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Title: Brazil: Rivers of Blood Author: CrimethInc. Date: April 6, 2018 Language: en Topics: Brazil, analysis, democracy, repression Source: Retrieved on 16th June 2021 from https://crimethinc.com/2018/04/06/brazil-rivers-of-blood-peace-is-war-security-is-hazardous-and-citizens-are-the-targets-of-the-state#fnref:1
In 2016, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff was impeached in a legal
coup d’état. On March 14, 2018, City Council member Marielle Franco was
murdered in downtown Rio de Janeiro, likely by the police or their
colleagues in the paramilitary cartels. Yesterday, a judge ordered the
imprisonment of Lula da Silva, the most popular candidate in the
upcoming presidential election. Rather than understanding these as
interruptions of Brazilian democracy, we have to recognize them as the
functioning of a system in which the forces that purport to provide
security are themselves the greatest source of danger.
On March 14, City Council member Marielle Franco and driver Anderson
Gomes were shot and killed in downtown Rio de Janeiro as they were
leaving a gathering of black women from a variety of social movements.
The attack bears all the hallmarks of an execution. Nothing was stolen;
she was shot in the head from behind and the driver was shot in the
back. Both died on the spot. Days before, Marielle had used social media
to denounce police brutality in the neighborhood of Acari, where the
military police battalion responsible for the region has been carrying
out executions and threatening residents.[1]
Marielle had dedicated her work to recording and denouncing the
occupation of the favelas in Rio by the Pacification Police Units (UPP),
which began in 2008. Recently, she had been one of the preeminent voices
against the Federal Intervention undertaken by President Michel Temer.
The Federal Government, in accordance with the State Government, took
over the Public Security Secretary, putting in charge an Army General,
with deployment of Army troops. This was an unprecedented measure,
deemed by many unconstitutional, reflecting the tactics of a government
determined to remake the law.
Many anarchist collectives and groups joined the protests denouncing the
murder of Marielle. She was a black lesbian woman, a longtime grassroots
militant in feminist movements and black resistance in the favelas. Her
work at the biggest university in Rio de Janeiro was dedicated to
exposing the previous military occupations. She was a comrade to all who
fight against oppression, state violence, and patriarchy.
Dozens of other prominent participants in social movements have been
killed in Brazil over the past few years; at least seven have already
been murdered in 2018. Despite being a known member of a political
party, she was shot and killed in the middle of the street. This shows
that not even a public position of power can protect you in the
situation of pervasive, constant and systematic violence that is now
normal for many in Brazil.
The corporate media is trying to whitewhash and conceal the radical
aspects of Marielle’s activism, suggesting that she was just fighting
for a vague notion of human rights. Worse, they are using the murder to
justify the military occupation, as if she was murdered because there
were not enough police on the streets.
On the contrary, Marielle Franco was murdered because of the police, and
quite possibly by them.
What is driving the militarization and repression in Brazil? How has it
escalated since the uprising of 2013, the World Cup, and the subsequent
reaction? What can it teach us about the future of democracy?
It is difficult to arrive at an understanding of Brazil’s political and
social situation today when the political and analytical categories one
would previously have used to do so are totally exhausted. Classical
concepts such as “citizenship,” “sovereignty,” “representation,”
“constitutional guarantees,” and all the other terms that derive from
them have become plastic; they have melted in the heat of the conflicts
taking place across the globe since the end of the 20^(th) century. One
has the impression that not even those who utter these words are able to
believe in them. Today, everything has become its own opposite: peace is
war, security is hazardous, and citizens are the targets of the same
state agencies tasked with protecting them.
The constitutional and militarized intervention in the public security
of Rio de Janeiro, instituted by presidential decree and captained by a
general of the Brazilian Armed Forces, exposes these contradictions. It
is so absurd that it provokes paralysis, waiting, polite requests for
explanation.
Though such a governmental decision is unprecedented, when we look at
the various interventions in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro that have
taken place over the last several decades, we can see that it is part of
a stream of events that has been flowing for a long time. One landmark
was the GLO (Guarantee of Law and Order) of 1992,[2] used to impose the
ECO-92 on the city of Rio de Janeiro.
