The Military Police and the blacks -

The Military Police and the Blacks

04/08/2023

Partners • Law/Judiciary • Racism

By LEONARDO SACRAMENTO*

Deaths due to police “intervention” shot up 26% with Tarcísio. Bahia de Rui Costa is the state that kills the most black people in Brazil

Killing poor and black workers is the great republican consensus. While Tarcísio de Freitas recomposes the social base of the extreme right around his figure after shocks in the first months, the Bahian police continue with their massacres without spotlights. If Tarcísio de Freitas proudly assumes a fascist aesthetic through a huge operation in Guarujá, openly outlining a policy of State terrorism, Jerônimo Rodrigues selflessly continues his Pôncio Pilate massacres, washing his hands in the waters of Praia do Farol da Barra, under the tearful eyes of the white elite of Salvador. He pursues the legacy of Rui Costa, the incognito.

Like the SS, which killed 10 ordinary people for every soldier killed, Tarcísio de Freitas orders the killing of similar amounts of workers for the dead soldier, without hiding it from anyone. It's not fortuitous. Neo-Nazi groups follow with appreciation – they understand the symbology and meaning of the action, more or less like Jair Bolsonaro in lives drinking milk. Those who ignore it, rejoice in the all-out war against the “manos”, or pretos. But what about Bahia? Soon the state with the most black people in the federation? Without a glass of milk, the congregation of the Soteropolitan elite does not fail to have their toast with white wines.

But what about investigations? The suspect suspected of killing the Rota soldier was arrested in São Paulo, more than 100 kilometers away from Guarujá, under investigation by the Civil Police. Therefore, the Nazi-fascist Operation had nothing to do with any investigation. It was explicitly a military operation to execute ordinary people, unrelated to any investigative process, since the so-called “Rota investigation” took the bodies to the IML without identification. Workers like the salesman Filipe do Nascimento died for going to the supermarket.[I] A homeless person was shot with a rifle.[ii] He arrived and left the IML as an indigent. If he has such a classification, what would be his relationship with the killers of the Rota police officer? None!

What about Bahia? It registered 19 deaths in four days, as well as São Paulo. Like Rota, the Bahian police claimed “an exchange of fire” in all cases.[iii] The efficiency of the Brazilian police in a “firefight” situation is the envy of special groups from the US, Russian and NATO armies. Obviously, it is not the objective to fall into the trap of podcast of milicos, in which they shout: “so you are wanting the policeman to die?!”. No. But it is strange that only the Brazilian police manage to reach a rate of 100% and the US army does not achieve such a “feat”. There are senators who took a SWAT course, but maybe SWAT and SEALS should take a course with the Brazilian police.

The press pretends that everything is fine, with the creation of grotesque terms, such as “presumed innocent”.[iv] Of course, there are the selfless ones used by the big newspapers to fan the winds of pluralism, as if massacres were objects for that purpose – in Brazil, they are! The judiciary does not pretend, but participates in Gestapo Operations, as happened in Germany in the 1930s, especially after 1937, under a new legal consensus, more or less like Sérgio Moro's attempt regarding the exclusion of illegality, already belonging to the practice of Brazilian criminal procedure. They are judges who live in Higienópolis and Farol da Barra.

The pattern of randomly killing workers for every police officer killed in a war that the PCC only won since the beginning of the century, becoming the main cartel in Latin America and one of the largest in the world, has now taken on institutional features. The 10 for 1 exchange was openly defended by the governor, as it left him “extremely satisfied”. Deaths by police “intervention”, in which police officers claim that there was an exchange of fire, never proven, not even investigated, shot up 26% with Tarcísio. The camera on the uniform in practice has already been abandoned.

It seems obvious that the Nazi-fascist militiaman uses the massacres as a way to keep the extreme right active. Therefore, he kills with political calculation, like any Nazi. He feels no remorse. On the contrary. He feels pleasure, as was evident in his interview. Jair Bolsonaro is being urged to defend the massacre, which demonstrates that the extreme right will dispute the Carioquisização of the São Paulo police, accompanied, by the way, by the Bahian police.

What about Bahia? Bahia is the state that kills the most black people in Brazil. 100% of those killed by the police in Salvador are black.[v] Statewide, the rate is 98%.[vi] It is the only state that has a facial recognition program in 80 cities, even though there is a scientific consensus that this method does not work with blacks, or rather, it incriminates more innocent blacks than whites.

Rui Costa is the incognito fascist of the left. That goat on top of the roof that attracts everyone's attention. Some afraid that the goat will fall, others because of the situation, all wondering how it got there. Rui Costa belongs to a left that uses public security as a negotiating currency and governance with the local right, handing over public security to fascists and rolling the dice for the fans. It's not that the traditional left doesn't have a debate about public safety. He has! But electorally, it doesn't work. And if fascists will kill black workers in the name of governance, so be it. Governability and the exchange of votes are the same thing, as they rest on the dead.

