke out for the first since 2006 in São Paulo. Again, the major parties were the PCC, the state’s main gang, and the military police. The latter lost over 100 officers to (mostly) targeted executions, while the murder rate in SP jumped.

The economy –

This is the big one. After growing 7.5% in 2010 (and causing us in the international press to rush here), then slowing to 2.7% in 2011, we may not do much better than 1% in 2012. Even more awkward was the moment when Finance Minister Guido Mantega joined the rest of analysts in wildly overestimating third-quarter growth, leading The Economist to call for his dismissal. Needless to say, President Dilma was not pleased to hear this from the British magazine.

But the economy is expected to pick up in 2013, thanks not only in part to the huge cut in interest rates carried out this year, which have finally come down to the levels of a normal country. And in reality, the 7.5% growth year was a statistical blip after -0.3% in crisis-hit 2009. Taken together, the economy had been growing at 3.6% a year, close to the average over the last 20 years, and to what we’re likely to see over the next few years.

But more worrying is that some investors believe, whether rightly or wrongly, that the government has begun to micro-manage the economy and that the possibility of intervention may be unpredictable. Much of this has to do with the decision to lower energy prices. I personally think they’re wrong, or at least that this was a problem of the government’s way of communicating the changes rather than the changes themselves. But some people are on edge, and this is especially important, as a drop in investment is the real culprit for the bad numbers.

And of course, there remains so much that Brazil should and could do to increase productivity and upgrade its growth model.

Infrastructure –

We are still waiting on this one. This is one part of Brazil’s economy that most desperately needs to be resolved, and we’ve still only seen baby steps.

The environment –

My visit to the Amazon this year was not pretty, both because of the persistence of slave labor and the obvious destruction of the rain forest. Things took a turn for the depressing for environmental activists as the government rolled back protections in 2012.

The good

Politics –

Whatever you think of the ruling Worker’s Party (PT), it is undeniable that if you use the standard most often applied to political parties, Lula and Dilma’s have overseen a truly remarkable success story since 2003. Lula left office one of the most popular leaders in the world, and two years into her term, Dilma is already widely supported. 78 per cent approval is a breathtaking figure. And this after everything that happened in 2012.

Despite the mensalão mess, the PT did very well in municipal elections this year, and took back São Paulo, South America’s largest city. If 2014 elections were held today, all polls indicate Dilma would win by a landslide.

And without a doubt, the country plays a much larger role on the world stage than it did in 2002.

The PT, like everyone else, could improve greatly, but widespread support and a rising nation means you are winning, big. This is a tough act to follow.

The real economy –

As I mentioned above, for all the dismal numbers, life on the ground still feels better than ever. Families are still rising out of poverty. The explanation for this is a little complicated, but the reality is there. It can’t last forever like this, of course, but forever hasn’t happened yet.

Justice –

The flip side to the mensalão mess is a justice system which really has teeth for the first time anyone can remember. This has always been the case for the poor, but now politicians can be on the hook, too. This has many hoping they will think twice in the future.

Even some police are being held to account. Some of those that gunned down suspected members of the PCC and, by all accounts, set off this year’s wave of violence, are now in jail.

World Cup preparations –

For years we wondered if Brazil would be ready to host the World Cup. We haven’t sorted out our infrastructure problems, but it looks like at least the stadiums will be ready.

My personal take is the following: The World Cup will go the way Brazil does for most visitors. Something or another will go wrong. They’ll be stuck in traffic, or miss a flight, or end up spending more than they expected on this or that. But those things will be heavily outweighed by the charm of the country and the fun of the event, and most will go home raving about Brazil.

Cost of living –

For us foreigners, it’s been good news that the real has come down significantly this year. Brazil is no longer so maddeningly expensive. For Brazilians, the cost of living hasn’t changed much.

Corinthians –

“The people’s team” from São Paulo took the world club championship, and gave Brazilian football a much-needed boost. This also meant lots of traffic and nonstop fireworks in the city, but overall it was very good for the country, and for South America.

The unexpected and interesting

Lula back on the scene –

I suppose it was more of an anomaly that he was actually gone for a while. But after recovering quickly from cancer, the former president was given a grand welcome back and got to work quickly, helping out in this year’s municipal elections. Crucially, he has so far floated above the mess of the mensalão scandal, and insisting he know nothing of the scheme. We’ll see if he can keep this up in 2013.

