The protection of Indigenous lands is guaranteed by the Brazilian constitution to preserve the rights and cultures of groups that have been persecuted for centuries. Brazil is home to approximately 900,000 Indigenous citizens from 305 tribes, most of whom live on reserves, but more than half of the locations claimed by Indigenous groups have not yet received government recognition. Bolsonaro, consistent with his anti-Indigenous stance throughout his career, said in a televised interview shortly after his election that if it were up to him, “there won’t be any more demarcations of Indigenous land.”

Any rollback of protections for Indigenous lands would pose a dire threat to the Amazon rainforest, which is being rapidly cut down by ranchers, farmers, and extractive industries.

Bolsonaro’s attitudes toward Brazil’s Indigenous people and their lands are similar to those of the military dictatorship that ruled the country from 1964 to 1985, during which time thousands of tribespeople were killed and thousands more were driven from their lands to make way for large infrastructure projects and farms.

In last year’s election, Bolsonaro campaigned hard on cuts to government funding for Indigenous services and freezing the expansion of federally protected reserves. He immediately moved to make good on these promises after his inauguration last month.

Meanwhile, armed bands of land grabbers, known as “grileiros,” have been staging attacks on Indigenous communities — a pattern of violence that has surged in the wake of Bolsonaro’s election, according to Indigenous leaders and allies interviewed for this article. “With Bolsonaro, the invaders are feeling more at ease,” Bitete Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau, who lives on an Indigenous reserve, told The Intercept by telephone.

He referred to the invaders as “peons” sent by powerful bosses to cut down trees, burn undergrowth, and plant grass for cattle grazing — the first stage in the vastly profitable criminal enterprise of land-grabbing in the Amazon. From there, the lands are often sold several times over on the black market, meaning that poor states lose out on much-needed tax revenue.

Prosecutors have raised the alarm over four territories that have experienced, or are in grave danger of, invasion or attack, while advocacy groups say the number is at least six territories and fear that darker days are still to come. An investigation published this week by the NGO Repórter Brasil found that at least 14 fully protected Indigenous territories are currently under attack.

Under Attack

Last month, the image of a bullet-riddled metal plaque reading “National Indigenous Foundation, Protected Territory” made the rounds on WhatsApp, Brazil’s most popular messaging app. The sign marks the entrance to one of several villages in the vast Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau Indigenous reserve, in a lawless region of the Amazonian state of Rondônia, near the Bolivian border.

Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau leaders and local advocacy groups shared the solemn photograph with an accompanying audio message explaining that the gunshots were fresh, the latest attack in an ongoing “invasion” by groups of grileiros.

The tribe fears that a violent conflict with gun-toting outsiders is imminent. Recently, armed with bows and arrows, they managed to expel a group of grileiros from the reserve and filmed the confrontation. The trespassers promised to return.

“They want to take the land, divide it up into lots, and raise cattle,” Bitete Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau said. “They are getting very close.” The Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau are not alone.

On his first day as president, Bolsonaro transferred the authority to protect Indigenous lands from Brazil’s National Indian Foundation, or FUNAI, a government entity tasked with the protection of Indigenous communities, to the Ministry of Agriculture, handing a victory to the powerful agribusiness sector that backed his campaign and has its eyes on large tracts of pristine forest. Sydney Possuelo, a veteran Indigenous observer and former FUNAI president, described the move as “the death” of FUNAI, in an interview with the Folha de São Paulo newspaper.

Brazil’s Ministry of Agriculture, now headed by Tereza Cristina Dias, a former member Congress from the powerful “ruralista” agricultural caucus, did not respond to The Intercept’s questions about whether the demarcation of Indigenous lands would continue.

Days after signing the decree, Bolsonaro tweeted a video clip of another one of his ministers who argued in a cable news interview that many of the existing Indigenous reserves were established using fraudulent documents, and called the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples “spurious” and “treasonous.”

The Chamber of Indigenous Peoples and Traditional Communities of Brazil’s Public Prosecutors Office has sent an urgent memo to the justice minister warning that the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau and three other communities were in danger. The Indigenous Missionary Council, or CIMI, a Catholic aid group, recorded attacks and threats in five states.

“What we are seeing is a new phase of illegal occupations of Indigenous lands,” said Cleber Buzatto, CIMI’s executive secretary.

The Bolsonaro Effect

According to Daniel Azevedo Lôbo, a public prosecutor in Rondônia, the region surrounding the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau territory is rife with criminal groups constantly looking to illegally exploit Indigenous territories or forest conservation units. In January, he said that dozens of suspected grileiros were planning a major invasion, and another had already taken place this year. Federal Police arrested one suspect, while the rest fled into the forest.

Grileiros “see themselves as workers and producers, but they are criminals,” Lôbo told The Intercept. He said that land grabbers in Rondônia likely felt encouraged by the new administration. “They always look for a way to legitimize their illegal actions,” he said. “The government might have changed, but the law didn’t.”

The 7,200-square mile Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau reserve is larger than the U.S. states of Connecticut and Rhode Island combined. Around 200 tribespeople of different Indigenous subgroups live in villages on the margins, and an unknown number of “isolated” Indigenous people who do not have direct contact with the outside world reside deeper within the borders.

