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.

Brazil president Dilma Rousseff declared last week that the country would welcome refugees “with open arms” and talked of the important role immigration has played in Brazilian history. But can such optimism survive the tensions that surround the issue? 

By James Young
Belo Horizonte

Surrounded by a withering economic crisis, the billowing Petrobras corruption scandal, a kick-in-the-teeth credit rating downgrade, and even the looming spectre of potential impeachment, Brazil president Dilma Rousseff must have been delighted to be able to send a positive message this week.

“Even in moments of difficulty and crisis, like we’re going through now, we have to welcome refugees with open arms,” she said in a message delivered via social media on Monday, Brazilian Independence Day. “I want to use today to reiterate the willingness of the government to receive those who, expelled from their homelands, want to come here and live, work and contribute to the prosperity and peace of Brazil,” she continued.

Citing the image of the lifeless body of Aylan Kurdi, the three-year-old Syrian boy who was found washed up on a Turkish beach, Rousseff also said that the world was facing a “humanitarian tragedy”.

Official figures say that Brazil is currently home to 2,077 Syrian refugees, representing 25% of the total number of refugees in the country and more, according to a BBC Brazil report, than the USA and a number of European countries have taken in. The number of refugees in Brazil has doubled in the last four years, rising from 4,218 in 2011 to 8,400 today.

The total has been boosted by a government policy to relax entry requirements for Syrian immigrants for “humanitarian reasons”, with those arriving in Brazil no longer needing to provide evidence of employment or means of financial support. In the coming weeks CONARE, the National Committee for Refugees, intends to extend such special conditions, which have been in place since 2013, for a further period.

One city that has taken in refugees is Belo Horizonte, Brazil’s third biggest urban area behind Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, where, according to local consulate figures, 78 Syrians have arrived this year.

“Today I’m working as a security guard…but I’m happy. The Brazilians have welcomed us with open arms,” Alaa Kassab, a lawyer in his home city of Homs, told the Globo network. Belo Horizonte has been receiving Syrian refugees since 2012, mostly as a result of the work of Father George Rateb Massis of the Sagrado Coração de Jesus church, a Syrian himself, who has lived in Brazil for 15 years.

“They come from the airport with a Brazilian visa. Thank God the government isn’t denying them that. The job market is very limited for them. Even though they are all university graduates, doctors and engineers, the opportunities are very basic,” Massis told Globo.

This latest wave of arrivals is the most recent chapter in Brazil’s long history of immigration, which began with colonisation by the Portuguese, and the forced transport of an estimated 4.9 million African slaves to the country between the 16th and 19th centuries.

Immigration in the modern sense of the word arrived in the 1820s in the form of large numbers of German migrants, unsettled by political and social upheaval at home and drawn by the lure of a new world in the south Atlantic, filled with vast, untapped areas of verdant farmland. The south of Brazil, where most of them settled, with its mountains and chilly temperatures, would not even have seemed all that far from home. The growth of the coffee industry subsequently created further demand for manpower, propelling more Europeans towards Brazil.

According to the Museu da Imigração in São Paulo, around 5.5 million immigrants arrived in Brazil between 1870 and 1953, from countries such as Italy, Portugal, Spain, Germany, Japan, and Poland. The influences of these arrivals can be felt today, from the stories of the Ukrainian born, naturalised Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector and the Germanic architecture found in parts of states such as Espirito Santo, Santa Catarina, Paraná and Rio Grande do Sul, to the Italian restaurants of the Bixiga neighbourhood in São Paulo and their Japanese counterparts in nearby Liberdade.

Arab immigration to Brazil, mostly from Lebanon and Syria, began in the late 19^th century, with sources estimating that around 140,000 people moved from the Middle East to the country between 1880 and 1969. While there are conflicting opinions about the number of Brazilians of Arab descent today – a 1998 survey by the IBGE research unit found that Arab-Brazilians make up 0.48% of the population, or around one million people, while other sources put the number closer to ten million – there is no doubting the profound influence Arab immigration has had on Brazil.

Comida Arabe restaurants and snack bars selling kibbehs (quibes/kibes) and sfihas (esfihas) are a staple in every Brazilian town and city, with the vast Habib’s chain one of the country’s biggest fast food networks. And many high-profile Brazilians – such as vice-president Michel Temer, whose family originally came from northern Lebanon, renowned author Milton Hatoum, TV presenter Sabrina Sato and actress Juliana Paes – are of Arab descent.

The welcome extended by Brazil towards refugees has not been without its critics, however, with some less globally-minded locals keen to point out the difficulty the country often faces in providing jobs, education and social care for its own citizens, let alone foreigners. “Before opening its arms to refugees, we should look after our own “refugees”, who have to live with violence and poverty,” commented one reader of the Folha de São Paulo coverage of Rousseff’s speech.

Tensions have risen too over the numbers of Haitian migrants in Brazil, with an argument breaking out between the governments of the entry point state of Acre in the north of the country, which lacks the infrastructure to deal with the volume of arrivals, and São Paulo, where the immigrants frequently end up.

And the kind of hostility and resentment that often surrounds the subject of migrants and refugees in the countries of the EU reared its ugly head a few weeks ago with the shooting of six Haitians by a man with a pellet gun in the centre of São Paulo, with the shooter reported to have shouted “you stole our jobs” after pulling the trigger.

“We Brazilians are a nation formed by people from a wide variety of origins, who today live in peace,” said Rousseff, when describing the country’s current stance on the refugee issue. With such tensions likely to grow as more and more immigrants arrive in the country, however, it is to be hoped that Brazil’s arms will remain open to refugees for as long as possible.

Recent high-profile examples of prejudice have stirred up the complex race debate in Brazil, a country that has in the past claimed to be built on foundations of racial democracy. 

