The Peace of Democracy and its Malcontents

by EDUARDO BAKER, BRUNO CAVA and GIUSEPPE COCCO

On the night of July 24th of the current year, the state military police invaded the Maré’s favela complex with its war apparatus: armored cars, choppers and rifles. The police occupied the territory inhabited by around 150 thousand people and starred in a night of terror. Besides the siege where “no one goes out, no one comes in”, electric and phone lines were interrupted, hundreds of homes were invaded with no warrants and, depending on who you talk to, between 9 and 14 residents were summarily executed by the police. Because simply shooting is “too little”, the elite troop chose to behead some of the victims. This reality is common in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas, a city in which the official numbers points to around 500 killed annually by the forces of the state, the great majority of which young people, black and poor and with the same number of people missing.

The difference of this slaughter was the context. Days after the one million march in the center of the city, the Maré’s “Massacre of Saint Bartholomew” happened in retaliation of a protest of “favelados” (people from the favelas) in the main avenue beside the favela. At the end of the protest of the 24th, under the pretext that there had been thefts occurring in the avenue, the police intervention led to the death of a resident and an officer from BOPE (Police special battalion). This triggered a typical revenge action from the police where each police officer dead must be avenged by a much greater number of residents. The “message” was given: “the “favelados” shouldn’t join the uprising, or they would be killed”.

While Maré was being assaulted by a bellicose attack that can only be categorized as an extermination, the corporate press of the city limited itself to talking about “another confrontation between police officers and drug dealers”. The focus consisted in highlighting the death of the police officer, implying that the action was an expected and legitimate response to Narco traffic. The government followed the same line of narrative, to blame the “traffic”. What could have ended buried again by the news, had another outcome. The following day, 3 thousand protestors descended from the hills of Rocinha’s and Vidigal’s favelas and went to the governor’s house in the luxurious neighborhood, Leblon, demanding better living conditions in the favelas, including sanitation, education, health and the end of the military police.

On July 4^th, 5 thousand people had the courage to protest again in Maré, on the same avenue of the protests on the 24th, uniting social movements, NGOs and collectives, all with the sign saying “State that kills, never again!”. There a new front of questioning was cast on the tide of terror against the black youth. When, on July 14th, a resident of Maré’s favela was taken by the police and, right after he “conveniently disappeared”, the campaign “Where is Amarildo?” emerged. The campaign reached national and international repercussions and Amarildo became the symbol of a resistance whose first challenge was to make visible the thousands of anonymous killed and missing daily in Brazil’s big cities. With the campaign we found out who Amarildo was, a 47 year-old constructions worker’s helper, father of 6, who was seen last being taken for “further inquiry” by the police. The case is particularly symbolic, taking into account that the officers who took him were from the Police Pacifier Unit (UPP), a military headquarters embedded in the favelas to implement the territorial “pacifying” policy. Public pressure was the decisive factor to guarantee the effectiveness of the investigation, which showed that Amarildo was dragged to a session of torture with electric shock and choking, until he was killed and his body “disappeared”. Not without reason, the chief police officer who conducted the investigation with fairness was “awarded” by the government and transferred to a police headquarters far away.

Since the beginning of the Brazilian cycle of protests, in July part of the left, inside the federal government, especially form Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT), has accused the protests of consisting mainly of middle class white people, with a right agenda, the so called “coxinhas” (a Brazilian snack). However, what is seen, other than the strengthening of the struggle in the favelas, is a growing number of poor black young participants in the protests. These people come from favelas, guetos, and from a social composition of workers put in precarious positions from the improperly called the “new middle class”, formed throughout the last ten years of massing social policies in Lula’s (2003-10) and Dilma’s (2011- ) governments. Also explained is the prohibition of masks in the protests, which in Rio was even instituted by a law approved by the state’s legislative power, on September 11th, which also allowed the use of force when there was “grounded suspicion”. This is an elastic concept which gives a broad margin for police decision – maybe a better word for it would be arbitrariness. Justified to allow the identification of “vandals” that were supposedly among the protestors, in fact tries to impede the mixture of groups much more threatening to the people in power, that is an alliance between black people and favelados (people from the favelas) with the traditional movements and left collectives. The mask creates the possibility of them being together. The Brazilian penal code, after all, recognizes their own in a state of institutionalized racism. The real distinction intended never was between “political prisoners” and “regular prisoners”, but between black and white. While the white tend to have their rights relatively recognized, the black are treated in a much more cruel form, disrespected from the moment of arrest until the police headquarters, where they are usually placed with their faces to the wall and therefore humiliated like runaway slaves.

