By ANDRÉ RODRIGUES & ANDRÉS DEL RIO*
The government found in the pandemic another opportunity to increase selective, racial and territorial killing
The former actress, former secretary and ephemeral widow of the dictatorship, Regina Duarte, had nervous tremors, live, in an interview with CNN[I], because she knew that it was up to her to be forgotten, a fate worse than death. She also knew that we will not fail to remember our dead, a fundamental task of those who fight for life. To speak of Bolsonarism, of its fascism embraced by the military once again in power, is to speak of death, the deaths it desires, the deaths it perpetrates. And that we won't forget.
On the day that Brazil reached the sad mark of 20 deaths from covid-19, Bolsonaro joked in a live broadcast on Facebook saying that “those who are from the right take chloroquine and those who are from the left take… tubaína”[ii]. Mockery, pure and simple. Pasture to nurture his network of followers, real and virtual, who feed on fanaticism and lack of respect for other people's lives, especially for the lives of those who don't have white skin.
On the day Brazil reached 30 deaths from the pandemic, Bolsonaro was reunited with his old wish not fulfilled in 1999[iii], and declared: "I mourn all the dead, but it is everyone's fate"[iv]. But beyond the incendiary manifestations, death is a governmental opportunity, as indicated by the genocide of the forest, Minister Salles and his official slogan: “pass the cattle”.[v]. Even legislators held a moment of silence virtually[vi].
In the week in which Brazil reached the number of 40.000 deaths, Bolsonaro followed his line of mockery in relation to the global crisis that now has Brazil as the world's epicenter of the disease. The week we passed 50.000 deaths, it was the same. There is nothing to be expected different from a government that has a serious commitment to death. The hyena's laugh at the thousands of lonely deaths, by asphyxiation, without a wake, without the right to tears. Bringing the experience of military lethality to the Ministry of Health, the government's last three public policies to combat covid-19 were: a) change the time for disclosing data, after the newscasts, before it was at 17 pm, and moved to 22 pm[vii]; b) hide the data, and not divulge the information day by day, even changing the way of computing[viii]; c) expand the protocol on the use of chloroquine. Obliged by the judiciary to return to previous standards for disclosing data, the Ministry of Health, under military intervention, resorted to design techniques to maintain what was possible of its desire to erase and falsify history: the accumulated number of deaths from covid -19 appears on the page with the smallest font size in the frame. It is a resource as ridiculous as it is cruel. A policy that exposes a genocidal Brazil to the whole world.
Bolsonaro's posture is shocking, but the attitude of shock, the rough polemic is precisely his tool for producing meaning. He speaks to his virtual networks and the worldviews that feed off of them. He speaks to macholas, cowards, sociopaths, hidden behind screens and keys. Bolsonaro's hallucinatory posture is material for his communication strategy. The rest of the work is operated by its digital militias.
In the week of the 20 deaths, a horde of virtual profiles on Twitter began to share a standard message en masse: “I don't know a Bolsonaro voter who is sorry, on the contrary, we have already started the campaign for 2022. He is the best president ever the times!". The tools of these virtual networks to control the propagation of this type of mass manipulation content are not enough. There is no way to denounce, one by one, this infinity of profiles. The judiciary, a frequent target of attacks by these virtual networks of lies and misinformation, is taking ongoing action against those government supporters who would be articulators of these networks[ix].
This mass communication content production plant, without any regulation, attacks on all fronts of government fascism. On WhatsApp, these communication products spread with extraordinary capillarity. The production of a reality with switched signals, such as the government rhetoric that insists on erasing deaths due to the pandemic, finds a fundamental element in these informational tools.
One of our contacts sends us, on a daily basis, a veritable flood of posts that challenge the logic, empathy and mental health of those who still have it, but seduce and modulate opinions of blind adherence to everything that Bolsonarist fascism proposes. It's a mix of: videos of people shot and killed by the police; warlike Christianity memes; racist messages and against sexual and gender identities; manifestos against scientific knowledge; anti-communist slogans in which everything that is not Bolsonarist fascism or an occasional alliance is communism; pornography; and small texts, apocryphal or signed by obscure figures, or even falsely attributed to renowned intellectuals, who claim to reveal the TRUTH, always in capital letters. Everything is scatological, crude, hateful, identical to the unhealthy spirit of those who are made of the same clay and are satisfied on the other side of screens and keys. The worst of us formatted for WhatsApp.
In one of these messages, there is a work of propaganda of the militia-military government's health policy. We transcribe:
SMILE, YOU HAVE BEEN FOOLED
WHO BEGINS TO RECOGNIZE ITS MISTAKE AND DR OSMAR TERRA WAS RIGHT FROM THE BEGINNING. THERE IS NOTHING SCIENTIFIC ABOUT ISOLATION. AND THE MEDICINE SAID BY BOLSONARO WOULD COST LESS THAN BRL 1,00 AND WITHOUT HOSPITALIZATION, WITHOUT VERY EXPENSIVE CHINESE RESPIRATORS AND WITHOUT BUILDING MILLIONAIRE HOSPITALS!
