{"id":28255,"date":"2016-05-07T09:00:11","date_gmt":"2016-05-07T12:00:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rioonwatch.org\/?p=28255"},"modified":"2016-05-07T09:26:42","modified_gmt":"2016-05-07T12:26:42","slug":"the-debate-of-our-times-public-coexistence-or-barbarism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/?p=28255","title":{"rendered":"The Debate of Our Times: The Right to Public Coexistence or Barbarism?"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

For the original article by Jailson de Souza e Silva<\/a>*\u00a0in Portuguese published by Nexo Jornal\u00a0<\/em>click<\/em> here<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Without the guarantee to the right to coexistence we won’t escape the barbarism that\u00a0Rosa Luxemburg prophesied in 1916<\/a>.<\/em><\/h4>\n

“He who fights monsters should see to it that he himself does not become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you,” F. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil<\/em><\/a>, 1886.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

On April 4, 2016, at 6am, Federal Police agents, CORE–Civil Police elite squad–and Military Police<\/a>\u00a0invaded the favela of Acari<\/a>\u00a0in Rio’s North Zone<\/a>\u00a0in order to enforce an arrest warrant of a local resident, sentenced to eight years for drug trafficking<\/a>. The result of this action is that\u00a0five people\u00a0are dead<\/a>,\u00a0two suspects were arrested in connection with drug trafficking, about 800 elementary school students had to miss classes, residents lived another day of armed terror, and the warranted arrest wasn’t carried out.<\/p>\n

Still, police affirm that the operation was a success. I have read all the news I could about what happened that day and, essentially, this was the information I could get.<\/p>\n

In contrast, on the same subject, an online newspaper in\u00a0S\u00e3o Paulo<\/a> and another in Esp\u00edrito Santo<\/a> published reports on the residents’ indignation on what was an execution and the fact that one of the dead had worked at a\u00a0municipal hospital in the Acari neighborhood. In one print newspaper, the report<\/a> also published residents’ comments\u00a0and the deceased employee’s name: Sergio Eduardo Fernandes. It was the only one to report that correctly.<\/p>\n

On March 22, 2016 the mainstream media<\/a>\u00a0highlighted the publication of the IPEA and Public Security Forum survey<\/a>. Brazil has become a\u00a0world champion in absolute numbers of murders in 2014, the latest year of systemized data.\u00a0We reached the number of 59,627 people killed in 2014, which represents 13% of homicides in the world that year. In comparison with Brazil itself, since\u00a0there is no realistic\u00a0comparison to be made with countries at\u00a0the same socio-economic development level: 39,325 murders were reported in 2003 which reduced the number to 37,113 in 2004, apparently due to\u00a0the Statute of Disarmament<\/a>\u00a0coming into force, according to the Map of Violence<\/a> in Brazil.<\/p>\n

However, in the context of the greatest economic and social development of the country in decades, with a significant reduction of poverty<\/a> and inequality<\/a>, we have also seen an almost 40% increase in lethal violence. This buries once-and-for-all the myth that poverty is the cause of violence. That’s not the worst of it, the fact is that according to this same\u00a0publication, 56,337 people were murdered in 2012. That means\u00a0there has been a systematic, ongoing, worsening of the phenomenon, which can not be reversed with short-term solutions. And\u00a0poor, black young people\u00a0from the favelas and peripheries<\/a>\u00a0will especially continue to feel its effects.<\/p>\n

What is the connection between the Nietzsche quotation above to the news of the Acari deaths and the data on murders in Brazil? My theory is that the “demonization” of the “other,” of the different, is the premise that sustains this naturalization and trivialization of deaths amongst a specific portion of the Brazilian population. When we demonize others, we remove their humanity. We no longer see them as similar to us and want them to leave our environment. Before Nazis started killing Jews, they demonized them, building a representation that obliterated people’s human condition. From the moment you spread this representation on a mass scale, you can start to eliminate the monsters.<\/p>\n

In Brazil, the same was done with drug traffickers and those with the same profile. When we take an unnatural look at what we read about the latest massacre in Acari favela\u2013or do we fail to consider five deaths a massacre?\u2013a\u00a0set of elements makes an impression on us.<\/p>\n

First, the small space the media allocates to death. The issue has become so commonplace that it does not gain\u00a0space on the front pages, nor is it featured on the inside pages. The second element, which further supports the demonization\u00a0hypothesis is the lack of identification of those who’ve died. We do not know their faces, their ages, their names, their profiles, their stories, their dreams, their habits… all the things the media likes to publish when someone considered to have the right to life dies. The only one who had the right to have his name registered, and nothing more than that, was the “worker.”\u00a0Sergio has very little chance of becoming a new “Amarildo<\/a>**,” an anonymous life which became a present and illuminated ghost after his death thanks to social media networks.<\/p>\n

The demonization\u00a0process disseminated in the country is also occurring with the attempted impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff<\/a>. Regardless of the positions in question on the issue\u2013and I have a lot of conviction in mine\u2013a significant proportion of the population is using the political dispute as a way to instill hatred, intolerance, contempt and even physical violence against those who think differently.<\/p>\n

Transforming one person\u00a0into “the corrupt one,” on the one hand, or “the fascist,” on the other, stems from the inability to assert the most important right to fight the various forms of barbarism that have dominated the contemporary world in all its latitudes: the right to coexistence, a transmutation for the 21st century of the least valued and recognized motto of the French Revolution triad: fraternity.<\/p>\n

And why is it that the French\u00a0revolutionaries added this third element to the fundamental pillars of the society which they sought? Because reconciling the positions of liberals on\u00a0individual freedom especially, and of proto democrats, socialists, communists and anarchists in relation to the equality of people could only be mediated if people accept living together, sharing the same space, and having common rules of coexistence, civility, and respect for one\u00a0other.<\/p>\n

Racism<\/a>, sexism<\/a>, homophobia<\/a>, religious<\/a>, ethnic, political and socio-economic intolerance are at the root of all conflicts and contemporary violence. And they can only be solved if we build common bases of coexistence. Both in favelas and affluent neighborhoods; both in political and cultural spheres; both in relation to us as in relation to them. Without the guarantee of the right to coexistence, we will not escape the barbarism prophesied by Rosa Luxemburg in 1916. We are already in it. Unlike that which occurred with the Roman Empire, we have become barbarians within our own society. The barbarism is manifested in the genocide of\u00a0young, black, poor people<\/a> and in the isolation and insecurity of the wealthy within their increasingly private spaces<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Our differences will continue to exist, there is no utopia to account for this. Fortunately history always continues. But for that, we need to affirm our common humanity above all. And build public policies that allow this right to coexistence. This is a choice we need to know we have to make. And live. Before we collapse completely.<\/p>\n

*Jailson de Souza e Silva is founder of the Favelas Observatory<\/a>\u00a0(Observat\u00f3rio de Favelas<\/a>) and author of, among other books, Bruxas e bruxos da cidade: personagens da revolu\u00e7\u00e3o do contempor\u00e2neo<\/a>\u00a0(Witches and wizards of the city: characters of the contemporary revolution) published\u00a0in 2016.<\/em><\/p>\n

**Amarildo was a bricklayer and resident\u00a0of Rocinha<\/a> who was murdered by UPP officers in 2013 and, thanks to immediate and widespread campaigning on social media which set off\u00a0civil protests<\/a>, his death was investigated by police, resulting in the arrest of the police officers<\/a> who tortured him to death. His body was not found.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Clique aqui para Portugu\u00eas For the original article by Jailson de Souza e Silva*\u00a0in Portuguese published by Nexo Jornal\u00a0click here. Without the guarantee to the right to coexistence we won’t escape the barbarism that\u00a0Rosa Luxemburg […]<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":28256,"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":[1328,1331,1282,1330,328,336],"tags":[555,426,2047,2048,203,878,866,23,1900,918,37,1781,876,671,268,2046,30],"writer":[2004],"translator":[1729],"illustrator":[],"photographer":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-28255","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-by-community-contributors","8":"category-opinion-2","9":"category-research-analysis","10":"category-translation","11":"category-understanding-rio","12":"category-violations","13":"tag-acari","14":"tag-brazil","15":"tag-compassion","16":"tag-disarmament","17":"tag-inequality","18":"tag-international-comparison","19":"tag-ipea","20":"tag-mass-media","21":"tag-media-narrative","22":"tag-military-police","23":"tag-north-zone","24":"tag-opinion-2","25":"tag-poverty","26":"tag-president-dilma-rousseff","27":"tag-state-violence","28":"tag-stats","29":"tag-urban-violence","30":"writer-jailson-de-souza-e-silva","31":"translator-sheila-taylor"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28255","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\/17"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=28255"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28255\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/28256"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=28255"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=28255"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=28255"},{"taxonomy":"writer","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fwriter&post=28255"},{"taxonomy":"translator","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftranslator&post=28255"},{"taxonomy":"illustrator","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fillustrator&post=28255"},{"taxonomy":"photographer","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fphotographer&post=28255"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}