Using satellite imagery, Brazil’s Social Environmental Institute concluded that only 2 percent of the reserve is deforested, as compared to 70 percent in the surrounding area.

Federally protected Indigenous reserves cover 12 percent of Brazil's territory and are among the Amazon's most important defenses against rampant deforestation. The borders between protected and unprotected territories in places like Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau in Rondônia and Araribóia in Maranhão are easily distinguishable in satellite imagery. Images: Google Maps

Rondônia is one of the Brazilian Amazon’s most deforested states, and much of the remaining jungle is in Indigenous lands and federal conservation units, making them popular targets for criminal gangs. By no coincidence, the state recorded 17 murders related to land conflicts in 2017, one of the worst rates in the nation.

Last year, Bolsonaro won in Rondônia by a wide margin and a retired military police officer from Bolsonaro’s Social Liberal Party was elected governor.

The Karipuna Indigenous territory, also in Rondônia, is similarly under assault from land grabbers. Greenpeace’s investigative journalism unit, Unearthed, reported from the territory in 2017 after prosecutors said the tribe — with less than 60 members living on the site — was at risk of “genocide.” “They are close to the village now,” Adriano Karipuna told The Intercept recently. He visited the U.N. headquarters in New York last year to denounce a possible “massacre” against his people.

Federal Police have since seized tractors and other heavy machinery from the nearby community of União Bandeirantes and are investigating three suspects in connection with illegal logging. The Public Ministry, with the support of the Federal Police and FUNAI, is expected to request National Guard troops to defend the reserve.

FUNAI’s new president, Franklimberg de Freitas — an army reserve general who is currently the target of a government ethics enquiry for conflict of interest regarding his former consultancy gig for the Canadian mining firm Belo Sun — also visited Rondônia late last month following the recent invasions.

Next door in Mato Grosso state, prosecutors warned that they would meet any invasion of the Marãiwatsédé reserve of the Xavante people with an “energetic response.” In 2012, farmers illegally occupying the land were expelled by court order. Brazil’s O Globo newspaper reported that Nelson Barbudo — also known as “Bearded Nelson” — the state’s most popular congressperson and Bolsonaro ally, had encouraged the invasion, calling their removal “a crime against producers.”

Twelve hundred miles south, in Rio Grande do Sul state, local prosecutors have opened an investigation into a reported incident in which two hooded men made threats and opened fire at a small Mbyá-Guarani encampment in the capital, Porto Alegre.

In Maranhão state, Claudio da Silva, who leads a local forest guard on the Caru Indigenous territory told The Intercept that a group of farmers that was removed in 2014 following a court decision was threatening to come back. “With the proposals of Bolsonaro, they are organizing to return to the Awá territory,” he said. “We can’t just cross our arms.”

From Bad to Worse

About 0.4 percent of Brazil’s population lives on federally protected Indigenous lands, which cover around 13 percent of national territory and contain some of the nation’s best-maintained forests. Climate scientists consider empowerment of Indigenous people and their lands as an important weapon in the fight against climate change. But regardless of who is running the nation, throughout recent history, those concerns have been sublimated to the short-term economic interests of major industries.

Before Bolsonaro, the situation was already increasingly dire for Brazil’s Indigenous communities as the agribusiness lobby has grown more powerful in state capitals and in the corridors of power in Brasília. In 2017, under President Michel Temer, FUNAI’s budget was cut by nearly half, and a law was passed that effectively gave amnesty to land grabbers who had continuously occupied lands since before 2011. A similar measure had already been passed in 2004.

Invasions of Indigenous lands jumped from 59 in 2016 to 96 in 2017, according to CIMI’s annual report “Violence Against Indigenous People in Brazil.” The study highlighted that “one can see a significant increase in invasions; theft of natural resources such as timber and minerals; illegal hunting and fishing; soil and water contamination by pesticides; and fires, among other criminal actions.” It was also one of Brazil’s bloodiest years on record for land dispute-related violence, with at least 70 killings, according to rural violence watchdog Comissão Pastoral da Terra.

Before Temer, President Dilma Rousseff’s administration recognized very few Indigenous lands, experts say, to appease allies in Congress who represented major agricultural interests.

During her mandate, she also inaugurated the controversial Belo Monte Hydroelectric Dam. Before construction began in 2011, environmentalists warned — correctly — that it would cause enormous damage and subsequent deforestation in the region.

But under Bolsonaro, Indigenous leaders in the region believe that the actions of unscrupulous loggers and land grabbers will only get worse.

Leo Xipaya, an Indigenous leader who fought against Belo Monte for years, has no doubts about it: “Bolsonaro’s plans put Indigenous people at risk.”

The post Jair Bolsonaro Praised the Genocide of Indigenous People. Now He’s Emboldening Attackers of Brazil’s Amazonian Communities. appeared first on The Intercept.

In an extremely violent, unequal, and racist society such as Brazil, where militarized policing of poor communities of mostly black and brown people is already the norm, it’s unsurprising that conservative, white elites would agree with these ideas. Bolsonaro’s support is strongest among men, whites, evangelicals, the wealthiest, and the most educated.

