This piece is dedicated to the activists fighting for Black liberation in Brazil and beyond.
Marielle Presente. Rafael Presente. Agatha Presente. As Vidas Negras Importam.
This piece would not have been possible without my JP adviser, the inimitable Professor Keeanga-Yamattah Taylor. I am further indebted to Professor Reena Goldthree for her insight and encouragement, Professor Dannelle Gutarra Cordero for her unquenchable spirit and unwavering support, Professors Ingrid Brioso Rieumont and Luis Gonçalves for teaching me enough Portuguese to live in Brazil and write a paper about it, and Professors Aisha Beliso DeJesus, Isadora Mota, Pedro Monteiro, Luis Gonçalves, and Marcia Nina Bernardes for their advice throughout this process.
Introduction
“In Brazil, racism is a rare thing. People are always pitting black against white.”
— President Jair Bolsonaro, Interview with RedeTV!, May 8th, 2019[1]
“The Brazilian state, directly or indirectly, provokes the genocide of Black youth.”
— Commission of Parliamentary Inquiry on Youth Assassinations, 2016[2]
These quotations present the fundamental paradox of Black genocide in Brazil: how can Brazil’s president deny racism’s existence, while a Senate inquiry finds compelling evidence of a state-sponsored Black genocide? These diametrically opposed conceptions of racism emerge from a long history of masking real, pervasive, and violent racial hierarchies with the myth of racial democracy.[3] Today, this masking continues in the design of ostensibly colorblind public policies which refuse to acknowledge the underlying racialized systems of oppression, and are thus doomed to reproduce them.[4]
Although race is almost entirely absent from state discourse on so-called “public safety” policy, the consequences of militarized policing, paramilitary governance, and disinvestment in favelas produce massively disproportionate rates of premature death for Afro-Brazilians. The charge of genocide from Black activists, however, undermines the dominant narrative of colorblindness by asserting how institutional racism produces widespread suffering in Afro-Brazilian communities. Despite overwhelming evidence supporting these charges, however, international institutions responsible for preventing and intervening in genocide remain silent, unwilling to act when powerful “democracies” are charged with unthinkable atrocity.
Masking Anti-Blackness: Racial Hierarchy and the Racial Democracy Myth
Understanding racial hierarchy in Brazil from a U.S. perspective requires reading between the lines. Brazil was the last nation in the hemisphere to abolish slavery. The next year, revolutionaries overthrew the monarchy and instated a republican government, but made no plan to integrate formerly enslaved Afro-Brazilians back into society.[5] Most Afro-Brazilians survived on the peripheries of society, toiling on the same plantations or ekeing out a living in urban centers through informal employment. Simultaneously, eugenicist “whitening policies” sought to dilute Blackness in Brazil by encouraging European immigration and miscegenation.[6] The government never addressed slavery’s enduring legacies: wealth inequality, under- and unemployment, geographic segregation, racially targeted state violence and criminalization, and the social stigmatization of Afro-Brazilian culture.[7]
However, government officials were quick to point out that racism in Brazil did not look like the legally codified segregation of the Jim Crow-era U.S., as racial discrimination was not enshrined in law, claiming any differences in social status or opportunity were exclusively linked to economic class.[8] Gilberto Freyre’s Casa-Grande & Senzala played a major role in promoting the enduring myth of “racial democracy,” painting Brazil as a racial paradise where racial hierarchy is no longer salient, in contrast to the codified discrimination of the U.S. It celebrated miscegenation as a means to eliminate Blackness from Brazilian phenotypes, with the goal of subordinating racial identity to national identity. [9] This myth enabled Brazilian elites to ignore the enduring influence of racism on the structure of security and opportunity in society.
Black activists have always countered this hegemonic narrative of Brazil’s national identity by asserting their lived experience with racial oppression and demonstrating the danger in the myth of racial democracy.[10] In the last two decades, this battle has primarily focused on education, promoting Afro-Brazilian and Indigenous history curriculums in secondary education and affirmative action policies to transform Brazil’s extremely exclusive public higher education system.[11] Increasingly, however, militarized public security policies and the rise in parastatal militias have led many in the Black movement to decry the ongoing, state-sponsored genocide of Black youth.
