{"id":5155,"date":"2012-09-15T09:00:02","date_gmt":"2012-09-15T12:00:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/?p=5155"},"modified":"2017-01-12T11:21:21","modified_gmt":"2017-01-12T14:21:21","slug":"beltrame-vidigal-now-exists","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/?p=5155","title":{"rendered":"Beltrame: \u201cVidigal Now Exists\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

For the original article in Portuguese click<\/em> here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"An evolving project, one that will not solve all of Rio\u2019s problems, much less from one day to the next. This is the realistic and confident way in which Rio State’s Security Secretary Jos\u00e9 Mariano Beltrame defines the Pacifying Police Units (UPPs<\/a>) implemented through much of Rio de Janeiro. In an interview with Vidiga!<\/a><\/em>\u00a0after an exhibition of the film \u20185x Pacifica\u00e7\u00e3o<\/em>\u2019 (5x Pacification<\/a>), coordinated by Cac\u00e1 Diegues and directed by Cadu Barcelos, Luciano Vidigal, Rodrigo Felha and Wagner Novais, the same group who directed \u20185x Favela \u2013 Agora por N\u00f3s Mesmos<\/em>\u2019 (5x Favela \u2013 Now by Ourselves<\/a>), the secretary shared his take on the film as well as on the specific case of pacification in the Vidigal community.<\/p>\n

The movie, comprised of five short films and interspersed with directors\u2019 comments\u2014all of whom are residents of favela communities, not all pacified\u2014dissects, analyzes and exposes pacification in a balanced way. Beltrame commented on controversial points, such as police corruption and amnesty for traffickers, raising the latter to the possibility of discussing the subject nationally for the first time.<\/p>\n

Does the documentary represent the UPP project well?<\/strong><\/h3>\n

I think it represents them well because the UPPs aren\u2019t a finished project. UPPs have to change. It\u2019s what I always say: the world will not be colored on Monday. The UPP is not the solution to all the problems, it\u2019s merely the possibility of other things to come, others then must do more.<\/p>\n

Photographer Maur\u00edcio Hora, resident of Provid\u00eancia, says in the film that the UPP came to save the communities from the police. What do you think of this statement? <\/strong><\/h3>\n

I also think it\u2019s a bit of that. Why not? You have a police that is prepared for war and, by waging war, absorbs the spoils, that\u2019s the point with corruption, appropriating everything the war brings. I use the example of the Louvre in Paris: it\u2019s a marvel, but it is full of spoils of war. When the police officer is thrown into war for 20, 30 years, it\u2019s internalized in him. The UPP is taking him out of that, saying: \u201clet\u2019s stop waging war, settle here and provide for the arrival of peace.\u201d<\/p>\n

In another scene, Jos\u00e9 J\u00fanior [AfroReggae founder] proposes amnesty so drug traffickers can start a new life. Is there any possibility of this happening?<\/strong><\/h3>\n

When speaking about this we are entering a totally legal topic, still at a very high judicial level, because it\u2019s an expedient in Brazilian criminal proceedings that falls under the President of the Republic. These matters need to be greatly discussed; it\u2019s not a simple yes or no answer. You have to broaden those horizons, talk about it a lot, because maybe you then find a way out. Maybe it won\u2019t be amnesty, or a bit of amnesty, or even precisely amnesty. It\u2019s something very new, something we need to let mature. The whole society needs to mature. Even the judiciary, who will have to make the decision. It has to be broadly debated and, who knows, the movie could begin to raise this discussion.<\/p>\n

Before, assaults didn\u2019t happen in favelas, but now many suffer them. In Vidigal, for example, when someone is assaulted or robbed, the UPP doesn\u2019t record what happened and asks residents to go to a police station\u2026 I myself went through this. <\/strong><\/h3>\n

A person who is safe in an informal setting, controlled by a tyrant, with people carrying guns, minors with automatic weapons\u2026 I\u2019m not sure you can consider this ‘feeling safe.’ If that [an assault] happened to you, at the very least the police officer responded wrongly, because he could get a squad car and drive you to the station to proceed with the report, or communicate with another officer to do this if he can\u2019t leave his post, or lead to a police station. That\u2019s the rule.<\/p>\n

Secondly, there\u2019s another aspect that must be considered: today, you were assaulted and there\u2019s the possibility of reporting it at a police station. Before, you weren\u2019t assaulted, but they burned people alive and you couldn\u2019t go to the police. Before, minors were thrown into the drug traffic. Today, police activity begins to show that a community of 50,000 is almost a city. So I\u2019m not going to say that it\u2019s normal for assaults to occur, but these things begin to happen in daily life like in great metropolitan regions. But the police officer should, at the very least, have attended to you better.<\/p>\n

Another problem that Vidigal \u2013 and other favelas in the South Zone of Rio\u2014are experiencing is the threat of \u201cwhite eviction\u201d (gentrification), investors entering in search of valuable land\u2026<\/strong><\/h3>\n

I think that that is something that can happen, because this is a phenomenon that is made possible through pacification. I guarantee that it\u2019s not the police that are doing this. It\u2019s some interest, some agency that has to fulfill its role of monitoring and organizing this and isn\u2019t. It was the trafficking, the tyrant, who did this before. Now that part of Vidigal is giving more work to some agencies that didn\u2019t have to worry about it before, because it was informal. It didn\u2019t exist, now it does exist. Now the municipal or state secretariat of housing, or whatever agency it is, has to carry out its responsibility of going there and certifying them. The state allowed those people to establish themselves there, how can it now go and simply make a counter-order? It\u2019s not a question of the police force. But this is a phenomenon that the UPPs brought with them and that other agencies have the obligation to come in. It\u2019s like I say: it\u2019s not the presence of the police inside these areas that\u2019s going to consolidate progress. This time you can\u2019t blame the police. The rest have to execute the job that should have been done 30 or 40 years ago.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Clique aqui para Portugu\u00eas For the original article in Portuguese click here. An evolving project, one that will not solve all of Rio\u2019s problems, much less from one day to the next. This is the […]<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":5175,"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":[1267,1277,1328,1284,335,1330],"tags":[245,602,262,15,156,363],"writer":[486],"translator":[601],"illustrator":[],"photographer":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-5155","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-gentrificationwatch","8":"category-uppwatch","9":"category-by-community-contributors","10":"category-interviews-profiles","11":"category-policies","12":"category-translation","13":"tag-beltrame","14":"tag-film","15":"tag-interview","16":"tag-pacifying-police-unit","17":"tag-south-zone","18":"tag-vidigal","19":"writer-mariana-albanese","20":"translator-margo-hufstetler"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5155","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\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5155"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5155\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5175"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5155"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5155"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5155"},{"taxonomy":"writer","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fwriter&post=5155"},{"taxonomy":"translator","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftranslator&post=5155"},{"taxonomy":"illustrator","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fillustrator&post=5155"},{"taxonomy":"photographer","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fphotographer&post=5155"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}