However, that’s not the whole story. In the most recent polling, 47 percent of self-defined black and brown voters support Bolsonaro. That’s 6 percentage points more than his opponent, the Workers’ Party’s Fernando Haddad, whose traditional base is among the poor. Bolsonaro has 38 percent support among voters who make minimum wage or less ($3,090 per year) and 48 percent among voters who make between $3,090 and $6,180. These numbers are consequential and, at first glance, perplexing: If police violence and abuse is endemic in Brazil, why would the principal victims of this problem support a candidate who wants those same police to be more violent and abusive? My field research as a social scientist offers some insight.

Maycon, 23, is a young black man from a poor neighborhood in Brazil. He has a brother in jail, dreams of being a police officer, and strongly defends implementing the death penalty, which he sees as the population’s defense against what he calls “homie rights,” a play on human rights. An ardent supporter of imprisoned ex-President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of the Workers’ Party, he would also like to see stricter laws for “bandits,” a central position of far-right candidates like Bolsonaro.

In the conversations I have had with teenagers from the poor outskirts of Brazil’s major cities, Bolsonaro voters follow the same punitive orientation and show solidarity with the police, who, they believe, should have the right to kill. Paradoxically, these same boys report daily humiliations at the hands of abusive police officers. “If I am not dressed as a humble worker and do not lower my head … I mean if I hold my head up high and with a name-brand hat, it makes me look like a thug to them, so they stop me, beat me up, and throw me on the floor,” said Pepe, 17.

The number of deaths with police involvement has increased dramatically in Brazil. So far this year in Rio de Janeiro, police have killed nearly 128 people per month, nearly triple the rate from five years ago. Across the country, 4,424 people were executed by police in 2016, according to the latest edition of the Atlas of Violence. This is a marked increase. If 71.5 percent of homicide victims are black or brown, and young men and the poor are drastically overrepresented, you can safely hypothesize that the same dynamic plays out among victims of police violence, despite the lack of available data.

With this in mind, Maycon and Pepe’s conservatism doesn’t appear to make sense. All it takes is one cop making the wrong split-second judgement — perhaps mistaking the umbrella in their hand for a rifle — and they could be the next casualty.

First, it must be pointed out that the degree of solidarity with the police varies according to the context. The situation is exceptional in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas, which are characterized by genocidal police action, and in most of the poor neighborhoods of São Paulo, where one-fifth of police killings occur. As a reaction to this, particularly strong citizen activism exists in both cities.

Maycon and Pepe, however, are from the outskirts of the southern city of Porto Alegre. Beyond the city’s activist and hip-hop circles, their views are quite common. By talking with public school teachers in the northeastern city of Fortaleza and reading Juliano Spyer’s book “Social Media in Emergent Brazil,” about an impoverished region of the northeastern state of Bahia, I increasingly have the feeling that, throughout the country’s urban poor and working-class neighborhoods and deep into the heartland, this apparent contradiction is much more prevalent than outsiders may have previously imagined.

Since colonial times, our collective consciousness has erected an imaginary partition, dividing the country into two separate Brazils: one white, civilized, and secure, and another black, barbaric, and dangerous.

Since colonial times, our collective consciousness has erected an imaginary partition, dividing the country into two separate Brazils: one white, civilized, and secure, and another black, barbaric, and dangerous. With the feminist theorist bell hooks and the researcher Teresa Caldeira, we learned that our dominant mythologies understand danger as “the other,” something from the outside. But Brazilian social thought theory warns that the construction of “marginality” — rife with projections of fear and risk — produces a central figure in our imaginations: that of the “vagabond” or “thug,” deviant and destabilizing to social order and therefore criminalized and dehumanized.

There are many ways that the vagabond figure perpetuates itself. Popular, sensationalist afternoon crime shows like “Urgent Brasil” do this with their strong, pro-police bias, but that hardly compares to the new genre of violent spectacle that has taken root: home videos that circulate on WhatsApp among lower and working-class communities. As Spyer explains, it is a separate universe, a class indicator in which real-life blood, brutal sex, gunshots, and stabbing are turned into brutal spectacle: an ostentation of violence, filmed and gossiped about in communities.

As I choose the words to write, I’m trembling as I remember the tightness in my chest and the sick feeling I had after watching a video that was sent to me of a man’s coldblooded execution, shot 29 times by drug traffickers. Then I received another, this time of drug dealers firing rifles into the air.

As Spyer notes, these images circulate as an expression of indignation with impunity, but also as a disciplining and moralizing power. It is also worth noting that the execution videos are almost always of cavalier and audacious traffickers operating within a lawless, Wild West environment. Executions by police, by contrast, are rarely filmed (for obvious reasons) and therefore less present in the popular imagination.

This type of ordinary violence creates a sense of impunity and insecurity that affects the poorest, who run the daily risk of losing what little they have managed to scrape together.