A note on terminology: in this article, “favelas” and Afro-Brazilian communities are used interchangeably. While over 66% of favela residents do identify as Black, the association between the othered, marginal space of favelas and Blackness is also produced by this myth.[12] Originating as informal settlements for veterans and the recently emancipated at the turn of the 19th century, favelas were historically treated as primitive blights on the modernizing project of Brazil. Considered illegal occupations, residents were refused the basic rights of land tenure, public infrastructure, and investment in healthcare, education, or economic development.[13] Over the last century, favelas vastly expanded, becoming more heterogeneous in structure, racial diversity, and class makeup, but their association with Blackness, violence, otherness, and marginality remains cemented in the popular imagination.[14]
The Charge of Anti-Black Genocide
Globally, the charge of anti-Black genocide is not a new phenomenon, but the international community is reluctant to levy the charge of genocide against the consequences of institutional racism in powerful “liberal democracies.” The 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide asserts that:
genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
1) Killing members of the group;
2) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
3) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
4) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
5) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.[15]
Under Article I, the charge of genocide should trigger swift international investigation and intervention: “genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law which they undertake to prevent and to punish.”[16] In practice, however, international intervention is incredibly rare. This is especially true when charges of genocide target long-standing racial and colonial hierarchies in the supposedly liberal democracies that dominate international politics.[17] Under the current language of the convention, written primarily by Western democracies with an outsize influence in global post-war politics, the quotidian violence of long-standing racial hierarchies is difficult to target. The doctrine of “special intent” (dolus specialis) requires evidence of the “existence of a State or organizational plan or policy” to prove the perpetrators’ explicit intent to exterminate the targeted group.[18] This is a high burden of proof in most Western democracies, where public policies rarely codify racial discrimination, but instead allow ostensibly “colorblind” policies to be implemented according to historical patterns of racial hierarchy. Genocide scholar Dylan Rodriguez proposes that genocide inhabits a racial “impasse” where the charge suggests a unique state of “exceptionality and absolute abnormality.” What makes anti-black oppression in the U.S., Brazil, and elsewhere so insidious and devastating, however, is its normalization and widespread acceptance.[19]
The 1951 We Charge Genocide petition to the U.N. General Assembly is a prominent illustration of this impasse.[20] The report, chronicling widespread institutional racism and rampant white supremacist terrorism, argued that the pervasive violence and oppression of U.S. racial hierarchy constituted genocide under Article II of the Genocide Convention, and that Article I obligated the international community to intervene.[21] The UN swiftly dismissed the petition; the U.S. government harassed, deported, and threatened to incarcerate its authors.[22] Raphael Lemkin, the lawyer chiefly responsible for developing the concept of genocide and the language of the convention, wrote that “confusing genocide with discrimination” was an injustice not only to international law, but to the “democratic societies” that would be “unjustly slandered” by this charge of genocide.[23]
The genocide convention was clearly not designed to challenge the racial and colonial hierarchies in the powerful Western democracies that created it. Still, the U.S.’s swift crackdown demonstrated the governments’ fear of a charge of genocide, illuminating the subversive potential of this approach. Framing centuries of racial and colonial violence as a state-sponsored, intentional genocide threatens the legitimacy and democratic image of nations like the U.S. and Brazil.
Public Security or a License to Kill?
Approximately 63,000 people were killed violently in Brazil each year for the last 10 years, exceeding the casualties of the civil war in Syria.[24] Between 2007 and 2017, 75% of victims of lethal violence in Brazil were Black; homicides of Black victims increased by 33% while homicides of non-black victims increased by 3%.[25] In 2019, 11 out of every 100 violent deaths in Brazil was perpetrated by the military police: 75.4% of citizens assassinated by the police were Black, and 77.9% were between 15 and 29 years old.[26] This data is incompletebecause racial identification in official statistics is unreliable, and, moreover, reports of police assassinations are often reclassified as acts of “resistance followed by death,” essentially blaming victim for their own death.[27] This massive death toll leads activists to claim agents of the state are directly perpetrating violence on the scale of anti-Black genocide, and that these casualties are intentional consequences of state policy to devastate Afro-Brazilian communities.
