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 They come every trash day. A black man in his twenties and his son, about seven, trade jokes while they work on separate trash bags. A young white man comes alone. He is stripped to the waist and looks like a middleweight boxer, very vigorous and determined, as he quickly loads a wagon and trundles up the hill with it.
A tall, slender, brown-faced youth is in charge of a couple of grade school children as they load recyclable material in a cart pulled by a skinny little pony with mottled tan and white fur. None of the trash pickers wear protective gloves or masks, none are any too clean (how would they be?), but not one could be called a "bum." Before moving to a working class district of Rio last year, I had seen an occasional bum going through the trash in my rural neighborhood in the United States, but never such a massive, competitive "mining" of refuse. Walking home just after dusk one evening, I came upon the little black kid who scavenges with his dad. He stood in the light from a doorway with a large load of cardboard on his head. His white T-shirt was torn over his ribs with the flap hanging down. I had the urge to pass a real (about 45 cents) to him. Instead, I smiled and said "Good evening. All well?" "All well." "Pardon me, may I ask you something." He looked a little puzzled but shrugged his shoulders as if to say, "Why not?" "How much cardboard does it take to earn one real? He shuffled his feet, looking a little bewildered. But by using gestures and my limited Portuguese, I was soon able to convey the concept, and he reflected on the question with some interest. He estimated that the biggest load he could carry might be worth that much: one real. I thanked him. At least in this neighborhood the garbage is regularly collected. In some of the municipalities around Rio, trash pickup can be so poor that residents have died from diseases such as leptospirosis, caused by rat urine. Some resort to throwing the piled up garbage into other neighborhoods, risking fines. Others, having paid the city once for garbage collection, pay again for private pickup service, to men who pull around little carts. But this is just one of the many hardships faced on a regular basis by Cariocas and residents of the adjacent cities to the north in Rio de Janeiro state. Parents from poor districts wait overnight in line to enroll their children in a school close to home. Thousands of unemployed stand in line for a few jobs. Supplicants queue up overnight to obtain bureaucratic paperwork from the government. Of those who wait overnight, perhaps the most abused are the people in line for health care. Sometimes they die waiting. One woman died in line and her body lay there six hours. A newspaper photographer captured the moment of her husband's arrival at the scene, four hours after her death: The corpse is covered by a black plastic bag held down by rocks. A hand and foot stick outside the bag; her belonging, a purse and some papers, are scattered alongside. The husband kneels beside the body; his head is thrown back, he cries, "Take my wife away from here!" The people standing in line hear the cry and give hushed witness to the scene. A teenage black girl stands with head bowed, arms crossed, down-turned lips, and lowered lashes; a little old brown-faced woman looks on the tragedy with stoicism and sadness; a ruddy young white man bends forward, his brows furrowed. As a whole the group displays little anger, but an Indian woman holds herself erect, lips twisted and eyes narrowed. A little black boy clutches her hand, apparently frightened by the cry and the thing lying partially covered on the sidewalk. A man in a gray police uniform, his face impassive, a cigarette between his lips, attaches a police line to a guardrail to seal the crowd from the body. The policeman, a very humble symbol of authority, seems neither touched by the scene nor callous, as if to say, "I see these things every day." A current scandal involves fraud in the purchase of ambulances. Among those deputies charged are four pastors, as well as a former bishop and his son. Judas had the decency to hang himself. Once inside a health clinic, patients diagnosed with a serious condition, calling for immediate surgery, may have to wait months for it. Physicians sometimes (illegally) demand money to perform operations sooner. Hospitals fill up with garbage, doctors lack basic supplies like bandages, elevators don't work for a year, roofs collapse on patients and hospital staff. One never pays bills in Rio by simply mailing a check to creditors because there is a very good chance the mail won't be delivered by the state-run post office. Sometimes you can pay at a local bank, but sometimes you must take an hour-long bus ride to pay at a downtown bank, or deliver your payments by hand. But all this is nothing. One night in March 2005, Rio police killed twenty-nine innocents (none accused of a crime, only two with a police record) including several women and children (See Addendum.) In one of the murders, the police stopped a group of men on the street. They forced one to turn his back to them and pull down his pants. Then they shot him seven times in the back. The people so battered and insulted have petitioned the authorities, marched, burned tires on busy intersections, released doves in plazas, prayed, sent emails, even begged just to be left alone. Authorities