Almost all of the setbacks in this area in the last decade have a leftist finger, see Haiti and Rio de Janeiro, responsible respectively for the articulation of the generals who inhabited the Jair Bolsonaro government and for the media occupation of Alemão against the Red Command, opening space for the militias. Both the invasion of Haiti and the boastful occupations of the hills in Rio, objects of real estate speculation before the World Cup and the Olympics, contributed to Bolsonarism. In Haiti, reports of rapes and massacres led the UN to demand the departure of General Augusto Heleno.[vii] They empowered the generals and helped expand the territory of the militias (right-wing paramilitary groups).[viii]

One cannot forget the Drug Law, used by judges and prosecutors to arrest blacks, the Terrorism Law, a fetish of the Jair Bolsonaro government to criminalize the left itself, and the GLO, used by Michel Temer in his ill-fated attempt to become electorally viable. . Marielle and Anderson were killed when Rio de Janeiro was under federal intervention led by General Braga Neto, who would become Jair Bolsonaro's minister.

Rui Costa was elected on the promise of a total war against drugs and property crimes, and he kept it. The only neighborhood that showed a significant improvement in the data was… Farol da Barra, the rich and white neighborhood of the city. For that, he killed blacks. The improvement came through the introduction of facial recognition, proven to be ineffective in blacks. Salvador, without a doubt, is a great laboratory for a facial recognition project, whose center to be protected are the neighborhoods that are the object of real estate speculation.[ix]

On the podium of killing blacks, Bahia is followed by Ceará and Pernambuco, led until then by Camilo Santana (PT) and Paulo Câmara (PSB), respectively. Therefore, like the right, the left commands police who kill as many or more black people. If we had a decent left, that would be a tipping point. Leonel Brizola suffered when defending that the trawlers were isolated, since he was the one who connected the north zone with the south zone with the first bus line of the Túnel Rebouças, attracting criticism from the press, such as The Globe, who fought against the so-called “caudilho” due to the rights related to the carnival.[X] The famous video of whites from the south zone calling blacks from the north zone filthy, stating that “they are not like us”, must be understood in this context.[xi]

No Profession Reporter On September 21, 2021, journalists traveled through three states to denounce the killings of young people by police: Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo and Bahia. Bahia drew attention as if it had a watermelon on its head.

It is the state that killed, in 2020, in all police “interventions”, 100% of young black men. Reporter Pedro Borges asked the then secretary of public security, Ricardo Mandarino, a white man, why. The secretary said that until 2020 the secretariat had a “policy of confrontation”, and that, in 2021, it would have changed, expressing itself in the 30% reduction in police killings. Data from 2022 prove the opposite. There is a plot by Public Security to free any and all police officers who participated in massacres.

However, assuming he was correct, there was a confession: “we had a policy of confrontation”. The murders shown in the report did not occur in exchanges of fire, and a woman who had a relative executed suffered a traumatic episode recorded by the report, needing to be controlled with “a glass of water”.

The man responsible for this policy is Rui Costa. It should also be remembered that the Bahia police were responsible for the execution of Adriano de Nóbrega in a situation that has not yet been explained, an evident burning of files. The then governor, current Minister of the Civil House, strangely poorly questioned about the case, chose a military candidate in the 2020 election to run for mayoralty in Salvador, despite the decision of the party's militancy. She lost. The PT has serious electoral problems in Salvador, and its security policy is one of the reasons.

Translating the secretary's interview, the governor's hesitant position in the face of Adriano de Nóbrega's execution and his militarized choice of the PT's military candidate for the Salvadoran election shows an impressive consistency. The governor surfed on Bolsonarism and punitivism. He authorized killing at will and faked a change in the face of the Bolsonarism crisis.

In the Cabula massacre, in 2015, in which 10 people were executed by his police, Rui said that the police behaved “like a scorer in front of the goal who tries to decide, in a few seconds, how he is going to put the ball in of the goal, to score the goal”. What would be the difference of “extremely satisfied” by Tarcísio de Freitas? At the time, the PGR asked for the federalization of the case due to the evident lack of exemption from the governor. The STJ denied. Operation Faroeste then unveiled a scheme by the secretary of security, Maurício Barbosa, with the judge who cleared Rui's killers. As described by Jailton Andrade, “according to delation by judge Sandra Inês Rusciolelli, the Secretary of Public Security would have been invited by the president of the TJ-BA to join the gang. The governor exonerated the secretary only after the STJ removed him from office. Afterwards, he put away the pen and the tongue”.[xii]

The Bahian police questioned the new police mortality data, saying that they have their own methods, such as not counting criminals killed by the police – but who says they are criminals? The police themselves? And even if they were, the method (and the argument) was used with political success by the Gestapo, and now, alongside the current governor Jerônimo, by Tarcísio. Perhaps similar to the method of a Nazi or a neo-Nazi denialist who claims that the Holocaust did not exist, which would be the result of a Jewish-Marxist plot.