The press and the government continue to accuse the protests of being violent. They were stripped of their causes by a bunch of masked people who, disrespecting the rules of civility, cross the lines to practice “acts of vandalism”, breaking windows, writing graffiti walls, burning empty buses and defending themselves from the police. This narrative, again, serves as justification for the brutal state action, when every protestor on the street is seen as a potential “vandal”, in the same way that, in a favela, any young black person is seen as a potential “drug dealer”. The only change is the ammunition. There was never a “confrontation” between protestors and police. Actually what happens is a squashing of the protests by a super armed and super violent state, which doesn’t hesitate to beat, throw gas, humiliate, torture and arbitrarily arrest whomever is in its way. In a reality of daily brutality, with Amarildos and Amarildas mass-fabricated, including by the pacifying policies, it sounds terribly phony to attribute the problem of urban violence to the “vandalism” in the protests. For many people, especially to the black and poor, the protests mean a chance to fight for peace. The fear, for them, already happened, and the violence – the summary executions, of the “convenient disappearance” and the armed terror – exists as normality in their lives. The struggle that the punitive power always reduces to “vandalism”, to many is a chance to build a peace that is not pacified.

It’s ironic how a country is led to another level of democracy not by the left institutionalized in the government, but by riots that unite, against fear, and many struggles of the metropolis. The government led by the former guerrilla fighter, instead of filling themselves with the agendas incarnated in the barricade, prefers to place itself on the opposite side, of a dictatorship disguised by the economic growth and mega events over optimism, the World Cup and the Olympic games. Cornered by the realization that the protests put to the test all its alliance system and governability, Dilma’s government chose the path of repression. They endorsed uncritically the repressive states governments’ actions. For instance, among others, the indiscriminate arrests of around 200 protestors who sat peacefully on the stairs of Rio’s municipal legislative house at the end of the protest on October 15^th, in which 50 thousand people were present. They were charged for the first time, according to a new law sanctioned by Dilma in September, as a “criminal organization” and 64 ended up incarcerated in a prison in Bangu, in medieval conditions. Three other protestors had already been arrested in September for “forming an armed gang” only because they administrated the “Black Bloc RJ” Facebook page. Most of the detained got their release with the help of a popular lawyer or the Public Defender’s office. Even so, 2 people remain in custody. A homeless man, arrested in June, and a militant of the homeless movement, arrested in October. The first one accused of possessing explosives: a broom and a bottle of chlorine, which he used to clean his place of rest – the streets of downtown Rio. The second prisoner is a young black man black young man who lives in an urban occupation and was part of the movements in Rio. He is accused of being a part of an armed criminal association.

In the mean time, in São Paulo on the 25th, a young man was arrested and accused of “first degree murder” after attacking a Military Police (PM) Colonel who had entered a city’s protest alone and in uniform, when 92 other protestors were arrested. In an interview, he lamented: “it was my turn”. On Sunday, the 27th, it was Douglas Rodrigues’ turn, a 17 year-old boy from the periphery of São Paulo, whose last words were: “why did you shoot me, sir?”. The riot that came after the murder, with the burning of buses and trucks on a nearby road, was brutally repressed, resulting in another 90 arrests by the PM. The officer who shot the unarmed teenager, different from the protestor who slapped the Colonel, is accused “second degree murder”, without the intention to kill.

Besides all this, on the November 25th, Gleise Nana, a young activist in the protests and who was reporting the online threats from a police officer, died in the hospital after a coma, with a great deal of her body burned, after a mysterious unsolved fire in her house, on October 19th.

The Justice Minister of Dilma’s government, finally, announced on October 31st, under the pretext of “combating the vandalism”, the federalization of the repression of the protests in the two main cities, Rio and São Paulo, putting at their disposals the Federal Police and the Intellingence System. PT and its government, represented by the Justice Minister transformed into the Minister of the Police, are throwing in the trash all of their history of struggles, even against the dictatorship. The only door they open to the movement... is the one to prison. Dilma and Cardozo are only concerned with the order of this power. Well, in Rio, 5 months of daily democratic mobilizations show one thing: when the power wants, the PM – despite its usual violence and the episodes of use of fire arm by isolated police officers – didn’t kill anyone on the avenue. This shows the world two things: the first is that the execution of young, poor, black people from the favelas is not an isolated non commanded event, but a clear and sustained state policy, a rational policy with purpose and goal. The movement from June to October was (and still is) the very powerful invention – because it is radically democratic – of peace. A democratic peace, not a “pacification” against the senzala (the slave quarters) to maintain slavery in different ways, but the freeing of the poor as peace.