Since the abolition of slavery, the primary function of the military police was the preservation of the established racial, social, and economic hierarchies; the institution was created to patrol and surveil working-class neighborhoods in order to squash protest and address the “rising threat” of the formerly enslaved population at the turn of the century.[28] Brazil’s first criminal code focused heavily on property crimes, protecting the estates of white, wealthy classes while policing the labor of newly emancipated Afro-Brazilians.[29] It heavily criminalized homelessness and “vagrancy,” and outlawed Afro-Brazilian religious practices in order to target Black Brazilians for incarceration or forced impressment into the military.[30] Through the 20th and into the 21st centuries, although the text of Brazilian law shifted, Afro-Brazilians appeared to live in what anthropologist Jaime Amparo Alves deems a permanent “state of exception” to the basic rights of Brazilian citizens, facing extreme levels of state violence and harassment without legal remedy.[31]
The 2006 anti-drug law, which criminalized drug sale and use and imposed longer sentences, overcrowded prisons and intensified militarized policing in Afro-Brazilian communities.[32] In preparation for the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Summer Olympics, the military police adopted the strategy of “pacification” in Rio’s favelas. Billed as a form of “community policing,” but utilizing tactics of territorial occupation and counter-insurgency, specialized pacification units (known as UPPs) invaded dozens of favelas, targeted for their proximity to airports, freeways, and event locations.[33] Despite intense propaganda to the contrary, homicides and other victimization rates did not decrease, while rates of arrest, incarceration, and violent interactions with police rose dramatically.[34] Residents reported that military police presumed all residents of favelas were connected to the drug trade and thus criminal suspects.[35]
In 2018, more reactionary administrations assumed power in the federal and Rio state governments, vowing to broaden the authority of state security forces to invade favelas and not only apprehend, but kill suspected criminals. On February 16, 2018, unelected interim president Michel Temer authorized a constitutionally dubious 10-month federal military intervention across Rio, where the military assumed control of public security and operated under special rules of engagement allowing soldiers greater discretion and little accountability in the use of lethal force.[36] As a result, state security forces killed a record number of civilians during the occupation. Rio’s governor Wilson Witzel continued this fear-based security paradigm after the occupation and fulfilled one of his primary campaign promises: granting military police the authority to shoot on sight any civilian with a firearm, deeming it an act of “legitimate defense” permitted under national law.[37] This cultural shift, along with transfers of state funding from social services to militarized policing, led to significant increases in raids and police assassinations.[38] There were 42% more police operations in the first half of 2019 compared to the same period in 2018; in July 2019, 37.5% of all 518 violent deaths in the state of Rio de Janeiro were committed by the police, a 49% increase from June 2018.[39] Witzel introduced more snipers and helicopters into the police’s arsenal, killing multiple unarmed children in Rio.[40]
In January 2020, the Pacote Anti-Crime (anti-crime package) codified Witzel’s “license to kill” in federal law by expanding the protection of “legitimate defense,” rendering it nearly impossible to prosecute or even reprimand an officer of the military police for killing a civilian while on duty.[41] Officers are protected under “legitimate defense” as long as they claim that they were responding to an act, or even a perceived risk of, aggression from a civilian.[42] The legislation also legalized asset seizure, expanded pre-trial detention, and increased the maximum incarceration sentence to 40 years, measures that will fuel mass incarceration.[43] While its direct impacts are yet to be calculated, activists, politicians, NGOs, and academic institutions repeatedly denounced this legislation since its introduction, calling it a potential “bloodbath” for Black communities.[44]
“Milícias” and Privatized Violence
