between tragedy and farce:  getting back to normal in rio de janeiro
Autor: gringo que fala | Publicado: 2014-07-21T07:11:00-07:00


not surprisingly, the
end of the world cup hasn’t done much to improve human rights in rio de
janeiro.&nbsp; it’s not as though they
were doing very well before the cup came along, of course, but the authorities’
eagerness to put on a happy face for tourists and show off a “global city” to
foreign investors and multinationals provided a huge accelerating force for the
sharp (but not especially short) shock of forced evictions, police brutality,
and clampdowns on free speech.&nbsp; the
first justification for those instincts has passed, but with presidential and
gubernatorial elections coming up in october and the olympics scheduled to come
crashing down in two years, it seems unlikely that the situation will improve
any time soon.




we want to have classes - free our teachers!
(sign at the july 15 protest)


it’s been a pretty
bizarre week here, accentuated by brief glimmers of hope and by a bumbling
criminal justice system that would be funny if it weren’t so fundamentally
belligerent.&nbsp; after the intense repression that marked the
final world cup protest last week, there was a protest on tuesday to free the
19 activists being held temporarily and accused – though not formally charged –
of criminal conspiracy.&nbsp; the
protest was bigger and louder than most of the actions during the world cup
(around 1000 people showed up), and though the riot cops came out in force,
they mostly managed to restrain themselves:&nbsp; there was no tear gas, no rubber bullets, and apparently not
even any arrests.&nbsp;&nbsp; toward the
end of the march, word got out that a habeas
corpus motion had been accepted and that 12 of the prisoners would be
released the next day, and that four of
the cops caught on video beating the shit out of
protestors and stealing their stuff were going to be taken into administrative custody.




protest is not a crime:
the new de rigeur facebook profile picture for the local activist set (by amnesty international)




this news kicked off
days of bureaucratic confusions and contortions.&nbsp; the habeas corpus
writs were initially challenged and then upheld, but the actual paperwork
somehow took more than 24 hours to find its way to the right people, so the 12
people scheduled to be released on wednesday only got out early on thursday
morning, when their 5-day arrests should already have expired.&nbsp; almost as soon as they were released,
state prosecutors announced that they would release a new dossier file a new
motion to arrest all of them again on friday.&nbsp; that motion apparently went through without any delays for
paperwork, and the 12 are now considered fugitives (along with 6 others who managed to avoid the initial arrests).&nbsp;
meanwhile, 5 more prisoners are still being held indefinitely, along
with 2 underage prisoners, who are still in custody but not subject to criminal
prosecution. 




before being leaked to the press, the new charges against the 19 activists were classified,
which sent their lawyers on a bureaucratic goose chase




the accusations keep
getting more grandiose and the numbers keep shifting – there were originally
supposed to be 60 arrest warrants, with more possibly on the way – which has
understandably created a pretty constant sense of fear among most of rio’s
activists.&nbsp; with different state
agencies and public officials competing with each other to either vilify or
liberate our friends, it’s difficult to how large the anti-activist dragnet
will extend or what consequences will be attached to what actions.&nbsp; the recently-leaked police dossier
makes some pretty outlandish claims (for example, that a local anarchist coalition
was plotting to blow up the rio de janeiro state legislature), and to my mind,
its tone is eerily similar to ai-5,
the 1968 declaration of martial law that signaled a major turning point for the
worse in brasil’s dictatorship.&nbsp; (i
won’t go into detail about that in a blog post, so you’ll either have to take
my word for it, or wait for my phd thesis in about three-ish years).



as new warrants
circulate, raising the prospect that more prominent activists will be subject
to arbitrary imprisonment, comparisons between between current political circumstances
and the 21 years (1964-85) of full-on military dictatorship keep coming up. these
comparisons have been common for a long time brasil, in part because so many of
the faces of the political and intellectual leadership are the same (check out josé sarney and antônio delfim netto for a very basic introduction), but mostly because institutions like the military police operate
in essentially the same way, largely ignoring the 1988 constitution and
interpreting the older, unchanged criminal code as they see fit. &nbsp;it’s a trueism that the dictatorship
stood out for subjecting the primarily white middle and upper classes to the
same sort of treatments that poor people of color always were and continue to
be subjected to:&nbsp; torture,
arbitrary arrests, and disappearances, to name just a few. &nbsp;&nbsp;




the difference between a political prisoner and a common prisoner
is that the common prisoner doesn't know that he's also a political prisoner


the human rights
debacle that we’re seeing played out now didn’t start with the world cup, and
what my activist friends are going through has long been an everyday reality
for favela residents throughout brasil, among others.&nbsp; ironically, many of the folks getting locked up now have been
especially vocal in pointing out the continued abuses of the criminal justice
system, and their current situation highlights what they’ve been expressing for
years:&nbsp; namely, that many of the
practices that defined the dictatorship continue more or less unabated. bruno
cava, a legal theorist, points out in this article (in portuguese) that the current situation is not so much a return
to the dictatorship as a reflection of how the current political system in
brasil has absorbed both dictatorial repression as well as more democratic
instincts that are constantly trying to outdo each other.&nbsp; these days, unfortunately, the
old-school hardliners seem to have the upper hand.


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a lot of folks in rio
have been reviving marx’s quote that
“history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, and the second time as
farce.”&nbsp; it’s worth bearing in
mind, though, that there’s an ongoing cycle of repetitions at work, and that
the distinction between tragedy and farce depends less on the passage of time
and more on an observer’s distance from any given event.&nbsp; as we move on from the world cup,
things may slowly be getting back to normal, but that doesn’t mean they’re
getting any better.




cavalry cops with swords (and with no id numbers or badges) at the final world cup protests