Political Report # 1429
A Surge in Killings by Police Roils Bolsonaro's Brazil
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Just before leaving her teaching job on the afternoon of May
17, Alessandra Mattos received a panicked voice message.
“Alessandra!” a relative said. “There’s been an accident
with Brayan.”
She grabbed her things, flagged a motorcycle taxi and rushed
to a slum in the Rio de Janeiro suburb of São Gonçalo. There, dead in a pool of
blood, lay Brayan Mattos dos Santos, the 19-year-old nephew she helped raise.
She tried to get closer, but a policeman blocked her
advance.
“It wasn’t me,” Mattos said the officer told her. “It wasn’t
me.”
The “accident,” Mattos soon learned, was the sort of fate
dreaded by families of young, dark-skinned men across South America’s most
populous country. Black and mixed-race youths like dos Santos long have been
disproportionately represented among homicide victims in Brazil, the country
with the world’s highest number of murders. Now, amid a crackdown on suspected
criminals championed by President Jair Bolsonaro, they are increasingly dying
at the hands of police.
No weapons, narcotics or other illegal materials were found
on dos Santos, a car and motorcycle enthusiast who had recently begun driving
for Uber. He appears, instead, to have been at the wrong place at the wrong
time — near a street stall for illegal drugs just as a police raid went down.
His death, in a state where killings by police have climbed by 16% this year,
according to government figures, is being investigated by Rio prosecutors.
The raid is one of many lethal operations that human rights
activists, some Rio residents and opposition lawmakers see as part of a bloody
and illegal campaign to clean up historically violent neighborhoods across
Latin America’s biggest country. Emboldened by victories last year of far-right
politicians with aggressive law-and-order agendas, Brazil’s police forces are
surpassing their own longstanding reputations for being among the most violent
in the world.
The slain include victims like dos Santos, who had no known
criminal ties. In late September, hundreds gathered in northern Rio to grieve
the death of an eight-year-old girl who was shot, according to bystanders, by a
policeman who missed when aiming at a motorcyclist. Her death, one of several
children allegedly shot by police this year, is still being investigated.
Two top commanders of Rio’s military and civil police
forces, which together are responsible for security in the state, told Reuters
that police have never received or issued orders to kill. Officers, rather, are
finding themselves in more violent confrontations because of a nearly 50%
increase in the number of raids, a response to higher crime.
“An officer never has the objective of killing,” said Fábio
Barucke, operational head of the civil police. “But we have a responsibility to
defend ourselves.”
Rio, a state of 17 million people that includes the seaside
metropolis of the same name, has long been known as a hotbed of conflict between
criminal gangs and sometimes trigger-happy police. Now, with Bolsonaro and a
like-minded governor urging lawmen to get even tougher, tensions, violence and
the death toll are mounting.
Bolsonaro is seeking to boost legal protections for police
who kill on the job, proposing in a bill to lessen sentences for officers who
shoot because of “excusable fear, surprise or violent emotion.” He has said
criminals should “die like cockroaches.” Wilson Witzel, Rio’s governor, has
ordered snipers to fire on suspects from helicopters. Witzel recently told
foreign journalists that suspects, when confronted by police, should “surrender
or die.”
To some in the political opposition, the rhetoric of
Brazil’s new leaders is reminiscent of Rodrigo Duterte, the Philippine president
whose offensive against drug dealers has led to thousands of killings by
police. “The police feel authorized to kill,” said Marcelo Freixo, a
congressman from Rio and veteran researcher on violence and organized crime.
“The discourse stimulates violence.”
Reuters found no evidence that Bolsonaro, Witzel or other
right-wing leaders elected in a wave of populist protest last year have ordered
police to break laws or methodically kill criminal suspects. Bolsonaro’s
justice minister, Sérgio Moro, told Reuters that the administration doesn’t
advocate police violence.
“Confrontations between police and criminals are always
undesirable,” he said in an interview in Brasília, the capital. “You don’t
resolve public security with confrontations, but with intelligence, strategy,
due process and state presence.”
Between January and August 2019, Rio police killed 1,249
people, according to official figures, nearly a fifth more than a year ago. The
rate amounts to 5 people per day, more for the period than any since the state
began keeping its current database in 2003. By contrast, 14 police officers
have died in operations this year, down from 24 killed on duty between January
and August 2018.
Recent nationwide figures aren’t available, but killings by
police have also climbed in São Paulo, Brazil’s most populous state, and other
major urban areas.
Like dos Santos, most victims of police killings are
dark-skinned, a reflection of the socioeconomic and racial makeup of poor
neighborhoods where most drug traffickers and other criminal gangs operate.
Although whites make up half the population in Rio, they accounted for 12% of
those killed by police early this year, according to government data obtained
by Reuters via a freedom of information request.
It’s impossible to calculate how many of the victims are
believed to have been innocent bystanders. Human-rights activists, however, say
they believe that the surge in killings indicates some police are out to kill,
regardless of any evidence or the risk of collateral damage.