Starting from Operation Rio (1994–1995), the use of the armed forces,
especially the army, through the GLO ceased to be exceptional. In view
of recent events, such as the pacification of favelas in Rio de Janeiro
and the so-called “public security crises” in the north of the country,
EspĂrito Santo and Goiás, we can conclude that the relationship between
the military and the police has been inverted. Whereas once, the
Military Police designated auxiliary reserve forces to serve the Army of
Brazil in the event of a external conflict, today the military itself
has become a sort of auxiliary police force answering to the state
governors.
So the militarization of Brazilian society was already in progress well
before 2013. The National Security Force, for example, was created in
2006 under the Lula administration. Yet the uprising of June 2013 marked
an inflection point.
Paulo Arantes wrote, “After June, peace will be total.” Five years
later, his prediction is confirmed—provided we understand democratic
social peace as identical with this militarized war on the population.
The conservative reaction intensified with the so-called mega-events,
the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics, both of which took place in Rio.
All of these offered the state the opportunity to implement
institutional adjustments in the field of security. The police received
new equipment and special training from the military, in partnership
with police from the UK and France; new special battalions of police
were created; GLOs have been issued regularly; and a new anti-terrorism
law has been introduced (No. 13,260 of March 16, 2016). In addition,
police are focusing more on video recording operations and monitoring
social media.
After June 2013, the ghostly figure of a diffuse and faceless (or
masked) enemy took on more discernible contours. The case of Amarildo de
Souza, who was tortured and murdered by a UPP (Pacifying Police Unit)
and reported missing, was a warning about the escalation of policing
that found no echo. The case of Rafael Braga Vieira, arrested in June
2013 in Rio de Janeiro, exemplifies the expansion of the power of
security forces over the civilian population. All these were
forewarnings of the murder of Marielle Franco.
Today, it is possible to justify almost anything in the name of
security. Daily life is full of little humiliations that supposedly
preserve our safety. These are still aimed chiefly at black people, the
poor, women, rebels, and others who are marginalized; Marielle Franco
was all of these. Because anyone can be understood as a potential
terrorist, anyone can become a target of state terrorism. Those who
object to this are themselves targeted for additional scrutiny from law
enforcement or subjected to monitoring devices.
Safety and danger are imposed by the same institutions. They have become
inextricably entangled, indistinguishable.
All of these developments confirm the authoritarian tendencies that have
already been consolidating in the world’s democracies for decades now.
At the same time, they hint at the steps that are coming next.
The fact that all this is coming to pass under democracy rather than a
military dictatorship seems to contradict the old-fashioned
understanding of the state of exception as the suspension of the law. In
Brazil, we are witnessing this intensification of violence, repression,
and electronic surveillance not as an interruption of the rule of law,
but as an extension of its logic. Today this is called the “austerity
policy”—the similarities with Greece are evident, especially in Rio de
Janeiro. These austerity measures are only the latest reallocation of
resources in a centuries-ongoing series of colonial robberies channeling
resources from the public purse into the pockets of the powerful, a
process that precedes democracy yet has been stabilized by it. What is
disappearing now is the illusory promise of isonomy (self-rule and
equality under the law) that supposedly qualified Brazil as a modern
democracy.
Crises do not necessarily cause moments of rupture. Instead, they can
offer new opportunities to impose government. In a society in perpetual
crisis, it is not surprising that the subjects want more and more
security—even though the ones promising security are also the ones
generating the crises. Here we arrive at what we can call the
securitization of democracy, in which the citizen to be protected and
the threat to be eliminated merge into a single subject, with the
criminal justice system and the armed forces playing central roles.
This explains, on the one hand, the militarizing of the police and, on
the other, the use of armies as police. Criminal justice is expanded and
“democratized,” becoming the locus of political decisions in all spheres
from local to international. At the same time, the armed forces have
redefined their functions and adapted to the constitutional rules and
protocols of international organizations, acting in new spaces and
according to new strategic objectives. These developments give a grim
subtext to the maxim “we must defend society.”
The result is the transformation of urban zones into theaters of war and
the vertiginous increase of state murders. In Brazil, this translates
into something like 60,000 corpses stacked up every year, almost all
black and poor. If in the 1990s it was said that Haiti is here in
Brazil, today the number of deaths surpasses the accumulation of corpses
in the Syrian conflict.