Music –

2012 was a much more interesting year musically than 2011, in my opinion. We saw the rise of Brazilian hip hop to the mainstream, “techno brega” from the Amazon in the form of Gaby Amarantos, and funky pop from the likes of Tulipa Ruiz. Here’s our full interview with Emicida, and Criolo’s will be posted next year.

Eike Batista –

He did not have a good year. There was the unfortunate incident with his son, Thor. Then he attracted lots of negative attention, and fell quite dramatically from his position as Brazil’s richest man.

Race –

Hard to categorize this one as good or bad, but the country stared two deep-seated problems in the face this year: relations with indigenous populations, and the government’s approach to black Brazilians.

Tourism –

The sector is doing quite well, but it has nothing to do with the gringos. The sector is almost entirely powered by Brazilians moving around their own country.

The rebirth of the center –

Long more famous for being “Crack land” than anything else, we saw interesting new movements coming up from the street.

Evangelical power –

Much to the dismay of bien-pensant liberals, Brazil’s numerous, and often unsettling, Evangelical Christian churches revealed themselves as an ever more potent political force.

Exhibitionist turn –

We saw Brazil’s sub-celebrity realitytainment industry power into the same bizarre gears we’ve been accustomed to around the world. First, there was the sex, or perhaps rape, transmitted live on Big Brother Brasil. Then we had the young girl who auctioned off her virginity for $800,000.

Petrobras – Graça Foster –

One of South America’s largest companies inherited a true rags-to-riches story as Graça Foster took over. Here’s hoping she can help navigate Petrobras out of its current mess.

Niemeyer –

And finally, we bid a sad farewell to nation-defining visionary architect Oscar Niemeyer, who passed at 104 years old. Here’s an interview I did with him last year, and perhaps next year I’ll post my pictures from his 104^th birthday party.

Here’s hoping 2013 goes better. Happy New Year.

Follow @Vinncent

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.

Follow @Vinncent

*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.”

By Dom Phillips in Rio de Janeiro

2,000 heavily armed police and marines, with 13 armoured cars and helicopters, set off at dawn Sunday October 14 to occupy one more of Rio’s notorious favelas. For years Manguinhos and the surrounding slums in North Rio had been run by the Comando Vermelho, or Red Command, drug trafficking gang.

It made for a dramatic scene, in the dark before dawn, as a mob of press in flak jackets and helmets buzzed around a row of urban tanks and a battalion of police and marines.

Armed cars began to roll at 4.45am and crushed concrete barriers gangs had placed at the entrance of the Manguinhos slum. Across the street in Jacarezinho, piles of rubbish had been set on fire.

But the bandits had long since fled – earlier, one had even suggested he offer himself for amnesty in an interview with this blog’s editor Vincent Bevins for the LA Times, like members of Colombia’s FARC can.

Nevertheless, it was still tense as the press pack followed police sharpshooters as they inched down alleyways with rifles at the ready in the nearby Jacarezinho favela, home to one of Rio’s biggest concentrations of crack users, with photographers careful not to get any other snappers in the shot.

Because it is a general rule of the media that no matter on how big a scale an event is being ccovered, reporters must always pretend that they are the only ones there. Even if just beside the shot of the correspondent doing that dramatic live report are another 20, doing exactly the same thing, just in different languages.

But much as in the invasion of Rocinha in Rio’s more upscale South Zone a year ago, this occupation passed off without a shot being fired. It took just 20 minutes to occupy Manguinhos and neighbouring favelas.

The operation was hailed as a success for the city’s policy of pacifying slums dominated by armed drug gangs. “What we achieved today was to improve the life of these people,” said Rio security secretary José Beltrame, in a press conference the same day.

“This is a Sunday stroll with the family,” said Officer Pittigliani, cradling a sub-machine gun, as he drove past in a black police pick-up.

36,000 people live in the area. Two armed police base, called UPPs, will be installed in incoming months – there are 28 such bases in Rio. “If the state decides to take control of a piece of land,” said Officer Geraldo Arranha, “there is nothing the gangs can do.”

