View from Brazil: Crime, police, and politics go together
View from Brazil: Crime, police, and politics go together
Leonardo Sakamoto writes about how crime, police, and politics work together in Brazil. This is after the arrests over the killing of Marielle Franco, the human rights activist and councillor in Rio de Janeiro.
The Brazilian Police say that that three men, the congressman Chiquinho Brazão, the Rio de Janeiro court official Domingos Brazão, and the former Rio de Janeiro police chief Rivaldo Barbosa planned the murder of Marielle Franco.
Marielle Franco was a Black woman from a poor family. Her murder in 2018 in a violent attack in downtown Rio de Janeiro shocked Brazil, and until recently was still not solved. But an investigation by the Attorney General’s Office, Police, and Rio Public Prosecutor’s Office led to the arrest in March of these three important men.
‘The arrests tell us a lot… Crime, police, and politics go together in Rio de Janeiro,’ says Marcelo Freixo, president of the Brazilian tourism agency. He was a congressman and introduced Marielle Franco to politics. Marcelo Freixo says they did not expect the police chief at the time of Marielle Franco’s murder to block the investigations. But, as we know, politics and policing in Rio de Janeiro support each other.
Since the end of Brazil’s military dictatorship in 1985, every living governor of Rio was put in prison or lost his job. Now the governor of Rio de Janeiro is Claudio Castro. They have not yet arrested him or put him in prison. But Superior Court of Justice ordered the checking of his tax records, his telephone, and his messages during a corruption investigation. The police have arrested other Rio police chiefs for corruption, money laundering, and criminal organisation.
All of this is part of the difficulty of life in a city where police often hide or even commit crimes. Since 2021, in Rio de Janeiro there has been an increase in the number of murders in poor communities by security agents. At the same time, paramilitary groups of criminal police officers are seizing territories, making deals with drug traffickers, directing residents’ votes to criminals in elections, and helping to increase real estate by allowing illegal occupation.
The police have not yet said anything about the reasons for the killing of Marielle Franco but people think that she was a target because she was against a bill allowing illegal occupation of real estate in Rio de Janeiro. When public officials plan to murder a politician supporting the nation’s poor and they feel sure they will avoid prosecution, the people with arms and power have won against the rule of law.
All of this tells us about the results of the time when Jair Bolsonaro was Brazil’s president. For four years, Bolsonaro tried to stop the monitoring of institutions, police, judges, and ministers. The Supreme Court stopped this and so it was a main target of an attempted rightwing coup in January 2023. Bolsonaro organised the attempted coup.
So, as we see, Brazil is still under the control of criminals and their supporters.
NOW TRY THE ORIGINAL:
https://newint.org/crime-and-justice/2024/view-brazil-crime-police-and-politics-go-hand-hand
(This article is in easier English so it is possible that we changed the words, the text structure, and the quotes.)