Violence with impunity
IN Brazil today, assassination groups act with impunity. Their brand of violence has become endemic; indicative of the nation's crisis. It will be of no surprise that police officers have been involved. Are they implementing official policy? Our correspondent explains.
International Viewpoint #251 December 1993 rooted inside the police. It is a vicious circle; the drug traffic survives because it gives money to the police, and the police stimulate the extension of organised crime.
We cannot afford to wait for structu-
JOSÉ CORRÊA* — São Paulo, September 1993
N the state of Rio de Janeiro the Ninth Battalion of the military police are responsible for a long list of murders. In 1988 ten children were killed with bullets to the head; in 1990 it was eleven; in July of this year eight more were killed. More recently the Ninth Battalion were responsible for the massacre of twenty-one residents in the Vigario Geral district of the city.
The latter assassinations were carried out in revenge for the death of four military police officers who had joined shopowners near the slums in a protection racket.
This brand of violence has spread throughout the country. In the state of Roraima, assassinations have become a daily occurrence and Yanomami Indians, murdered by gold prospectors, have joined a list of victims that runs into hundreds. In the state of São Paulo the military police massacred 111 inmates at the Carandiru prison.
### Criminality
Several explanations have been put forward for the extent of the violence: a growth in criminality linked to poverty, the "deterioration of the social fabric, government neglect, and the crisis of the State.
There are of course elements of truth in the above but none explain the growth in such criminality.
There are two linked structural causes. The first is the militarisation of the military police. Crimes committed by military police officers are tried in special tribunals, but fellow officers are the judges. Thus, it can act with total impunity. Moreover, militarisation has engendered a dehumanisation of the "troops", making sadism more the rule than the exception. It is vital that proposed legislation for the demilitarisation of the state police forces and the fusion of 24 the civilian and military police be passed as soon as possible.
The second cause is rooted in the federal structure of the national State, which creates a situation ripe for the control of regional state apparatuses by a handful of oligarchies. These operate on the fringes of legality, particularly in the states of Rondônia, Acre, Roraima and Amapa, all bordering the Amazon, where "might means right" and there is no public security. However, arbitrary regimes of a similar nature also exist in many other states
Institutions
The federal Ministry of the Interior needs to establish control over its corresponding institutions in the regional states (which today exist only in a formal sense) and then extend the orbit of the federal police.
The massacres are not the product of government neglect, but rather of security policies which for some time have consciously been put into operation by state governments. The Carandiru prison massacre was a point of pride for the military police of São Paulo — a police force which has already killed hundreds and perhaps thousands of innocent people. The extermination of the Yanomamis is part of the official policy of the state government of Roraima.
However, the state of Rio de Janeiro is clearly the worst example. From 1982 onwards regional security policy laid the ground for peaceful co-existence between the police and drug traffickers. The result was a close inter-twining of the two over the following decade. Today, organised crime in the state is divided between them, but the police represent the biggest threat to the population.
In practice, it is often possible for local residents to negotiate with the gangs that control their area. But it is quite another story when the gangs are ral reforms, linked to changes in federal legislation, in order to respond to these urgent problems. The situation in Rio is particularly serious. However, although the military police constitutes the main threat to public security in that state, sending in the army is no solution.
### Reactionary layers
Although one reason for this is that the army is not trained for public security tasks, there are also sound political reasons. The most reactionary layers of the dominant class are beginning to understand that their traditional political power is decreasing and that it is likely to do so further following the 1994 Presidential elections. Increasingly, their only option lies in a break with legality.
When it has been proposed that the military run a candidate for President, a call for the army to ensure public order would be reckless to say the least. Their intervention also could make victims out of totally discredited politicians - and thus give them a second wind.
A genuine response to this problem has to be developed within a democratic framework, which includes the mobilisation of civil society and the complete dismantling of organised crime, beginning with the military police in the state of Rio.
We must not underestimate the danger represented by the increase in violence; it is neither disorganised nor a product of neglect. It is fuelling a realignment of the social fabric and a political culture which can only benefit the right but be used against the left and democracy. In Argentina, the military dictatorship's death squads began under the last Peron government as groups that hunted down and killed thieves and delinquents
In Brazil, we must never let the snake crawl from out of its egg. *
* The article was originally published in Em Tempo, no. 270. September 1993. Em Tempo is published by the Socialist Democracy, a Fourth Internationalist current in the PT.
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VIOLENCE