Beto, an Uber driver and passionate Bolsonaro voter, saw half of his teenage friends die at the hands of traffickers or the police. Recently, while driving a passenger, he was held up at gunpoint. The robber took not only his money and cellphone, but also his dignity, forcing him to get down on all fours and beg for his life. He showed me and my research partner, Lúcia Scalco, a video of his “mooch” cousin in prison: He was playing soccer and watching Netflix. “He’s better off than I am: He’s got food and TV shows.” Stories like this of bad guys who have it easy in jail and then return to the streets to rob and steal are always circulating. “Is it fair that I work 15 hours a day and these bums have everything handed to them?” he asked.

Beto’s feeling of injustice makes logical sense when we remember that a youth from a marginalized community who manages to study and has a decent job is a person who managed to overcome a series of obstacles, through great individual effort and the help of family support networks, plus some luck. They had to face down the appeal of drug trafficking on the one hand, and absolute state neglect on the other. To build your personal narrative as an “honest, law-abiding person” in this context is a radical tale of survival.

It is therefore not at all exceptional that many marginalized people reproduce unpopular ideologies to be accepted socially. It is extremely useful for them to blame the bad guys to justify their own predicament in life.

For intellectuals from W.E.B. Du Bois to Cornel West, the notion of “double consciousness” attempts to account for a conflicting identity of (black) subjects who suffer from prejudice, but seek to fit into the norm. Young men who back more hard-line policing live this existential dilemma: They know they may be the next victims, but they deny the statistics of mass incarceration and police brutality.

Most of our research participants have attempted a military career. Many do not pass and follow other paths, such as Maycon, who is now taking a course to become a private security guard and dreams of the day he receives his permit to carry a firearm (a privilege that is tightly restricted at the moment, but which Bolsonaro wants to loosen). In this universe of multiple violences, having a weapon means “not having to get on all fours.” It’s the promise of being able to defend yourself. In the daily struggle of life, death is always more present than for his more privileged peers. Guns are a language learned from childhood in games of traffickers and robbers that simulate bloody executions. Guns also represent virility: Those rifles raised high by drug dealers are there, phallic, to reassert male power.

Before we reproduce biases about the “right-wing poor,” we should make the effort to put things in perspective and remember that, in most cases, protection comes only from religion, family, collective action, and social movements — rarely from the state. For many, their entire lived experience is marked by violence, from the beating they received from their father to the regular, humiliating encounters they endure from the police. It’s hardly the most fertile soil to sprout democratic and defiant souls.

If we elect a fascist president and if part of that vote comes from the popular classes, the responsibility for this lies, firstly, in class hatred, racism, and decades of state neglect.

If we elect a fascist president and if part of that vote comes from the popular classes, the responsibility for this lies, firstly, in class hatred, racism, and decades of state neglect. Those who are beaten by the real police, but cheer for the ideal police, are only expressing the very contradictions of the Brazilian nation as it has always existed.

Bolsonaro speaks to the core of a part of popular and masculine culture. When the candidate says live on the evening news that if “thugs” have rifles, then policemen and good citizens need even bigger ones and “not flowers,” the call for increased violence shocks some viewers, but not all. For many, he is speaking directly to their deepest fears and desires. They have experienced violence and demand that violence be inflicted upon others in equal measure.

The post Jair Bolsonaro Wants Brazilian Cops to Kill More. So Why Are Victims of Police Violence Voting for Him? appeared first on The Intercept.

In Salvador, the country’s capital of Afro-Brazilian culture, Paulo Sérgio Ferreira Santana was jailed last week for the killing of Moa do Katendê, a master of the Afro-Brazilian martial art capoeira, in a bar, hours after Bolsonaro narrowly missed winning the election in the first round of voting.

Eyewitnesses said the pair argued about politics and traded insults before Santana, a Bolsonaro supporter, paid his bill, left, returned with a knife, and stabbed the capoeira master, a Workers’ Party supporter, 12 times in the back.

“Some guy with one of my shirts commits an excess. What do I have to do with it? I lament it.”

At a rally last month, Bolsonaro grabbed a camera tripod and pretended to shoot it like a rifle, telling a crowd of enthusiastic supporters, “Let’s shoot the petralhada here,” using a derogatory term for Workers’ Party voters. It was hardly an isolated comment in his decades-long career of praising torture, hate crimes, and political violence. The candidate, however, denied any responsibility for Katendê’s death. “Some guy with one of my shirts commits an excess,” said Bolsonaro. “What do I have to do with it? I lament it.”

He pointed out that, in fact, he was a victim of electoral violence, referencing a recent incident where he was stabbed by a mentally ill attacker while on the campaign trail, which landed him in a hospital for three weeks. “I ask people not to do this,” he added. “I have no control over millions and millions of people who support me.”

Since September 30, more than 70 politically motivated attacks and threats have been documented across Brazil — at least 50 of which were perpetrated by Bolsonaro supporters and six against them, according to data from the Brasil.io data lab, Agência Pública, and Open Knowledge Brasil. The numbers do not include online threats and harassment.

A pro-Bolsonaro media site questioned the legitimacy of the report, because Agência Pública receives funding from George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, adding that it “will not go into the merits of analyzing the veracity of the cases reported in the article.”

