By LUIZ EDUARDO SOARES*
The democratic rule of law was the second nature of his professional history, the essence of his commitment to his legal career, the foundation and normative and evaluative horizon of his engagement
On August 11, 2011, at the age of 47, judge Patrícia Acioli paid with her own life for daring to honor her role, facing police violence and the tyrannical power of militias. She was murdered with 21 shots by military police officers from the 7th BPM (Sã Gonçalo), at the door of her home, in Piratininga, Niterói, Metropolitan Region of Rio de Janeiro.
Patrícia Acioli was head of the 4th Criminal Court of São Gonçalo and faced with extraordinary courage extermination groups formed by PMs from the 7th BPM, who forged resistance reports to legitimize their executions. In a sad irony of fate, as sad and perverse as the history of Brazilian inequities, August 11 is also remembered for the creation of legal courses in Brazil. Patrícia was killed on Justice Day.
On August 12, 2024, the Patrícia Acioli Chair was inaugurated, at the Colégio Brasileiro de Altos Estudos da UFRJ, an interdisciplinary research space on ethics, justice and public security, whose purpose will be to keep her legacy alive and contribute to the construction of borderless dialogues about paths to change.1
Another coincidence: August 12th is National Human Rights Day, established in 2012, in honor of union leader Margarida Maria Alves, also killed on her doorstep with a gunshot to the face, in the presence of her husband and eight-year-old son. years. The fact that they are both women is not arbitrary: misogyny is one of the main sources of violence in patriarchal societies.
In 2011, in the heat of the moment, I wrote a statement with then-Senator Lindbergh Faria, which I reproduce below, and the complement below:
We are devastated by the brutal and cowardly murder of judge Patrícia Acioli. Twenty-one shots hit her in front of her house. Her children, entering adolescence, heard the blasts and will never forget them. And us? Did we hear? Do we hear the 21 echoes of the final point imposed on an exemplary life story? And us? Will we forget?
We believe it is our duty to listen to these 21 shots, to listen to what they tell us. Listen to each of the 21 sounds, Patrícia's voice, the voice of the strong woman who will not be silenced.
To build a country, you need to look ahead and believe, trust, and not lose hope. This thesis was prompted by the youth of Patrícia Acioli, a precocious heroine. Everything in her biography refers to the future: she was driven by confidence, which was fueled by hope rather than a realistic diagnosis of the present. Until the end, judge Patrícia Acioli demonstrated full confidence in the possibility of building a fair social order, which would allow her to travel alone, driving her own car, safely. She lived this desired future to anticipate it, making it real in her actions.
Looking forward with confidence cannot be just an act of will without support in the past, without a basis to support the steps towards the future. This applies to individuals and societies. To build the future, it is necessary to look the past in the eye, even if the price to pay is painful.
Judge Patrícia Acioli, despite being recognized for her compassion, knew how to be rigorous in demanding responsibilities. For her, as for former president Nelson Mandela and Reverend Desmond Tutu: truth and reconciliation are the cornerstones of a complete and consistent democratic transition. If one of them is missing, the building collapses.
Patrícia Acioli was from a generation that reached adulthood and entered the professional world when the 1988 Constitution was being drafted and promulgated. As a legal practitioner, public defender and later criminal judge, she was a daughter of the Constitution. She benefited from democratic achievements, to which she was always faithful in her institutional practice. Her life as a judge cannot be seen except within the framework of this framework.
The democratic rule of law was the second nature of his professional history, the essence of his commitment to his legal career, the foundation and normative and evaluative horizon of his engagement. One more lesson: democracy is not a temporary opportunistic accommodation or a tactical move, but a strategic, permanent, existential and professional, ethical and political engagement.
We deduce another implicit teaching from judge Patrícia Acioli, by contrasting her appreciation of laws and legal institutions with her vigorous dissatisfaction, manifested in the tireless and courageous fight against police brutality, against State violence, and also translated into her dedication to the causes of poorest, those who are most vulnerable to injustice: inequality in access to justice is one of the most infamous manifestations of inequality in our society. Fighting it is the duty of every democrat.
No modern country, of the size and complexity of Brazil, is immune to police violence, much less to infestation by mafias and other forms of organized crime. Why, then, establish connections between criminal episodes and the conditions under which the Brazilian democratic transition took place?
There were 8.708 reports of resistance between 2003 and 2010, in the State of Rio de Janeiro. Therefore, 8.708 people were killed by the police (between 2003 and 2023, that would be 21.662). It is not known how many were summarily executed, but researchers suspect the majority. Finally, 21 shots to the judge's chest and face: the common signature of militias and extermination groups boasting of impunity.
There is another important aspect that distinguishes the situation in our country, in the face of police violence seen in other countries: the indifference of public authorities to the betrayal of which it is a victim, when its agents commit crimes against citizenship. Again, it is Judge Patrícia Acioli's public performance that teaches us: the insistence with which she, in her sentences and in her attitudes, called on the authorities to assume their responsibilities in the face of the disaster, in the face of the police's lack of control.
Patrícia Acioli leads us to two major questions: what is the historical root of this astonishing reality, in which we see strata of the State entirely detached from the official discourse, the legal norm, the constitutional commitment attributed to the institutions? And why does this astonishing reality, despite having gone through the period of institutional reforms practically unscathed, persist today in such a profoundly different Brazil?
The persistence of Patrícia Acioli, who resisted, clashing with the insistence of police institutions in preserving behavioral, cognitive and evaluative patterns inherited from the authoritarian past, generates friction and raises a thesis: this brutal legacy, which dates back to slavery, went unscathed by the changes brought about by the democratic transition. Certainly, the professional culture we are talking about was not born during the dictatorship, but owes its qualifications to it, in the negative sense of the word. The regime resulting from the 1964 coup uncritically absorbed and modernized the worst of our authoritarian, racist and violent traditions, which had never been directly confronted in the police sphere, even in the democracy of 1945.
Another important aspect of the old police culture is that some archaic procedures persist because they are partially compatible with certain expectations and certain values of some sectors of society.
The two answers (the historical root and the partial functionality) complement each other and, superimposed, lead to yet another thesis: the Brazilian political transition, by excluding any procedure that valued the restoration of the truth, in relation to the State's crimes, founded the pact of reconstruction unilaterally in reconciliation, subjecting the memory of painful facts to the regime of denial. Pure and simple denial is equivalent to repression and leads to the destructive continuity of the traumatic experience, which applies to victims and perpetrators. The regime of denial affected civic culture, produced effects on political culture and extended to the entire repressive apparatus of the dictatorship, therefore reaching the problems of the police and their respective institutional cultures.
Not morally deconstituting the crimes of the past in a politically and symbolically powerful rite of passage also implied not questioning standard police procedures with moral radicality. Everything gets worse when one bears in mind that such procedures, consecrated and modernized by the 1964 dictatorship, preceded it – that is, they are deeply rooted.
The truth commission that will – we hope – be constituted soon should play not only a decisive role with regard to the reestablishment of Brazil's real history, but also a strategic role for our future. The truth commission will be able to commit to flooding the State with the spirit and conviction that “never again” will our country tolerate the intolerable, resign itself to living with the unacceptable. Never again! Never again, barbarism. This was the cry that echoed in the voice of judge Patrícia Acioli, in each of her acts: “never again”. Torture, extra-judicial executions, death squads, crimes perpetrated by State agents under the cover of pusillanimity: “never again”.
If Brazilian police officers are devalued professionally, if they receive unworthy salaries and inadequate training, if they work in precarious and risky conditions, if they work in organizational structures that inhibit rather than enhance their capabilities, we must offer them alternatives and perspectives for change.
However, nothing justifies us postponing confronting this painful issue: the serpent's egg must be extirpated for the benefit of Brazilian society, the democratic rule of law, public security, respect for rights and freedoms, and for the benefit of the people themselves. police officers, who deserve a prominent place in the construction of a more just and peaceful future in our country.
Just as Maria da Penha's ordeal stimulated women's fight against violence, we hope that Patrícia Acioli's sacrifice inspires and mobilizes us. It's the least we owe her to honor her memory.
***
13 years have passed since Patrícia Acioli was murdered and the statement was written. During this period, eleven military police officers were convicted and expelled from the Military Police for Patrícia's murder, including the then commander of the 7th BPM, identified as having ordered the crime. The culprits were punished, although, unbelievably, the expulsion of the perpetrator only occurred in May 2023, eleven years after the crime.
Despite the response of the criminal justice system, with the identification and conviction of criminals, the conditions that made this unspeakable crime possible did not change, on the contrary, they worsened. Seven years after August 11th, we had March 14th. In 2018, Marielle Franco and Anderson Gomes were savagely murdered. Their families, today, are united with Patricia Acioli's family in pain and indignation.
The truth commission, praised in the 2011 statement, was actually established and did its work, but suffered all sorts of boycotts and hostilities, to the point where it was attributed responsibility for the re-emergence of Brazilian fascism. The faith in the future that sets the tone of the statement, as a counterpoint to the desolation due to the tragedy that stole Patrícia Acioli from her family, is today difficult to sustain when observing the Brazilian and global reality.
But the historical regression in our country only proves how correct the statement was when it emphasized the importance of transitional justice that the representatives of the military regime refused to accept, in the 1980s, blackmailing the civil power and making the shadow of the dictatorship extended over the nascent democracy, garrotting it while it was still in its cradle. During this difficult journey, there were many other victims. Our duty is to reject oblivion and keep alive the struggles for dignity and equality, for life, for democracy that deserves the name, for human rights.
At this moment, the struggles converge into a synthesis, which takes us once again to the front. Probably in September, ADPF 635 (Argument of Failure to Comply with a Fundamental Precept) will go to trial, in full court of the STF. The most significant movement by the Judiciary to impose limits on police brutality will be at stake, both the limits already dictated by the Constitution and those required by simple common sense, all of which are systematically transgressed by the police in Rio de Janeiro.
Justice only pronounces itself when provoked and, even then, when it comes to the Supreme Court, in major cases that violate the Federal Constitution, after all previous steps have been completed without success, after all means have been exhausted. That's what happened. We owe the initial victory to the sensitivity of Minister Edson Fachin, the mobilization of entities active in the favelas – such as Redes da Maré, whose experience was a precursor – and the committed competence of Dr. Daniel Sarmento, PSB lawyer.
The police in the state of Rio spread the absolutely unsustainable idea that insecurity has worsened because the STF had banned operations in the favelas. The accusation is not valid. There was no prohibition either, just the determination that elementary conditions be observed. The ADPF had already been approved, but is now back in court because it has been constantly breached, which has given rise to new demands.
If the STF renews the demands, the fight for human rights will have gained, in this instrument, a precious ally. It is necessary to mobilize all democratic sectors for a broad alliance for life, because the forces of obscurantism are already reviving their old crusade for fear. The common heritage of Patrícia Acioli and Marielle Franco demands courage and engagement from us: the ADPF is just one step, but an important one, that will have repercussions for human rights throughout the country.
* 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]
Originally published on the website Other words.
Note
[1] The Patricia Acioli Chair will be coordinated by Luiz Eduardo Soares, in partnership with Eliana Sousa Silva, Miriam Krenzinger and Leonardo Melo, and is part of the CBAE/UFRJ, directed by Ana Celia Castro.
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