With the military intervention, it was clear that we had reached a low
point, but the well has no bottom. The execution of PSOL councillor
Marielle Franco exceeds the routinely deadly violence of securitized
democracy. It confronts each of us with the necessity of taking sides in
this stupid war.
Some have speculated that Marielle’s assassination was motivated by the
pursuit of electoral power. This is partly true, but that narrative is
most useful to white experts looking to fill the airtime of their
innocuous televised debates. Marielle Franco was not executed as part of
an isolated plot to undermine democracy. She was executed by the state
for the same reason that thousands of other black, poor, queer, and
female people are executed.
Whenever people mobilize autonomously—for example, against the tariff in
2013, or against the extermination of black people and poor people by
the police—the police intensify their violence. Any police action, no
matter how violent, can be justified in the name of maintaining order,
the sanctity of property, and even the security of the demonstrators
themselves. That includes the extrajudicial murders of untold thousands.
Who will police the police? This is one of the fundamental problems with
state democracy. There is no democratic principle, no civil or human
right, that could stop the security forces from mobilizing against the
population. The question of the legitimacy of specific instances of
police violence, so dear to liberals and defenders of constitutional
rights, has no bearing on the systemic function that the police serve
through the countless acts of violence that are never documented. To
this day, from Ferguson to Rio de Janeiro, the relationship between
police violence and legality is the insoluble problem of administrative
law. And yet it is the police that enforce the law; they are the
precondition for its enforcement.
This is why we argue that we are witnessing the consolidation of
democratic securitization, rather than a permanent state of exception or
a slide towards a dictatorship like the ones that governed so much of
the world during the 20^(th) century, especially in nuestra América. And
we have to fight it accordingly—not by demanding the return of democracy
to the state, but by definitively rejecting the violence of the state in
every form it can assume.
In 2018, we will see elections for executive and legislative positions
throughout Brazil, including president and governors. It is the first
election year after the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff. It will be an
electoral process fraught with fear, suspicion, and danger—posing
serious risks of legal and constitutional insecurity, as jurists like to
say. This was already true before the execution of Mareille Franco.
It would not be surprising for social movements to show interest in this
electoral contest. Indeed, it is precisely when democracy fails people
the most that they most want to rehabilitate it. However, looking closer
at all the parties contending to take the reins, we can see that whoever
comes to power will not put a stop to the bloodshed. The police and the
army are the primary agents of the violence that government officials
claim to be fighting, and they are essential to the system. Neither Lula
da Silva nor Dilma Rousseff did anything to rein in the security forces
when they were in power before. Nor will any of their successors—unless
governing itself becomes impossible.
We do not seek seats at the negotiating table of legislative power. We
have to take to the streets, as so many people did after Mareille Franco
was executed. We have to make the streets our arena and make
ungovernable revolt our instrument of struggle. The alternations between
parties in the government have gotten us nowhere. If the state is the
space of modern politics where all seek recognition, we need something
that is unrecognizable on that terrain—that does not depend on the
assembling of majorities or the preservation of a lethal security.
To begin this process, it does not matter if a thousand people take the
street or a hundred thousand. It does not matter if the movement
receives a hundred “likes” on social media or a million. What causes the
annoyance to our rulers—and has the power to expose the scandal of the
truth—is the courage to be a minority.
This is the only path forward out of securitized democracy. It is also
the only way to properly honor all the people who have died at the hands
of the police and the military over the years. As the artist Rogério
Duarte said, describing his experience of torture during the
civil-military dictatorship in Brazil (1964–1985) when he faced the
Grande Porta do Medo (Great Door of Fear): there may be a beginning and
an end to the stories, but what really matters is the river of blood
that runs in the middle.
[1] In Brazil, we have three different kinds of police. The Civil Police
investigate crimes on the state level; the Federal Police investigate
crimes on the national level; and the military police patrol the
streets. The military police are the ones who will profile you for your
color or beat you when a riot breaks out.
[2] The GLOs are carried out exclusively by order of the Presidency of
the Brazilian Republic to arrange for the intervention of the armed
forces in situations in which the public security forces are not able to
ensure order (see Art. CF 1988). In early 2014, during the
administration of Dilma Rousseff, civilian and military advisers
produced a “GLO Manual” that standardizes the prescribed activities of
the forces deployed in this type of activity.