{"id":17420,"date":"2014-08-25T10:32:44","date_gmt":"2014-08-25T13:32:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rioonwatch.org\/?p=17420"},"modified":"2017-07-25T09:19:38","modified_gmt":"2017-07-25T12:19:38","slug":"ferguson-rings-familiar-in-brazil","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/?p=17420","title":{"rendered":"Ferguson Rings Familiar in Brazil"},"content":{"rendered":"

Clique aqui para Portugu\u00eas\"\"<\/em><\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

On August 9, unarmed American teenager Michael Brown was shot to death by a policeman in Ferguson, Missouri, unleashing immediate protest<\/a>. On the same day, residents of Complexo do Alem\u00e3o in Rio de Janeiro organized a march<\/a> to demand an end to recent\u00a0shootings that have injured and killed<\/a> unarmed community residents.<\/h4>\n

\"militarizationA\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Brown\u2019s death has left many Americans outraged, but sadly not surprised. The case is one among several recent incidents of young black men dying at the hands of the police in the US. What caught more Americans off guard was the militarized force with which the police responded to the ensuing protests in Ferguson. With protesters and journalists arrested<\/a> and assaulted<\/a>, onlookers across the country decried<\/a> the heavy-handed policing that seemed to belong to a previous era, to a different part of the world<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In Brazil, in contrast, neither high death rates of innocent\u00a0poor black citizens nor oppressive police tactics are\u00a0a surprise to citizens. In Rio de Janeiro in particular, harboring some of Brazil’s most violent police<\/a> and most extreme inequality<\/a>, what happened in Ferguson is the city’s\u00a0modus operandi<\/em>, its\u00a0bread-and-butter. This even applies to many of\u00a0Rio\u2019s “community policing,” or\u00a0Pacifying Police Units<\/a>\u00a0(UPP) program sites, a program\u00a0launched\u00a0in 2008 that establishes a constant police presence in selected favelas around the city. In Alem\u00e3o, for example, police stand at strategic street corners with rifles\u00a0pointed down narrow alleyways or over walls. Residents, including young children, pass through such alleyways on their way to schools, shops or work, on a daily basis. Just last night, August 24, inhabitants of the favela complex took to social media<\/a> to report “intense shooting” that saw people running for their lives and animals wounded and killed.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"militarizationB\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Critics argue<\/a> that this approach to improving safety inherently criminalizes the city\u2019s low-income, majority-black favela residents.<\/p>\n

Much as media in the United States have analyzed<\/a> the startling appearance of Ferguson and St. Louis police armed<\/a> and uniformed<\/a> for war, there was similar discussion of the police attire and armament during this year’s World Cup in Brazil. Military Police, sporting \u2018Robocop<\/a>\u2019 gear reminiscent of Darth Vader<\/a>, responded to demonstrations<\/a> against the tournament with tear gas, rubber bullets, and batons. Some\u00a0activists were preemptively<\/em> arrested<\/a> before the protests even began, criminalized without actually committing a crime, for taking part in the democratic process.\u00a0Last year, the\u00a0incipient protest movement that took 300,000 Rio citizens to the streets was quickly squelched<\/a> by a deeply troubling police operation<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"militarizationC\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Following the massive protests during the 2013 Confederations Cup, the Brazilian government prepared for the World Cup by expanding the police\u2019s arsenal with purchases from Israeli military weapons companies<\/a>. Similarly, local law enforcement agencies across the United States receive military level equipment<\/a> from the Pentagon, a process that many Americans only realized as events unfolded in Ferguson.<\/p>\n

At a recent debate<\/a> on police violence and the criminalization of poverty and social movements held at the Fluminense Federal University (UFF), participants traced evidence of criminalizing narratives and propaganda throughout Brazilian history<\/a> to try to explain the (mis)use of violence and police militarization in Brazil today. Speaker Thiago Melo, lawyer and director of the\u00a0Human Rights Defenders Institute<\/a>,\u00a0argued that, while the use of heavy equipment, lethal weaponry and warfare vehicles in the face of civilians should be indubitably unconstitutional, the abuse of non-lethal<\/em> weapons constitutes an equally clear case of illegality.<\/p>\n