By James Young

Belo Horizonte

From the glorious colonial architecture of Ouro Preto in the hills of Minas Gerais to the exquisite Teatro Amazonas in Manaus, Brazil is justifiably proud of the evidence of its rich history and culture. But a recent trip back into another kind of past – the blackface tradition of US theatre, or some of the darkest moments of 1970s UK TV, for example – has left more than a few Brazilians feeling squeamish.

Most famous for its scantily clad Panicat dancers, the puerile Pânico Na Band comedy show is not known for scaling intellectual heights. In recent weeks, however, it has plumbed new depths with the introduction of a character known only as The African, played by “blacked-up” white actor Eduardo Sterblitch, who speaks only in grunts and shrieks and acts in what the show’s creators presumably believe constitutes typical “African” behaviour – scratching at all parts of his body, tearing at plants and leaves and performing a dance of thanks for the judges of a cooking contest.

The show caused outrage among some Brazilians, with the National Black Slavery Truth Commission, an initiative of the Brazilian Bar Association, stating that the character was a “racial affront” which contributed to the “perpetuation of the effects and vestiges of slavery.”

Sterblich has since apologised for his performance, while Pânico has said that it intends to remove the character from the show, before rather spoiling the gesture by offering up the dubious defence that the program makes fun of “Mexicans, Chinese and Arabs” as well.

It is the latest in a string of recent racism-linked episodes in the media or involving well-known Brazilians. Last month the black presenter of the weather segment on the Globo TV network’s nightly news program, Maria Júlia Coutinho, was abused with a string of racist comments on the show’s Facebook page.

This week Flamengo boss Cristóvão Borges claimed that some of the deluge of criticism he has received during his career “has a racial connotation…I was even called the Mourinho of the Pelourinho”, a reference to Chelsea boss Jose and the historic district of Borges’ home city of Salvador, Brazil’s most African-influenced city, the name of which is taken from the Portuguese word for a slave-era whipping post.

Like the “monkey” chants aimed at the black goalkeeper Aranha during last year’s Copa do Brasil tie between Grêmio and Santos, the incidents have brought the issue of racism in Brazil to the fore, and provided further evidence of the myth of the theory of democracia racial – the idea that the country, with its complex racial mix of indigenous peoples, European colonizers, African slaves, and later large-scale immigration from countries such as Japan, Italy and Germany, would somehow magically avoid the racial conflicts seen in other nations.   

The high-profile examples above rather give the lie to such a notion, as does the sheer weight of statistics describing the different realities of life for Brazil’s racial groups. A 2014 study by the Brazilian Public Security Forum found that the murder rate among young black Brazilians in 2012 was 70.8%, compared to 27.8% among their white equivalents.

“There are more than 30,000 young people with this profile (black) murdered every year. It’s as though a full plane crashes every day,” said Atilia Roque, director of Amnesty International in Brazil, on the launch of the “Keep Black Youth Alive” campaign to bring attention to the issue. Another report last year found that black or brown-skinned Brazilians earn slightly over half the average salary of white workers.

 Yet despite Brazil’s great racial divide, visibly obvious everywhere from expensive restaurants to public hospitals, or etched on the faces of the manual workers queueing in early morning bus lines, the race debate is largely played out at low volume here. “If I went after everybody who called me black, I would have sued the whole world,” Pelé said earlier this year, when advising Aranha that “indifference” was the best form of defence against the racists, while the expression “Brazil is not a racist country” is commonly heard.

Part of that is down to the difficulties of racial classification in a country where there has been intermingling between different ethnic groups for so long. A recent survey found that 53% of Brazilians described themselves as “black” or “brown”, but the numbers of people declaring themselves as negro, branco or pardo (brown skinned or mixed race) can vary considerably from one study to another, based on the current cultural and social mood.

The concept that one’s racial identity can be flexible was summed up neatly by the footballer-turned-senator Romario when talking about Neymar. “I’m black,” he said, “If (he) doesn’t consider himself black, then he’s not. It’s up to him.” And a 1980 survey by the historian Clovis Moura identified 136 types of racial classification that Brazilians use to describe themselves, including “milky coffee”, “dirty white” and “cinnamon.”

At the same time, black consciousness in Brazil has grown in recent years through the activities of social groups and initiatives such as Dia Nacional da Consciência Negra, or National Black Consciousness Day.  “I became black – it was a process…but the fact that I had to “learn” to be black is terrible,” the actress Jana Guinond has said of her eventual decision to describe herself as negra.  

Episodes like that of “The African” and the affronts suffered by Cristóvão Borges and Maria Júlia Coutinho raise another issue in Brazil’s race debate – the local habit of using racially based slang terms such as Negão (“Big Black”), or Pretinha (“Little Black Girl”) or Japa (“Japanese-Brazilian”) to describe people.

Brazilians are fond of saying that such terms are mostly affectionate, not intended to be offensive, and used for physical description only. Subconsciously or otherwise, however, such language is surely built on stereotypes, and it seems unthinkable that such terms would be used in countries where the racial discussion is more sensitive.

And Brazilians may now have another area of potential racial conflict with which to deal. The shooting of six Haitian immigrants by a man with a pellet gun in the centre of São Paulo two weeks ago was notable for the fact that the shooter was reported to have shouted “you stole our jobs” after pulling the trigger.

Some estimates say over 50,000 Haitians have moved to Brazil since 2012, and the shooting felt like an unsettling echo of the resentment and xenophobia that surrounds immigration, often from Africa or Eastern Europe, into the wealthier countries of the EU, particularly when such countries are experiencing the kind of economic recession that Brazil is undergoing today.

If such unpleasant incidents have an upside, however, it is that from racist TV characters and football fans to anti-immigrant feeling, the race debate in Brazil seems slowly to be getting louder – and perhaps not before time.