It was all very different two years ago when police and soldiers fought pitched battles with drug gangs in Rio’s Complexo do Alemão favela during an invasion. Now security forces advertise invasions in advance. They also begin operations days earlier. Five suspected bandidos were killed on the previous Friday night in the Juramento favela, also in North Rio, where members of the Red Command gang were believed to have fled.

In the run-up and aftermath of the operation, cocaine, crack, marijuana and weapons were seized. Gang leaders were arrested. But what did the population think? Those I talked to were cautiously optimistic.

At the Our Lady Helper catholic church in Jacarezinho, Father Dario da Silva, 60, led his congregation in a Sunday morning prayer for peace as police patrolled the streets. “We hope this will bring change,” he said afterwards. “The community is very poor and needy.”

The last gunfight took place a week earlier, Father da Silva said. Killings were frequent. But he argued that the Red Command gang fulfilled a sort of social role in the area that the state, up until now, had not. The gang bought medicine and gas for poor families, and even held a children’s party on Brazil’s Day of the Child. “If the state does not meet its obligations, they will want them back,” he said.

In Manguinhos, in front of a wide, dirt avenue strewn with rubbish, Luciana Regina, 32, was hanging out washing in her tiny concrete-walled front yard. “There are always gunfights here. A lot of people come to buy drugs. It is frightening. Now it is going to stop,” she said.

On the street in front of her, an enormous pig grubbed in a pile of rubbish, surrounded by vultures. “It has to get better. That’s what they say. Let’s see what happens,” Regina said.

“It’s great,” said Antonio Bispo, 54, from behind the counter of his bar in Jacarezinho. “Those of us who are workers are going to have more freedom. We have been imprisoned, silent.”

Critics say the favela pacification policy is just forcing gangs further out to the Rio suburbs. That it only affects those situated near tourist areas, World Cup and Olympic sites, or pieces of land slotted for gentrification.

This has largely been the case, but is certainly not true when it comes to Manguinhos, which is in a part of Rio tourists never venture out to. It is not on a hill, does not have sea views, and is not picturesque. It’s dirty and poor. Media reports after the invasion suggested that this outpost of Comando Vermelho had been had been singled out because police suspect leaders of the gangs here of pulling off a jailbreak this July, in which one of their fellow traffickers was freed.

Rio governor Sérgio Cabral said that 9,000 new homes would be built and that the Brazilian development bank BNDES would lend R$100 million ($49.3 million). The Rio government also moved to seize an oil refinery situated nearby as a place to build new homes.

Will the government deliver on its promises for Manguinhos? Will it just open up room for property speculators to move in? Residents and critics will be watching keenly. If experience in other pacified favelas is any guide, property values, prices, and profits will likely rise here.

By late Sunday morning, life in Manguinhos was returning to normal. As a soldier watched from the turret of an armed car, a man laid second hand shoes out on a blanket to sell and a fruit and vegetable stall opened. People bustled in the streets as if nothing had happened. Perhaps what was most important about Sunday’s occupation was that nothing actually happened. A sign that favela pacification is now part of the norm.

[Photo Dom Phillips]

In the interview, he asked me to announce that he and many others want to give themselves in and turn over their weapons and territory in return for amnesty. This was going to be part of a larger story coming out later. But when I found out the police plan to invade the favela he runs this Sunday, we decided to publish that part of the interview at the LA Times.

He said that “he and many other drug traffickers would be eager to take advantage of a voluntary demobilization program similar to that available to leftist guerrillas in Colombia.
 
“I’d do whatever it takes to get some kind of amnesty,” the heavily armed leader said in an interview on his home turf recently. “Any way I can pay my debt to society.”

The rest of the story will come out soon enough, but those are the bits we thought we should get out now.

He is currently wanted and the photo above is up on the Rio police Wanted site. I don’t know where he is.

Click here to continue reading “As police move in on Rio’s favelas, a drug lord seeks amnesty”

In this profile I did for the Los Angeles Times, sources explain that his catastrophic losses this year were in part related to his, erm, shall we say, unique personality. Much about the way he behaves will shock English-speaking readers, and the way he promised investors more than he could deliver led the markets to punish him severely.

His losses were far worse than anything else going on in Brazil. It is him, and not the economy more generally, that really tanked. The current wisdom is that Brazil will probably re-balance to more modest but decent growth, and that Eike’s companies will probably do OK eventually.