WE'VE ALL BEEN FOOLED!!!
WHAT NOW STF?
WHAT NOW GOVERNORS?
WHAT NOW MAYORS?
READ THIS TEXT:
After shouting “SCIENCE” non-stop, health authorities imposed horizontal isolation on us, hoping to supposedly “flatten the curve” of contagion.
Innocent (and dumb) that we are, we bovinely obey the WHO instructions, some even became bellicose in defense of such a “scientific” institution.
What was noticed next is that confinement actually INCREASED THE CONTAMINATION VECTORS, as the WHO is now beginning to admit.
The truth, my dears, is that the confinement that broke the country's economy was not a "scientific" measure, as your IDIOT DOCTOR FRIEND kept telling you with an air of superiority, it was just a suggestion coming from China and endorsed by the WHO , without any preliminary study that would justify its application.
We were all GUINEA PIGS IN A CHINESE EXPERIMENT, and now that the results of that experiment are being translated into numbers, we discover that Dr Osmar Terra was right all along, while SCREAMING to himself that confinement would increase the speed of contagion and that this story of “flattening the curve” was a ridiculous invention.
Your enemies scream:
– “DEMOCRACY”, while dictatorship is imposed on you;
– They shout “Science” while imposing the LIE on you;
– They scream “moreLove” as they try to EXTERMINATE you… and you believe it, EVERY TIME, again and again!!
The truth is that hydroxychloroquine was already used in 2002, to fight SARS exactly, check it out... it wasn't exactly covid-19 but it was a CORONA VIRUS too, so because no one associated the treatment that was already known against SARS.
Is 2002 so far buried in the past that no “scientist” remembers it anymore?
The scientific community was partly STUPID and partly really rogue, because hydroxychloroquine has an expired patent and anyone with an Anvisa license can produce it at very low costs, so how would they profit from the “pandemic”?
They wanted to buy time trying to invent some new “cure” that could be patented and monetized, while hiding hodroxychloriquine.
Even GOOGLE helped hide it, and you can only find reports of chloroquine use in 2002 if you cheat Google and type in the drug's fantasy name.
And your Governor?
What's up with him??
He knows that hydroxychloroquine costs 1 real and the patient can be treated at home, with 100% of the cases treated in the first symptoms without ICU and respirators. But why miss the chance to build hundreds of millions of reais beds and hospitals?
Why invest in 1 real pills if I can invest in respirators that cost 150 thousand per person?
And who are we going to buy from? from China??
Its governors are genocidal, part of the scientific community is genocidal, China is genocidal and the WHO is genocidal.
Yes, we are muggles, we were muggles and we will always be muggles... until you decide to put an end to it.
This time Bolsonaro's obstinacy saved us... too bad for some it was too late.
Do as I copy and paste, this message cannot stop!
This message, probably extracted from similar content that is reproduced by Trumpist networks, expresses, in short: everything is nothing more than a conspiracy by communist China, supported by communist governors; anyone who disagrees is either innocent or an idiot; and chloroquine is the cheap and miraculous medicine that would make it possible to go against all the policies practiced by health authorities and world medical science; it's not our problem, it's all the fault of a permanent external enemy; all with pedestrian language abuse and capital letters. The basic primer of fascist communication in a few characters, sent and replicated by fake profiles that infect real profiles and consciences. The logic of this communication tool is viral. It spreads in outbreaks, seeking, through epidemic cycles, to consolidate itself as an endemic modulator of reality.
The fruits of this perverse project are reaped by militia and military authoritarianism that advances in the structures of state and federal powers. After the transition from Minister Teich to the establishment of the (Military) Ministry of Health, he forced a change in the protocol for the use of chloroquine, allowing its use even for less severe cases or initial stages of the disease, including children and pregnant women[X]. Thus justifying the project already in progress in which the Army had already been producing chloroquine in mass, contrary to the precepts of public administration, by the unjustified expenditure of public resources, and scientific knowledge, since clinical studies indicate that the medicine does not work and its side effects would be an additional risk for the worsening of clinical conditions of the disease[xi]. Let us remember that the acceptance of the illusion in medicine format does not only come from the production of the military forces themselves, but also from abroad. The United States announced the shipment of 2 million chloroquine pills to Brazil[xii], this after the Center for Disease Control in that country backtracked on the use of the drug[xiii]. With friends like that, we don't need enemies.
