Drug crime has returned to some of the favelas taken over by Rio’s police in recent years, putting the ‘pacification’ program under further scrutiny. Escalating violence and accusations of human rights abuses indicate police forces may be losing control. One resident group questions the wisdom of trying to resolve the problem with more military force.

By Anna Jean Kaiser

Complexo do Alemão and Complexo da Penha, favelas in northern Rio, have recently seen a wave of shootings, four police fatalities in 30 days, and accusations of human rights abuses commited by police. Rocinha and Manguinhos, two other favelas supposedly conquered and ‘pacified’ by Rio security forces since the push started in 2009, have seen armed attacks on police stations.

In the wake of what seems to be a loss of control, Rio Governor Sergio Cabral has called upon the federal armed forces to intervene and act alongside UPP and state military police.

For five years now, foreign and domestic observers have largely praised the pacification program. But recently, it’s become clear how difficult the long-term situation will be.

The state and the residents seem to agree: combating crime in the community is arduous and the current solution is not working. But the state’s solution, that of sending in more armed forces, seems problematic for some residents, who are asking for dialogue, more participation in society, and above all, positive steps toward social justice.

In light of the escalating conflicts in Complexo do Alemão, an activist group known as “Ocupa Alemão” (Occupy Alemão) released a manifesto. Its opening line reads:

“For decades the State has not recognized the favela as an integral part of the city, denying favela residents their basic rights. Today, after three years of public security occupation in Complexo do Alemão, we see that the path to the guarantee of our civil rights is still long, as the branch of the state that most enters the favela is the armed branch.”

As the Manifesto made its way around the social networks, the state sent in the Battalion of Special Operations (BOPE) and then announced the anticipated arrival of the military.

“The current strategy of the government is centered around military force being the solution for the favela,” Thainã de Medeiros from the Ocupa Alemão movement told ‘From Brazil,’ “We do not believe that this is a good solution for either side, neither for the residents nor for the military forces… The current strategy costs lives on all sides.”

Alemão residents are caught in the middle. The very large majority of residents are working class families with no links to crime, and the effects of human rights abuses and high levels of violence are traumatizing.

After UPP officer Rodrigo de Souza Paes Leme was fatally shot in Alemão, police arrested two minors, Kleyton da Rocha Afonso and Hallam Marcilio Gonçalves, for their alleged involvement with drug trafficking and the officer’s death. Family and friends of the teenagers claimed the allegations were unjust – they had no criminal records and no proven links to drug trafficking. A peaceful protest against their incarceration turned violent, police throwing tear gas and shooting.

Some favela residents go so far as to say that life has deteriorated.

“The residents are living worse than they were before,” said Roberto Borges, the president of the Alemão Resident’s Association to Agência Brasil, “The UPP alone will not solve a public problem that has existed for decades.”

But the state continues to turn to more troops and Secretary Beltrame insists that the program is not at risk, though he does admit that there are serious problems in both Alemão and Rocinha  – noting that the situation is “very far from ideal.”

“Rio de Janeiro lived with this for 30 years and never did anything. There is no guarantee to remove all weapons from everywhere, because for 30 years the state has not done its job and society tolerated it,” he said in defense of the program.

Anna Jean Kaiser is editorial assistant in Brazil for The Guardian and freelance correspondent for outlets such as USA Today.

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

By Dom Phillips

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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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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