Racialized state violence extends beyond assassinations directly perpetrated by militarized police. While the military police regularly invade Rio’s North zone, ostensibly to eradicate narcotrafficking organizations, mafia-esque, parastatal organizations known as milícias maintain a monopoly on violence and exercise territorial control and quasi-governance in the developing Western zone.[45] Composed primarily of active and retired police officers and prison guards, milícias both collaborate with and replace the state, establishing authority through threats and violence in order to extort residents into paying them for security and public services.[46] Many scholars consider milícias direct descendants of esquadrões de morte, or death squads, off-duty military police officers who terrorized Rio under the military dictatorship through killings and disappearances of suspected criminals and political dissidents.[47] These paramilitary structures survived and consolidated their power by charging business owners and residents for protection.[48] Eventually, capitalizing on the government’s sluggish expansion of critical public services to favelas in the West zone and northern peripheries, many milícias used coercive force and connections to politicians to establish unchallenged monopolies over public services, such as van transportation and pirated water, sewage, electricity, cable, and internet connections.[49]
Milícias cultivated moral legitimacy among community members and politicians through a narrative of vigilante-style justice, claiming to eradicate gangs and protect residents from crime in the absence of state authority and branding themselves as a “lesser evil” to narco-traffickers. This is patently false: 70% of milícia-controlled neighborhoods had no history of criminal organizations before the establishment of the milícia.[50] Milícias are not a parallel power, but instead an extension of the state itself: their authority is evidence of the government’s deliberate choice to allow an illegal armed groupto control public security and the provision of public services in more disposable communities.[51] Known milícia members are granted government contracts, elected to public office, and attend parties with the President and his family members.[52] The political connections of retired state agents, their familiarity with the system, and their capacity to intimidate witnesses makes investigation and prosecution of milícia members extremely difficult.[53]Milícias rarely entered public debate until the assassination of representative Marielle Franco, a Black, queer, favela-born, socialist politician who had worked to reopen bring attention to the violent realities of milícia control in the state legislature.[54] While the investigation still drags on, many suspects have ties to the powerful milícia Escritório do Crime [Office of Crime], as well as President Bolsonaro and his family, who have a history of supporting milícias both personally and in their public offices.[55]
Institutional Racism, Divestment, and the Conditions for Premature Death
Deaths directly attributed to state security agents or tacitly endorsed milícias still tell an incomplete story of anti-Black genocide in Brazil. Activists argue that social and economic policies of deprivation and negligence in predominantly Black communities, shaped by institutional racism, produce the conditions that lead to disproportionately high rates of premature death for Afro-Brazilians. Nationwide, Black Brazilians have lower life expectancies and higher premature death rates than white Brazilians. This results from both higher rates of lethal violence against Afro-Brazilians as well as lower access to healthcare and more biological, psychological, and social stress factors in their communities.[56] In other words, the government routinely prioritizes militarized police intervention over providing essential public services, neglecting the structural inequalities in housing, sanitation, healthcare, education, and income in favelas that create precarious conditions of life in Afro-Brazilian communities.
As described above, Pacification units (UPPs), billed as all-encompassing models of community policing and infrastructure investment that would formalize and integrate favela spaces into the city by 2020, in practice enabled widespread militarized policing and criminalization, taking many Afro-Brazilian lives.[57] However, what the UPPs failed to do also matters. Despite their marketing as investments in the development and social well-being of favelas, nearly all of their budget went to funding military police invasions and the construction of bases in each neighborhood.[58] Residents and international observers reported most programs only existed on paper, and any improvements were chiefly cosmetic in areas close to World Cup and Olympic venues.[59] The broken promises of the UPP program are indicative of the state’s clear choice to invest in violent policing and occupation of Afro-Brazilian communities, rather than fund projects to alleviate real needs for critical infrastructure, adequate housing, accessible healthcare, public education, and economic opportunity.
