you may have heard that
cops in rio are using live ammo at protests now. there are a few cases of uniformed military police firing warning shots at protestors on sunday night during the official opening of maracanã stadium, as well as footage of
an off-duty civil police officer aiming at protestors. police also
dropped tear gas canisters from helicopters, and several protestors mentioned
that the gas felt stronger than during previous protests (possibly a switch to
military-grade stuff, which also happened in seattle in 1999).
throughout brasil, the
cops are cracking down: in são
paulo, on the first day of the cup, a schoolteacher who was hit twice with
rubber bullets was pepper-sprayed in the face while he was already immobilized
and in a chokehold, and in belo horizonte, a member of the midia ninja
collective was arrested and tortured by cops, who also threatened to kill him
and his colleagues.
there weren’t that
many of us at the protest in rio on sunday night: i would say 300, friends say
400, the mainstream media here says 150, and you can choose your own source. but it felt especially
energized, and not only because everyone was on edge even before the cops
started pulling out the guns. maracanã
has become a major symbol of everything that’s gone wrong with world cup
preparations and rio’s “reurbanization” in general: it’s a public stadium that
was rebuilt at a cost of R$1.6 billion (about US $600 million) before being sold at bargain basement
rates to a group of private construction firms. indigenous folks living in
the defunct museum right next to the stadium – land that has been deeded to
indigenous people since the nineteenth century – were evicted twice over the
course of a year to make way for more parking spaces. and in the midst
of these preparations, ticket prices have skyrocketed, leaving most local fans to
afford tickets to games, a factor that’s not physically violent but still
deeply felt hereabouts.
from the time we
gathered on sunday afternoon at praça saens pena, about a mile away from
maracanã, it was clear that with 300 (or 400 or 150) people, we weren’t even
going to reach the stadium, let alone affect the game in any way. but it was also clear
to everyone at the protest – and plenty of other people who weren’t on the
street with us – that maracanã couldn’t debut as though everyone had just given
in and accepted the inevitability of the world cup. the first game in rio couldn’t just be business as usual.
this goes against
pretty much everything written in most mainstream media sources (at least in
english and portuguese) since the cup began. even the guardian, which has been good at covering
protests and public debate in brasil in the past year, ran an article contrasting protest to public security, as though
protestors have been a principle cause of violence in the build-up to the cup, as
though protests have disrupted what would otherwise be a happy party in a more-or-less calm city.
the problem with that,
of course, is that “business as usual” in rio has been defined by truculent
policing and other forms of officially sanctioned violence since long before
the protests started getting really big last june. and although rubber bullets and “civilian-grade” tear gas seem to be giving way to
live bullets and military-grade stuff at the protests, all of that is still a walk in the park
compared to what policing looks like in the favelas and
outside of the public eye.
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| downtown protest compared to favelas. cartoon by carlos latuff, 2013 |
as protests were
picking up steam throughout the city last year, a group of cops descended on maré,
a complex of favelas, and indiscriminately killed 11 people, some with bullets
and others with bayonets. and this
march, cops shot cláudia ferreira silva, a hospital custodian and mother of
four who lived in the morro da congonha favela, and then dragged her to death
after she fell out of the trunk of the police car. i’ve already mentioned the disappearance and torture of amarildo silva. my point is that, like school shootings in the us, these
are not isolated incidents: they
represent a widespread “kill ’em all, let god sort ’em out” attitude in local
policing that the world cup has both encouraged and provoked.
just to be clear, my
own brushes with violence are incredibly minimal by local standards. i may sometimes be a witness to all of
this stuff, but i’m never really the subject of it. the closest i come is the occasional gassing when shit
really gets out of hand during protests, but i never bear the brunt of it, and i
tend not to be a target. a friend joked on sunday that i have an invisibility
cloak: between my white skin, the
colorful clothes i was wearing, and a hundred other factors, i could basically
walk right past cops if i was by myself and keeping calm. it worked twice that night, when i
passed dozens of riot cops milling around back streets as i headed away from
the helicopters, the clouds of gas, and who knows what else around
maracanã. i fit into a vision of public security that considers protestors to be a major threat, and considers
favela residents, indigenous people, and people of color in general to be an
even bigger one. it’s a vision that depends on a whole lot of live ammunition and an
ever-present threat to use even more of it.
protests and protestors
are not the main problem with the world cup; intimidation, displacement, and violence are. and i’m sorry to say that if
you’re hosting world cup parties and posting about the game on facebook, i think you’re part of
the problem. i’m not going to
delete you or stop being friends with you in real life or even look at you
funny, but you’re buying into a very well-produced spectacle, a spectacle that
maintains itself locally through a belligerent cop culture that spent sunday
night aiming guns at my friends. this is not a good time to pretend that everything's ok and that the show must go on.
of course the world
cup didn’t introduce this vision of "public security” to rio: it’s been going on for a long time, and
it will continue long past this particular megaevent and the long slog toward
the next one (the 2016 olympics).
and of course it’s not just rio:
security and “public safety” throughout brasil, latin america, the us,
and most of the rest of the world has come to mean making spaces safe and
comfortable for a primarily white middle and upper class with the resources to
generate enough money to keep the public safety machine running. in rio – and
pretty much everywhere else – “reurbanizing,” “pacifying,” and generally making
the city ready for the world cup, the olympics, and the future installation of
mega-businesses or mega-events, has meant that the city’s most vulnerable
residents have become targets of an official violence that keeps spreading and
amplifying. what we saw on sunday
is only a small taste of that violence, but it highlights something we’ve known
for a long time: that even questioning
this paradigm of “public safety” and order is an act that will continue to be
met with increasingly violent intimidation and repression. and as long as that’s what it takes to
keep “business as usual” going, we’ll be out in the street.
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| - using pepper spray against an immobilized man - injuring foreign journalists with bomb shrapnel - if the military police aren't afraid to act this way when the whole world is watching, - imagine what it must be like when no one sees. (pirikart) |
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