https://crimethinc.com/2018/04/06/brazil-rivers-of-blood-pea
ce-is-war-security-is-hazardous-and-citizens-are-the-targets
-of-the-state

Brazil: Rivers of Blood
Peace Is War, Security Is Hazardous, and Citizens Are the
Targets of the State

Analysis Current Events

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.

The army on the streets of Rio de Janeiro after the decree
of occupation.
The Execution of Marielle Franco

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.

Marielle Presente.

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?

Tropical paradise.
Escalating Militarization and Policing

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 20th 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 used 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,
Espírito 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.

How many more have to die for this war to end?

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.

A soldier taking a photograph of the ID of a person who is
attempting to enter a neighborhood on the west side of Rio
de Janeiro.
Not Securing Democracy, but Securitizing It

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.

Michel Temer signs the decree of military intervention in
Rio de Janeiro.
The Courage to Be a Minority

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 20th 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.

A protest in Belo Horizonte remembering Marielle Franco on
March 15, the day after she was murdered.

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.

They don't care about us.

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. ↩

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. ↩

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