The primer of genocidal and eugenic fascism now used in the context of the pandemic, under the panacea of a chloroquine republic, was already written in the way in which state police and militias associated with governments and police commands operate the extermination of black and peripheral youth . The context of the homicides of black and indigenous youths in the interior and cities of Brazil may seem like another matter, but it is in full continuity with the crusade for chloroquine now on the health agenda. Biopolitics, state of exception, banality of evil, necropolitics, the bibliography of critical thought is abundant in designations for the methods of contemporary fascism. Bolsonaro, his civilian doormats, and the military of his government know that those who will die are mostly the same ones that the police and militias eliminate throughout Brazil.
While the federal government takes care of ensuring that Brazil is one of the countries in the world with the greatest impact from the pandemic, the police and militias continue to do their work in the states. Several recent events mean that, under the torpor of the health tragedy, we have an urgent need to remember the dead by public security policies (including in this expression the militia actions, which both we and other authors defend are associated with official policies and not in contradiction with them).
A police operation in Complexo do Alemão on Friday, May 15, left 12 dead.[xiv]. Sources of local social movements point to 13 deaths. A massacre committed in a police operation. It was obviously not a confrontation. This death toll cannot be considered accidental or self-defence deaths from wrongful assault under any acceptable standard of policing. A carnage that has been repeated for decades. No preservation of the crime scene, no possibility of investigative work for the punishment of crime by the police. They are the judges and executors, covered by a system that sustains, in practice, the logic of excluding illegality and turns the police into a power above institutions and other people's citizenship. This context, in technical terms, makes police work a criminal and authoritarian, illegal and tyrannical force, a basic instrument of fascism in which we are now diving at the federal level.
On Monday, May 18, João Pedro Matos Pinto, aged just 14, was shot dead at home, during a joint operation by the Federal Police and the Civil Police, in Complexo do Salgueiro, in São Gonçalo. João was removed from the scene of the crime and taken by a helicopter from the Fire Department, claiming that he needed to provide assistance to the victim. But João Pedro was never taken to a hospital and his family, after a painful search, located his body at the Legal Medical Institute of Tribobó, on Tuesday morning[xv]. The police disappeared with João Pedro and his family having to find him with their own efforts, reinforcing the indignity with which the State treats the relatives of the victims of its violence. The course of events points to strong evidence of the already known script of mischaracterization of the crime scene and procedural fraud under the justification of the impossibility of preserving the scene and the victim's need for help.
João Pedro's death adds to that of 12 other teenagers shot during police operations in Rio de Janeiro in 2020. And it's difficult to update, because it's daily, permanent, odd. And it hurts, a lot.
In addition to deaths by the police and armed violence, we witnessed a case in Pernambuco in which structural racism manifested itself as a tool of death through neglect, through the devaluation of black lives. Miguel, just 5 years old, fell from the ninth floor of a luxury building while he was under the care of his mother's employer. Forced to work amid the pandemic because her employer would not keep her wages so she could stay at home, Mirtes left her son in the care of Sari Corte Real, first lady of the city of Tamandaré, a white woman. Sari let the boy go up the elevator alone, which caused his death. What made Sari consider that a 5-year-old could go up in an elevator unaccompanied was purely and simply her racist mentality, the engine of her negligence.
Since then, we see cases of police violence against young black people on a daily basis. Guilherme, 15 years old, was killed on the outskirts of São Paulo, and the suspect in the death is a sergeant of the Military Police. Cases of deaths caused by the Military Police of São Paulo rose 53% in April 2020, compared to the same month of 2019[xvi]. The police in Rio de Janeiro, the most lethal in Brazil, have in 2020 the highest number of deaths caused by the police in 22 years[xvii]. The explosion of deaths by State agents in Rio de Janeiro is accompanied by a reduction in the total number of homicides, in a process that demonstrates that the ongoing policy is one of trying to monopolize the illegal use of force by the State. In practice, the transformation of the police into militias. Those who support police violence are racist and endorse the more structural aspects of state corruption.
Data from the Fogo Cruzado platform show that, with the quarantine, in the period from March 14 to June 13, in the metropolitan region of Rio de Janeiro, 8 people were killed at home. During the period, we also had 4 children and 8 teenagers shot. 12 massacres were recorded by the platform in the period, with a total of 42 dead[xviii].
In addition to interrupting the routine course of life in the favelas and outskirts of the metropolitan region, these shootings caused interruptions in the service of 14% of health units in the capital of Rio de Janeiro, which had activities impacted[xx]. A pandemic and an endemic hand in hand, in the middle of the street, like the devil Great Sertão by Guimaraes Rosa.
One piece of data seems fundamental to us in the report published by Fogo Cruzado. Shootings in which police forces participate are much more lethal.
Source: Crossfire: https://fogocruzado.org.br/coronavirus-quarentena-tres-meses/
Of the 1405 shootings that took place in the three months of quarantine, 273 involved police officers. Of the total of 239 deaths that occurred in these shootings, 169, 70%, occurred in events with police participation. Almost all of the injured were injured in incidents with the presence of police, 91% of the total of 229 injured.
