Certainly the Minister of Justice, a man of high legal knowledge, former minister of the Federal Supreme Court, does not know what the daily lives of people in a favela or underserved communities across the country are like.
Poor by birth, President Luiz Inácio da Silva, whose childhood hardships belong to another time, doesn’t either. Almost all deputies and senators also don’t know what it’s like to live hostage to crime on their doorstep.
Governors and mayors live more closely with what is spreading throughout Brazil, but they may not have the time or inclination to experience the daily lives of citizens under siege in dominated territories. Even if they had the necessary attention, they would not be able to deal with the problem with their police forces alone.
I once went to the Maré complex, in the north of Rio, to talk to high school students about their professional aspirations. Leaving, I asked to get to know the community, go up the hill a little. I couldn’t go because I heard, shocked by the naturalness of the warning, that after 6pm the circulation of “strangers” was prohibited.
I don’t need to say who the owners of the area were and dictated the rules. A small and even mild example of domination in the face of the permanent threat in which families live who are forced to pay to crime for the services that in the south zone we pay to the State, replaced in those areas by the force of the rifle. It is the law that still imposes on the dominated the rule of silence.
The slaughter that took place this week in Alemão and Penha is tragic evidence of the failure of methods to combat a situation that did not arise overnight nor was it born by spontaneous generation.
For 42 years, Rio has become, in Fernanda Abreu’s precise verse, the “purgatory of beauty and chaos”. Postcard of wonders, of cultural innovations, but also of the misfortune that spreads to the Amazon in a country whose sovereignty is undermined by criminal factions, under the stunned gaze of the State.
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