promise: "This case will be thoroughly investigated, with the offenders brought to swift and certain justice." Years later, in many cases, the offenders are still walking the streets, and the services are still shoddy. Meanwhile, in the biggest current government scandal, the "mensalão" ("big monthly bribe"), I have read journalist's estimates of up to half a billion total dollars in graft changing hands. That figures out to about a billion big loads of cardboard for children who go through the trash. I'd pick up a gun. That is the natural impulse I think many Americans would feel when confronted with such indignities. Remember what happened after the first Rodney King verdict? (In spite of the video of a brutal police beating, a jury exonerated the officers; thousands rioted and the cops eventually went to prison, though Los Angeles police scandals continue.) I'd pick up a gun, but history shows it wouldn't be smart. True, the American colonists picked up their flintlocks in 1776, and, after many trials and hardships, won. But for every successful violent revolution, you can find twenty that failed. A successful revolution is one that, first, overthrows the oppressors and, second, replaces them with a just, stable government. The first step is the easy one. Picking up a gun, the natural, angry impulse would be a disaster for everybody in Brazil, except those who want another military dictatorship. The other side would also pick up a gun. Some in the military would love to step in to secure order, as they did in 1964 to stop the Communist threat. Kill the marginais (marginal ones, those on the outside) even the women and children, before they kill us! More waste, more repression. Even if the angry people, with help from the drug lords, could collect enough roadside bombs and rocket propelled grenades to stymie the authorities, as has the insurgency in Iraq, a vision of Rio in flames, another Baghdad, is not heartwarming. Tourism would suffer. More passion wasted, more blood spilled. I'd pick up a ballot. It seems so simple. There are millions of honest, hard-working people in Rio and only thousands of rich and corrupt. In a democracy, every adult, rich or poor, has one vote. The victimized need only elect representatives who will fight for simple justice. If a representative does not perform, vote him/her out, and keep looking. On her visit to Brazil, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said, "Democracy is alive and well in Brazil." But the duly elected politicians who took half a billion in graft can't run a post office or a hospital, and are not protecting citizens from the police. The crux of the problem, then, seems to be to find out why the simple democratic ideal is not working. It's not happening in Brazil but then neither is it happening in many "democracies" throughout the world. I am searching for the answers with an open mind. I have a lot a work ahead of me. ADDENDUM Abu Ghraib, Emmett Till, and The Massacre of the Innocents Rio's greatest police slaughter of innocents, twenty-nine on a March night of 2005, actually took place north of Rio proper, in a troubled region known as the Baixada, "Lowlands." Of the eleven policemen originally charged, five will be going to trial for homicide. The trials have not begun. One hopes they will shed some light on the circumstances of the slayings. The information we now have is horrifying, and, to an American, almost inconceivable. Let us not be self-righteous. Brazilian police are poorly paid, so poorly that some must live in favelas, where they and their families are often harassed by neighbors. They daily run a grave chance of being killed in the line of duty. And they are routinely killed off duty. So great is the hostility between police and criminals, if robbers find a policeman among their victims, they usually kill him out of hand. Generally, the courage of police is admirable. One often reads of an incident such as the following: a single cop, accosted by bandits, shoots down one before being killed by the rest. But, tragically, it appears that most police do not see favela residents as fellow humans, struggling like themselves on the low end of the status scale, and needing their protection. In this respect abusive cops are rather like the Abu Ghraib guards, of low status themselves, who tortured and killed prisoners. They could not see the prisoners as human. The prisoners and the favela victims and their communities answered with hate, resulting in still more abuse. And what of the public response to these atrocities? After the initial shock of the photos of Abu Ghraib wore off, polls show the typical US citizen to be not very concerned about the torture of "terrorists." And with the photos of the Baixada massacre faded from memory, a minority of Cariocas seem worried about alleged execution of "marginals" by police. In both the United States and Brazil, the general public seems to approve any action by guards or police that is supposed to make them - the citizens - safer from suspected "terrorists" or "marginals." But some guards and police did not torture or abuse, so those guilty cannot escape blame. Still, we might feel the higher-ups to be the most blameworthy - they are educated, presumably enlightened individuals. The facts in the Baixada case are paradoxical. The proximate cause of the massacre was an admirable impulse on the part of leadership. Some time before the