The global COVID-19 pandemic further reveals the deadly consequences of racialized disparities in Brazilian society. Favela residents are the primary victims of the Brazilian government’s reckless response, lacking the income and infrastructure to implement the social distancing and public health protocols needed to curb the spread of the lethal virus. Regular handwashing is incredibly difficult without formal connections to water utilities, and a pre-existing water contamination crisis left many favelas facing regular water shortages.[60] Most residents work in informal or service sectors where remote work is impossible, forcing residents to make the impossible “choice” between social distancing and earning income to feed their families.[61] The Brazilian public healthcare system, already overwhelmed, is collapsing, but most favela residents can’t afford private hospitals.[62] The President is actively encouraging citizens, particularly the working class, to ignore prevention guidelines and reinstate business as usual.[63] Instead of assisting relief efforts, the military police resumed violent operations in some favelas, including evictions.[64] Many communities organized response teams, distributing food, essential supplies, and information as well as mounting political pressure on the government to provide essential resources to the most vulnerable populations.[65] Activists believe that the pandemic will amount to a mass extermination in the most vulnerable communities in Brazil, a direct result of the state’s abandonment of its citizens.[66]
Parem de Nos Matar: Charging Brazil with Anti-Black Genocide
On September 20th, 2019, eight-year-old Ágatha Felix was killed in her grandmother’s car by a military police officer during a raid in northern Rio.[67] Ágatha’s family joined many before them in protesting the state sanctioned murder of their children, chanting #ParemDeNosMatar [Stop Killing Us] and #ACulpaÉDoWitzel [It’s Witzel’s fault].[68] Building on a long legacy of Black mobilization and resistance, Afro-Brazilian activists have rapidly organized to respond to the reactionary shift in Brazilian politics, confronting a wave of policies designed to appear “tough on crime” while relying on the assumption that Black lives are disposable.[69] In contrast to the focus on affirmative action and cultural education that dominated the media narrative around the Black movement since the 1990’s, Afro-Brazilian communities are now visibly fighting for their very existence and survival. Through charging genocide, activists have significantly reframed the national conversation on race and public security to focus on the structural racism of state policies and center transformative solutions.
The charge of anti-Black genocide in Brazil first emerged in the 1970’s, but it remained a fringe theory due to state censorship and marginalization within academia and movement spaces. Prominent scholar and writer Abdias do Nascimento’s O genocídio do negro brasileiro: processo de um racismo mascarado [The Black Brazilian Genocide: a process of veiled racism] argues the state has perpetrated anti-Black genocide since slavery, but carefully masked its consequences in the narrative of racial democracy. Today, activists and academics are returning to Nascimento’s work to explain the historical roots of the violence faced by Afro-Brazilian communities and resist hegemonic discourses of colorblind progress.[70] A new generation of activists reframes their struggle as surviving the state-perpetrated genocide of Black youth, rather than fighting for inclusion as citizens of the very nation committed to their extermination.[71] The Bahia-based Reaja ou Será Mortx! [React or Die!],[72] founded in 2005 after the brutal torture and murder of 6 young people by a death squad, calls on Black social movements to “politicize [their] deaths” to resist the “genocidal state,” to combat the linked agendas of “police brutality, prisons, death squads, militias and extermination groups,” and to seek “reparations for victims of the state.”[73] Dozens of organizations joined their campaign denouncing the “genocide promoted by state public security policy” and to end the silence around the death of Black youth, calling for the demilitarization and public oversight of police in Bahia, along with a legislative investigation into death squads and police brutality.[74] Reaja organized the first Marcha Internacional Contra o Genocídio do Povo Negro [International March Against Black Genocide] in August 2013, mobilizing 5,000 demonstrators to publicly mourn and remember victims of state violence.[75] In 2014, organizers of the second march articulated their platform in direct solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement coalescing in Ferguson.[76] Reaja now organizes this march annually, garnering extensive media coverage and inspiring sister actions nationwide.[77]
Other campaigns across the country began to identify Black genocide as the underlying structure enabling racist state violence. In 2013, Rafael Braga Viera became a national symbol of the hyper-criminalization of Black favela residents when he was the only person detained and charged during massive nationwide anti-government protests. Braga was not protesting: he was arrested for carrying Pine Sol and bleach, which the police claimed to be a Molotov cocktail.[78] His liberation campaign characterized him as a political prisoner of a system designed to ensnare Black youth from the favelas on the “inevitable” path to incarceration or death.[79]
