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.

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.

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?

I was at the Brazil-Uruguay game on Wednesday, which was surrounded by protests marked by an especially large amount of property destruction and clashes with police. I left the game, and walked past a line of Police Shock Troops (I was wearing a big Fifa press badge, so they let me) into a bizarre world. I left a tightly organized sports mega-spectacle into what felt like a post-apocalyptic movie, with street fires, smashed windows, terrifying (though polite) police, and journalists and residents wandering aimlessly among the wreckage.  Above, some motorcycles on fire in the street.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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.

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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.

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.

Ideally, police are the solution to the problem, not the cause. But for the last week, most attention here in Brazil has been focused on police strikes that probably led to a number of deaths and at one point seemed to threaten the country’s extremely important Carnival celebrations.

It now looks like things will more or less return to normal. The strike in Salvador which began at the beginning of the month has now ended, and the small strike in Rio may very well end today. A vote is scheduled for tonight.

But this was an unpleasant wake up call for Brazil, and a difficult reminder of the sometimes tense relationship between the police, the federal government, and civil society.

As professor David Fleischer said, “The strikes were organized to be on the eve of the Carnival to put these cities in a very difficult position.” That comes off sounding like a bit of an understatement. It is hard to overestimate the role Carnival plays in Brazilian culture, and indeed, in Brazilian business. Salvador and Rio host the country’s largest and most profitable celebrations.

So it’s quite important that the police actually be policing during the events, and that they do not let thugs run wild, unleashing a spree of murders and robberies. So it seemed the police had authorities right where they wanted them. But this strategy may have backfired. While the government of Bahia let things get out of hand, Rio made it clear very quickly the strike would not be tolerated, coming down hard on leaders.

As with most strikes, it was about money. Brazilian police are not paid very well, and the country is very expensive. One sympathizes. But the question is whether or not allowing people to die is a legitimate bargaining chip. It seemed quite reasonable when President Dilma Rousseff judged that it was not.

So what does this tell us about Brazil in 2012? It’s hard to say. Should we worry that the country won’t be prepared for host the World Cup in 2014, or the Olympics in 2016. Probably not. When things are that important, Brazil finds a solution. But perhaps more worrying is that in their day-to-day lives many Brazilians view police with suspicion, and that some police consider their situation so difficult that they thought they needed to send this message. Whatever the message is, it’s not a good one.

Links:

Reuters story with the latest news 

My Los Angeles Times article from Saturday

An excellent set of photos on the A Folha de São Paulo site