(This article supports what I wrote earlier in this thread concerning death squads being contracted by business men to kill street kids.)The Murder of Rio's Street Kids
By Stephen Brookes
In Rio de Janeiro for Insight Magazine
On a warm, humid morning in December, children playing in a waste dump near Rio de Janeiro stumbled onto two battered and abandoned bodies. Both were girls; one had been raped and mutilated before being shot in the head; the other had been beaten and then shot repeatedly. And the girls were still children -- kids who lived on Rio's tough and dangerous streets.
There are, according to UNICEF, around 12 million children living by their wits on the streets of Brazil. Some have families they see from time to time, but a huge number are simply abandoned. Sleeping in doorways or on beaches at night, they swarm over the big cities in packs -- there are tens of thousands of them in Rio de Janeiro alone, and Sao Paulo and Recife have thousands more.
They seem to be everywhere: begging in front of restaurants, peddling cigarettes in sidewalk cafes, shining shoes outside the train station, washing clothes in public fountains. Take a morning stroll on the elegant, black-and-white mosaic sidewalk that curves along Rio's Copacabana Beach and you'll see dozens of them, sleeping under the palms. And as the country plummets ever more deeply into economic chaos, there are more kids on the street every day.
As their ranks have multiplied, so has petty crime, both in the cities and the sprawling shantytowns known as favelas that surround them. Much of the blame, ironically, can be put squarely on Brazil's juvenile justice code, which makes it next to impossible to lock up anyone under the age of 17. If a kid is arrested, whether for the first or the 40th time, he's usually back on the street in 48 hours or less with a slap on the wrist.
Armed with that virtual guarantee of impunity, kids as young as 5 and 6 years old have taken to crime in droves. Some work for drug dealers, some become prostitutes, some pick pockets and snatch purses, some form gangs and rob pedestrians with knives and broken bottles. As neighborhoods have become more dangerous, small groups of vigilantes or death squads, as they're known have implemented their own, bloody system of justice.
Last year, according to government statistics, 492 street kids were murdered in Brazil, many of them gruesomely mutilated. Other groups, like Rio's National Movement for Street Children, say the figures are even higher. "From January 1988 to December 1990, 4,611 kids were assassinated," says Volmer do Nascimento, the group's director (and a former math teacher with a penchant for quoting statistics from memory). "That's 4.2 kids a day," he adds. "Every day. And it's getting worse."
The kids get killed for almost any reason. Some are thieves who prey on shopkeepers; the shopkeepers, unable to get them jailed, hire gunmen to solve the problem. Others work for drug gangs or crooked cops and get in over their heads. Some are witnesses to other crimes and have to be eliminated, a practice known as "burning the files."
Some, according to social workers, are simply killed for being street kids. When the body of 9-year-old Patricio Hilario da Silva was found on a main street in Ipanema in 1989, there was a handwritten note tied around his neck. "I killed you because you didn't study and had no future," the note read. "The government must not allow the streets of the city to be invaded by kids."
The death squads, which often include ex- or off-duty cops, have proliferated through the favelas -- one study found 15 groups in the Baixada slum alone -- as de facto police. They are generally supported by the people there, who get little or no protection from official police.
Judge Darlan: Death squads target "anybody""The death squads don't just kill children," says Judge Siro Darlan of the juvenile courts. "They go after criminals, homosexuals, old people, anybody. They exist because the government can't guarantee security to the people. So it's a threatened population that takes things into its own hands."
"We're living in a society of generalized violence;' agrees Roberto dos Santos, a Rio social worker. "The public doesn't believe in justice, or in the leadership. So there's a widespread feeling that violence is a cure for the problems."
Three of every four homicides in Rio go unsolved, according to one of the city's public prosecutors. "The police are almost completely ineffective," says social worker Nascimento. "In Duque de Caxias
, 919 people were killed in 1989, according to official statistics. In 281 of those cases, the police could identify the killers. But only 25 of those have been brought before a judge, and only eight were convicted."