Brazil is one of the world’s most violent countries, with nearly 64,000 homicides last year, the vast majority of which have gone unsolved. Political murders and violence are common in the country: An average of nine elected officials are killed per year, and 28 candidates were murdered nationwide in the 2016 municipal election cycle — but usually because of land, property, or economic interests.

“People didn’t kill each other before because of what another demanded from the world politically. It’s a result of this election,” said Bruno Paes Manso, a researcher at the Center for the Study of Violence at the University of São Paulo, which maps and publishes data on Brazil’s homicides.

“It’s a discourse of war.”

“It’s a different justification to kill – as much as emotion, alcohol, or provocation might be involved,” he said. “The fact that immediate interests such as land or property aren’t involved is something new,” he added.

Bolsonaro, a former army captain, has said that “violence can only be combated with violence,” that “minorities have to shut up and bend to the majority,” and once called for former Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso to be executed.

“It’s a discourse of war,” said Manso. “Against an enemy.”

Multiple incidents of women being beaten or harassed for wearing anti-Bolsonaro stickers have been reported across the country, adding to a climate of fear among social groups targeted by Bolsonaro’s rhetoric.

In Nova Iguaçu, just north of Rio de Janeiro, a transgender woman was reportedly beaten with a metal bar while her attackers yelled transphobic insults, including, “I hope Bolsonaro wins to kill this piece of trash.” Videos of soccer fans, inside and outside of stadiums, singing, “Bolsonaro will kill faggots!” have flooded social media in recent weeks.

As the nation went to the polls, images circulated online of a Bolsonaro supporter using a pistol to push buttons in a voting booth. Police investigated and the gun turned out to be a toy.

Last week, a video game in which a Bolsonaro character trawls the streets beating up mostly black “thugs,” feminists, transgender people, and journalists was blasted by Brazil’s electoral court for “inciting hate crimes” – a charge that Bolsonaro himself has faced in the past.

Last Wednesday night, Bolsonaro and Haddad both released notes condemning the violence. Bolsonaro went to Twitter to reject the votes of or association with those who practice violence against his rivals and asked that they cast a blank ballot or for “the opposition for consistency, and that the authorities take the appropriate measures, as against slanderers who try to harm us.”

The next day, Joice Hasselmann, a former journalist disgraced for serial plagiarism and now congresswoman-elect with Bolsonaro’s Social Liberal Party, posted a video on her popular YouTube channel explaining that Workers’ Party militants dressed in Bolsonaro T-shirts were inciting violence.

Attacks on Journalists

The electoral violence has been accompanied by a rise in attacks on journalists and media professionals. Brazil’s Association of Investigative Journalism, or Abraji, has assembled a list of 138 attacks against journalists in 2018, 62 of which have involved physical violence.

Mistrust of Brazil’s highly concentrated and oligarchical media was already on the rise among all sectors of society, a phenomenon that Bolsonaro has stoked throughout his campaign.

During the first round vote, supporters outside Bolsonaro’s home blasted journalists from the billionaire-owned Globo network as “communists.”

Violence against journalists in Brazil was already a very real phenomenon. Since 2013, 16 journalists have been killed for their work, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Most of the killings happen in Amazon or interior cities, targeting journalists or radio hosts who reported on local corruption. Earlier this year, there were reports of journalists being intimidated while covering the controversial jailing of former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

Digital threats and harassment have also become increasingly common, and the sheer volume and ferocity of attacks over this electoral period is extremely worrisome, observers say.

“When there are coordinated attacks on a person’s reputation, publishing of personal details, which we have seen a lot of, this worries us a lot. It’s a new tendency, and we have to be prepared,” said Daniel Bramatti, president of Abraji and head of data journalism at the Estadão newspaper.

Bramatti said female journalists are especially vulnerable to attacks. In northeastern Pernambuco state, a journalist reported being violently attacked by two men who brandished a knife and threatened to rape her after calling her a “leftist.” One of the men was wearing a “President Bolsonaro” T-shirt.

“Female journalists suffer much more” than their male counterparts, notes Janaina Garcia, head of the Journalists Against Harassment collective. “By calling her a slut or a whore and using threats of sexual violence,” she says, “misogyny is being used to disqualify” female reporters’ work.

The climate of violence against journalists is stimulated by constant accusations of “fake news” and attempts to delegitimize the media, Bramatti said.

In the runup to the vote, Hasselmann posted on her right-wing YouTube channel that a Brazilian magazine had received $152 million to smear Bolsonaro.

But while denouncing reports that discredit Bolsonaro as “fake news,” his supporters are responsible for a tidal wave of misinformation.

In open WhatsApp groups set up by Bolsonaro supporters, videos and pictures with titles like “Haddad’s Friend says Jesus is Gay” and “Haddad promises to take 350 thousand prisoners out of jail” are shared, as well as images linking Haddad to the sexualization of children.

Elsewhere, one of Bolsonaro’s sons was falsely depicted wearing a T-shirt with offensive remarks about Brazil’s northeastern population.

“We know the importance of freedom of the press,” Bolsonaro posted on Twitter last Thursday, after retweeting a follower claiming that the Bahia killing had not been committed by a Bolsonaro voter, as had been widely reported. The candidate added, “Trash press!”