These campaigns are shifting public discourse about race and state violence. In 2016, federal legislators conducted parliamentary inquiries into youth assassinations that acknowledged an ongoing genocide of Black youth throughout Brazil. The reports clearly cite the “militancy of the Black movement” as their impetus for analyzing extrajudicial executions as evidence of a genocide against Black youth and dedicated the entire first chapter to the causes of anti-Black genocide in Brazil.[80] Although it focuses primarily on extrajudicial executions, the report states that “the violent deaths of Black youth result from both the actions and omissions of the state,” acknowledging the state’s failure to address the rise of drug trafficking gangs and milícias as similarly constitutive of genocide.[81] Instead of blaming a few bad apples in the police for racist extrajudicial executions, the report indicts the entire state of Brazil for its complicity in the genocide of Black youth. Consequently, the committee’s recommendations would fundamentally restructure the relationship between police and citizens, eliminating the excuse of “self-defense” to promote police accountability and demilitarizing of the military police.[82]
However, a few progressive legislators hardly represent the state. In 2015, one of the leaders of Reaja, Hamilton Borges dos Santos, testified before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) about the violence faced by Afro-Brazilian youth, directly charging the state with perpetrating the genocide of Black youth, through institutional racism, abandoning social and educational institutions, and a complete lack of police accountability. While the state claimed to be “on the same page” as the petitioners and not their enemies, Borges dos Santos made clear that as long as the state continues to treat Afro-Brazilian communities as internal enemies, they are in fact at war. The petitioners exposed the government’s plan for social investment in youth wellbeing as purely a set of ideals without the funding and political will to implement them, calling instead for the demilitarization of favelas and the abolition of the military police.[83] By indicting the state with colonial genocide, the activists bolstered their case dismantling the institutions responsible for assassinating Black youth, while making the state look ridiculous responding to a charge of genocide with promises for after-school programs and PSAs in favelas to break their “culture of violence.”[84]
In 2018, the execution of outspoken socialist politician Marielle Franco mobilized hundreds of thousands of Brazilians to memorialize Franco and protest Black genocide.[85] The UN and OAS were quick to condemn her assassination and pressure the state for more information, but as of publication, the investigation has still not identified the intellectual authors of the assassinations.[86] Irregularities plague the investigation, including witness intimidation and murder, milícia involvement, and links to prominent politicians, including the President and his family, who recently admitted to requesting the replacement of the lead prosecutor.[87] As the state struggled to conduct a just and impartial investigation into Franco’s assassination, former Minister of Justice Sergio Moro used the outrage over her execution just a year later to sell his proposed “anti-crime package,” decried by many grassroots organizations, NGOs, and legal experts for “authorizing the liquidation and genocide of Black people.”[88]
A coalition of 39 organizations wrote to the UN and the OAS to denounce the existential threat posed by these iron-fist policies, highlighting the hypocrisy of proposals to reduce police accountability and enable mass incarceration when congressional committees had just denounced the genocide of Black youth.[89]
In May 2019, representatives from this coalition, including mothers who lost their children to police violence and Marielle Franco’s sister, gave emotional testimony to the IACHR on the dangers of the anti-crime bill and the devastating impacts of police invasions, mass incarceration, and extra-judicial executions.[90] The state’s delegation dismissed their concerns as “just speculation,” and assured the petitioners that, like all laws, it would be applied in the same manner to all Brazilians regardless of race. In a rare vocal reaction from a commissioner, Margarette May Macaulay from the OAS thought they must be “talking about a different country,” because in Brazil it “seems as if there is a plan to do away with [Afro-Brazilian people] through acts of genocide.”[91] While Brazil’s confrontation with the charge of genocide on the international stage is significant, there was practically no media coverage of the hearing, and the official video has less than a thousand views. The IACHR did not publicly release any recommendations after the hearing, and the neither the UN or the OAS publicly released any statements regarding the anti-crime bill. While the charge of genocide may have shifted public discourse in Brazil, its ability to spur concrete international intervention, even symbolically, remains extremely limited. Multilateral human rights organizations are still either ill-equipped or unwilling to seriously address charges of colonial genocide, even when the accused nation’s reputation as a liberal democracy is rapidly slipping away.
