WHEN LULA AND THE WORKERS’ PARTY
TOOK POWER IN BRAZIL, THEY HAD A
PLAN TO TAKE ON CRIME AND THE POWER
OF THE POLICE. THEIR FAILURE HELPED
UNDERMINE THEIR ENTIRE PROGRAM.
ANDREW FISHMAN AND CECÍLIA OLLIVEIRA
OUTHS OPEN, EYES CLOSED, faces spattered with
blood, two freshly decapitated heads lie on a fi lthy fl oor.
A pushcart full of dismembered limbs stands in front of
a wall of iron bars as men yell in the background. These
are just two of many brutal scenes captured in shaky cell
phone videos that spread across Brazil in January 2017.
The Northern Family criminal syndicate had staged
a rebellion at the overcrowded Anísio Jobim prison
complex in the Amazonian city of Manaus, home to
over 1,200 prisoners, more than double its maximum
capacity. Within hours, they had executed fi fty-six
alleged members of their São Paulo–based rival, the
First Command of the Capital, or pcc, the most pow-
erful syndicate in Brazil.
Days later, 450 miles to the north, the p c c
responded at another penitentiary in the state of
Roraima with thirty decapitations. Videos of human
hearts being removed from bodies made the rounds
on messaging apps. “Here is the answer for you — you
killed our brothers in Manaus, and now you’re going to
pay for it.” It was a particularly gruesome episode in a
cycle of violence that the Brazilian government appears
powerless — or unwilling — to stop.
More than thirty-fi ve years after the rebirth of
democracy in the country, in many of Brazil’s favelas,
prisons, and remote rural villages, criminal gangs rule
with impunity. Their violence and terror seeps into the
surrounding communities of the relatively privileged
and pervades the body politic. Like colonial barons,
their power is granted with the connivance of local gov-
ernments. And, just like the olden days, everyone is
expected to kick up a fat share of their ill-gotten spoils.
Corrupt law enforcement in many areas decided in
recent years to forego the middlemen and establish their
own paramilitary mafi as, dubbed militias, to control
the streets themselves. These mafi as have innovated
in cruelty and methods of extortion and far surpassed
traditional drug gangs in their ability to capture state
institutions, pushing Brazil’s drug war to new fron-
tiers. Decades ago, criminals carried rusty revolvers.
Today, gangs tied into global markets have rifles
powerful enough to shoot down armored helicopters —
and even a rocket launcher or two.
In its mainstream press, Brazil’s rampant armed
violence is mostly treated as a police question — and, as
a result, politicians have invested in armored vehicles
and allowed cops to gleefully lean into President Jair
Bolsonaro’s “shoot fi rst, ask questions later” approach
to their work.
In deeply unequal Brazil, it is the oligarchs, the fear-
mongering right-wing politicians, the dirty cops and
military men who most profi t from and perpetuate the
violence that serves as a mechanism for and justifi ca-
tion of social control. The poor and working classes,
overwhelmingly black, suffer almost all the conse-
quences. It would be reasonable for you to assume, then,
that the Brazilian Left is laser-focused on the issue of
public safety and brimming with winning proposals to
end the madness.
You’d be wrong. The Left’s failure on public security
is one of the most puzzling and complicated political
realities in a country notorious for its inscrutable politics.
DAILY INDIGNITIES
Rampant and increasingly hyperviolent criminality does
not impact all Brazilians equally, but the terror and
despair it instills is nearly universal. Brazilians are afraid
to leave their homes and walk down their own streets.
A 2018 survey of Rio de Janeiro residents — a city with
a typical homicide rate by Brazilian standards, but 5.7
times the average for US cities that year — found that
92 percent worry every day that they will be hit by a
stray bullet.
