Note from BW of Brazil: Over the past year and a half this blog has featured many articles on what appears to be an act of ongoing genocide against the black population by Brazil’s Military Police and death squads. The numbers of murders of Afro-Brazilians, particularly those between the ages of 18 and 30 are alarming and are comparable to numbers of a country at war. Black males in Brazil are defined by the police as suspects of the “standard color” which seems to give police and death squads, often time off duty police, free reign to senselessly assassinate the Afro-Brazilian population. When police and death squad numbers are combined with general numbers of homicides this situation is and should be labeled a crisis that deserves United Nation intervention. If one looks at overall numbers of death squad assassinations, techniques of military police/death squads, sanctioned “stop and frisk” procedures, overall homicides, and reports from states like Bahia, Paraíba, Espírito Santo, Alagoas, and cities like São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Recife, one must come to the conclusion that this is no accident.
As such, University of São Paulo professor Dennis Oliveira uncovered a document that seems to point to the extermination of the Brazil’s poor populations that live in the peripheries of large cities as actions of the extreme right of the military thought up by a think tank back in the late 1980s. It is only in this light that the outrageous numbers of murders coming out of Brazil can start to make sense. This is something that should be investigated especially with the World Cup and the Olympics coming to Brazil in the next few years.
Extermination of the population of the periphery, a political action thought of in the 1980s
by Dennis Oliveira
I have already mentioned in previous articles the document the Escola Superior de Guerra (Superior School of War) titled “Estrutura para o poder nacional para o ano 2001 – 1990/2000, a década vital para um Brasil moderno e democratic (Framework for national power for the year 2001 – 1990/2000, the vital decade for a modern and democratic Brazil)” produced by an extreme right-wing Brazilian military think tank in view of the 1989 presidential elections in Brazil. The document cites often “Objetivos Nacionais Permanentes (Permanent National Objectives)” – development and social peace – and defends the hypothesis that the development of the nation has the cost of maintaining security structures to ensure the protection of these objectives to threats to national stability.
One of the threats that is the keynote of this chapter is “public safety”. The document reads “In the internal environment, as a strong future threat to the permanent national objective Social Peace and to peace itself, there is a concrete situation that has can affect and may even affect Public Security in a dominant way with reflexes and even reaching the field of Security generating a state of general insecurity such that the powers that be, under the Constitution, come to request the concurso of the Armed Forces to restore law and order” (p. 283).
Further, the document states that there are two interrelated problems in this issue: the belts of poverty and misery and the abandoned “minors”.
Regarding the belts of misery, the document states:
“To the extent that state and society are unable to offer work, welfare and safety, these clandestine structures of virtual parallel power are creating conditions for improvement for each local community, the micro-space where the current structure, to which it entails together with the local resident population, if not an attitude of participation or complicity, at least entails an atmosphere of sympathy and solidarity even when in confrontation with law enforcement.” (p. 284)
Later, it concludes in respect to this point:
“The current example of Colombia (1989) points out a possible framework to occur with the presence of the subversion and challenge to democratic values in the context of this problem which can lead one of the executive, legislative or judiciary powers to take the initiative regarding the use of the Armed Forces to restore (posterior action) or guarantee (preventive action) threatened Law and Order” (p. 284, italics and emphasis added).
The reference to Colombia is illustrative because this South American country practically militarized under US command, making the entire civil society a hostage of the Armed Forces. I note here the use of “subversion” and “dispute” combined with “criminality”, a typical analogy from the times of the military dictatorship. It also draws attention to the idea that the military could play a “preventive security” role.
Regarding the problem of “abandoned children”, the document states:
“It is difficult to assess how many, since the estimates are many thousands even millions. If, only to conjecture, we assume that today this number to be 200 thousand (…) we have that at the beginning of the next century there will be a contingent of delinquents, wrongdoers and even murderers of effective similar to the current Army (…) Then, when the Military Police lack conditions to face such a situation, it is reasonable to imagine what will fatally occur, the constituted Executive, Legislative and Judiciary powers may request the assistance of the Armed Forces to take charge of the hard task of facing this horde of bandits, neutralizing them, even destroying them, in order to maintain law and order.” (p. 285, emphasis and italics added)
The Southern Command of the Armed Forces of the USA publishes a magazine called Dialogue (Diálogo in Portuguese) that circulates in the military. In this publication, there is a clear spread of the idea that the role of the Armed Forces of Latin America countries is to fight against drug trafficking and organized crime, often citing the examples (positive for them) of the role played by the military in Colombia and Mexico. It is evident that the magazine argues that these military actions should occur with the “know how” of the US. Thus, besides a crackdown, this policy is a disguised form of US intervention in Latin American countries.
The campaign developed by organizations in the anti-racist movement against Genocide of the Black Population (click here to see), especially in the outskirts of large cities is of great importance to bring this issue to the center of the political agenda. Although this ESG document is from more than 20 years ago, it shows there is a thought in the country to militarize the issue of security and, moreover, that such action is necessary for the “development of the country.” An important issue considering that one of the pillars of the developmental project of the current government has as one of the pillars the major international events to come (World Cup and Olympics) and urban interventions resulting from this. Conflicts with the periphery tend to intensify and ideas like this can proliferate.
Source: Revista Forum
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