So why, after Ágatha’s assassination in September, did a grieving community once again turn to the UN to denounce Governor Witzel and the state of Brazil for perpetrating the genocide of Black youth that produced her death?[92] Douglas Belchior, an activist and educator with Uneafro, suggested one possibility in the May 2019 hearing: if international institutions will not condemn the state for the institutionalization of barbarity and continued perpetration of genocide, then history will.[93] Activists charging Brazil with anti-Black genocide are building a historical archive of their struggle in these appeals, insisting the world pay attention to the ongoing genocide and exposing not just the atrocities committed by Brazil, but the silence and inaction of the international community towards genocide in the 21st century. Activists have shown that the charge of genocide is not just a legal instrument, but a narrative shift. The framework of colonial genocide considers how both the acts and omissions in state policy can produce death, and evaluates the real consequences of these actions, rather than stated intent. Exposing an intentional, state-perpetrated genocide forces citizens to consider their own “liberal democracy” in the historical pantheon of evil we are taught to revile. The charge of Black genocide also demands more than incremental solutions and colorblind cosmetic reforms. If the underlying logic of institutions and policy is the extermination of marginalized groups, activists must demand the complete dismantling and reimagining of those institutions. While denouncing the racist structures that have produced so much death, they are also demanding the creation of new institutions and relationships that preserve and protect life.
If you would like to support the community organizers responding to the health crisis in the favelas, you can donate to RioOnWatch’s strategic assistance campaign here. You can also find fantastic English-language journalism by favela activists at their blog here.
You can support the Marielle Franco Institute in their ongoing work for racial justice in Brazil here, Criola’s advocacy for the rights of Black women in Brazil here, or Uneafro’s decolonial education program here.
[1] “Bolsonaro para Luciana Gimenez.” Author’s translation.
[2] “Final Report — CPI Youth Assasination.” Author’s translation.
[3] Da Costa, “Confounding Anti-Racism.”
[4] Vargas, “Hyperconsciousness of Race and Its Negation.”
[5] Trochim, “The Brazilian Black Guard.” pg. 285-286.
[6] Borges, O que é encarceramento em massa? Pg. 50-52.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Da Costa, “Confounding Anti-Racism.” pg. 3.
[9]Freyre, Casa-grande & senzala. Referenced as the most prominent source of the racial democracy myth in a variety of works, including but not limited to: Vargas, 2004 & 2005; Costa, 2014; Borges, 2018; Amar, 2013; Baiocchi et. al 2010; and Alves, 2017.
[10] Campos, “Movimento Negro no Brasil”; Silva, “Movimento negro e as lutas contra o racismo”; Hanchard, Orpheus and Power, The Movimento Negro of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, Brazil 1945-1988; Passos and Nogueira, “Movimento negro, ação política e as transformações sociais no Brasil contemporâneo”; Lino Gomes, “O movimento negro no Brasil: ausências, emergências e a produção dos saberes.”
[11] Silva, “Movimento negro e as lutas contra o racismo.” pg. 630.
[12] Olavarria-Berenguer, “The Favelas of Rio de Janeiro.” Pgs. 11, 113, & 115.
[13]Lacerda, “Rio de Janeiro and the Divided State.” pg. 76
[14]Richmond, “Rio de Janeiro’s Favela Assemblage.” Pg. 1051.
[15] “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.”
[16] Ibid.
[17] Meiches, “The Charge of Genocide.” pg. 30.
[18] “United Nations Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect.”
[19] Rodríguez, “Inhabiting the ImpasseRacial/Racial-Colonial Power, Genocide Poetics, and the Logic of Evisceration.”pg. 21
[20] Meiches, “The Charge of Genocide.” pg. 20.
[21] We Charge Genocide.
[22] Meiches, “The Charge of Genocide.” pg. 23
[23] Lemkin, “Nature of Genocide; Confusion With Discrimination Against Individuals Seen.”
[24] “A violência no Brasil mata mais que a Guerra na Síria.”
[25] “A violência contra negros e negras no Brasil.”
[26] “Anuário Brasileiro de Segurança Publica 2019.” pg. 58.
[27] Ibid.
[28] Borges, O que é encarceramento em massa?; Bretas, Ordem na cidade. Pgs. 40 & 43.
[29] Ibid, pg. 50-51.
[30] Beattie, “Conscription versus Penal Servitude.” pg. 853. Lima dos Santos, “Leis e Religiões: as ações do Estado sobre as religiões no Brasil do século XIX.” pg. 7.
[31] Alves, “Neither Humans nor Rights.” pgs. 151, 153.
[32] