Conquest Re-Enacted: Thoughts About Race and Police Violence in Brazil

Conquest re-enacted: Thoughts about race and police violence in Brazil

Rita had warned her son; he told me so. He and I stood on opposite sides of the barbed- wire fence that separated Rita’s banana tree and backyard cistern from the hardpacked dirt of the village plaza. It was 2012 in Brazil, and Jonatas, the son, was seventeen years old. He recalled his mother’s words for me. Be careful in the city, Rita had admonished. Because you are Black, you will have trouble from the criminals and from the police who think you’re a criminal. A few days after that conversation, Jonatas moved to the metropolis. Rita’s view seemed to be uncommon in the village. When I recounted her fears to two middle-aged women a few feet down the road, they chuckled dismissively. Jonatas was well- known to be one the most honest, law-abiding, helpful young men in the countryside for miles around. Racism? “Rita’s the one who put that stuff in his head,” one of them explained. But Rita was right. Soon afterward I traveled to the city myself and found Jonatas on a busy corner. He wore plastic sunglasses and smiled broadly. He had hidden most of himself behind a giant pushcart of fresh-green umbú fruit, which he and his father were selling to passerby, but he was not too busy to stop for a long and hopeful conversation. He liked the city, he said, and he wanted to stay. He would send money back to his mother in the village. He would continue high school. Apparently, he even told Rita that he dreamed of going to college for engineering. On January 13th, 2012 the police picked up a man in possession of drugs and asked him where he had obtained them. The little Black guy with the umbú fruit, said the man, falsely. Soon after, the police beat Jonatas in the street, called him “Black man,” and threw him in jail. That day, as Jonatas later pointed out to me, was Friday the 13th. Nineteen days before, on December 25th, Jonatas had stopped into the tiny Protestant church in the village. There it was prophesied to him that he would find himself in such a difficult situation that God would be the only exit for him, and he would abandon the world. In jail, Jonatas told me, the prophesy came true. A well-connected friend in the state capital called lawyers for Jonatas. As it turned out, there was no evidence against him, and he was freed without charges. He moved back to the village.

Stories and numbers

Jonatas’s story, like most such stories, never made it to the newspaper. A few of them do. Amarildo Dias de Souza, a construction worker, was taken from the door of his one-room house to a police station in Rio de Janeiro on the night of July 13, 2013 and never seen again. Amarildo was apparently mistaken by the police for a different man they suspected of selling drugs. That night, the two security cameras at the police station stopped recording and the GPS systems on the police cars were disconnected. A military inspector later found that a police commander attempted to bribe a local woman to offer false evidence linking Amarildo’s disappearance to a local gang. An investigation concluded that officers shocked Amarildo with electricity and asphyxiated him in plastic bags and a bucket of water, while he screamed, for nearly two hours. In 2019, eight police officers were convicted of torturing Amarildo, murdering him, and hiding his body.

More recently, on May 18, 2020, police officers undertook a neighborhood raid that ended with more than seventy bullets fired into a house in São Gonçalo. A resident shouted that only children were inside, lying on the ground with their hands up. Fourteen-year-old João Pedro Mattos Pinto, who had been asleep with the gunshots began, was killed. He was planning to become a lawyer. Amarildo’s name turned into a hashtag, #WhereIsAmarildo. João Pedro’s name has been remembered alongside George Floyd’s in protests and songs. These are names that stand in for a much more pervasive reality. Brazil’s police, both on- and off-duty, killed 6,220 people in 2018. In the US, a nation that is one and a half times larger by population, police killed 998 people that year. No wealthy nation comes anywhere close to either figure: in 2018, Australia’s police killed 21 people, Japan’s police killed 2, and Norway’s police killed no-one at all. Brazil’s police killings represent more than 10% of all intentional violent deaths in the nation. These killings – and the horrifying rate of violence in general – have been the subject of extensive study. Anthropologist Stephanie Savell is co-director of Brown University’s Costs of War Project. She has spent years living in Rio’s poorest neighborhoods. There, she points out, police often act “like soldiers in enemy territory,” “waging a literal war.”

Violence has a past

What is the history of this war? From where does it come? The war, as Rita knew, has a race. In 2018, 75.4% of the people killed by police in Brazil were Black. The war also has a territory. When Brazil’s police undertake extensive operations in neighborhoods previously dominated by gang leadership, the police have repeatedly held rituals to hoist the national flag, “symbol of conquest,” on the highest hill in the area. Why would law enforcement officials stage themselves as the conquerors of territory for the nation – territory that is already located in the middle of the nation’s biggest cities? Perhaps the police are invoking the memory of an earlier group of armed men. The bandeirantes, or “flag-carriers,” spent much of the 1600s rallying various squads of adventurers around the Portuguese flag. They conducted expeditions to enslave Native people. They discovered gold. They waged war on the self-liberated slaves who had fled plantations for the freedom of the backlands. Where the bandeirantes went, they planted the flag, and so they quite literally created the borders of colonial Brazil. But the conquest seems to have remained unfinished, at least in the eyes of the conquerors. To this day, Brazil’s police re-enact, over and over, the foundational gesture of an enslaving settler colony: they take land. Such rituals cast the police not as members of a society, but as its invaders. The bandeirantes were not yet police; they were ad-hoc gatherings of men with guns. For the police to come into existence, as historians Luiz Antonio Simas and Ynaê dos Santos point out, a further step was necessary. Brazil’s first police force was the Military Division of the Royal Police Guard, founded in 1809; today, the same force is known as the Military Police of Rio de Janeiro (PMERJ). The year 1809 matters, because the Royal Police Guard was formed through two events. The first was the arrival of Portugal’s King João VI and his court, who came to Rio fleeing the Napoleonic invasion of Portugal. João installed the throne in his Brazilian

