A good part of the population also openly or discreetly applauds the death squads that mete out capital punishment even when it’s against the law and do so with the participation or complicity of the police and the military. In Brazil they started by killing guerrillas. Then they moved on to adult criminals, later to homosexuals and panhandlers, and finally to teenagers and children. Silvio Cunha, the president of a merchants’ association in Rio, said in 1991, “Killing a young slum dweller is a service to society.” The owner of a shop in the barrio of Botafogo was robbed four times in two months. A policeman explained why: there’s no point arresting children today, since the judge will set them free to rob tomorrow. “It’s up to you,” the policeman said. And for a reasonable price he offered to take care of things when he was off-duty, “to get rid of them,” he said.
“Get rid of them?”
“That’s right.”
Under contract to store owners, the death squads in Brazil, which like to call themselves “self-defense groups,” clean up the cities while in the countryside their colleagues under contract to big landowners gun down landless peasants and other bothersome people. According to the May 20, 1998, issue of Isto é magazine, in the state of Maranhão the life of a judge is worth five hundred dollars, that of a priest four hundred. It’s only three hundred to knock off a lawyer. Murderers for hire offer their services by Internet, with discounts for subscribers.
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Public Enemy/1
In April 1997, Brazilian television viewers were invited to vote on the fate of a young perpetrator of a violent assault. Execution won by a landslide, two to one over prison.
According to researcher Vera Malaguti, the image of public enemy number one is modeled on a great-grandchild of slaves who lives in the favelas, can’t read, adores “funk” music, uses or sells drugs, is arrogant and pushy, and fails to show the least remorse.
* * *
Death squads in Colombia—known officially as “self-defense groups,” they call themselves “social cleansing groups”—also began by killing guerrillas and now, under contract to store owners, landowners, or whoever will pay, they’ll kill anyone. Many of their members are policemen or soldiers without uniform, but they also train young executioners. In Medellín, several schools for hit men attract teenagers with offers of easy money and cheap thrills. These fifteen-year-olds trained in the arts of crime are sometimes hired to kill other children as dead of hunger as they are. Poor against poor, as usual: poverty is a blanket that’s too narrow, and everyone pulls it to his own side. But the victims might also be prominent politicians or famous journalists. The chosen target is called a “dog” or a “package.” The young assassins get paid according to the importance of the dog and the risks of the operation. Often the executioners are protected by the legal mask of security companies. At the end of 1997, the Colombian government acknowledged that it had only thirty inspectors for three thousand private security firms. Last year in an exemplary operation that lasted a week, one agent inspected four hundred “self-defense groups.” He found nothing out of the ordinary.
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Public Enemy/2
At the beginning of 1998, journalist Samuel Blixen made an eloquent comparison. The take from fifty muggings carried out by the best-known criminal gangs in Uruguay added up to $5 million. The take from two muggings carried out without a shot by a bank and a financier totaled $70 million.
* * *
Death squads leave no fingerprints. Rarely is the silence broken. An exception occurred in Colombia in mid-1991: sixty beggars were shot dead in the city of Pereira. The murderers weren’t arrested, but fifteen police officers, two of high rank, were “disciplined” and forced to retire. Another exception occurred in Rio de Janeiro in mid-1993: fifty homeless children sleeping at the gates of Candelaria Church were shot; eight of them died. The massacre was news around the world and, in the end, two of the military police who carried out the operation went to jail. A miracle.
Afanásio Jazadji was elected to the legislature with the largest vote in the history of the state of São Paulo. He earned his popularity preaching on the radio, day after day, microphone in hand. Enough talk of problems, he said, it’s time for solutions. Overcrowded jails? “We should take all those incorrigible prisoners, put them up against the wall, and incinerate them with a flamethrower. Or set off a bomb. Boom. Problem solved. Those bums are costing us millions.” Interviewed in 1987 by Bell Chevigny, Jazadji explained that torture is okay because the police torture only the guilty. Sometimes, he said, the police don’t know what crimes the crook has committed and can find out only by beating him, just like a husband when he beats his wife. Torture, he concluded, is the only way to discover the truth.
Back in the year 1252 Pope Innocent IV authorized the torture of those suspected of heresy. The Inquisition invented new techniques for the production of pain, which twentieth-century technology has elevated to industrial perfection. Amnesty International has documented the systematic practice of electric-shock torture in fifty countries. In the thirteenth century the powerful called a spade a spade; now torture is committed but not discussed. Power avoids bad words. At the end of 1996, when the Israeli Supreme Court authorized the torture of Palestinian prisoners, the justices called it “moderate physical pressure.” In Latin America torture is called “legal compulsion.” Common criminals, or those who look like them, have always suffered “compulsion” in the police stations here. It’s a custom, considered normal, for the police to extract confessions by the same means of torment that military dictatorships recently used on political prisoners. The difference is that many of those political prisoners were middle-class, some upper-class, and social class is the only boundary impunity occasionally acknowledges. During the military horror, campaigns by human rights groups didn’t always ring like a wooden bell; sometimes they struck a chord in the closed environment of life under dictatorship and even in the world beyond. Who, in contrast, will listen to common criminals, socially despised and legally invisible? When one of them commits insanity by announcing that he’s been tortured, the police send him back for more intensive care.