They’re also angry. Angry at the criminals who rob
them; at the police who are rarely there when they need
them; at the justice system that — despite locking up sus-
pects and throwing them in medieval prisons at record
levels — is seen as soft on crime, corrupt, and ineff ec-
tive; at the politicians, with their empty promises and
fake smiles. Angry at the indignity of living with it all
in a country so beautiful and rich in natural resources.
Public insecurity is perhaps the best prism through
which one can understand Brazil’s often bewildering
politics. It is at the root of Bolsonaro’s ascent to power,
the rise of the anti-corruption movement that led to the
traditional drug gangs in their ability to capture state
institutions, pushing Brazil’s drug war to new fron-
tiers. Decades ago, criminals carried rusty revolvers.
Today, gangs tied into global markets have rifles
powerful enough to shoot down armored helicopters —
and even a rocket launcher or two.
In its mainstream press, Brazil’s rampant armed
violence is mostly treated as a police question — and, as
a result, politicians have invested in armored vehicles
and allowed cops to gleefully lean into President Jair
Bolsonaro’s “shoot fi rst, ask questions later” approach
to their work.
In deeply unequal Brazil, it is the oligarchs, the fear-
mongering right-wing politicians, the dirty cops and
military men who most profi t from and perpetuate the
violence that serves as a mechanism for and justifi ca-
tion of social control. The poor and working classes,
overwhelmingly black, suffer almost all the conse-
quences. It would be reasonable for you to assume, then,
that the Brazilian Left is laser-focused on the issue of
public safety and brimming with winning proposals to
end the madness.
You’d be wrong. The Left’s failure on public security
is one of the most puzzling and complicated political
realities in a country notorious for its inscrutable politics.
DAILY INDIGNITIES
Rampant and increasingly hyperviolent criminality does
not impact all Brazilians equally, but the terror and
despair it instills is nearly universal. Brazilians are afraid
to leave their homes and walk down their own streets.
A 2018 survey of Rio de Janeiro residents — a city with
a typical homicide rate by Brazilian standards, but 5.7
times the average for US cities that year — found that
92 percent worry every day that they will be hit by a
stray bullet.
They’re also angry. Angry at the criminals who rob
them; at the police who are rarely there when they need
them; at the justice system that — despite locking up sus-
pects and throwing them in medieval prisons at record
levels — is seen as soft on crime, corrupt, and ineff ec-
tive; at the politicians, with their empty promises and
fake smiles. Angry at the indignity of living with it all
in a country so beautiful and rich in natural resources.
Public insecurity is perhaps the best prism through
which one can understand Brazil’s often bewildering
politics. It is at the root of Bolsonaro’s ascent to power,
the rise of the anti-corruption movement that led to the
killed our brothers in Manaus, and now you’re going to
pay for it.” It was a particularly gruesome episode in a
cycle of violence that the Brazilian government appears
powerless — or unwilling — to stop.
More than thirty-fi ve years after the rebirth of
democracy in the country, in many of Brazil’s favelas,
prisons, and remote rural villages, criminal gangs rule
with impunity. Their violence and terror seeps into the
surrounding communities of the relatively privileged
and pervades the body politic. Like colonial barons,
their power is granted with the connivance of local gov-
ernments. And, just like the olden days, everyone is
expected to kick up a fat share of their ill-gotten spoils.
Corrupt law enforcement in many areas decided in
recent years to forego the middlemen and establish their
own paramilitary mafi as, dubbed militias, to control
the streets themselves. These mafi as have innovated
in cruelty and methods of extortion and far surpassed
traditional drug gangs in their ability to capture state
institutions, pushing Brazil’s drug war to new fron-
tiers. Decades ago, criminals carried rusty revolvers.
Today, gangs tied into global markets have rifles
powerful enough to shoot down armored helicopters —
and even a rocket launcher or two.
In its mainstream press, Brazil’s rampant armed
violence is mostly treated as a police question — and, as
a result, politicians have invested in armored vehicles
and allowed cops to gleefully lean into President Jair
Bolsonaro’s “shoot fi rst, ask questions later” approach
to their work.
