The word genocide conjures images of the Holocaust, or of Rwanda, and the word was in fact created by a Jewish lawyer in order to refer to the Holocaust.

The Holocaust occupies a critical position in human memory as history’s most substantial genocide. Meanwhile, the case of the Rwandan genocide is crystal clear and accepted as the atrocity’s paragon.

However, way too many conflicts in the world today are attributable to ethnic, racial, and religious differences. The use of the word genocide is often avoided in these cases, perhaps, as such a designation calls for drastic measures in response.

The United Nations Security Council maintains, in fact, the obligation to intervene in scenarios of widely recognized genocide. It was for this reason that, in 1994, amid hesitation by a portion of the Security Council and members of the United States government to call what was taking place in Rwanda “genocide” (and when US Ambassador to Rwanda David Rawson advised instead to state that “acts of genocide may have occurred”), Reuters journalist Alan Elsner asked then-State Department spokesperson Christine Shelley: “How many acts of genocide does it take to make genocide?”

The history of the formation of the Brazilian State is one characterized by the extermination of both bodies and knowledge. This took place first during the project of colonization in the Americas, reaching the diverse ethnicities and communities grouped under the “indigenous” umbrella in the European imaginary, and second, during the project of slavery, in the deliberate extermination of not one, but myriad peoples and groups, linked only by their color and geographic origin.

Neither movement ceased with the end of colonization or slavery. Throughout the 20th century, the extermination of indigenous peoples has continued, with environmental conflict over resources and to make way for large development projects, with indigenous populations having reached their lowest level in the mid 20th century (having fallen from an estimated 3 million in 1500 to some 70,000 in the 1950s).

In Brazil, genocide was recognized as a crime beginning in 1956 via Law 2,889, with the country’s most well-known case of genocide taking place in 1993: the Haximu massacre, in which a Yanomami encampment was attacked twice, leaving 16 people, including women and children, murdered and mutilated.

Between 2003 and 2015, 742 indigenous people were murdered, and such numbers are now increasing under the Bolsonaro government’s mining plans for the Amazon and the obstruction of indigenous land demarcation – the sum of which has already triggered a 150% increase in invasions of indigenous lands and a wave of attacks on indigenous peoples since the 2018 election.

With respect to the black population, 2019’s Brazil has seen not only the deliberate killing of black bodies, including at the hands of the State, but also diverse restrictions on rights and an unequal distribution of goods and services, which have had direct and indirect effects in the extermination of black people.

Key to understanding this process is the portion of the United Nations genocide definition that includes not only “Killing members of [a] group” and “Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of [a] group,” but also “Deliberately inflicting on [a] group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part” and “imposing measures to prevent births within [a] group.”

This process can be understood through Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe’s term, necropolitics – a concept that has gained momentum recently, employed by Brazilian social movements to characterize governments that fetishize death, such as that of current Rio governor Wilson Witzel.

Meanwhile Witzel has used the word genocide to describe killings by drug traffickers in Rio. Necropower refers not only to the power to control life and produce life (prolonging, multiplying, disciplining life such that it produces value), but also to the power to trigger death and allow death to occur in select groups – as in when the State does not provide sufficient health services to treat illness among the poor, or when it does not provide adequate water and sanitation services in certain areas to prevent disease, or when it in any way exposes some individuals to a higher risk of death.

Necropower in Brazil is informed by State racism – a criterion for deciding upon which bodies the power of death may be exercised – in choosing who lives and who dies.

As such, in 2019 Brazil faces the following question: how many acts of genocide will it take for us to call the extermination of black people genocide?

How many more black people must die for us to call the extermination of black people genocide?

According to the most recent Atlas of Violence study, published by the Institute of Applied Economic Analysis (IPEA), in 2017, 75% of all people killed in Brazil were black (in Rio, the percentage is 78.4%). This despite 56% of the population being black.

That is, 49,000 people in a single year – and as the rate of murder of non-black people falls, the murder of black people has grown over 23% in the ten-year period from 2007 to 2017. At this proportion and scale, in 10 to 20 years, the number of black people killed will equal that of the Rwandan genocide (an estimated 500,000 to 1 million deaths).

One study in Rio de Janeiro found that black people are at a 24% greater risk of homicide than other groups, and that the percentage reaches a peak of 147% at age 21. The Index of Youth Vulnerability to Violence and Racial Inequality has shown that a black youth in Brazil is nearly three times more likely to be killed than a white youth.

How many more massacres?

Rio de Janeiro has experienced 400 massacres in the last decade alone, with 1300 dead. Eight were killed by Rio’s special operations unit (BOPE, akin to the US’s SWAT) at a party in Rocinha, in the city’s South Zone, in 2018, the majority of them black youth.

Five were killed in the Greater Rio city of Maricá, also in 2018, in a social area of a public housing complex constructed under the Minha Casa Minha Vida program, all of them black youth, members of local rap-poetry circles and socialist youth groups.