massacre authorities recognized that the corruption and police violence in the Baixada had become intolerable and resolved to do something about the situation. An order went down from high offices of law enforcement to clean up the mess. Precinct heads of doubtful integrity were removed and their replacements charged with enforcing the law. The result was rebellion in the ranks. Police lodged so many complaints about the new work conditions that a state legislator requested an investigation of the situation, which was denied. Police especially complained of the excessive punishments of one Colonel Lopes, head of a precinct in the Baixada. Thirty officers had suffered administrative imprisonment in the months before the slaughter. In this atmosphere of smoldering tension, a trivial incident set off a horrifying series of events. Police under Colonel Lopes recovered a stolen truck. Before taking it to the station, the officers stopped by a tire dealer and "requisitioned" seven tires from it. A neighbor reported the theft to law enforcement authorities. When Colonel Lopez arrived at the locale, he saw another police car, with policemen in it giving cover to their colleagues. The officers who removed the tires were booked for theft and the ones who gave cover were administratively imprisoned. In the early morning of the next day, a severed head was found on the hood of a police car in the station commanded by Colonel Lopes. The rest of the corpse, stabbed to death, was found behind the station, beside another victim, who had been strangled and beheaded. Apparently neither of the victims had a police record. A security camera showed two police cars in the area where the bodies were found. Authorities suspected the crimes were committed by police in reprisal for the actions of Colonel Lopes. Nine policemen were ordered administratively detained for 30 days. This apparently sparked the massacre, which occurred the following night. The actions of Colonel Lopes and the other authorities were praiseworthy, even brave. (They later received death threats.) But investigations by journalists following the massacre turned up some incredible facts. One of the officers charged with homicide in the massacre had been indicted in the past year for formation of a gang. He was under investigation for involvement in the robbery and dismantling of cars, belonging to an extermination group, and extortion. Authorities suspected him of stealing the jewelry of a woman who had disappeared along with her son. (After the slaughter some of the jewelry was found in his home.) Two of the other accused policemen had been called upon to respond to a charge of homicide of a fellow officer that occurred in March 2004. They were also suspected of forging a document claiming that a student leader had resisted arrest before being killed in January 2002. The list of suspicious incidents involving those accused in the Baixada killing goes on and on: officer suspected of killing two transvestites; two men 17 and 19, seen shot to death by police on a street corner, bodies found along highway; three males, aged 13, 18, 20, found dead in a forest, last seen in a car heading for a police checkpoint; robbery of a bus, four robbers wounded and apparently killed by police on the way to hospital, most of loot missing. So far as I know, none of these cases has gone to trial. But if law enforcement officials gave a gun, badge, and license to kill to men suspected of the most serious crimes, could they not foresee the result? The great Massacre of the Innocents, twenty-nine in one night, was not inevitable. But similar horrors were inevitable, only with a body count small enough so as not to shock the world. Since that terrible night, we continue to read of suspicious deaths. Often it is "just" one or two black youths, favela residents, with criminal records. Then there are the horrendous cases, such as one officer implicated in the deaths of nine children and youths, with evidence of torture. Incidents between these extremes occur every few weeks. Americans do not realize how lucky they are. The US military has no particular tradition of torturing prisoners. But the custom of police brutality in Brazil goes back at least fifty years. Provided we do not have another 9/11, we are seeing evidence that Americans of good will may stamp out the Abu Ghraib evil before it becomes commonplace. But for many Cariocas, 9/11 is not five years ago in a distant city, but last month just down the block. Add to this a legal system in which the only sure way to bring a suspected criminal to justice is to kill him right away. Finally, Cariocas are continuously bombarded by accounts of enormous thefts by politicians and community leaders, most ultimately unpunished, which must make them weary of the dream of justice. In 1955 the murder with impunity in Mississippi of a 14-year-old black youth, Emmett Till, mobilized the American civil rights movement. Today, some fifty years later, an impoverished black man with a criminal record in Mississippi may still be unjustly sent to prison. But the murder with impunity of black children in Mississippi is no longer tolerated. Yet fifty years is a long time. Dr. Addison Jump is a retired mathematician living in Rio. Of Native American descent, he worked at a college for American Indians and later for the U.S. Department of Defense. Email:
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