2 colony in 1808. He brought with him economic vitality, free trade, and ideas for a new order, such as the organization of the police. The second event was the revolution in Haiti. By 1804, Haiti’s enslaved people had quite clearly defeated the French Empire and won their independence. News of the revolution inspired Black Brazilians; in 1807, enslaved inhabitants of Rio de Janeiro were wearing necklaces with the image of Henri Christophe, the president of independent Haiti.1 The same Haitian news terrified Brazil’s enslaving elite. To them, it must have seemed only prudent to create the police. While the bandeirantes (and subsequently the military) had once exemplified the wanton violence and irregular spontaneity of conquest, a standing police force demonstrated organization, permanence, and banal regularity – a different kind of domination. Brazil’s police, then, are not simply conquerors, not just new bandeirantes. At their founding, they absorb two impulses. They incarnate the Enlightenment hope for a rational ordering of human affairs. And they shiver with fear projected against people whose freedom remains unrepresented inside that rational ordering. Such law enforcement is built for both careful investigations and outbursts of rage, cool proceduralism and uncontained attack. In an enslaving world system, the police force is born at the border between reason and the truths that reason can’t bear to see.

Fighting against violence

Brazilians creatively, noisily resist the practices of police violence. Brazil’s recent gestures of solidarity for George Floyd have their roots in a long organizing tradition. Some groups focus on unifying one particular neighborhood against police abuse and land speculation, like the Gamboa de Baixo neighborhood association studied by Keisha-Khan Perry. Others rely on art and culture displays that take over public space, like this performance analyzed by Christen Smith and those considered by Falina Enriquez.2 Still other organizations emphasize the experience of women and especially Black women, as noted by Luciane Rocha. Even some cops organize as allies: Brazil is home to the Movement of Anti-Fascist Police Officers, who call for police demilitarization and respect for the dignity of police as workers. As if in response to Savell’s sad observation, one of their mottos is “We are not at war.”

1 See p. 46 in Joao José Reis and Paulo F. de Moraes Farias (1989). “Islam and Slave Resistance in Bahia, Brazil” Islam et Sociétés au Sud du Sahara 3: 41-66

2 Enriquez, Falina. "The Ins and Outs of Cultura: How Bands Voice Their Relationships to the State‐Sponsored Music Scene in Recife, Brazil." Journal of Popular Music Studies 24.4 (2012): 532-553.

Symbol of the Movement of Anti-Fascist Insignia of today’s Military Police of Rio de Police Officers. Note the use of the Antifa Janeiro. Note the initials GRP (Royal Police symbol in the middle of the badge. Guard), the crown, the year 1809, and the leaves of https://marcozero.org/quem-sao-e-o-que- coffee and sugar cane, two major products of pretendem-os-policiais-antifascistas/ plantation labor.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Police_of_Rio_de _Janeiro_State#/media/File:Bras%C3%A3o_PMRJ.PNG, https://www.dw.com/pt-br/a-viol%C3%AAncia-policial- contra-negros-como-pol%C3%ADtica-de-estado-no- brasil/a-53729007

Another kind of response flows directly from the act of continuing to live. Jonatas, for example, became an evangelical Protestant convert, then a devotee, then a more and more powerful preacher of the Word. He traveled from village to village. Eventually, he moved back to the city; he found work at a bus company and joined a church. Over the past three months, because of the coronavirus pandemic, churches have had difficulty meeting in Jonatas’s neighborhood. Jonatas invented a solution. Last week, he announced an outdoor service, with himself officiating right in front of his house and his younger brother, a few feet behind him, picking out a song on the guitar. From their windows, from spots on the pavement, people from the neighborhood looked on. Last night I reached out to Jonatas on WhatsApp to ask permission to write about his arrest in this article. “You can use it,” he enthused, “as a story of overcoming!” He explained. “That day when I was arrested, for me, was a day of shame. There were maybe twenty or thirty people looking. So why do I say it’s a story of overcoming?

Today the audience that I preach to is an audience of three hundred people.” Much had changed in the last eight years, but some of it had come full circle. Jonatas had returned to the territory. He was back in the city. He was standing on a street corner again. “So,” Jonatas concluded, “it was a turnaround in my life.”

Jonatas preaching and his brother Jeferson playing guitar in front of his house, June 6, 2020 See more of the video at Facebook: Jonatas Martins

In addition to the sources linked above, the following articles are fascinating:

Merle L. Bowen/ Josilene Brandão da Costa (2010). “The struggle for black land rights in Brazil: an insider's view on quilombos and the quilombo land movement.” African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal 3(2): 147-168.

Rocha, Luciane de Oliveira (2012). “Black mothers’ experiences of violence in Rio de Janeiro.” Cultural Dynamics 24(1): 59-73.

Savell, Stephanie (2016). “Performing humanitarian militarism: Public security and the military in Brazil.” Focaal 75: 59-72.

Smith, Christen A. (2016). “Sorrow as artifact: Radical Black mothering in times of terror—A prologue.” Transforming Anthropology 24(1): 5-7.

Smith, Christen A. (2016) “Facing the dragon: Black mothering, sequelae, and gendered necropolitics in the Americas.” Transforming Anthropology 24(1): 31-48.