Five black youth were killed by the police, shot 111 times inside a car in the North Zone neighborhood of Costa Barros in 2015. Eight youth living on Rio’s downtown streets were killed by the police in the emblematic Candelária Massacre of 1993, the majority of them black.

Since then, 44 of 70 youth identified as living on the street in the Candelária area in downtown Rio have died, the majority of them black. These are just a few of the devastatingly frequent massacres experienced in Rio and they all follow a profile, as do police confrontations: their targets are most often young black men.

How many more “acts of resistance”?

In its “You Killed My Son” report, Amnesty International analyzed all cases of auto de resistência (acts of resistance, a Brazilian legal designation for an event in which someone is killed by police in a confrontation, whereby the police claim they acted in self-defense) in Rio proper between 2010 and 2013: four out of every five cases of auto de resistência, now called homicídios decorrentes de intervenção policial (homicides resulting from police intervention), were black men.

According to the Brazilian Forum on Public Safety’s 2019 bulletin, in 2018, three out of every four victims of auto de resistência were black. The majority of police killed on – and off-duty are also black (including suicides) – black officers made up 51.7%% of all police killed in Brazil in 2018.

How many more must be imprisoned for us to realize we are a hotbed of necropolitics?

Brazil is home to more than 800,000 prisoners. One 2016 study found that 64% of prisoners in Brazil (of those providing racial information) were black. In Rio de Janeiro, the same statistic was 72%.

Drug trafficking is the most common reason for incarceration in Brazil (one in every three prisoners). Here, in the absence of legal determinations stipulating the quantity of drug possession that separates personal use from trafficking, sentencing decisions are left to judges, often biased by a racist perspective.

The case of Rafael Braga is emblematic. The black adolescent arrested at a protest for carrying a bottle of cleaning detergent in his backpack was sentenced to 11 years in prison, while white youth caught with drugs go free: in São Paulo, black people are more likely to be sentenced for drug trafficking, and with lower quantities of drugs than white defendants.

Concerning incarceration, even putting aside the violence involved in restricting an individual’s liberty simply for the possession of drugs, people are six times likelier to die in prison in Brazil than outside of prison.

On top of poor conditions in Brazilian jails, including a lack of hygiene and inadequate nutrition, violent confrontations take place with prison guards and between drug factions.

Massacres are not uncommon: in July of 2019, 57 people were killed in five hours in a massacre in a prison in the state of Pará, 16 of them decapitated. In Rio, 257 died in prison in 2016, mainly from tuberculosis and HIV-related complications.

How many more living on the streets?

The 2008 National Study on the Homeless Population remains the most comprehensive and trustworthy data source on the Brazilian population living on the streets, a number that tripled between 2014 and 2017.

In 2008, 67% of all homeless Brazilians were black. In addition to the dangers and difficulties present in living on the street in terms of access to public services and employment, the homeless are also subject to violence, murder, and, in the case of women, sexual violence.

In 2017, Rio had the third highest number of registered notifications of violence against homeless people among Brazilian capital cities. Of these, the majority involved violence against black people (55%) and women (51%). Between March and August of 2017, Brazil registered 69 cases of homeless people murdered, and between 2015 and 2017, 673 notifications of sexual violence.

How many more must commit suicide?

According to the Brazilian Ministry of Health, the suicide rate among black youth (up to 29 years of age) is 45% higher than that of white youth. Afro-Brazilians suffer from the psychological impacts of racism. They are also often more vulnerable to the psychological impacts of poverty, lack of representation and belonging in spaces, and the accumulation of productive and reproductive work, among others.

Furthermore, they have less access to mental health professionals, either owing to the expense of such treatment, stigma (mental health issues are seen as “someone else’s problem”) or to unpreparedness of Brazilian mental health professionals in dealing with the impacts of racism, as well as low levels of black professionals in the field of psychology.

Some argue that the case of Brazil does not involve deliberate and systematic extermination and that thus we should not engage in the term genocide. More common is the use of “war” to describe urban violence in Rio de Janeiro, a term which has gained new momentum since the 2017 creation of a “war editorial” page in the newspaper Extra.

This image of war is reinforced by a security policy based on the “war on drugs” and armed confrontation, endorsed by the governor when who encouraged the police to shoot anyone armed, rather than attempting to disarm them, part of a project of both constructing an enemy and dehumanizing that enemy.

“War” contributes to the legitimation of violent practices and crimes that are in fact committed discriminately against black, poor, and favela populations-including the invitation of the use of the Brazilian armed forces to act in urban scenarios around the country, such as in the federal military intervention of 2018, and the frequent use of the Guarantee of Law and Order (GLO) provision-masking the failure of institutional public policies, attributing responsibility instead to “enemies,” construed as irrational and blood-thirsty.

We can thus argue that the case of Brazil is closer to genocide than war, as, in addition to the data presented above, war assumes a minimum of parity between parties, a mutual project of destruction – not for destruction in itself – but in order to attain a clear objective.

In Brazil, it is undeniable that black people are left to die or even targeted because they are black – not only from hate crimes and autos de resistência, but also indirectly, through their marginalization in the economic system and negligence in terms of access to health and education.

This State racism, which dictates the color of a constructed “enemy” and dictates the color of those bodies whose deaths are deemed acceptable, stands as proof of intent.

It is therefore important to use the accurate term, genocide, in order to create pressure, both nationally and internationally, to demand public policies for confronting this extermination, from non-racist drug policies, to health policies directed specifically for black populations, affirmative action policies in education, and policies for taking on racism in police institutions (including in the investigation and punishment in cases of auto de resistência). And yes, reparations.

This article appeared originally in RioOnWatch – https://www.rioonwatch.org/

That evening, Yvonne Bezerra de Mello had a premonition. “I gave three boys a coin so they could call me if something was wrong,” she says. Then she left the group of 70 street children, who were sleeping rough outside the Candelária Church in the center of Rio de Janeiro.

The date was July 23, 1993. Back then Bezerra was trying to help the children, whom the state had completely abandoned to their fate. The youngest of them was six years old, the oldest in their early twenties.

“That night, the calls came,” says Bezerra. “The boys were shouting, “They’re killing us.”

Today, a quarter of a century later, Yvonne Bezerra is an educator with an international reputation, but what happened that Friday night has shaped her entire life.

It became known as the Candelária Massacre, and it attracted worldwide attention — partly because it showed a very different Brazil to the one on the postcards: a merciless, brutal, socially divided Brazil. “A country that is still that way today,” says Yvonne Bezerra.

From her large apartment in Rio’s Flamengo district, Bezerra, 61, tells the story of the massacre. A couple of times she gets out some old photos to illustrate it. “When I got to the Candelária half an hour later there were bodies in front of the church,” she remembers. The children were absolutely terrified.

Eight children and young people aged between 11 and 19 were shot dead that night. It soon emerged that the perpetrators were policemen. They were from the 5th Battalion of Rio’s military police, which had a sort of death squad whose members were also involved in drug dealing.

An Unpaid Debt?

There are different versions of what exactly prompted the policemen to carry out the massacre. It seems that the youngsters had thrown a stone at a police car, which goaded them on.

However, Yvonne Bezerra is convinced that it was more about settling scores. “The police were dealing cocaine, and some of the older kids were helping them,” she says. Her explanation is that the police took revenge because the kids owed them money.

Seven people stood trial for the murders; three policemen were convicted. One defendant was killed during the investigation, presumably to cover the murderers’ tracks. All three of those convicted are already out of prison. Two were freed before the end of their sentences.

The main culprit, Marcus Vinicius Emmanuel Borges, was pardoned after serving 18 years of a 300-year sentence, but the pardon was rescinded a year later. He failed to appear when an arrest warrant was put out and is considered a fugitive.

“In this society, poor people and black people don’t count,” says Yvonne Bezerra. At the time she was vilified as an accomplice of the “vagabonds,” as the street kids were called. There were many people who found their presence disturbing, and Bezerra says that in some quarters the massacre was regarded as necessary social cleansing.

For Bezerra, July 23, 1993 was a turning point. From then on she devoted her life to working with children. She founded the renowned educational project Uere, which now runs a school in the favela complex of Maré. To this day she still receives threats as a result of her social engagement.

‘None of the Children Made It to 50’

Bezerra believes that all of the street children from the Candelária Church are now dead. She maintained contact with some of them for many years, but the last survivor she knew was killed recently by a ricocheting bullet in Maré.

“None of the children made it to 50,” she says. “Their lives were always marked by violence.” One of the traumatized survivors, Sandro do Nascimento, became known for hijacking a bus with a revolver in 2000. He was asphyxiated shortly afterwards in police custody. The Brazilian documentary film “Bus 174,” directed by Jose Padilha, tells the story of the hijacking.

There is one survivor of that night in 1993. Wagner dos Santos’ involvement was more or less accidental. After the police had shot six children outside the Candelária Church, they began searching the surrounding area for more victims.

Dos Santos happened to be standing near two street kids and the police tried to kill him, too. He was hit by four bullets, one of which hit him in the face, but he survived and went on to become the key witness in the trial. As a result he was targeted again in another attack — another four bullets, which once again he survived.

Sole Survivor Lives in Switzerland

Today Dos Santos is 45 years old and lives in Switzerland, for his own safety. “He is blind in one eye and deaf in one ear, and he suffers from severe trauma,” says his sister Patricia Oliveira.

She sits on a sofa in the office of the organization “Rede de Comunidades e Movimentos contra a Violência” [Network of Communities and Movements Against Violence] in the center of Rio, an organization she founded herself.

She reports that her brother does not believe in justice in Brazil, and says that nothing has changed with regard to the conditions that led to the massacre. The police are still killing young black men with no repercussions, she says.

Today, Wagner dos Santos receives a pension from the Brazilian state equivalent to 420 euros (US$ 490). “He wants to finally leave the massacre behind,” says his sister Oliveira. “But how is he supposed to forget this violence?”