In deeply unequal Brazil, it is the oligarchs, the fear-
mongering right-wing politicians, the dirty cops and
military men who most profi t from and perpetuate the
violence that serves as a mechanism for and justifi ca-
tion of social control. The poor and working classes,
overwhelmingly black, suffer almost all the conse-
quences. It would be reasonable for you to assume, then,
that the Brazilian Left is laser-focused on the issue of
public safety and brimming with winning proposals to
end the madness.
You’d be wrong. The Left’s failure on public security
is one of the most puzzling and complicated political
realities in a country notorious for its inscrutable politics.
DAILY INDIGNITIES
Rampant and increasingly hyperviolent criminality does
not impact all Brazilians equally, but the terror and
despair it instills is nearly universal. Brazilians are afraid
to leave their homes and walk down their own streets.
A 2018 survey of Rio de Janeiro residents — a city with
a typical homicide rate by Brazilian standards, but 5.7
times the average for US cities that year — found that
92 percent worry every day that they will be hit by a
stray bullet.
They’re also angry. Angry at the criminals who rob
them; at the police who are rarely there when they need
them; at the justice system that — despite locking up sus-
pects and throwing them in medieval prisons at record
levels — is seen as soft on crime, corrupt, and ineff ec-
tive; at the politicians, with their empty promises and
fake smiles. Angry at the indignity of living with it all
in a country so beautiful and rich in natural resources.
Public insecurity is perhaps the best prism through
which one can understand Brazil’s often bewildering
politics. It is at the root of Bolsonaro’s ascent to power,
the rise of the anti-corruption movement that led to the
impeachment of president Dilma Rousseff , the imprison-
ment of former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the
nationwide repudiation of their Workers’ Party (pt) in
the last elections, and the Left’s struggle to conquer the
hearts and minds of the Brazilian poor and working class.
The pt was in power for more than thirteen con-
secutive years and came into government with bold
proposals to tackle violence, decriminalize drug use,
reimagine the prison system, and, for the fi rst time in
history, seriously address crime’s underlying causes.
How is it possible, then, that homicides have increased,
the prison population has ballooned, the war on drugs
has only intensifi ed, and law enforcement criminality
is a more serious threat than ever? And how can it be
that, despite Rio de Janeiro alone recording more police
killings per year than the entire United States, the over-
whelming majority of Brazilians are clamoring for more
cops on the streets?
BLOOD ON THE STREETS
More than a million Brazilians have been murdered over
the past two decades, according to offi cial statistics,
which researchers suggest are severely undercounted.
That’s a higher death toll than the United States’
“global war on terror” over the same period. Brazil’s
2018 homicide rate is more than six times that of its
southern neighbor Argentina and even of the gun-crazy
United States.
Brazil is also the seventh most unequal country on
the planet. This inequality is sharply demarcated along
racial lines. Not only are black and brown Brazilians
more likely to be poor and undereducated, they’re also
much more likely to live in higher-crime neighborhoods
and be sent to barbaric prisons, and they die violent
deaths at three times the rate of their peers — a gap
that is growing markedly year over year. It is the living
legacy of slavery in the country that imported more
African slaves than any other and only abolished the
institution in 1888.
The fi rst ever Brazilian police forces were consti-
tuted to repress revolts in a society where slaves far
outnumbered masters. With the end of formal slavery
came new anti-vagrancy laws that empowered offi cials
to arrest those caught being “idle.” The punishment
was forced, unpaid labor. Forced labor was abolished
under the current constitution, but it still exists in some
prisons; its full return is a “dream” of Bolsonaro’s.
Resistance, however, has never been very far away.
