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Brazil Boiling


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do the police still shoot the homeless?

 

Yes.

 

 

INTERNATIONAL CHILD RESOURCE INSTITUTE (ICRI)

24 April 1995

THE KILLINGS ESCALATE IN BRAZIL

Street Children: More and More Killed Everyday

By Caius Brandao

ICRI Brazil Project Coordinator

 

Brazil has highly progressive children's rights legislation, the world's largest and strongest movement for the rights of street children and was one of the first countries to sign and ratify the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child. Why, then, does the ever-growing number of murdered children and adolescents seem to have no end? Why, indeed, are more and more Brazilian children dying while society already has at hand powerful tools for the protection of their rights?

 

The answer, lamentably, is that killing children is a profitable 'pastime' in Brazil. The so called 'cycle of impunity' means not only neglect or omission, but a rather profitable corruption scheme within public security and law-enforcement agencies. Tania de Almeida, head judge of Duque de Caxias Court, delivered a powerful speech at the Street Children Hearing in Copenhagen. The judge explained a vicious circle: the powerful elite in Rio pay private security agencies to provide for its safety; these agencies are headed by police officers or chiefs of the Military Police; rank-and-file police officers, unable to live on their salaries, often moonlight, quite commonly for the security agencies; reassured by the cycle of impunity, the security agencies branch out into 'illegal' business, which as often as not, turns out to be 'cleaning up' the streets for dissatisfied merchants; cleaning up the streets comes to mean eliminating the children of the poor perceived as one of the source of Rio's modern-day problems. Judge de Almeida went on to characterize the staff of these private security agencies as largely comprised of professional killers. Finally, according to de Almeida, there are several Rio 'parlamentares', or city officials, who, once professional killers themselves, currently protect their 'successors'.

 

Clearly, there is a perceived benefit to killing destitute children, not only to those who directly profit from it, i.e., the hit-men. When street children die it also 'benefit' the people who paid the professional killers to clean up the streets in the first place. The benefit of children-free streets can get to be very expensive, since the killers need protection at the judicial level as well, and this is where corruption comes into play. Money and political power are the most common means of undermining the law in Brazil. Ultimately, the Children and Adolescent Act (ECA) and the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child become dead-letters. Despite well-voiced national and international outrage, murder, the most violent abuse against children, continues to go unpunished by the government. According to Amnesty International, 90% of the killings of impoverished Brazilian children and adolescents--who are mostly of African descent--have never been resolved because of the infamous cycle of impunity. As a result, the killings escalate.

 

On April 4, the Second Juvenile Court of the city of Rio de Janeiro, using 1994 figures which include children and adolescents from the city of Rio and the neighboring Baixada Fluminense, reported a 10% increase in the number of minors killed in Rio de Janeiro over the previous year. In 1994, 1221 minors were killed in the State of Rio de Janeiro, an average of more then three kids everyday; 570 died from gun-shot wounds, and a total of 344 were under the age of 11.

 

International Child Resource Institute

Brazil Project

1810 Hopkins St

Berkeley, CA 94707 USA

Tel (510) 644-1000

Fax (510) 525-4106

Email icri@igc.org

 

 

And this.

 

Oh, and this one.

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So, in the last couple of years where have we seen widespread anti government protests/rioting/violence?

 

UK

Greece

Spain

Egypt

Tunisia

Sweden

Brazil

Syria

 

I'm sure there are more.

Edited by Tamuff_Villa
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So, in the last couple of years where have we seen widespread anti government protests/rioting/violence?

UK

Greece

Spain

Egypt

Tunisia

Sweden

Brazil

Syria

I'm sure there are more.

Add Malaysia to that list.

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Updated list:

 

UK

Greece

Spain

Egypt

Tunisia

Sweden

Brazil

Syria

ADDED: Malaysia

ADDED: France

ADDED: Bulgaria

ADDED: Libya

ADDED: Turkey

Edited by Tamuff_Villa
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Yes, it is all very exciting. It'll result in more transparency (read: the rich will find other ways to stash their money) and perhaps a few more social-democratic governments will come along and the poor will get a wee boost, education & health care will get better and things will look OK for a while.

 

All the while people keep having babies. Lots of them.

 

And at some point some leaders will turn around and say, hey guys, quadrupling the population of any species in any ecosystem is a bad idea, what the **** are we doing?

 

But it will be too late and while the advanced countries come to terms with chowing down lab-meat, and the rich enjoy their natural foods, the majority of the earths population will get hungrier, and hungrier, while the weather turns to shit and farmlands scorch, droughts and famines are widespread, and some rather populous islands begin to flood.

 

Or it could all turn out OK.

 

I haven't had my coffee yet.

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I thought things were peachy in Brazil, what with a decade or so of social democratic government...

Lots of growth, but isn't the issue how it's distributed?

 

 

same old same old

the place is booming for capitalists because they've got a vast pool of labour that will make shoes for a penny and now have a vast pool of trained labour that can build a car for a dollar

 

people can usually work out if they are being stiffed by the man

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Rio and Sao Paulo have reversed the price hikes.

 

A protest that worked?!?!?

 

An experiment.  Can you buy them off with seashells?  Does the semblance of flexibility work better than shooting their eyes out with tear gas grenades, as in Istanbul?

 

The issue for the government is managing the process credibly, bringing order without excessive violence while the world is watching (they can get back to the usual violence in a few weeks, round up the ringleaders they have been following with drones and electronically, intimidate their families, make a few examples.

 

The issue for the protesters is moving beyond the immediate presenting problem, to a broader explanation of what's wrong, and conveying that to the people who have come out on the streets (who are, almost by definition, likely to be the more impulsive and the less interested in complicated ideas with long payback times).

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