Massacres Still Happening Today

Yvonne Bezerra also believes that nothing has changed in Brazil since 1993. “State and society tolerate massacres of the poor,” she says. Just one month after the Candelária attack, a police death squad murdered 21 people in Rio’s Vigário Geral favela. Of the 52 people who stood trial, seven were convicted, of whom only one remains in custody.

To this day the Brazilian police are still murdering impoverished young black people, especially in Rio de Janeiro. This is compounded by the drug violence in the favelas, which the state allows to continue.

Yvonne Bezerra has the statistics: In 1993 around 11,000 young people in Brazil died a violent death. Nowadays, the annual figure is around 28,000. It’s a gradual genocide.

Amnesty International Reaction

The struggle to protect black Brazilian youths from police violence and deliver justice for the victims of the past remains as vital and relevant as ever, Amnesty International said on the 25th anniversary of the Candelária massacre, in which eight young boys were killed by off-duty police officers in Rio de Janeiro.

The murder of the boys, who were sleeping rough near the city’s Candelária Church on 23 July, 1993, sparked international outrage. Yet today Brazilian police and other state agents continue to form “extermination” groups who remain one of the main drivers of violence in Rio.

“Police violence in Rio de Janeiro has been stimulated by the state’s own policies in the 1990s, which rewarded officers based on the number of ‘criminals’ they killed,” said Jurema Werneck, Executive Director of Amnesty International Brazil.

“The repercussions of this inhumane approach are felt to this day. Instead of guiding the police to protect and preserve life, the state has reinforced the notion that the police’s role is to kill.”

In the wake of the killings at Candelária, Amnesty International denounced violations by the police and joined the victims’ families’ movement for justice, truth and reparation.

The organization did the same when, just a month later, an “extermination group” formed by police officers killed another 21 people – mainly young black men – in Rio’s Vigário Geral favela.

The police’s violent approach in the 1990s was inflamed by government initiatives such as the “Western Gratification” policy, a financial reward for “bravery” that was measured by the number of people killed; and by official government statements supporting the executions.

Today, some of those members of police “extermination” groups occupy prominent positions in the state apparatus, further bolstering impunity.

In response to unchecked violence by police and other state agents, a movement formed by mothers of victims has blossomed.

Organized during the mourning period and the fight for justice that followed the horrendous killings in the 1990s, the groups have since expanded their support and solidarity networks and gained increased prominence.

The mothers’ detailed monitoring of cases and unrelenting demands for justice have made them key players in the campaign to hold security forces accountable for human rights violations.

They have denounced the endemic racism within the security forces which has fueled the killings of youths, especially black people from favelas and other poor suburbs.

The mothers’ ultimate goal is to prevent the police violence that took the lives of their children being repeated for other families.

“The mothers have given visibility to issues previously treated with indifference in the national public agenda, and their struggle is vital in pressuring the Brazilian authorities to create a new public security policy that values life,” said Jurema Werneck.

DW/MP

Unfortunately, shortly afterwards, I am here writing again in the wake of this tragedy that occurred in Rio.

Marielle Franco, a member of the leftist party PSOL, who had the fifth most votes as a candidate for city councilor in Rio de Janeiro (2016), was shot dead on her way back from an event about black women’s empowerment.

She was in her car when nine shots were fired at her from another vehicle. Marielle and Anderson Gomes (her driver) were killed at the scene and the Councilor’s PR assistant was injured.

Initially, the terrible fact was broadcast by the Brazilian mainstream media without an appropriate focus on its highly political implications, but it was the international press who immediately stressed the political dimension of such a tragic and highly symbolic crime.

Marielle (aged 38) was black and lesbian. She came from a very deprived background; she was raised (and currently lived) in Favela da Maré (Maré Favela), one of the poorest slums in Rio de Janeiro. Her outstanding career was marked by her fight for human rights and fairer realities for minorities in her city.

The Councilor had to battle her own reality in order to become a Sociologist, as well as an MA in public administration. With a defiant platform focused on minorities and inclusion, she beat the odds when elected for the Rio de Janeiro’s Municipal Chamber in 2017.

Marielle’s fiercest fight was against the brutal police violence enforced towards Rio’s embattled favela populations. Only a day prior to her assassination, referring to the killing of a favela resident, she tweeted: Another young man’ homicide that can be credited to the PM (police) account. Matheus Melo was leaving the church. How many more deaths will it be needed in order to end this war?

The increasing support for her causes stirred up fear among conservative layers of Rio’s administration, as her platform posed a threat to the status quo.

The fact that her life had such a violent end, by an allegedly targeted and racist assassination, does not provide hope for those fighting for change.

Brazil’s cities have become so filled with criminal violence, and there has been so many charades with the justice system, that this is inevitably leading to a total breakdown of trust between the people and their institutions.

Rio’s military intervention one month ago was very concerning, and now, when something of this magnitude happens, it becomes highly alarming. The President’s order to put the military in charge of Rio was justified by the need for ‘securitization’, the need for improving safety and increasing protection of the citizens. Wait. Improvement of safety?! For whom?

Aurea Carolina de Freitas e Silva, a member of the PSOL party and the most voted city councilor in the city of Belo Horizonte, in the state of Minas Gerais, who also identifies herself as an activist black woman, spoke to me in the light of recent events and for the occasion of this article, stressing the heartfelt note released by her office, and expressing her profound pain and deep concern for what is in store for politicians and activists that fight for minorities, such as herself in her heartfelt note released by her office.

She described Marielle as: Comrade and tireless defender of Human Rights, a black lesbian woman from the favelas, an inspiration and a sister. You will be, forever present! Aurea Carolina stated the feeling of hopelessness that her death brings about: we shared a common dream of a better country. Today, while the body of another black woman falls to the ground, this very dream breaks into pieces.

Throughout Brazil, marches have been organized by political movements and civil society organizations and the word has been spread through social media, with the hope to gather the highest amount of people possible to protest against the increasing violence and militarization in the country.

This tragic event immediately reminds us of darker periods in the history of Brazil, when activists and advocates for change and human rights were abducted, tortured and killed during a highly oppressive military dictatorship (1964-1985).

Ahead of a worrying presidential election due later this year, and amidst political processes and corruption trials targeting a good tranche of the political class, President Temer’s latest appointments of military personnel to security posts, including the first non-civilian to be the head of the Ministry of Defense since the late 90’s, have prompted the fear of a possible come back of military rule.

The lyrics of O Tempo Não Para, a famous song by Cazuza, a renowned Brazilian rock star from the 80s, comes to my head: ‘I see the future repeating the past…’. So, if this is where we are and where we are heading to, it can become true disaster indeed.

Today, a red line has been crossed in our country. It is a very sad day for minorities’ and human rights defenders, and also for all of us who, only a week ago, were chanting and marching the streets of our cities across the globe and hoping for a future without violence, without abuse.

Eduarda Fontes is a doctoral researcher at the Department of Politics and International Relations of the University of Westminster.

This article appeared originally in Open Democracy https://www.opendemocracy.net/

“A country with close to 60,000 killings a year urgently needs to consider new approaches to public security,” said Maria Laura Canineu, Brazil director at Human Rights Watch.

“Those who fight crime every day on the streets have an invaluable perspective on security policy and police reform; and should be able to express their views without fear of being punished arbitrarily.”

Brazil’s 436,000 military police officers patrol the country’s streets, a purely civilian task, but are subject to military law because they are technically considered to be auxiliary forces of the Army. Brazil’s military criminal code and various state disciplinary codes include broad restrictions on the officers’ free speech rights.

Police officers who transgress these limits can end up in prison under the military criminal code. Police commanders also have wide discretion to impose harsh penalties under the disciplinary codes.

Under article 166 of the military criminal code, criticizing a superior officer or a government decision are crimes punishable with up to a year in prison. Inciting “indiscipline” is punishable with up to four years under article 155.

State disciplinary codes that govern the conduct of military police officers, both on duty and off duty, and of retired military police officers contain similar infractions, punishable with up to 30 days in detention and expulsion from the force.

These offenses are so broadly framed that they allow for harsh punishment out of all proportion to the severity of the offense, and in some cases this is precisely what happens.

International human rights law allows countries considerable – though limited – discretion to limit the free expression rights of security force personnel. It does not, however, allow authorities to impose punishments that are disproportionate to the severity of any offense.

Darlan Abrantes, a military police officer in the state of Ceará, was sentenced to two years in prison in July 2016 after he self-published a book saying that the police force should be demilitarized. The sentence was suspended, but he had already been expelled from the force in 2014 in connection with the matter, destroying his career.

Police officers also told Human Rights Watch that they had been subject to arbitrary punishments in retaliation for speaking out in ways that angered superiors, without access to any effective remedy.

Brazilian authorities should reform laws to ensure that any punishments meted out to military police officers who transgress legal restrictions on their right to free expression are proportionate to the severity of any offense, Human Rights Watch said. They should ensure that all officers have access to an effective and impartial appeals process.

The authorities should also consider whether it is necessary and appropriate for police officers to be subject to the limits on free expression imposed under the military criminal code and state disciplinary codes, or whether a less restrictive legal framework is called for under international and regional human rights law.

Several reform efforts are under way that could achieve that purpose, and result in more accountable and effective policing. They include bills in Congress to delink the military police from the army and to abolish administrative detention, as well as proposals at the state level to reform disciplinary codes.

The unreasonably harsh punishments handed down to some police officers have a dramatic chilling effect on other members of the force, who often refrain from expressing opinions or suggestions about law enforcement reform for fear of reprisals, said Human Rights Watch.

“Officers can be imprisoned and their careers destroyed for expressing opinions about police reform that their commanders don’t like,” said Canineu. “These penalties are out of all proportion to whatever interest the government has in limiting their ability to speak out.”

Detailed Analysis

Darlan Abrantes, a military police officer in the state of Ceará, self-published Militarism – An Archaic Security System, in 2008, printing 300 copies. In the book, Abrantes asserts that Brazil has a “medieval” police system in which low-ranking police officers “are not allowed to think for themselves.”

They are supposed to simply follow orders and if they criticize militarism they are detained, he wrote. Abrantes contends that transforming the military police into a civil police force would make it more efficient in fighting crime and would bring it closer to the population.

The Ceará state command expelled Abrantes from the force in 2014, under article 24 of the state’s disciplinary statute, concluding that the book contained “serious offenses” and that, in publishing it, Abrantes had demonstrated “absolute lack of discipline and insubordination.” At that time, his police record was “excellent,” Abrantes told Human Rights Watch.

A military court – made up of four high-ranking officers and a judge – sentenced Abrantes, in July 2016, to two years in prison, under article 155 of the military criminal code, for “inciting to disobedience, indiscipline or the practice of a military crime.” The prosecutor accused Abrantes of handing out his book in the police academy, which he denies.

The military criminal code does not define what actions may be considered to constitute incitement to disobedience, indiscipline, or the practice of a military crime. This gives military prosecutors ample leeway to criminalize the expression of opinions that are critical of the police command.

In Abrantes’ case, the judge imposed a suspended sentence, under which he will not spend time in prison as long as he complies with five probation conditions: not committing another crime, not drinking alcohol, not going into gambling locations, not carrying firearms or thrusting weapons, and appearing before the court once a month.

“They considered me a criminal because I dared to think differently – I dared to say that the military system is not working,” Abrantes told Human Rights Watch. “I am living proof that the military police do not respect either democracy or freedom of expression.”

Abrantes’ call for “demilitarization” is far from the fringe. More than 76 percent of military police officers polled nationwide in 2014 said that state military police forces should abandon their military structure and subordination to the army. Their link to the military, as auxiliary forces, subjects them to the military criminal code that was adopted during Brazil’s military dictatorship (1964-1985).

This issue is an important area of public debate that could have important human rights implications, given the prevalence of police abuses in Brazil. Some high-ranking and low-ranking police officers interviewed by Human Rights Watch criticized military training and structure.

In their view, the military nature of the police forces perpetuates a vision of officers as heroes fighting an enemy – suspected criminals – that can lead to excessive use of force, especially in poor neighborhoods, and to high levels of stress among officers. Instead, police should focus on preventing crime and use lethal force only when strictly unavoidable to protect life.

State disciplinary codes, some of which also date to the dictatorship, likewise contain broad restrictions on free speech and allow for disproportionate penalties for both active and retired military police officers.

The code of the state of São Paulo, for example, prohibits publishing or spreading information that may “discredit” the military police or harm hierarchy or discipline, without any further definition of what kinds of information may cause those effects.

The disciplinary codes of São Paulo and 14 other states also contain the same prohibition – not allowing officers “to discuss or incite the discussion, through any communications media, of political, military or military police matters, except for those exclusively technical when duly authorized.”

This can be interpreted to subject military police officers to punishment for any public statement about policing or public security.

Many state disciplinary statutes also confer commanders the authority to determine the gravity of the administrative infraction, which gives them broad discretion to impose harsh or disproportionate punishment. Sanctions include up to 30 days in detention in the barracks or expulsion from the force.

One such case involves Pará state military police officer Luiz Fernando Passinho. Every year, on Brazilian Independence Day, nationwide demonstrations celebrate “The Shout of the Excluded,” in which people protest against social exclusion.

Passinho took a microphone during such a demonstration on September 7, 2014, and in a two-minute speech, complained that military police officers and military firefighters are told during training that they have no rights.

“That message distorts the nature of our mission, our sense of citizenship, and has a direct effect on our relationship to the community,” said Passinho, who was not in uniform. “We cannot accept that our freedom of expression should be considered a crime.”

The general commander of the Pará State military police decided that Passinho’s speech had “violated discipline and military hierarchy,” caused “disorder” within the force, and damaged the reputation of its command.

The commander accused Passinho of having failed to exhibit a long list of values that every military police officer is required to respect, under articles 17 and 18 of the disciplinary statute of the state of Pará, including “professionalism,” “loyalty,” and “discipline.”

The commander said Passinho had violated nine prohibitions, under article 37, including by exhibiting “inappropriate behavior in public” and by publishing information that could “discredit the force or harm discipline.”

The commander ordered Passinho detained for 30 days in October 2016. Passinho has appealed the decision to the same commander who issued it, as the procedure in the state’s disciplinary code establishes.

Meanwhile, the command is persecuting him for speaking out, he told Human Rights Watch. In September, for example, the command ordered him detained for 15 days for a single instance of not wearing his hat while in uniform, he said, an infraction usually punished with a warning.

“The military command uses the disciplinary statute arbitrarily,” Passinho said. “Police officers who commit real crimes escape punishment.”

Dozens of low-ranking officers in Rio de Janeiro interviewed by Human Rights Watch in 2015 and 2016 said they were afraid of being punished for expressing opinions. Almost all requested that their names not be published, for fear of reprisal, though the state military command had given Human Rights Watch written authorization to conduct the research.