The post Political Violence Surges in Brazil as Far-Right Strongman Jair Bolsonaro Inches Closer to the Presidency appeared first on The Intercept.

“The child, they took him when he was only 8 days old. She asks that you not take away her children again.”

Two-hundred women listened in silence to Élida’s testimony, given in her native language Guarani, an indigenous language of central South America. A local named Wanda Kuña Rendy had volunteered to translate Élida’s words to Portuguese for the authorities in attendance, but she was only able to get through a few sentences before bursting into tears. “The child, they took him when he was only 8 days old,” Rendy said. “She asks that you not take away her children again.”

Élida smiled when I asked for an interview, but she was hesitant to allow her youngest child to leave her lap as we recorded. As a researcher, I had prepared to attend the sixth annual Kuñangue Aty, a large gathering of women from the Kaiowá and Guarani indigenous communities, to focus on the prayers and songs that marked the nights and days of the meeting, from the initial reception to the final debates. As an ethnographer or a reporter, however, I was compelled to pay attention to the issues afflicting the human beings involved. “Why has the number of indigenous children in institutional care increased so much in the last year?” I wondered. Janete Alegre, organizer of the Amambai meeting, asked, “Is there now a law that says indigenous children must be taken from their indigenous families and given to the whites?”

In the sprawling municipality of Dourados alone — with a population of some 200,000 people in an area twice the size of Los Angeles — 50 indigenous children were living in shelters at the end of 2017, according to a study by the Funai Regional Office. By July 2018, 34 remained separated from their families. I discovered the stories of Élida and other mothers in Dourados are just the tip of the iceberg. Uncountable communities suffer from the complex problems associated with the state taking indigenous children from their families. There are indications of even more serious irregularities in the processes where the children are taken, which have been monitored since 2010 by Funai, the Public Defender’s Office, and the Federal Public Ministry.

“The institution says that she is poor, that she lives in an unauthorized occupation,” shouts Jaqueline Gonçalves, a young member of the Kaiowá leadership. “Institutions need to respect us. This is the genocide of indigenous peoples!” Her words invoked the violence inflicted upon the Kaiowá and Guarani peoples in Brazil since the beginning of the 20th century. The local family court alleges mistreatment and neglect, as well as drug and alcohol problems, to justify the separation of children from their mothers.

“They claim that our children are dirty. But of course! We live off the land and cook over open fires,” a group of women wrote in a letter signed by participants of the Amambai meeting. Demanding that alternatives be found within the villages themselves, as mandated by the federal Statute for Children and Adolescents, these women want to have the right to follow the traditions of child care passed down from their ancestors. You should eat food from your place of origin and sing to newborn babies, they said.

The post “Forget Your Son”: Brazil Is Forcibly Taking Indigenous Children and Putting Them Up for Adoption appeared first on The Intercept.

Franco was killed in a nighttime ambush with no chance to react. It’s the same cowardly way that people are killed in impoverished favelas across Rio de Janeiro and the rest of Brazil — places where the mail isn’t delivered, the electricity is spotty, the water is polluted, and schools close when gunfire begins. In these parts of town, residents’ main point of contact with the government are armored personnel carriers — known as a “Big Skull” — who enter their neighborhood with a license to kill.

In her first campaign for public office in 2016, Franco ran from a scrappy, progressive political party, and still won the fifth-highest vote total out of her colleagues on Rio de Janeiro’s City Council. A black, lesbian single mother, born and raised in a favela, Franco was a rare face of representation in an overwhelming white and male political landscape. And with two degrees from one of Brazil’s most elite universities and over a decade of experience in politics, she was an undeniably powerful charismatic force in the growing movement to confront the epidemic of violence perpetrated or perpetuated by the state. Last year, Rio saw only slightly fewer killings by police than in the entire United States, which is itself a dramatic outlier.

“It was a message,” came the refrain from mourners. But what were Franco’s killers trying to say? And to whom?

Stunned mourners filled the streets of downtown Rio de Janeiro last Thursday to grieve and protest Franco’s death. “It was a message,” the oft-heard refrain came from the crowd. But what were Franco’s killers trying to say? And to whom? The killers seemed to shout in a whisper: “Don’t you dare mess with the systems around you.”

It is too early to know whether Franco’s murderers took her life in retaliation for her activism against police violence. A few scant facts have emerged in the days since her assassination suggesting that perhaps Franco’s murder shares similarities with the killings she regularly denounced. Police investigators traced bullet casings found at the crime scene to a purchase made by the Federal Police. Bullets from the same batch were used in the deadliest massacre in São Paulo’s history in 2015. Two police officers and a municipal guard were convicted of murdering 17 and the attempted murder of seven more. The connection to the police bullets led a top federal criminal prosecutor in Rio to quickly go on the record to say the details of Franco’s murder “denote a certain degree of planning that leads me to consider police officers as suspects in this crime,” but that other hypotheses should also be considered.

Whatever the result of the investigation into Franco’s death and its possible connection to her advocacy, all the killings offer a window into the violence and impunity that reigns on Rio de Janeiro’s streets.

