Não Vai Ter Copa

As you may have seen or read in your own national media, there were more protests in central São Paulo on Saturday night. This time they were against the World Cup being staged in Brazil (as opposed to the hike in bus fares that was the flashpoint for last year’s protests) and, as with the previous demonstrations, they didn’t come off peacefully.

The most pressing story is that of 22 year old Fabrício Proteus Nunes Fonseca Mendonça Chaves. Chaves was detained by police on the corner of Ruas Paiuí and Sabará as he and a friend came away from the protests that were winding down on nearby Rua Consolação. Bystanders report that they were surrounded by at least four police officers and that Chaves tried to run away, but was stopped. There was then a struggle during which the Military Police allege that Chaves pulled a knife and tried to attack them, and was subsequently shot twice, once in the chest and once in the groin.

Subsequent analysis of footage from a nearby security camera does not confirm whether or not Chaves had a knife, nor whether the moment at which the young man falls over on top one of the police officers was an attempt to overpower him, as the police allege, or an attempt to try and stay on his feet, perhaps after having been shot already. The footage cannot, apparently, confirm when the shots were fired nor were the officers wearing the high-res portable cameras that other officers had been wearing during the evening.

Following four bouts of surgery and an induced coma, from which Chaves has since been resuscitated, it has also emerged that he was in fact shot three times, as opposed to the two shots reported by the police officers. The two policemen additionally contravened procedural protocol by transporting Chaves to Hospital Santa Casa themselves, after the SAMU ambulance service still hadn’t shown up following a half-hour wait.

At around the same time, 135 protesters on nearby Rua Augusta, including a large number of women, were encircled by members of the Military Police’s tropa de choque (‘shock troop’). The protesters fled into the lobby of the Hotel Linson, where they were followed by the shock troopers, allegedly at the invitation of hotel employees (although the hotel management has refused to confirm this). The officers then fired on the protesters twice with rubber bullets from a distance of at most ten feet, as can be seen in this video by photojournalist Felipe Larozza.

Commenting on these events, the Secretary of Public Security claims that the action was justified following the ‘invasion’ of the lobby by protesters. Governor of São Paulo, Geraldo Alckmin, subsequently gave his unreserved support to the actions of the military police, saying that, in preventing the protesters from reaching Praça de Republica in downtown São Paulo, where there was a celebration commemorating the city’s 460^th anniversary, they had averted ‘a tragedy’. He refused to comment on the shooting of Chaves, claiming not to have detailed information about the incident.

Finally, additional footage obtained by the newspaper Folha de São Paulo, shows that the Shock Troops weren’t wearing their name badges, as they’re required to whenever on duty.

The protesters, meanwhile, or the Black Bloc element within their number, reverted to the tactics of vandalising the private property of major corporations widely seen during last June’s protests, including the vandalism of banks (one Caixa and one Santander branch, respectively), a Fiat dealership and an attempted attack on a McDonalds. 

Here’s a few points I’ve thought of in connection with these events: 

1. Why does Brazil need a military police when it is no longer a military dictatorship? (And why does the Judiciary allow archaic and obsolete laws from the era of the dictatorship such as the autos-de-resistência (‘acts of self-defence’) – which make it nigh on impossible to prosecute police officers for wrongful killing – persist within today’s Brazil (albeit under slightly different terminology)?

2. Whether or not he had a knife, the proportionality of the police in detaining Chaves was clearly excessive. As Heloisa Estellita, a Professor in Criminal Law at the Fundação Getulio Vargas (SP) points out, Chaves was a civilian with no who may or may not have been armed, who had been seen to try and escape and who being confronted by several armed policemen who, critically, had all received crowd-control training that should have enabled them to restrain Chaves without the recourse to shooting him.

3. Analysis of the 119 arrestees on whom information has been released reveals that the most represented profession among the protesters are teachers and university professors. Many of the others are underage and are therefore still in mainstream education. Therefore, these protests are not, as certain elements within the Brazilian media have maintained, led by a combination of ne’er-do-well anarchists and faveleiros (poor, working-class inhabitants of the favelas), but by, among others, middle-class individuals with enough education to recognise the urgent need for change within their country (and for whom the Bread and Circuses PR coup of the World Cup is a crucible of protest). Furthermore, attempts to segregate the protesters by stamping harder on those demonstrations occurring in the periferia (the economically depressed outskirts of the São Paulo, particularly the Zona Leste) or criminalising the use of masks as a means of spot-checking racial stereotypes, are clearly tactics to enable the police to vary the degree of repressiveness they employ against different socio-economic classes.   

4. All these events happened in places I know really well. I used to take my kids to the Hospital-Infantil Sabará not five hundred metres from the corner of Sabará and Paiuí, where Chaves was shot; I buy my lights on Rua da Consolação, where Saturday’s protests dispersed; and, if I’m feeling flush, I stop for coffee on Rua Augusta, where the Hotel Linson’s located. Moroever, the shocking image below, which helped spur on last year’s protests after it became the cover shot for an edition of Folha de São Paulo, was taken outside the Starbucks I visit whenever I’m up on Avenida Paulista (read this piece by Vincent Bevins for an incisive, English-language analysis of the crisis within Brazilian policing).

The point I’m trying to make is that all these things are happening squarely in my world, yet it would be only too easy to pretend they weren’t. At my local supermarket they’re still piping the ‘Girl from Ipanema’ over the tannoy and plastering that terrible fucking armadillo over everything from beer coolers to mop buckets. It’s like there’s an invisible film dividing separate realities. I live in the daytime world of commerce and families, and the protests take place in an alternate universe that inhabits this one like a ghost or a double exposure. And I have to be honest, as much as I support their cause, the thought of entering the protesters’ world, in which fear and indiscriminate oppression are the accepted norm, badly scares me.

5. It requires hardly any effort to make human beings drop the civilised mask and revert to brutality. A little fear, a little hatred, and there we are again, revealed as monsters.