Restrictions on free speech also stifle internal debate. A nationwide study published in 2016 by Brazil’s federal government concluded that low-ranking officers believe they are rarely allowed to express an opinion different from that of a superior officer at work. They were frequently afraid to do so. More than 14,000 low-ranking military police officers participated in the study.

Many police officers are afraid not only of formal disciplinary action, but of broader retaliation they may face for speaking out. Leandro Bispo, a police officer in Pará State, faced disciplinary action in 2012, 2013, and 2014 in connection with three Facebook posts he wrote or shared.

One said that police have inadequate working conditions. Another alleged corruption and abuse within the police. A third offered scathing criticism of public institutions in Brazil without mentioning the police by name.

The disciplinary proceedings against Bispo resulted in his demotion from corporal to soldier in 2016 and required him to return six months’ worth of a salary increase that he had already received, he told Human Rights Watch. He also said there had been informal retaliation against him, for which he had no effective recourse.

His commander transferred him to the city of Porto de Moz, four hours away by car and speedboat from his home, which he believed was in response to the comments he wrote or shared on Facebook.

When Bispo filed a petition to contest the transfer, he faced yet another disciplinary proceeding, in which the commander contended that Bispo had wrongly accused him of violating internal regulations.

In December, Bispo was expelled from the force altogether for various violations of the state disciplinary statute, including requirements to revere the symbols and traditions of the military police, to respect discipline and to avoid “inconvenient” comments about the police, discrediting a superior officer, and making anonymous comments. Bispo plans to appeal to a civil court.

Bispo, who has a daughter and a pregnant wife, borrowed money from his mother-in-law to make a down payment on the lawyer’s fees and needs to pay the rest in monthly installments. He said that losing his job in a time of economic crisis in Brazil is adding to the stress of the situation.

Brazil’s Federal Government issued recommendations in 2010 urging states to reform laws and disciplinary codes to respect the rights contemplated in the country’s Constitution.

The recommendations called on states not only to guarantee the rights of police officers to free speech, especially over the internet, but to encourage their participation in public fora and initiatives, such as seminars, councils, research projects, and conferences.

In places where public security policies “are debated, publicized, studied, reflected on and formulated.” Implementation of the recommendations, however, has been disappointing.

Human Rights Framework

Under international human rights law, the right to free expression can be limited by law only to the extent necessary for respect of the rights and reputations of others, or to protect national security, public order, public health or morals.

This framework is applicable under both the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the American Convention on Human Rights. Brazil is a state party to both.

In cases in 2005 and in 2009, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights found that government efforts to curtail the speech of former military officers were unlawful restrictions on their rights. However, it is generally accepted that governments have much broader leeway than in other contexts to restrict the free expression rights of security force personnel if considered necessary to protect national security or public order.

This reflects, among other things, a recognition of the state’s legitimate interests in maintaining discipline and hierarchy within the ranks and ensuring that the police and military as institutions are not politicized.

This does not, however, obviate governments’ responsibility to ensure that restrictions on the free expression of security force members are in fact “necessary” to protect national security and public order, and no more restrictive than necessary to achieve those aims.

As the special rapporteur for freedom of expression of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights state d in 2009, members of the armed forces are “entitled to freedom of expression and are legitimately able to exercise this right, and the limits imposed upon them must be respectful of the conditions established in the American Convention.”

Limitations to that right “can be neither excessive nor unnecessary, and they must in every case meet the requirements set forth in article 13.2 of the Convention.”

In December 2016, a second-instance civil judge in the state of Rio Grande do Norte ordered an end to disciplinary proceedings against an active-duty military police officer, João Figueiredo, whom the state military police command had ordered detained for 15 days for “offending” the force in a comment he posted online.

The judge issued her ruling on the basis of “the violation of the defendant’s human rights, the violation of the Constitution regarding freedom of expression and thought, and also because of the legal flaws in the proceedings, the very clear restrictions placed upon the defense by the authority, and the disproportionality of the punishment.” The military police command did not appeal the decision.

Even where laws that restrict the right to free expression are acceptable, the punishments must be proportionate to the seriousness of the offense.

Authorities in that state say police will return to work on Saturday thanks to an agreement that was reached between the parts. The families of the striking police, however, say that they were not informed of the resolution and that they will continue their effort to prevent the police cars to leave for patrolling.

The walk-out is expected to end at 7 am on Saturday morning, at which time police officers “will return to their duties,” said Julio César Pompeu, the Secretary of Human Rights of Espírito Santo, which had been negotiating an end to the strike.

Pompeu said those who supported the strike “will not suffer disciplinary sanctions” as long as they present themselves to work until 7 am.

The state’s entire police force walked off the job a week ago in a row over pay, when the officers’ female relatives side-stepped a law barring police from demonstrating and barricaded the obliging officers into their police stations.

While officers walked off the job, the army was called in to maintain law and order

On Friday, authorities threatened to charge more than 700 striking police officers with rebellion. It is unclear whether those threats led to the end of the strike. If convicted, the officers could be sentenced to between eight and 20 years in military prison.