The problem, however, is that he quite purposefully and forcefully made himself a symbol of Brazil’s success. And not just the long-term opportunities for natural resource extraction he represents. His getting REALLY RICH, RIGHT NOW became a goal in itself, and, the myth went, proof of Brazil’s worth. That never made much sense.

Continue reading “In Brazil, a billionaire’s reality check” at the Los Angeles Times

Heads of state from all the countries in the Americas will spend the weekend in the beautiful city of Cartagena das Índias, on the Colombian coast. The meeting promises the same old scenes: speeches about the blockade on Cuba, Chávez acting up, and Obama’s glittering smile, with the Caribbean as backdrop.

Meanwhile, Latin America is drowning in a sea of blood. It’s the most violent piece of land on the planet, much worse than Africa. Out of the 14 countries with the world’s highest murder rate, seven are in Latin America, starting with El Salvador, where the chance of being shot to death is higher than in wartime Iraq.

Brazil is in the Olympic competition for the most murderous countries, coming in at 18th with 26 murders per 100,000 residents, or more than Palestine, Afghanistan, and Mozambique. In absolute terms, we win the gold: no other country in the world kills as many as we do.

The reason for the violence is as clear as the waters of the Caribbean: the war on drugs.

Over the last 40 years, since Richard Nixon sat in Obama’s place, the US has led a repressive offensive on drugs throughout our entire continent.

The fierce laws give criminals a monopoly in a very lucrative market, allowing them to be better armed and better paid than our own official security forces.

The result is that violence skyrockets. Paradoxically, increases in drug use do not slow down, as a result of a lack of investment in health in education. All that money is already earmarked for guns and prisons.

The war on drugs is now the main obstacle to development in Latin America, bringing down businesses, increasing our costs and scaring away tourists. But for many years now, no politician in the region has had the courage to face the problem – they’re scared to death of our big brother to the North, and of losing votes.

This has started to change. Last month, Otto Peréz Molina, the president of Guatemala – the world’s 7th most violent country – proposed that we should start talking about solutions to the problem – including the idea of creating controlled markets for marijuana, in an attempt to bring down the profitability of drug trafficking, and as a result, the amount of weapons involved.

Perez Molina is no bearded hippie. He is a hard-line general that was elected after saying he’d “crush the cartels with an iron fist.”

And he’s no dope, either. He knows he has no chance of winning as long as our drug policies enrich the enemy armies. Support for Molina’s courageous position popped up in important countries, including Colombia, Mexico, Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile.

The US did exactly what we’d expect: they sent the vice president to go give Molina a stern rebuke, and acted outraged. They’re playing to the crowd: in an election year Obama can’t be seen as “soft on drugs.”

Colombia’s former president Cesar Gaviria, said that the majority of US officials already know that the war on drugs has been a mistake, and that they don’t end it because “it’s on automatic pilot.”

In the midst of all this mess, one country is fundamental: Brazil. If Dilma gives clear support, Brazil, Mexico and Colombia, the three biggest economies in Latin America, will be on the same side, defending the region against a bloodbath. This will lead to changes around the world.

But Brazil pretends that this is not our battle. The Foreign Ministry refuses to say anything, other than giving a vague declaration that the country “is not opposed to opening a debate.” Our politicians must be too busy writing speeches about Cuba.

Denis Russo Burgierman is a Brazilian journalist and author of “The end of the war: marijuana and the creation of a new system to deal with drugs.” (Leya)

Photo: Fabiana Andres Lopez, left, and another relative, mourn on the coffin containing the body of her son Elmer Constantino Castro Andres, after the identification and repatriation of the remains from Mexico at an Air Force base in Guatemala City , Wednesday, March 21, 2012. According to Mexican authorities, Castro was one of 72 migrants allegedly executed Aug. 25, 2010 by the Zetas drug cartel in the northeastern Mexico town of San Fernando, just 100 miles from the U.S. border. (AP Photo/Rodrigo Abd)

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It depends where you’re from.

An article by Simon Romero at the New York Times offers an insight into the way we foreigners tend to see Brazil differently, and the way Brazil’s story is repeatedly told differently outside the country.