Filthy jails, prisoners like sardines in a can—most of them have not been convicted, many haven’t even been tried. They’re just there and nobody knows why. Compared with these seething prisons, Dante’s Inferno looks like Disneyland. Riots break out continually, and the forces of order spray the disorderly with bullets, in the process killing as many as they can to ease the overcrowding. In 1992, there were over fifty uprisings in Latin America’s most overcrowded prisons. Nine hundred were killed, most of them in cold blood.
Thanks to torture, which makes the mute sing, many are imprisoned for crimes they did not commit, since it’s better to have an innocent behind bars than a criminal walking free. Others confess to murders that are child’s play compared with the feats of certain generals or to robberies that are jokes compared with the frauds run by businessmen and bankers or the commissions charged by politicians every time they sell off another piece of the country. The military dictatorships are gone, but the jails of Latin America’s democracies are filled to bursting. The prisoners are poor, as you’d expect, because only the poor go to jail in countries where nobody goes to jail for the collapse of a brand-new bridge, the bankruptcy of a looted bank, or the crumbling of a building with no foundation.
The system of power that creates poverty is the same one that wages war without quarter on the desperate people it begets. A century ago, Georges Vacher de Lapouge demanded more guillotines to purify the race. This French thinker, who believed that all geniuses were German, was convinced that only the guillotine could correct the errors of “natural selection” and end the alarming proliferation of incompetents and criminals. “A good crook is a dead crook,” say those who today demand ironhanded social therapy. Society has the right to kill in legitimate defense of public health, given the danger posed by slums infected with ne’er-do-wells and drug addicts. With social pro
blems reduced to police problems, there is a growing clamor for the death penalty, a fair punishment that will reduce the cost of prisons, have a healthy, intimidating effect, and solve the problem of recidivism by eliminating potential repeat offenders. You learn by dying. In most Latin American countries the law does not allow capital punishment, but it gets carried out every time a police warning shot enters the back of a suspect’s neck or death squads kill with impunity. With or without the law, the state practices premeditated homicide, treachery, and discrimination. Yet no matter how many people the state kills, it can’t seem to do a thing about the no-man’s-land the street has become.
Power keeps hacking away at the weeds, but it can’t pull out the roots without threatening itself. Criminals get sentenced but not the machine that keeps churning them out, just as drug addicts get sentenced but not the lifestyle that cries out for chemical consolation and an illusion of escape. Society is thus exonerated from responsibility. The law is like a spider’s web, says author Daniel Drew, spun to trap flies and other small insects, not to block the way of larger species. Over a century ago, the poet José Hernández compared the law to a knife that never turns on those who wield it. Official speeches invoke the law as if it applied to everyone, not just to the unfortunates who can’t evade it. Poor criminals are the bad guys in this movie; rich criminals write the script and direct the action.
In other times, the police served an economic system that needed abundant docile labor. The justice system punished vagrants by forcing them into factories at bayonet point. That’s how European society industrialized the peasantry and managed to impose the work ethic in its cities. But today the question is how to impose the unemployment ethic. What mandatory obedience techniques are there to manage the growing multitudes who have no work or hope of ever getting any? What can be done to keep all those who have fallen overboard from trying to climb back in and capsizing the ship?
The raison d’être of the state today is the same as that of the financial markets that rule the world and produce nothing but speculation. Subcommandante Marcos, the spokesman for the Indians of Chiapas, described the process aptly: we are witnessing, he said, a striptease. The state takes off everything down to its underwear, that indispensable intimate garment which is repression. The moment of truth: the state exists only to pay the foreign debt and guarantee social peace.
The state murders by omission as well as commission. At the end of 1995, there were these items of news from Brazil and Argentina:
Crime by commission: the Rio de Janeiro military police killed civilians at eight times the rate of the previous year, and the police in Buenos Aires barrios hunted young people as if they were wild beasts.
Crime by omission: forty kidney patients lay dying in the town of Caruarú in northeast Brazil after a public hospital used polluted water for dialysis, while in Argentina’s northeast province of Misiones, pesticide-laced drinking water was producing babies with leprous lips and deformations of the spinal medulla.
In the favelas of Rio, women carry cans of water on their heads like crowns, while children fly kites in the wind as warnings that the police are coming. At carnival time, black-skinned queens and kings come down from the hills in wigs of white curls, collars of lights, silken coats. On Ash Wednesday, when carnival ends and the tourists depart, anyone still in costume gets thrown in jail. And every other day of the year, the state makes sure the plebeians who were monarchs for a moment toe the line.