Since the strike began, assaults, looting and murders in the state have skyrocketed. More than 120 people have been reported killed, approximately six times the state’s average daily homicide rate last year.

In his first public remarks since the start of the police crisis, Brazilian President Michel Temer on Friday called the strike “unacceptable” and said, “The right to protest cannot take the Brazilian people hostage.”

The central government, which had already sent some 1,200 soldiers to the state in an attempt to quell chaotic scenes, was prepared to deploy an additional 3,000 troops by the weekend if the strike persisted.

Espírito Santo is already suffering from a budget crisis, part of an ongoing nation-wide recession that has limited public services and forced many of Brazil’s states to meet austerity targets in order to qualify for debt relief from the federal government.

Businesses, shops, public transport and schools have remained closed throughout the week as many citizens avoided the streets.

The police strike has spread to the Rio de Janeiro state, just south of Espírito Santo, where residents fear a broad-scale police absence could lead to a spike in violent confrontations.

According to a police spokesperson, 95 percent of Rio officers were on duty as scheduled and only five police stations had been barricaded, with demonstrations taking place outside of 27 of the state’s 100 total stations.

But the action forced mayors of various cities in Rio to head off any further crisis by promising to cover state salary shortfalls with city finances.

Many are anxious about whether a total strike in Rio could overlap with the state’s famous Carnaval festivities arriving at the end of the month, but so far officials do not expect the demonstrations to impact the celebrations.

Lawlessness

Local media has been broadcasting video of muggings, carjackings, looting and other violence as the cities, including state capital Vitória, remained bereft of law enforcement.

After four days of strike, Espírito Santo had already seen about 200 robberies and about 90 million reais (US$ 29 million) in damages to local businesses, the local police union said as the federal government remained mum on crime figures.

“We are taking steps to increase the level of the National Force, which is police, and of the armed forces so that we can have security,” Governor Colnago told the press. He said the condition on the streets had deteriorated so badly that many were afraid to leave their homes.

The Military Police, as the forces patrolling Brazil’s city streets are known, were demanding better working conditions and higher pay as the country’s budget crisis has begun to affect all sectors of society.

Although they are barred by law from going on strike, relatives and sympathizers have blocked police stations and the officers are not trying to get out.

A court declared the strike illegal and the state police chief was removed from office, but these measures had little effect.

DW/Bzz

The state authorities handed over operational control of the public security to Brigadier General Adilson Carlos Katibe, commander of the joint task force and the authority in charge of the Armed Forces operations in the state.

In a statement on Wednesday (February 8), Defense Minister Raul Jungmann announced that 550 men from the Armed Forces would be deployed to boost security reinforcements in the state.

An additional 100 members of the National Public Security Force are also being sent to Vitória, the state capital, and will also patrol other municipalities in the state.

They will come as a reinforcement to the 1,000 men from the Army and 200 from the National Force who are already patrolling the streets of Vitória metropolitan area.

Espírito Santo has been going through a severe public security crisis since military police stopped patrolling the streets, in a protest that began Friday (February 3).

Since the by law policemen cannot strike, relatives of police officers, mainly wives, gathered in front of a military unit in Serra, greater Vitória area, and blocked police vehicles from leaving.

According to one of the fire fighter and police associations, similar protests are taking place in barracks throughout the state.

The lack of security and a surge in criminal violence in the state has led the local government of Vitória to call off the beginning of the school year in locally-run schools and shut down health services. The Espírito Santo Road Transport Workers’ Union issued a statement announcing their decision to cancel passenger transport services until security is fully restored.

At a meeting between state government secretaries and representatives of the wives and military police unions, the leaders of the protest presented two main demands: the state’s pardon for all law enforcement officers (they are banned from going on strikes) and a 100% pay rise for the entire class.

The police association reported that the state police officers’ wage at entry-level is 2,600 reais (US$ 831.87), compared to a national average of 4,000 reais (US$ 1,280).

State Human Rights Secretary, Júlio Pompeu, said the state government was going to examine the proposal to see what they could offer to advance negotiations.

Dead Unionist

Wallace Barão, head of the Highway Workers’ Trade Union of Guarapari, was found shot dead in a car Thursday morning (February 9) in the city of Vila Velha, Espírito Santo state.

After his death, his colleagues staged a new stoppage in the metropolitan region of Vitória, the state capital. The buses had resumed their regular activities this morning.

The chairman of the Highway Workers’ Trade Union of Espírito Santos (Sindirodoviários), Edson Bastos, reported that the buses returned to their depots and will only be brought back into circulation when security is restored in the state.

“The government promised security. Some bus terminals were guarded by Army troops, others weren’t. We’ve had drivers threatened with guns. You can’t work like that,” Bastos said.

The State Secretariat for Public Security still does not have the data on the incidents that have taken place in Espírito Santo since family members of the military police started protesting outside police quarters.

Jorge Emílio Leal, president of Trade Union for the Civil Police of Espírito Santo (Sindipol), declared that 105 murders have been reported in the state since Saturday (February 4), most of them in Vitória’s metropolitan region.

ABr