Rather than concentrating on who was right or wrong – of course, we don’t know – Romero’s piece concentrated on the circumstances that led to the collision:

Two Brazils also met head-on: one in which a small elite live with almost unfathomable wealth, and another in which millions eke out an existence on the margins of that abundance.

To put it simply, we gringos tend to see this all the time, and this is not exactly what Brazilians constantly see, if I am to judge by comparing English and Portuguese-language media coverage, or by how unwelcome our observations on the subject tend to be here. Much to the annoyance of many locals, many of those of us who grew up outside Brazil tend to view the country through the prism of social inequality.

I may be wrong. but I have a hard time seeing an article with this focus come out in the Brazilian press without being considered quite radical.

Of course Romero is right that some class dynamics led to the collision. Why did Wanderson need to be on a high-speed freeway to pick up milk? It’s remarkable to see the way that highways are often thrown across communities here, without offering residents any safe way to get around them.

And as for Thor, would he have been driving differently if he wasn’t in a million-dollar car? Who knows. But it appears that due to the number of violations he’d already racked up, he shouldn’t have been driving at all.

It’s worth checking out the whole piece to see truly the remarkable way Eike and Thor acted in public after a man lost his life. Do they know how that looks, given the circumstances?

Of course, it is natural that foreigners will tell the story of Brazil differently than Brazilians do. The inverse is also true. As jarring as Brazilian class divisions are to North Americans or Western Europeans, there are countless things we don’t focus on so much in our own societies that are just as striking to Brazilians, the Japanese, or Nigerians.

It’s not obvious for those of us from the US, for example, what it sometimes can be like to be a foreigner in our country. For the amount of power Washington has around the world, it tends to shock foreigners how little we know about much of it. And on inequality, we are not really too much better than Brazil.

Who is right? Is Brazil too used to some problems, or are we foreigners self-righteous, naive and sanctimonious? Maybe neither, maybe both.

But it seems clear that when we tell the story of Brazil outside the country, it will make sense to focus on what is noticeably different for us. And despite all the progress made, one of Brazil’s most obvious characteristics is still inequality.

Links (or, a list of times we foreigners took the equality angle):

New York Times: At War With São Paulo’s Establishment, Black Paint in Hand
Los Angeles Times: Brazil’s poor seem left behind in growth spurt
Financial Times: Sway of the wealthy remains strong in Brazil’s cities
New York Times: Slum Dwellers Are Defying Brazil’s Grand Design for Olympics
Financial Times: 2010 census shows Brazil’s inequalities remain

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Neither Thor nor Eike denied that the 20-year old’s Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren struck 30-year old Wanderson Pereira da Silva at high speed, killing him instantly. But both took to social networks to proclaim Thor was not at fault.

Now, it looks like the heir-apparent to the $30bn empire will not face any criminal charges, and that empire has just gotten a very welcome cash injection from a friendly sheikh in the Gulf. Mubadala, an investment arm of the Abu Dhabi government, will drop $2bn into EBX, Eike Batista’s group.

Mr. Batista has gotten very, very rich off of publicly floated plans to develop Brazil’s oil, gas and mineral resources, and has recently expanded into hospitality, real estate, technology, and beauty companies.

But so far, few of his businesses have actually made any real profits. This makes the new deal especially important for him.

As the FT’s Beyondbrics reports:

Mubadala’s $2bn investment in the EBX holding company itself is a big vote of confidence. As Batista said himself in an interview with beyondbrics, “it brings branding by a strategic investor who is internationally known”. But more importantly, it means Batista can choose to spread the cash across his various businesses without losing any operational control.

Batista is quite a character. His father was head of Vale, Brazil’s most important mining company. After Eike made his own billions, he has often surprised the foreign correspondents who interview him by showing off the Mercedes he keeps parked in his living room, openly proclaiming he will soon be the world’s richest man, or taking them for a helicopter ride.

Such a man understandably divides opinion. Some praise him as proof that private sector entrepreneurship and the pursuit of wealth bring benefits to Brazil, and have made his book, “The X Factor“, a best-seller. Others see his bragging as very poor taste in a country still facing widespread poverty. And the financial crowd has often questioned when his companies will actually make money.

But after a rough spot, the Brazilian legal system and Arab money have stepped in to help him out, and Eike is on top again.

Links:
Why has Brazil been getting richer?
FT Beyondbrics – Batista gets a new friend from the Gulf

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