At the beginning of the century there was only one favela in Rio. In the forties, by which time there were a few, writer Stefan Zweig paid them a visit and found neither violence nor sadness. Today, there are over five hundred favelas in Rio. Many working people live there, cheap hands who serve tables or wash cars and clothes and bathrooms in wealthy neighborhoods. There, too, live many who are shut out of any market, a number of whom find in drugs some income or relief. From the point of view of the society that created them, favelas are no more than a refuge for organized crime and the cocaine trade. The military police invade them frequently in Vietnam War–lookalike operations, and dozens of death squads work them as well. The dead—illiterate children of illiterates—are mostly black adolescents.
A century ago, the head of a reform school in Illinois concluded that one-third of his internees could not be redeemed. They were future criminals who loved the world, the flesh, and the Devil. It was not clear what could be done with them, but back then a few scientists like the Englishman Cyril Burt proposed fighting crime at the source by eliminating the poorest of the poor, “impeding the propagation of their species.” A hundred years later, the countries of the South treat the poorest poor as if they were toxic waste. The countries of the North export their dangerous industrial waste to the South, but the South can’t return the favor. What then can be done with its dangerous human waste that cannot be redeemed? Bullets do their best to impede “the propagation of their species,” and indeed the Pentagon, military vanguard of the world, says that the wars of the twenty-first century will require ever more specialized weapons for street riots and looting. In some cities of the Americas, like Washington and Santiago de Chile, as in many British cities, video cameras keep a watchful eye on the streets.
* * *
Let’s Tell It Like It Is
The first South American Police Congress met in Uruguay in 1979 under the military dictatorship. The congress decided to continue its work in Chile under the military dictatorship, “to benefit the high interests that sparkle along the path of the peoples of America,” as the final resolution put it.
The delegation from Argentina, also under military dictatorship, highlighted the role of the forces of order in the struggle against child and youth crime. Its report was eloquent, as only the police can be: “Although it may seem simplistic, to get to the root of the problem, to its essence in the animating substratum of its dynamism and evolution, we will state and reiterate that the minimal common base is family reality, which has little to do with the socioeconomic-cultural side.… Needy adolescents try to find models of identity in other subcultures (hippie, criminal, etc.), thereby causing an interruption in the socialization process.… The maintenance of public order transcends the interindividual level and, reaching the intraindividual level, takes up that unique and indivisible reality of the individual being and the social being.… If some minors have demonstrated conduct that could degenerate into inadequate behavior presenting an individual-social threat, they have been easily detected and reoriented, and the problem resolved.
* * *
Consumer society consumes people and things like so many shooting stars. Things made not to last die soon after birth, and more and more people are condemned from the moment they peek out of the womb. Abandoned children on the streets of Bogotá used to be called “gamines”; now they’re called “disposable kids” and they’re marked to die. In the technocratic language of the moment, the many nobodies are “economically inviable.” What fate awaits these human leftovers? The world invites them to disappear, saying, “You don’t exist because you don’t deserve to exist.” Official reality tries to ignore them: the fastest-growing slum in Buenos Aires is called Hidden City, while in Mexico City the barrios of tin and cardboard sprouting in gullies and garbage dumps are called “lost cities.”
Covenant House interviewed more than 140 orphans and abandoned children living on the streets of Guatemala City: all of them sold their bodies for coins, all had venereal disease, all sniffed glue or solvents. One morning in the middle of 1990, some of those children were talking in a park when several armed men took them away in a truck. One girl escaped by hiding in a garbage can. Four of their bodies turned up a few days later without ears, without eyes, without tongues. The police had taught them a lesson.
In April 1997, Galdino Jesús dos Santos, an indigenous leader visiting Brasilia, was burned alive as he slept at a bus stop. Five teenagers from good families, out on the town, had sprayed him with alcohol and set him alight. They jus
tified what they did by saying, “We thought he was a beggar.” A year later they received light prison sentences; after all, it wasn’t a case of premeditated homicide. As the spokesman for the federal district court explained, the boys used only half the fuel they were carrying, which proved they acted “with the intention of having a good time, not of killing.” The burning of beggars is a sport practiced by the youth of Brazil’s upper class with some regularity, but the news doesn’t usually reach the papers.
Leftovers: street kids, vagrants, beggars, prostitutes, transvestites, homosexuals, pickpockets, small-time thieves, drug addicts, drunks, squeegee kids. In 1993, Colombia’s “disposable kids” crawled out from under their rocks to protest. The demonstration erupted when it hit the news that “social cleansing groups” were killing beggars and selling the bodies to anatomy students at the Free University of Barranquilla. At the demonstration, storyteller Nicolás Buenaventura told those vomited up by the system the real story of the Creation: every time God created something, he had a little bit left over. While the sun and the moon, time and the world, the seas and the jungles were being born from his hand, God kept tossing the leftovers into the abyss. But God, being rather scatterbrained, forgot to make the first woman and man, and they had no choice but to make themselves. Way down there in God’s garbage dump, at the bottom of that abyss, the first woman and the first man made themselves out of God’s leftovers. We human beings were born from garbage, and that’s why we all have a bit of day and a bit of night, and we’re all time and earth and water and wind.