The government found in the pandemic another opportunity to increase selective, racial and territorial killing. If, on the one hand, economic difficulties affect a large portion of the population, there is governmental sadism in releasing economic aid to people in a dropper, for the gringo to see. But it is a time-consuming, small and not very humane public policy. Ironically, it is very effective in the A and B sectors of society. One third of these classes requested assistance[I]. On the other hand, the requirement to stay at home becomes impossible, due to the crumbling form of aid and hunger. Thus, going out is a risk, but staying at home is also a risk in these sectors that are targeted by the government: even staying at home, there is a delivered of death, of operations that take life even inside the house. In Brazil, the pandemic is varied, bigger, complex, but it always has the same target audience in mind. A Brazilian tradition, slavery and racist.
We will not forget the victims of these two epidemics: that of the virus and that of weapons. We will not fail to point the finger in the face of those who defend these two genocidal projects. We are in the residues of the 1988 Constitution, in the ruins of democracy, but we breathe. The fight is much more than resisting the pandemic, it is fighting and building a new inclusive and plural horizon.
* André Rodrigues He is a professor at the Department of Geography and Public Policy at UFF.
*Andres del Rio He is a professor at the Department of Geography and Public Policy at UFF.
Notes:
[I]https://www.metropoles.com/brasil/economia-br/um-terco-das-classes-a-e-b-pediu-o-auxilio-de-r-600-diz-pesquisa
[I]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9gLHrP7RNw
[ii]https://extra.globo.com/noticias/brasil/no-pior-dia-da-pandemia-de-coronavirus-no-brasil-bolsonaro-faz-piada-sobre-uso-da-cloroquina-esquerda-toma-tubaina-24436029.html
[iii]https://operamundi.uol.com.br/coronavirus/64996/bolsonaro-ja-cumpriu-o-que-prometeu-temos-30-mil-mortos
[iv]https://www.dw.com/pt-br/brasil-ultrapassa-30-mil-mortes-por-covid-19/a-53663144
[v]https://www.brasildefato.com.br/2020/06/05/passar-a-boiada-politica-ambiental-de-bolsonaro-e-alvo-de-acoes-na-justica
[vi]https://www12.senado.leg.br/noticias/materias/2020/06/02/pandemia-senadores-fazem-um-minuto-de-silencio-em-homenagem-aos-30-mil-mortos
[vii]https://noticias.uol.com.br/ultimas-noticias/agencia-brasil/2020/06/08/ministerio-da-saude-muda-formato-de-divulgacao-de-dados-de-covid-19.htm
[viii]https://epoca.globo.com/brasil/brasil-destaque-no-mundo-por-esconder-dados-de-mortes-por-covid-19-oms-cobra-transparencia-24468531
[ix]http://portal.stf.jus.br/noticias/verNoticiaDetalhe.asp?idConteudo=445182&ori=1
[X]https://www.cnnbrasil.com.br/saude/2020/05/20/governo-muda-protocolo-e-autoriza-hidroxicloroquina-para-casos-leves-de-covid-19; https://noticias.uol.com.br/videos/2020/06/15/covid-19-governo-muda-protocolo-e-recomenda-cloroquina-a-criancas-e-gestantes.htm
[xi]https://veja.abril.com.br/blog/matheus-leitao/exercito-e-a-producao-em-massa-de-cloroquina-ajudaram-a-derrubar-teich/
[xii]https://oglobo.globo.com/sociedade/estados-unidos-anunciam-envio-de-2-milhoes-de-doses-de-cloroquina-para-brasil-24455665
[xiii]https://oglobo.globo.com/sociedade/coronavirus-servico/cdc-americano-retira-de-seu-site-as-orientacoes-sobre-uso-da-cloroquina-para-tratar-covid-19-1-24362306
[xiv]https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/cotidiano/2020/05/operacao-policial-deixa-ao-menos-10-mortos-no-complexo-do-alemao-no-rio.shtml
[xv]https://brasil.elpais.com/sociedade/2020-05-19/jovem-de-14-anos-e-morto-durante-acao-policial-no-rio-e-familia-fica-horas-sem-saber-seu-paradeiro.html
[xvi]https://g1.globo.com/fantastico/noticia/2020/06/21/morte-de-jovem-na-periferia-de-sp-provoca-protestos-contra-violencia-policial.ghtml
[xvii]https://g1.globo.com/rj/rio-de-janeiro/noticia/2020/06/22/rj-tem-maior-numero-de-mortes-por-policiais-em-22-anos-e-o-2o-menor-indice-de-homicidios-ja-registrado-pelo-isp.ghtm
[xviii]https://fogocruzado.org.br/coronavirus-quarentena-tres-meses/
[xx]https://fogocruzado.org.br/coronavirus-quarentena-dois-meses/