Bahian methods are Nazi,[xiii] as Rui Costa showed with a naturalizing silence in the Gamboa massacre. The methods of all governors, to different degrees, are Nazi, because they naturalize the execution of blacks, just as the execution of Jews was naturalized in the 1930s in Germany. And making this explicit helps us understand that the Extermination Policy for poor and black workers is a State Policy. And it is this State Policy that authorizes and gives Tarcísio social and political legitimacy, to the point of building an operation and explicitly claiming a fascist aesthetic, even in the official interview.

The case of civic-military schools clearly demonstrates that militarization is a State policy, whose last governor to openly fight against it was Leonel Brizola. Rui Costa, in a pioneering way, installed civic-military schools for blacks while his police killed blacks. In 2020, the state already had more than 100 schools, before any implementation by the federal government, at the initiative of the governor himself. Cases of racism exploded in schools, with bans on hair, clothing and repression of behavior considered “popular” and “black” too much for “disciplinary” police.

On TikTok, it is common for profiles that share, with adoration, the performance of the military police in Bahian carnivals, randomly beating people with truncheons over their heads. So random that a civil police officer was beaten by police officers.[xiv] His crime: dreadlocks. By the way, a young man was beaten in front of everyone's eyes (and cell phones) by a police officer, who shouted that he hated his hair.[xv] A young woman was banned from entering the civic-military school because she didn't make a bun, a white hair, or someone who proposes to do some straightening.[xvi] Any process for recognizing and punishing these police officers is unknown to the public. Judging by the Rui Costa pattern, now reproduced by Jerônimo Rodrigues,[xvii] must have been promoted.

Rui Costa is that goat on the roof. That white sheep that no one talks about… It is a disconcerting pattern for Lula, who preferred to remain silent after the publication of the Bahia data. They say that Bolsonarism still resists in the Central Bank. True. They say he's getting back together with Tarcísio de Freitas. True. But now the extreme right has objective and transparent data to throw in the face of the left that its police are as or more violent than the police commanded by right-wing and extreme right-wing governors. It is the great republican consensus of the Nation.

*Leonardo Sacramento is a teacher of basic education and pedagogue at IFSP. Author, among other books, of Discourse on White: Notes on Racism and the Apocalypse of Liberalism (Mall).

Notes

[I] Available in https://noticias.uol.com.br/cotidiano/ultimas-noticias/2023/08/02/mulher-diz-que-pm-matou-vendedor-no-guaruja-ele-saiu-para-ir-ao-mercado.htm.

[ii] Available in https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/cotidiano/2023/08/pm-matou-possivel-morador-de-rua-com-tiros-de-fuzil-e-pistola-em-guaruja.shtml#:~:text=O%20poss%C3%ADvel%20morador%20de%20rua,do%20litoral%20de%20S%C3%A3o%20Paulo..

[iii] Available in https://g1.globo.com/ba/bahia/noticia/2023/08/01/bahia-registra-19-mortes-apos-confrontos-entre-policiais-militares-e-suspeitos-em-quatro-dias.ghtml.

[iv] "The suspect recorded a video before surrendering. In it, he asked the police to stop the “killing” of supposedly innocent people in operations after the death of soldier Reis”. Available in https://noticias.uol.com.br/cotidiano/ultimas-noticias/2023/08/02/suspeito-matar-pm-guaruja-confundiu-viatura-temia-pcc-diz-investigacao.htm.

[v] Available in https://g1.globo.com/ba/bahia/noticia/2021/12/14/bahia-e-o-estado-mais-letal-do-nordeste-e-100percent-dos-mortos-pela-policia-em-salvados-sao-negros-aponta-pesquisa.ghtml.

[vi] Available in https://www.brasildefato.com.br/2022/11/17/a-cada-100-mortos-pela-policia-da-bahia-98-sao-negros-afirma-relatorio.

[vii] Available in https://exame.com/brasil/general-augusto-heleno-futuro-ministro-liderou-missao-polemica-no-haiti/.

[viii] Available in https://www.brasildefato.com.br/2019/03/18/fantasmas-de-massacre-no-haiti-assombram-generais-do-governo-bolsonaro.

[ix] For a review of facial recognition in Bahia, see Racist Lenses: Rui Costa is turning Bahia into a surveillance laboratory with facial recognition. Available in https://www.intercept.com.br/2021/09/20/rui-costa-esta-transformando-a-bahia-em-um-laboratorio-de-vigilancia-com-reconhecimento-facial/.

[X] For the topic, see the interview with Michel Misse, then coordinator of the Nucleus for the Study of Citizenship, Conflict and Urban Violence at UFRJ. Available in https://m.folha.uol.com.br/cotidiano/2015/10/1689960-reacao-a-arrastao-e-ascensao-conservadora-diz-sociologo.shtml?cmpid=comptw.

[xi] To view the video, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3P0BXYdtpT8.