This week, Rio de Janeiro police returned to Complexo do Salgueiro, in the Metropolitan Region, in another chapter of confrontational politics at the Red Command. Around a thousand agents participated in a new stage of Operation Containment, the same one which, at the end of October, left 117 civilians and five agents dead in the regions of Alemão and Penha, northern zone of the capital. Five years ago, a poorly explained incursion by civil and federal police into the same group of São Gonçalo favelas cost the life of 14-year-old teenager João Pedro Mattos Pinto. The assassination in the home of a family, in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, led Minister Edson Fachin, now President of the Supreme Federal Court (STF), to ban operations in communities during the health crisis.
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This is the first act of the STF in the ADPF of the Favelas, which recently led to the arrest of deputy Rodrigo Bacellar, dismissed from the presidency of the Legislative Assembly of Rio (Alerj) by decision of Minister Alexandre de Moraes, Fachin’s successor as rapporteur. The ADPF demanded the use of body cameras by security forces; preparation of plans aimed at reducing police lethality and retaking by the State territories dominated by armed groups; and federal police investigation into factions operating between states, as well as links between local authorities and organized crime.
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The execution of João Pedro – still unpunished today – spread the wave of demonstrations in Brazil which, in the same month of May 2020, invaded cities in the United States to protest the murder of George Floyd, a black man asphyxiated by a white police officer. Here, posts on a black background have multiplied on social networks with the slogan #vidasnegrasimportam, translated from the Black Lives Matter movement. The statement by Angela Davis, professor, writer, philosopher and activist, also went viral:
— In a racist society, it is not enough to not be racist. We must be anti-racist.
It is a call for a firm attitude against racial discrimination: non-conformism rather than resignation; commitment, instead of omission; action rather than passivity.
The condemnation of the former Black Panther spread like wildfire, but anti-racism, in fact, was little seen. In recent times, in line with the xenophobic and supremacist practices of Donald Trump, for the second time President of the United States, what has gained strength in businesses, spaces of power and in many hearts and minds is the brazen confrontation with the inclusion demanded by black and brown people, women, indigenous peoples, LGBTQIA+. A world made boring – and ironic – by minorities who, historically cut off from the best living conditions, demand equity.
By analogy with anti-racism before, the prefix which signals opposition and annoyance is also necessary on other fronts. There is urgency in the face of the permanent threats of machismo and coup d’état. The country – it must be repeated ad nauseam – is experiencing an epidemic of feminicides, attacks, insults, attacks and abuse against girls, young people and women. The statistics are piling up; Brazilian women are desperate; legislation, even if abundant, is not enough. If they are truly outraged by barbarity, men must break their silence and raise their voices against a joke, a comment, a speech or an act of misogyny. Women, we will not alone demolish the pillars of a society based on gender violence. It is not enough to not beat, rape or murder women. The time has come to embarrass, to react, to confront those who beat, rape and murder.
In politics, the same. Brazilian democracy is experiencing a continuous coup d’état, which is not only expressed by the conspiracy which has resulted in more than 1,600 criminal actions, 500 non-prosecution agreements, almost 700 convictions, including that of Jair Bolsonaro. This week, a new episode of attack against the regime established by the 1988 Constitution broke out in the Chamber of Deputies. In the early hours of Wednesday, the plenary approved the bill on dosimetry, a euphemism for the soft amnesty designed specifically for the former President of the Republic, imprisoned in a room of the federal police in Brasilia.
To halve the period of closed detention of the far-right leader, parliamentarians did not hesitate to disfigure the criminal execution law and modify the framework for the protection of democracy, promulgated by Bolsonaro himself in 2021. They were able to ratify a text which obliges the judiciary to incorporate the crime of violent abolition of the democratic state with that of attempted coup d’état; allows a reduction in sentence for books read in home detention; establishes a progression of the regime of one sixth of the prison sentence, in cases which do not involve violence against persons or property.
Against repeated coups d’état, only non-negotiable anti-coupism. Or else we will be condemned, as the historian Carlos Fico wrote, echoing Francisco Iglésias, to a “melancholy national trajectory”.
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