During the US-backed military dictatorship that lasted
from 1964 to 1985, poor, mostly black, common crimi-
nals who had been deprived of a decent education were
locked up with educated, mostly white, well-heeled,
radical leftist political prisoners. A political education
ensued, and out of the prisons was born the Comando
Vermelho, or Red Command, a new kind of gang that
preached class consciousness. Many others, like the pcc,
founded in a São Paulo prison in 1993, later followed this
model. It ran stickup crews, sold weed, and, in keeping
with its righteous message, gave back to the favelas that
it controlled to earn legitimacy. Such contributions
were essential lifelines in communities that had been
completely abandoned by the state.
To this day, the Comando Vermelho is one of the
largest street-level criminal organizations in Brazil,
although after decades of turf wars, competition with
militias, and changing leadership, brutal capitalism has
supplanted much of the social mission
Beginning in the 1980s and exploding in the 1990s
and 2000s, Brazil evolved from being just a transfer
point for the multibillion-dollar international cocaine
trade to become a market as well. Profi ts soared, as did
competition for turf, investment in the weaponry to
defend it, and the body count. Across Brazil, gangs mul-
tiplied and fortifi ed, but it was the protected politicians,
military offi cers, and businessmen who controlled the
trade routes that made the real profi ts.
This evolution of violence was immortalized in
the 2002 fi lm City of God, which tells the stories of
boys coming of age in a Rio de Janeiro favela as the
cocaine trade begins to take root in their commu-
nity. That same year, Brazil elected Lula as its fi rst
working-class president.
COMPROMISE, CONCILIATION, AND FAILURE
By the time the Workers’ Party (pt) won their fi rst pres-
idential election in 2002, phantasmagoric drug gangs
were well established as society’s principal villains in
Brazil’s monopoly-dominated media. TV news would
faithfully reproduce offi cial police narratives while
broadcasting ubiquitous images of lanky young black
men dressed in shorts and sandals, with a bandanna or
T-shirt obscuring their face, brandishing guns in the
favelas they ruled. However, rather than a tale of suc-
cess, the pt’s attempts to reform Brazil’s justice system
off er an illustrative example of the diffi culties a left-wing
government faces in tackling crime.
Lula won in a landslide in 2002 by moderating
the leftist rhetoric from past failed campaigns while
still promising bold reforms in public security — based
on the correct understanding that poor kids in sandals
were not the root cause of the violence, even if they
were the face of it. “The Brazilian people are domi-
nated by a widespread feeling of insecurity,” read Lula’s
twenty-eight-point public safety plan that year, “and, for
this very reason, our government will seek to institute a
nationally articulated public security system.”
For the fi rst time in Brazil’s history, the country
had a national plan that centered “social exclusion” as
a principal driver of criminality and the need for social
programs to prevent crime. The plan also highlighted the
“lack of preparation” of the police and the “slow pace of
justice” as aggravating factors. It did not mince words
when pointing out the major role of corruption: “orga-
nized crime threatens to compromise the functioning
of democratic institutions, often infi ltrated by gangs.”
However, the party quickly and quietly dropped
any mention of institutional reforms to tackle cor-
ruption within the police and justice system. Lula
and his successor, Rousseff , neutered the ambitions
of their reforms, according to criminologists Rodrigo
Ghiringhelli de Azevedo and Ana Cláudia Cifali, due to
sharp resistance they were guaranteed to face within
the police forces. They were taking the reins of a
country shaped by centuries of brutal exploitation and
extreme poverty, with exceptionally young democratic
institutions — violent policing was one of the few tools
the government had at its disposal for Brazil’s many
unresolved confl icts.
Police forces in Brazil are organized at the state
level, but many public security specialists believe that
eff ective changes will only come through coordination
from the federal government. Lula promised this kind
of change as a candidate, but he realized that it would
require massive congressional support and lengthy nego-
tiations with all twenty-seven governors in order to pass
a constitutional amendment. He was most concerned
that “the scale and depth of the reforms” would put
the presidency “at the center of the public safety issue
giving it unusual prominence in an area that predomi-
nantly aff ects state governments, which would imply an
imminent risk of political damage,” according to Luiz
Eduardo Soares, a former public security secretary under
Lula. So they abandoned the plan.
