By LUIZ EDUARDO SOARES*

In the name of the respect that the former minister deserves, in the name of the respect that women victims deserve, I wonder if it is not time to change the key to judicialization, policing and penalization.

Do you think that the lightning speed with which a man, a brilliant black man, devoted to the anti-racist struggle, who stood out as a candidate for leadership positions at the national and international level due to his ability and trajectory, was accused, judged and condemned to perpetual and irrevocable abomination has nothing to do with racism? Do you really think that the unceremonious way in which he was branded with the fiery symbol of banishment has nothing to do with the color of this man, his ancestry, the dark blackness of his skin? In less than 24 hours, Silvio Almeida was banished from the homeland of decent and honorable citizens, those who are granted voice and dignity. Would it make sense for him to become a stateless person forever, wandering between the arrogant contempt of the right and the inflamed repulsion of the left? An invisible man? No, worse. 

Did you think there would be no more painful fate than invisibility? Well, there is, because invisibility, although devastating, can serve as a survival strategy, offering a kind of shadow for those who desperately need to escape from omnipresent tormentors. Invisibility can be a solitary trench for those for whom disappearance is a more bearable death than degradation without consolation, respite or salvation. The condemned prisoner one day serves his sentence, the tortured prisoner cultivates the hope of future reparation, but the morally deconstituted person in the fire of language will never again have shelter in any future version of our common history. The morally stigmatized person runs the risk of becoming, for as long as he lives, a living dead person who contaminates the space around him with the death he displays. 

A self-sufficient accusation goes through all the stages in an instant, from the denunciation to the gallows. Who will dare to stand by the condemned man who carries with him the postponed death, infecting the surroundings? To report the unspeakable pain of moral execration will mean to ally oneself with the perpetrator and bring upon oneself the stigma of complicity. Who will risk immolating oneself on the sacrificial pyre of good feelings? Whoever attempts a gesture of empathy with the banished man will be stoned with the obvious and inevitable retorts, which will demand the omission of the other pain, the pain of the victims, the suffering neglected when the focus of the description is the torment imposed on the accused. Another turn of the screw, cornering those who doubt, hesitate, lament the tragedy that befalls both, accused and victim.  

The extremely serious conflict between the need to legitimize the voice of victims, taking accusations seriously, and at the same time respecting the presumption of innocence and the right to defense, this conflict is far from being resolved, whether legally, culturally, morally or politically. We are hanging by a thread over the abyss, and in order for it not to break we must, at least, I think, be humble and extremely careful when dealing with cases of this kind, cases that this situation dramatizes so intensely, due to its implications. Ultimately, I feel immense sadness for all the losses involved, and for the lack of recognition of the gravity of this impasse. There is no right to defense when its exercise is automatically taken as a renewed aggression against the victim, a kind of extension of the criminal act, disallowing the defense itself. On the other hand, as we know, we reached this extreme because it was necessary to reverse the historical silencing to which women were subjected, a patriarchal silencing that disallowed their accusations. 

In the case of Silvio Almeida, not only has this impasse been restored to Brazilian society. The dual oppression of gender and race is being mobilized. Abuse has been the language of the male oppressor. Accusations that result in lifelong and irreversible sentences have been the language of racism, as evidenced by the mass incarceration of young black men, whose sentences are so often based on the word of the police officer responsible for the arrest.

In the name of the respect that the former minister deserves, in the name of the respect that women victims deserve, I wonder if it is not time to change the key to judicialization, policing and penalization of situations that could perhaps be better addressed and addressed using other languages ​​and mechanisms, in which the structures that end up reiterating racial and gender oppression, articulated with class domination, could be effectively broken. Let us not fool ourselves: moral condemnations that are perpetual and transcend punishment do not advance the noblest struggles, they only worsen the dramatic Brazilian inequities, which crush so many lives — with the most perverse hypocrisy — in the name of justice, order and morality.

* Luiz Eduardo Soares is an anthropologist, political scientist and writer. Former national secretary of public security. Author, among other books, of Demilitarize: public security and human rights (boitempo) [https://amzn.to/4754KdV]

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