In Rio, around one in six homicides are solved, according to official statistics — though that number hasn’t been updated for more than three years. From 2010 to 2015, police killed 3,441 people, yet charges were only filed in four of those cases — about 0.1% — despite, for instance, Human Rights Watch having independently documented 15 cases over that period which merited investigation.

These statistics are just symptoms of much bigger problems. Approximately 2 million people live in areas controlled by milícias, gangs run by current and former members of the police and firefighter corps. Milícias were explicitly supported by state institutions, which sold them as an answer to combat drug traffickers. Soon, however, the milícias proved themselves to be as violent and oppressive, or worse, while making small fortunes by extorting local businesses, running illegal rackets, and, in some areas, selling drugs. While milícias battle drug gangs for territory head to head, on-duty cops are notorious business partners of traffickers, demanding a fixed monthly cut of the profits in exchange for protection and intelligence. Corrupt cops also sell guns and munitions to the very gangs their colleagues may do battle with the next day. Politicians benefit from the criminality in a variety of ways and have shown themselves to be unwilling or unable to fight against it.

Marielle Franco is gone, but the pressure to respond to these murders – and all crimes against young people in poor neighborhoods – cannot stop. The conventional wisdom that organized crime can’t be confronted without using weapons is wrong. The idea that people in Brazil’s poor suburbs cannot have personal freedoms is as tired as it is wrong. Perhaps a single woman cannot stand down Brazil’s lords of war, but the masses can.

Just days before her execution, Franco denounced the murders of three men. They were all young and from poor neighborhoods, members of the “target demographic” for violent death, the type of killings that fill Brazil’s cemeteries. Two of the victims’ killings took place in a police district infamous for the bloody terror it inflicts on residents; another died at a police checkpoint in a different favela. These are the stories Marielle Franco told.

Matheus Melo Castro, 23. Killed on March 12

It was a short trip on the route he always took. Matheus Melo Castro, a pastoral assistant, had wrapped up a Monday meeting at the Mission of Faith Evangelical Church in a favela called Manguinhos. He hopped on the motorcycle he had bought with his earnings as a garbage collector to drop off his girlfriend in the Jacarezinho favela. A single avenue separates the two communities. On his way home, around 10 p.m., Melo came across a police checkpoint. Onlookers said the officers were stopping and frisking underage boys. Melo’s family said he was not told to stop his bike. He went through the checkpoint, and just a few yards ahead, two bullets tore through his body, one in the chest and the other in the right arm.

Melo fell to the ground. Police watched from a distance, as if they’d just taken down an animal in a hunt. They offered no first aid. Gravely wounded but still alive, crack users wandering the nearby streets came to his aid. Unsure what to do, they decided to put him in a wheelbarrow and ran across a heavily trafficked avenue to get to an urgent care clinic.

Police offered no first aid. Gravely wounded but still alive, crack users wandering the nearby streets came to his aid.

Drivers passing by witnessed the scene and word about the incident spread. More than 100 friends and relatives quickly assembled to keep vigil outside the clinic. Many of those present were with Melo singing and praying in church just a short while earlier. He had led the service they called “youth refuge” that night.

The medical attention was not enough, and Melo succumbed to his wounds.

“It was cruel. He went by and they shot him up,” one of Melo’s aunts told The Intercept Brasil.

A cousin added, “Worst of all, they didn’t offer first aid. It was the crack addicts that carried him to the clinic. If he had been a trafficker, the police would have captured him and guarded him in a hospital. But since he was just a random guy, they shot him and left him, like he was nobody.”

His family members asked to not be named, fearing reprisals for speaking publicly about the crime.

In cases such as Melo’s death, a stilted, perfunctory apology from the police is the norm. Usually, they put out a short press release that says nothing, because these deaths are just collateral damage — unlucky victims caught in the eternal crossfire between the Good Guys and the Bandits. Yet local residents in Manguinhos said there had been no confrontations going on at the time Melo — who was well-known in the neighborhood and said to have no criminal connections — was killed. Some hours later, however, people began to hear gunshots.

Melo’s family believes the shootout after the fact was an attempt to portray Melo as another tragic victim of a “stray bullet.” The family saw it as smoke and mirrors. The local police united responsible for “pacifying” – a euphemism used by the Rio government to designate a crumbling, decade-old community policing initiative –  the favela said that its base in the neighborhood was “attacked by criminals” and they were therefore obliged to return fire. Additionally, a bus had been set on fire in the early-morning hours on a main access road into the favela. All of this took place within walking distance from a sprawling “Police City” compound, which sits wedged between the favelas of Manguinhos and Jacarezinho. The bus arson, just like Melo’s death, is under “confidential investigation,” like so many other cases that collect dust in Rio’s police stations.

Melo’s family feels threatened and is considering fleeing, following advice proffered by some some neighbors. But the family is also considering fighting back. The family is looking for his killers despite their fear, and Melo may well have his day in court. His family intends to sue the state government and has already begun a parallel investigation to find out who pulled the trigger. Their lawyers are looking for images from the city’s traffic surveillance cameras that may have captured his last minutes of life. Security cameras from a nearby animal shelter may also offer crucial footage.