A low conviction rate is not, of course, directly the fault of the police. In the lawless favelas, witnesses are often understandably afraid to come forward to testify; in Rio alone, at least 13 prosecution witnesses to death squad killings have been murdered since 1983. And juries are often unwilling to convict, partly because of the danger of reprisals, but also because a large part of the population condones vigilantism. In Sao Paulo, the gangs are called justiceiros -- "justice bringers."
Disdain for the police has become so pervasive, in fact, that even spontaneous mob lynchings are becoming common. When three men tried earlier this year to steal a van in Rio's middle-class neighborhood of Jacarepagua, the van's driver smashed it into a tree and fled, screaming for help. A crowd started chasing the thieves, caught one of them, then tied him to a tree. As the crowd swelled to more than 50 people, someone doused him with gasoline and set him on fire. He burned to death.
Police say the death squads earn $40 to $50 for killing a street kid and as much as $500 for an adult. In January, Health Minister Alceni Guerra said the government had evidence that "businessmen are financing and even directing the killing of street children." The military police confirm this. "There are groups that are paid by businessmen to protect their shops," says Maj. Altanir Freitas. "But since the community protects these groups, it's hard to find out who they are."
More:
http://www.stephenbrookes.com/international/2006/4/18/the-murder-of-rios-street-kids.html~~~~~~~~~~NACLA Report on the Americas
May/June 1994
KIDS OUT OF PLACE (Part 2 of 2)
By Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Daniel Hoffman
In 1991 Veja reported that the public morgue in Recife received approximately 15 bodies of dead children and adolescents a month. Black and brown (mixed race) bodies outnumbered white bodies 12 to 1, and boys outnumbered girls at a ratio of 7 to l. In 80 percent of the cases, the bodies had been damaged or mutilated.14 The local human rights organization GAJOP characterizes the routine assassinations of poor adolescents as an unofficial death penalty which is carried out "with chilling cruelty and without any chance of defense whatsoever."(15)
Brazilian journalist Gilberto Dimenstein, in his forceful denunciation of violence against children, Brazil: War on Children, emphasized the complicity of off-duty policemen, hired killers, and store owners (lojistas) in the death squads.(16) Typically, it is store owners who pay to have "undesirable" adolescents and children eliminated. A similar conclusion was reached in a report by the São Paulo chapter of the Brazilian Bar Association, which indicated that "the military police and death squads paid by shantytown shopkeepers killed most of the nearly 1,000 street children slain here in 1990."(17)
Dimenstein writes that support of human rights for children in Brazil is confined to a relatively small minority, and that to make a case for the rights of children is perceived by many as "an attack on decent people's rights to walk down the street in safety."(18) Underlying this sentiment is a perception that street adolescents are dangerous criminals with little chance of reform. Discourses regarding human rights, including rights for children, easily come into conflict with popular concerns for public safety, leading some to claim that human rights are the "privileges of bandits."(19)
Support for death squads, "private justice," lynchings and lethal tactics by the police is related to widespread perceptions that the justice system does not work, and that police are inefficient, corrupt, and frequently themselves involved in crime.(20) Residents of poor neighborhoods are often the strongest supporters of violent, extrajudicial solutions to local crime, a phenomenon that has been, in part, attributed to the lack of security in these communities. As one observer writes, "people are usually asking the police, whom they fear and accuse of being violent, to be violent 'against the side that deserves it.'"(21) The poor, it appears, feel every bit as besieged by crime, if not more so, as the rich and middle class do. This is crucial to understanding their acceptance of extreme forms of private justice, even when they are most likely to become the targets of its abuses.
Thus, each time a troublesome young street child was swept up in a police raid or was physically attacked or "disappeared" in Bom Jesus, people said nothing. Some residents were even sympathetic to these violent attacks on other people's "bad" children," and would occasionally murmur under their breath, "Good job, nice work!"
The tolerance for violence is also a legacy of the dictatorship. Throughout Brazilian military rule (1964-1985), the civil and military police were heavily implicated in the disappearances, tortures and deaths of suspected "subversives." Although the process of democratization has been fairly rapid since 1982, it has yet to check the extraordinary power of the civil and military police over the poorer populations. Today, the police are called upon to enforce, often violently, the apartheid-like codes that seek to keep the poor and the black--young as well as old--"in their proper place." Indeed "race" and race hatred have emerged today as popular discourses that justify violent and illegal police actions in shantytown communities. Death squad persecution is directed at a specific class and shade of shantytown resident. Consequently, young black males in Brazil are increasingly a threatened population.