“These numbers aren’t those of a few murders,” said Freixo,
the congressman. “They are numbers of execution, of extermination.”
Officially, many of the deaths in police operations are
attributed to “resistance” by suspects. Police, wary of heavily armed gangs,
argue they have little choice but to shoot in self defense, especially in
labyrinthine slums where gangs can easily ambush them. But local and
international activists have for decades decried excessive force and outright
executions by police.
The problem predates Bolsonaro.
After a 2003 visit to Brazil, a special rapporteur for the
United Nations Commission on Human Rights wrote that she was “overwhelmed with
information about human rights violations.” She criticized Brazil’s government,
especially some state administrations, because they “fail to fully accept the
existence of extrajudicial and summary executions.”
In early September, Michelle Bachelet, a former Chilean
president who is now the UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights, criticized
Brazil for “discourse legitimizing summary executions.” In response, Bolsonaro
criticized Bachelet for pursuing the agenda “of criminals” and “attacking our
valiant police.”
Dos Santos died at the hands of Rio’s 7th Military Police
Battalion, the state’s most lethal. The unit, one of 39 battalions in Rio,
since 2003 has killed 1,055 people. Through August, 137 civilians this year
have died in operations involving the 7th, 35 more than any other battalion in
the state.
The 7th operates “in very complex geography,” said Rogério
Figueredo, commander of Rio’s military police force. “There are various
communities with several criminal factions all disputing the territory.”
According to a police report reviewed by Reuters, dos
Santos’ death may have been accidental. Officers, the report said, returned
fire after being shot at by suspects. Dos Santos died because of “intervention
by a state agent.”
To understand his killing and the recent rise in the body
count, Reuters spoke to police and government officials, security experts,
human rights researchers, and friends and family of dos Santos. The picture
that emerges, including exclusive details about the May raid in São Gonçalo, is
that of an entrenched conflict worsening amid the law-and-order agenda of a new
populist leadership.
T he very structure of Brazilian police forces has long been
controversial.
After a two-decade military dictatorship that ended in the
1980s, a new constitution gave responsibility for most law enforcement to each
of Brazil’s 26 states. Rather than reinvent their forces, the states kept a
military format for police charged with everyday law enforcement. A “civil
police” force were made responsible for investigations and working with prosecutors.
But the beat cops and routine patrols that most Brazilians encounter still
operate within a highly regimented, militaristic structure.
As a result, everything from the fortresslike architecture
of police stations to the language used by officers still reflects a barracks
mentality. Training is often phrased in terms of “us” against “them.” Criminals
are “the enemy.”
“The mold is that of the military,” said Fernando Salema, a
former commander of the 7th battalion who is now a lawmaker, from Bolsonaro’s party,
in the Rio state assembly. “We inherited that culture.”
That culture is often in sharp relief in Rio.
Clashes are as much a part of the landscape as its verdant
hillsides and dramatic juxtaposition of rich and poor. Shootouts and the hum of
police helicopters are a daily reality for many in a state where haphazard
planning led slums and wealthy neighborhoods to co-exist in a dense urban
tangle.
São Gonçalo, a hardscrabble suburb across the bay that
carves Rio’s coastline, in recent decades became one of the state’s most
violent areas. Per capita income, about $4,000 a year, is similar to that of El
Salvador and less than a third the level in the city of Rio.
Once an industrial center, São Gonçalo has increasingly
become a base for criminal gangs who smuggle drugs and weapons through the bay
and hijack nearby highway cargo. It’s also one of many areas around Rio where
so-called “militias,” violent criminal enterprises made up of retired and
off-duty police, control extortion rackets and other illegal ventures.
In 2011, Patricia Acioli, a state judge who jailed dozens of
corrupt São Gonçalo police, was shot 21 times outside her home. Eleven officers
from the 7th, including its chief, were convicted of planning and executing the
murder.
“São Gonçalo is a giant favela,” or slum, said another
recent commander of the 7th. The officer, who now leads another battalion and
spoke on condition of anonymity, said crime is so common it seeps into the
force. “It has a corrupt population, and the officers come from the same.”
Earlier this decade, as Rio prepared to host the 2014 World
Cup and 2016 Olympics, locals in São Gonçalo complained yet more criminals were
moving in because of a police cleanup near beaches, hotels and sporting venues.
When a deep recession took root shortly thereafter, crime worsened across
Brazil. In 2017, a record 64,000 murders were reported nationwide, more than in
any other country.
Already exasperated with the downturn and a far-reaching
corruption scandal, voters swung sharply right, electing Bolsonaro and other
populist conservatives last year. A former fringe congressman with little
record as a lawmaker, Bolsonaro was best known for incendiary comments,
including a 2015 quip in which he said police “should kill more.” Witzel, a
former judge, was unfamiliar to most of Rio’s electorate until he too
outmaneuvered veteran rivals with promises to purge crime.