The press office of Rio’s Civil Police, responding to queries about Melo’s death, said in an email that the probe is “ongoing and, at the moment, there are no updates to report about this case.”

The police high command from the unit responsible for “pacifying” the favela said it has opened an inquiry to verify if one of its officers was involved in the shooting. By phone, a representative from the unit told The Intercept Brasil that an internal probe had been opened the day after the crime. They were not able to confirm whether a police vehicle was at the location where Melo was killed. “Even if there were one, it was not necessarily from the pacifying police unit. It could have been from the local Military Police battalion or the Civil Police,” the source said. The police probe underway is an “inquiry,” not a full-blown “investigation,” which means that it cannot produce formal accusations.

Into this fog of uncertainty waded Marielle Franco — as she so often did. “Yet another young man’s murder that may have been at the hands of the police,” Franco tweeted last Tuesday. “Matheus Melo was leaving church. How many more need to die for this war to end?”

The next day, amid hymns and cries for justice, Melo was buried in a Rio de Janeiro cemetery. Just hours later, Franco was executed.

Eduardo Ferreira, 39, and Reginaldo Santos Batista, age unknown. Killed March 5

Locals heard gunshots shortly before sunrise. They thought it odd at such early hour. It didn’t look like there was any shootout going on with drug traffickers – their usual points of sale weren’t even open yet. When the shots died down, a small group of neighbors went to investigate the scene. They found two bodies in a sparsely forested area near the Acari River in the northern part of Rio de Janeiro.

The first was lying facedown, wearing board shorts and a T-shirt, his eyes shut. The neighbors decided to pull him up by his legs and get him off the slope in order to identify the body. In times like these, no one waits for a forensic crew to arrive – that can take hours. So bystanders try to divine for themselves if the victim was a friend or relative. Later, the locals would discover the body belonged to Eduardo Ferreira, 39.

“Here, we learn how to hoist a body when we’re just kids.”

The other body, a few yards ahead of him on a steeper incline, belonged to Reginaldo Santos Batista, whose age was unknown. More effort was required to lift Batista off the hillside. “Here, we learn how to hoist a body when we’re just kids,” said one of the locals. “Do you know how to do that? I think not, right?”

It took all day for the homicide unit of the police to arrive. At around 7 p.m., they filled out a body tag: “Black man, muscular, strong features, shaved head.”

Ferreira lived in Acari since he was a child. He left behind two children and a girlfriend. His mother, siblings, and cousins are all evangelical Christians who also live in the neighborhood. Ferreira was self-employed and “always chatting” with locals in the area, according to his friends. “He was a solitary guy. Somewhat shy,” said a local resident. “I remember him telling me to be careful in this area. He was concerned about his neighbors.”

Little is known about Batista. No one came forward to claim his body.

The circumstances of the deaths remain shrouded in mystery. Eyewitnesses said a group of police officers were hiding in the forest just outside the Acari favela and left the bodies there before taking off. The 41st police battalion, infamous for being the most lethal unit in Rio, posts near daily updates about its actions usually appear, but there are no entries for March 5. The Twitter account of the Rio state police also has no mentions of an incident in Acari.

When questioned, the police said they were unaware of any operation underway in the area at that time. A few hours later, they sent out a press release saying that police from the 41st battalion were patrolling the area to “repress drug sales, car robberies, and arrest criminals.” The release also said that police had arrested a suspected drug dealer, who goes by “Timbau,” that was carrying a walkie-talkie.

After the Monday killings, there were shootouts every day for a week. The following Saturday, a neighborhood woman was going to pick up donations at the community residents’ association when she heard shots. She looked around to see if there were any drug dealers engaged in a shootout or if the points of sale were open, but it was early and everything was closed. Police were “shooting at random from their vehicle,” she said. “I looked all around and I could not tell why they were shooting. There was nothing. Just residents out on the streets.” She took shelter at a neighbor’s. It was 8 a.m.

“Around 1 p.m., I went back to the same place and there were even more police, and they kept shooting. That’s when two armored police vehicles entered the favela,” she said.

Other residents sent voice messages around to alert the neighborhood. “My God, so many gunshots here,” one said. Another, on the verge of tears, related: “Guys, I am so scared. Really scared. They’re right in front of my house.” Another neighbor responded: “These guys are harassing residents. Shooting up other people’s houses. This isn’t right. On a Saturday?”

As the hail of gunshots from the police continued to ring out through Acari, Marielle Franco answered the call. She denounced the police operation. On her Facebook page, she wrote: “We need to raise our voices so everyone knows what’s happening in Acari right now. Rio’s 41st Military Police Battalion is terrorizing and abusing residents of Acari. This week, two young men were killed and thrown into a gulley. Today, the police walked the streets threatening residents. It has always happened and with the military intervention it has gotten even worse.”

Adapted to English by Taylor Barnes and Andrew Fishman

The post Brazil’s Marielle Franco Denounced Three Murders in the Days Before Her Assassination. These Are the Stories. appeared first on The Intercept.