During his eight years in offi ce, Lula was still able
to implement some ambitious policies, beginning
with the federal disarmament statute that severely
restricted the ability of average citizens to purchase
and own guns. This measure alone is widely credited
with creating an immediate, marked reduction in homi-
cides, but the pt nonetheless conceded the narrative
to pro-gun, “law-and-order” voices on the Right that
attacked the policy as a gift to criminals at the expense
of “good citizens.”
The government was perpetually worried about
being labeled “soft on crime” by a largely conservative
electorate. Instead of building on its reformist successes,
it chose to simultaneously endorse a series of laws that
swelled the prison population and pushed the criminal
justice system to the limit.
Chief among them was a 2006 law that increased
penalties for drug traffi cking. While it decriminalized
drug possession for personal use, a progressive measure
on its face, it did not specify quantities, which perversely
led to many poor, black Brazilians with a joint in their
pocket facing serious time for “narcotics traffi cking”
while rich, white kids got off the hook. The discrimi-
natory law allowed location to be taken into account
for sentencing, so a small quantity of drugs seized in a
favela was more “suspect” than the same amount in a
wealthy neighborhood.
Worse still, 84 percent of drug traffi cking prose-
cutions for ten grams or less are based solely on police
testimony and don’t have physical evidence to back
them up. During the pt years, Brazil’s incarcerated
population tripled to 726,700 people, the third-largest in the world.
Rousseff , who took offi ce in 2011, was far less ambi-
tious in her broader public security agenda than her
predecessor had been, but even more zealous on the
crime question.
In the fi rst weeks of her government, the newly
appointed secretary for drug policy, Pedro Abramovay,
who had previously served as a top justice offi cial under
Lula, told the O Globo newspaper that the administration
wanted to end prison sentences for small-scale, nonvio-
lent drug dealers who were selling to support their own
habits. This would correct one of the principal failures
of the 2006 drug law. “We are talking about people with
no ties to organized crime, putting them in prison, and a
year and a half later, now with organized crime connec-
tions, returning them to society,” explained Abramovay,
who argued that the policy was also contributing to
prison overcrowding.
Rousseff was furious. She demanded that the justice
minister fi re him immediately and go on the record
making clear that the government was in fact moving
in the opposite direction. Abramovay resigned, and the
proposal never saw the light of day.
Soares, Lula’s former public security secretary,
recounted another emblematic disappointment for pro-
gressive reformers that occurred that July. Ministry of
Justice leaders had spent six months preparing new
policy proposals to tackle skyrocketing murder rates.
“The long-awaited date arrived: the meeting with the
president. The minister handed her the document while
the technician prepared to present it,” wrote Soares.
“Homicides?” Rousseff replied. “That’s up to
the states.” As Soares recalls, “she put the document
aside and ordered that they move on to the next
item on the agenda.” Homicides rose 18 percent during
her presidency.
Under intense pressure from the United States ahead
of hosting the Olympics and World Cup, and facing
unexpectedly vehement anti-government protests, in
2013, Rousseff passed a repressive counterterrorism
law and another that gave police greater power to obtain
evidence and infi ltrate suspected criminal organiza-
tions — both broad enough to be used against social
movements. These choices alienated allies on the Left
but also provided the legal tools that the Lava Jato
(Operation Car Wash) anti-corruption investigations
would exploit to persecute the pt, setting in motion a
chain of events leading to Rousseff ’s 2016 impeachment and
Lula's impeachment
In 2014, Rousseff also signed a “Guarantee of
Law and Order” (glo) decree that deployed the mil-
itary in Rio’s favelas to fi ght drug gangs and “pacify”
them ahead of Brazil hosting the World Cup that year,
resulting in a laundry list of abuses, crimes, and rights
violations.
“The favela streets and life were brutally militarized
by the rulers in that recent so-called democratic period,”
wrote Gizele Martins, a journalist and activist from the
Complexo da Maré favelas, which were occupied under
the glo. For seventeen months, “we lived with cur-
fews, surveillance, arrests, and house raids, in addition
to the prohibition of any type of activity on the street.”
According to Martins, local activists like her were “cen-
sored” and “threatened” for documenting daily abuses.
Left-leaning politicians counter that they are limited
by conservative popular opinions. This is largely true.
Only 24 percent of Brazilians support legalizing recre-
ational marijuana, for example. But the pt’s own polling
data from 2015 reveals a complex mixture of opinions
that suggests the public could be persuaded either way
on many public safety issues, if presented with the right
leadership and messaging.
While 72 percent said cops ignore wrongdoing by
colleagues, the same portion said they trust the police,
and the most cited problem was not enough police on the
streets. “Invest more in police training and equipment”
and “combat police corruption” tied as the most pop-
ular responses for how the government should improve
safety. And while 82 percent approved of using the
military to fi ght crime, the same number said police
should change their strategies to avoid deaths and that
greater oversight was necessary. Overwhelming major-
ities believed that “Brazilian prisons are a school for
organized crime” (84 percent) and that “overcrowding
of prisons violates human rights” (77 percent).
Interestingly, 90.8 percent said they had never
heard the phrase “demilitarize the police,” a popular
slogan at left-wing anti-government protests two years
earlier that had already been embraced by some pro-
gressive politicians.
In the end, the pt’s conciliatory strategy led it to
seek institutional arrangements with the Brazilian secu-
rity establishment rather than pursue reforms. As a
result, without progressive leadership framing the issue,
the most reactionary elements of Brazilian society have
dominated the public safety debate with a simple, clear,
and vengeful message
MILITIAS RISING
On the morning of February 9, 2020, seventy heavily
armed police rolled up on a farmhouse in the sleepy,
rural town of Esplanada in the interior of the north-
eastern state of Bahia. The property belonged to a local
politician from Bolsonaro’s most recent political party.
The details of what happened next are contested, except
for one: the police killed Adriano Nóbrega, at the time
Brazil’s most notorious militiaman and fugitive. Police
say he died in a gun battle, but autopsy photos suggest
he was shot at point-blank range and possibly tortured.
While on the lam, Nóbrega met with multiple close
confi dants of the Bolsonaro clan, attended parties, and
even participated in rodeo competitions.
The Brazilian press had exposed during the previous
year that Nóbrega’s family was employed by Bolsonaro’s
son Flávio, and that they were intimately involved in
the family’s alleged embezzlement scheme. Investi-
gators suspect that Nóbrega, a former captain in Rio’s
elite bope swat team, helped launder and invest the
Bolsonaros’ stolen funds. But Nóbrega fi rst gained
national notoriety for commanding the “Crime Offi ce,”
a militia group and hit squad alleged to have carried out
the assassination of left-wing Rio city council member
Marielle Franco in March 2018. Ten years earlier, Franco
was a staff er for progressive state representative Marcelo
Freixo when he led a congressional commission inves-
tigating militias.
Two of Nóbrega’s militia colleagues — including
Bolsonaro’s next-door neighbor and the father of his
son’s ex-girlfriend — are awaiting trial for allegedly
carrying out the killing. Like Nóbrega, multiple people
suspected of being involved in the hit died under
suspicious circumstances. Almost four years later,
the case is still unsolved, and the masterminds remain
at large.
The brazen killing of Franco, the ineff ective inves-
tigation, and the close relationship the suspects have
with Brazil’s fi rst family represent the apex of a national
militia movement decades in the making — with gov-
ernment assistance. The earliest modern antecedents to
today’s militias were “extermination squads” formed by
off -duty cops in cities like Rio during the dictatorship.
They were paid by local business interests to “clean up
the streets” and execute “undesirable elements,” while
being cheered on by the press and granted virtual impu-
nity by the state.
In Rio de Janeiro, as militias grew, intense operations
against drug gangs by the police and military in strategi-
cally important neighborhoods paved the way for militia
takeovers. A study by Fogo Cruzado, an organization
that tracks armed violence, revealed that more than half
of Rio is now controlled by militias.
And it’s no coincidence that Nóbrega chose to lay
not-so-low in Bahia, where militia activity is on the rise.
Prosecutors in the state are investigating police mafi as
for murder for hire, theft, witness kidnappings, drug
traffi cking, torture, and extortion.
In the northern state of Pará, where the Amazon
River meets the Atlantic Ocean, militias battle for drug
territory with the local chapter of Comando Vermelho.
Militias, as in Rio, control informal public transportation
services, hold monopolies on pirated TV and internet
connections and cooking gas, extort local businesses for
“protection,” and sell drugs. Pará is second only to Rio in
police killings per year.
These territorial disputes inevitably lead to more
death, but once the militias install themselves and formal
police authorities leave them alone, shoot-outs in their
areas tend to be less common. “Disappearances,” how-
ever, are much higher, and they aren’t included in crime
statistics. This allows complicit politicians to claim that
they are eff ectively fi ghting crime, when in fact they are
only hastening crime’s capture of public institutions.
Despite outrage over Marielle Franco’s murder,
Brazil elected a wave of militia-aligned political candi-
dates just eight months later. Their far-right message
vociferously opposed the pt and its supposed predilec-
tion for crime, corruption, communism, and cultural
degeneracy. Their platforms also included demands for
greater police impunity to “fi ght crime,” including carte
blanche to kill suspects, a public safety policy known as
the “Slaughter Law,” proposals to inhibit investigations
and prosecutions involving police malpractice, and a
push to make it much easier to buy guns. Cheered on
by right-wing members of the media, these open propo-
nents of police crookedness by a diff erent name rode a
cynical wave of “anti-corruption” sentiment that almost
exclusively targeted the pt and the Left.
Many of the successful “law-and-order” candidates
were former police and military themselves — including
a representative from São Paulo who made her name off
of a surveillance camera video that showed her pulling
her service pistol out of her purse to shoot dead an
armed robber in front of her child’s school. The gov-
ernor, eyeing the upcoming election, hastily organized
a ceremony the next day to honor her with a pink orchid.
LEFT OUT OF THE DEBATE
The Left suff ered massive defeats in 2016 and 2018. In
São Paulo, Lula’s home base, poor and working-class
neighborhoods that had long voted faithfully for the pt
fl ipped overwhelmingly to Bolsonaro-aligned, tough-on-
crime politicians pushing a neoliberal economic agenda.
The pt and its allies, after years of passing laws that
made the justice system more punitive and arbitrary,
spent 2018 focused almost exclusively on the punitive
and arbitrary imprisonment of their leader, after two
years fi xated on the unjust impeachment of Rousseff .
While they tried to avoid the subject of corruption
almost entirely, their opponents eff ectively tarred them
as “the most corrupt party in the history of Brazil.”
The anti-pt claims, of course, were greatly over-
stated. The corruption that took place was hardly
novel and involved most of the same people leading
the attacks on the party. Much of it was the “cost of
business” for bringing establishment parties into the
governing coalition in Congress. Even after years of
intensive investigations, prosecutors have been unable to
prove that Lula or Rousseff made a dime through corrup-
tion. But that didn’t matter. The narrative had already
taken root, thanks in large part to years of unquestioning
wall-to-wall press coverage of the now disgraced Lava
Jato investigation.
In the eyes of many Brazilians, the details didn’t
matter. During the pt governments, they’d watched
militias and gangs grow, seen that impunity for crimi-
nals and crooked cops was worse than ever, and perhaps
directly experienced small-scale corruption involving a
police offi cer or government offi cial. Maybe they even
lost their job or some of their savings when the coun-
try’s most celebrated entrepreneur of the era, the fl ashy
huckster Eike Batista, grew rich with plenty of pt sup-
port, only to be exposed as a fraud and have his empire
collapse. By 2014, Brazil was plunged into its deepest
economic recession in history, and crime rates were
worse than ever. If all this bad business was happening
under the pt’s watch, was it so hard to believe that they
were crooks, too?
Just as they had tried to do with street crime, the pt
had the vision to clean up high-level crime and corrup-
tion but lacked the will or the power to implement the
structural reforms necessary. As a result, half measures
served to fortify the party’s enemies. Ironically, the pt
built nearly all the tools that would be used to tear it down
through the justice system. It granted greater autonomy
to the federal police, the public prosecutor, and the
comptroller general, empowering them to more freely
investigate political corruption, and it legalized new
investigatory methods that would be used and abused in
the Lava Jato trials. But it did not implement political or
electoral reform that would dilute the power of money
in politics, weakening their enemies as well as the need
for any party in power to buy allies to cement a ruling
coalition. Nor did it go through with promised regula-
tions that would break up infl uential right-wing media
empires, instead fl ooding them with government money.
The party’s biggest failure was “the Lula strategy”
of “permanent conciliation,” argued Lincoln Secco, a
historian whose work focuses on the pt. “It was useful
to elect Lula in 2002,” Secco said in an interview with
El País, but conditions changed, and the pt under
Lula and Rousseff continued with “the tactic of being
pragmatic while the opposition became radical and
ideological.” Structural reforms were not adequately
pursued “when Lula had very high popularity and it
was possible.”
The non-pt left, however, has proven even less
prepared on these issues. One segment, led by former
presidential candidate Ciro Gomes, has pivoted hard
right on security, while another has embraced identi-
tarian and radical slogans that do not resonate outside
their activist circles.
The Socialism and Liberty Party, or psol, has best
represented this trend. It was formed by a dissident fac-
tion of pt exiles who objected to alliances with old-guard
oligarch politicians. They left, but the pt’s working-class
base did not follow. Despite advocating for pro-worker
policies and making eff orts to recruit nonwhite candi-
dates from favelas, the lion’s share of their voters — just
like their leadership — live in the wealthiest, whitest,
and most progressive neighborhoods.
This disconnection is demonstrated by slogans
like “abolish the police,” which has been embraced by
the psol.
“Recently, we’ve seen groups within left-wing par-
ties trying to reenter the debate but heavily employing
identitarian discourse, in a way that ends up scoring
points online rather than engaging in conversation,”
says Maria Isabel Couto, a director at Fogo Cruzado. “It
is disconnected from broader bases that are in dialogue
with people frightened by rising violence.”
LESSONS EARNED
Crime is too important an issue to be left in the hands
of the Right. After all, it is an expression of oppression,
especially in countries like Brazil with brutal histories
of dictatorship, racism, and violence. The Left took
power with a transformative vision for reducing crime
and attempted to implement reforms — but it ultimately
ended up prioritizing its relationships with institutional
actors, in an eff ort to maintain power, over its expressed
vision for an egalitarian society. While taking power
always requires some sort of accommodation, these very
compromises with conservative forces helped create the
conditions for a deadly surge in violent crime, dissatis-
faction among the base, and the subsequent rise of the
far right. At the same time, the non-pt left has failed to
mount a credible alternative in terms of public security.
Quite simply, the bloody scenes in the Anísio Jobim
penitentiary and across Brazil were the product of
“law-and-order” forces that are themselves deeply
embedded in organized crime and that oppose the social
programs that can fi ght the root causes of violence. They
hold the working-class victims of crime in contempt —
but a Left that ignores them isn't serving the publc much better.
JACOBIN
ILLUSTRATION BY RICARDO SANTOS
No comments:
Post a Comment