After taking office in January, the two politicians embraced
their law-and-order mandate. Witzel rode along with rifle-wielding police in a
helicopter and posted the video online, promising to “bring peace back.” In an
opinion piece in a local newspaper, he said the surge in police killings “isn’t
difficult to justify.”
Some police say they felt invigorated. “It’s what we want to
hear,” Salema, the former commander turned assemblyman, told Reuters.
On Salema’s old beat, police this year began struggling with
an internecine war within the local branch of the Comando Vermelho, or CV, one
of Brazil’s most powerful drug gangs. After one CV boss in April killed a
rival, fighting between factions spilled onto the streets. Gun battles erupted
across São Gonçalo, and schools, hospitals and bus routes shut down.
The violence soon spread to other parts of Rio, prompting
operations by police seeking to track down those responsible. In Maré, a slum
near Rio’s international airport, a police helicopter on May 6 flew overhead
and began shooting, according to local residents.
By the end of the operation, police had killed eight
suspects, including four who had been surrounded after running into a home. A
resident of the home told state prosecutors she hid in another room and heard
the confrontation. A prosecutor, speaking on condition of anonymity, gave
Reuters details of her account.
When police entered, the resident told prosecutors, two of
the men gave up. But the officers rejected their surrender, according to the
resident, replying, “our order is to kill.” The police then shot the two men
and, finding the other two suspects on the roof, shot them, too. Before a
forensics team could arrive, the resident told prosecutors, the police dragged
the four bodies outside.
The officers, the prosecutor said, told investigators they
only fired after being shot at. Rio’s civil police force, which ordered and
conducted the operation, said it is still carrying out its own investigation
and couldn’t comment on specifics of the raid.
Eleven days later, in São Gonçalo, officers from the 7th
battalion conducted the raid that killed dos Santos. As part of their efforts
to curb gang activity, police had targeted a point of sale for drugs in the São
Gonçalo slum of Chumbada.
Around 4:40 p.m., according to the police report reviewed by
Reuters, at least four officers neared the drug stall and split into two teams.
One team, Captain Renato de Souza and Sargent Andre Ricardo Mendes, took one
path toward the stall. A second, Corporal Erik Ribeiro and Corporal Alex Dias,
took another.
Reuters was unable to confirm the details of the police
report independently. Police officials declined a request to speak with the
officers.
As the operation got underway, dos Santos had gone to a shop
in Chumbada to buy clothes for a party that evening, according to Mattos, his
aunt. She showed Reuters a credit card receipt for the purchase, which she said
came from dos Santos’ telephone, valued at 217.79 reais, or about $53.
“It’s expensive here,” dos Santos texted a friend in a
message, seen by Reuters, about 10 minutes before the raid began.
According to statements the officers gave civil police
investigators, Ribeiro and Dias were approaching the stall when gunfire burst
from a group of about six people. It isn’t clear from the report who within
that group is alleged to have fired. The officers, carrying high-caliber rifles
made by Imbel, a Brazilian state-owned manufacturer of military weaponry, said
they returned fire. Ribeiro fired 23 times, Dias 31.
During the firefight, Ribeiro told investigators, one person
fell to the ground “near a shop.” Two others fled on a Honda motorcycle;
several more escaped on foot. Another man, his shirt stained by a bullet wound
in the shoulder, put his hands up and dropped to the ground.
Ribeiro and Dias approached the drug stall as the other two
officers pursued the motorcycle. The injured man, still prone and unarmed, told
police he had gone there to buy marijuana. Several meters beyond the stall, on
a residential street, lay dos Santos.
Renato Perez, a civil police chief in São Gonçalo with
knowledge of the raid, told Reuters he suspected dos Santos had gone there to
buy marijuana. He offered no evidence or documentation to support that claim.
Mattos, the aunt, denied the assertion, saying her nephew didn’t use drugs.
“They always have to invent something,” she said.
Mendes and de Souza, the officers who chased the motorcycle,
caught up with the two suspects on a nearby street. According to the police
report, one of the men carried 65.2 grams of marijuana and a 9 mm pistol with
two bullets and its serial number scraped off. The other carried 49.7 grams of
cocaine and a walkie-talkie.
The two were detained and charged with resisting arrest and
possession of narcotics. They are awaiting trial, according to Rio’s public
defenders’ office and state court filings. No other suspects were apprehended
and no other weapons were found.
Danielle Costa, the civil police investigator who authored
the report, concluded the officers had acted legitimately. They had “no other
option,” she wrote, but to “use their firearms, in legitimate defense and to
overcome resistance posed by lawbreakers.”
The civil police declined to make Costa available for an
interview.
State prosecutors are probing the operation.
Andrea Amin, a Rio prosecutor who investigates police
killings, in an interview told Reuters the law-and-order rhetoric risks
legitimizing excessive force and a lack of due process. “A rise in deaths can’t
be seen as a successful public security policy,” she said.
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