More:
http://www.pangaea.org/street_children/latin/sheper2.htm~~~~~~~~~~Death Squads
Monday, May. 05, 1980
Return of the vigilantes
The victims are often found lying in roadside ditches on the outskirts of teeming favelas, the makeshift slums surrounding Rio de Janeiro or industrial São Paulo. Their hands are usually tied behind their backs with nylon cord. The bodies often show signs of torture: cigarette burns, bruises, broken teeth, occasionally even castration. Almost all are riddled with gunshot wounds. Sometimes the corpses have been drenched in gasoline and then set ablaze, making identification impossible.
Those grisly scenes of execution are becoming alarmingly commonplace in Brazil's major cities. Hundreds of such deaths have been reported so far this year, over 150 of them in Rio's northern slum of Baixada Fluminense. On one typical day this month, Rio police discovered seven scarred and bullet-torn bodies. The victims included a suspected prostitute, a transvestite, a photographer and his girlfriend.
Who is responsible for the executions? The most frequent claimants are gangs of self-styled vigilantes who boast that they are fighting an underground war against the crime that infests the underpoliced favelas. Since 1965, the number of slum dwellers in Rio has risen from 450,000 to a staggering 1.7 million. Lacking adequate sanitation, schooling and jobs, the ramshackle favelas have become breeding grounds for crime and violence, out of which have come the countercrime and violence of the vigilantes. Explains Eduardo Fagundes, who is the present head of the Brazilian bar, "Ten years ago the death squads received open support from higher authorities. Now they act on the belief that the legal system is completely inert."
In Rio, the vigilantes usually identify themselves as the Mão Branco, the White Hand, and their counterparts in São Paulo go by the name the Black Hand. Typically, a gang member will telephone local police and newspapers, announcing in mocking terms where the latest "meat" will be dropped; almost invariably, a corpse is found there.
Many slum dwellers applaud the vigilantes, especially since the majority of victims have been suspected criminals. The police, for their part, attribute the many killings to gangland drug wars.
Yet perhaps the most frightening theory is that the police themselves may be moonlighting as "protection teams" hired by fearful merchants to clean up their neighborhoods.More:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,948851,00.html?promoid=googlep~~~~~~~~~~CHILDREN IN THE STREETS OF BRAZIL:
Drug Use, Crime, Violence, and HIV Risks
James A. Inciardi and Hilary L. Surratt
Substance Use and Misuse, 1997
~snip~
Violence Against Street Children
Street children throughout Latin America are viewed by many police groups, merchants, and other citizens as undesirable, pariah populations (Thomas, 1995:88-89). In Brazil, they are targets of fear, and are seen by the upper classes and the political right-wing as being: . . . a blemish on the urban landscape and a reminder that all is not well in the country. Unwanted and considered human waste, these ubiquitous tattered, mainly black children and adolescents evoke strong and contradictory emotions of fear, aversion, pity and anger in those who view their neighborhood streets, boulevards and squares as 'private places" under siege (Scheper-Hughes and Hoffman, 1994:23).
Because of their drug use, predatory crimes, and general unacceptability on urban thoroughfares, street children have frequently been the targets of local vigilante groups, drug gangs, and police "death squads."
Perhaps most notorious have been the death squads, which initially appeared in Brazil in 1968, and principally in Rio de Janeiro, at first to avenge the terrorist murder of a well-known police officer. The death squads proliferated during the years of Brazil's military rule, which ended in 1985. As the killings spread, political and community leaders were often targeted, and the victims were easily recognized. Their hands were always tied behind their backs, their tongues cut out, and a crudely drawn skull and cross-bones were left on the corpse with the initials "E.M."--"Esquadrão de Morte"--
More:
http://www.udel.edu/butzin/articles/child.htmlcenter]~~~~~~~~~~
I'm sure we all recognize the depth of sincerity in any right-winger's expressed "concern" for the victims of death squads.
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