The Brazilian government may have cited heightened security demands during the World Cup as the main reason for bulking up security forces, but sports and politics writer Dave Zirin\u00a0points out that new high-tech gadgets will not be put aside<\/a> now that the World Cup is over. New instruments will become part of the routine equipment and remain long after the mega-event, or the \u201cstate of emergency,\u201d has ended. Henrique Vieira, a professor, theologian and militant who participated in the UFF debate, elaborated that the need for expediency during an \u201cemergency\u201d situation like a mega-event opens the political space for exceptional measures, such as the suspension of inalienable rights. This state of emergency both nurtures and is nurtured by efforts to normalize the criminalization of segments of the population.<\/p>\n

Participants in the UFF debate raised questions about Ferguson, wondering why similar tragedies in Brazil have not stirred the same global attention. It is not only in academic environments that Brazilians have tied the two cases together. The protesters at the August 9 march in Rio sprayed #SOSComplexoDoAlemao around the favela, sparking a\u00a0Twitter campaign\u00a0which provokes natural comparison between the two cases.<\/p>\n

\"militarizationD\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Blogger Rio Gringa has noted<\/a> that the tweet\u00a0contents will be immediately familiar to anyone following the Michael Brown case. Many Twitter campaign\u00a0participants noted that it is \u201cyoung, black, poor men who die the most in this war.\u201d One participant stated: \u201cI want my kids to have the freedom to come and go at whatever time without being afraid of becoming a statistic,\u201d a statement echoed by African-American parents<\/a> across the United States. Just as discussions in the United States\u00a0have debated the intersecting roles of race and class dictating the disproportionate numbers of young black men shot by police, #SOSComplexoDoAlem\u00e3o tweets<\/a>\u00a0also see both race and class at play in the criminalization of favela residents. \u201cPoverty is not a crime,\u201d one participant declared.<\/p>\n

Although most Americans are unlikely to know about #SOSComplexoDoAlemao, Brazilian activists are certainly aware of the Twitter campaigns resulting from events in Ferguson, notably #DONTSHOOT<\/a>. The independent reporting collective M\u00eddia NINJA has used #DONTSHOOT to call out police violence<\/a> \u201cin Ferguson, in Brazil, in Palestine\u201d and to demand an end<\/a> to the \u201cgenocide against poor black people in Brazil going on now.\u201d<\/p>\n

Black Women of Brazil<\/a>, a blog \u201cdedicated to Brazilian women of African descent,\u201d also used #DONTSHOOT to communicate the March Against the Genocide of Black People<\/a> on August 22<\/a>. This event was actually a number of marches in various locations across the country, with the Rio march taking place in Manguinhos.<\/p>\n

While Americans are questioning domestic policies, structures and inequalities to make sense of events in Ferguson, these Brazilian activists are deliberately highlighting global parallels as key insights to understanding the processes of criminalization and police militarization in Brazil, and worldwide.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Clique aqui para Portugu\u00eas On August 9, unarmed American teenager Michael Brown was shot to death by a policeman in Ferguson, Missouri, unleashing immediate protest. On the same day, residents of Complexo do Alem\u00e3o in […]<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":17491,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1277,1288,335,336,1329],"tags":[32,909,1396,1397,25,878,1259,918,15,2471,17,18,124,1353,167],"writer":[1398,1352],"translator":[],"illustrator":[],"photographer":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-17420","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-uppwatch","8":"category-highlight","9":"category-policies","10":"category-violations","11":"category-by-international-observers","12":"tag-complexo-do-alemao","13":"tag-confederations-cup","14":"tag-criminalization-of-poverty","15":"tag-ferguson","16":"tag-human-rights","17":"tag-international-comparison","18":"tag-mega-events","19":"tag-military-police","20":"tag-pacifying-police-unit","21":"tag-palestine","22":"tag-police-brutality","23":"tag-protest","24":"tag-race","25":"tag-usa","26":"tag-world-cup","27":"writer-andrea-cangialosi","28":"writer-cerianne-robertson"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17420","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17420"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17420\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/17491"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17420"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17420"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17420"},{"taxonomy":"writer","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fwriter&post=17420"},{"taxonomy":"translator","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftranslator&post=17420"},{"taxonomy":"illustrator","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fillustrator&post=17420"},{"taxonomy":"photographer","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fphotographer&post=17420"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}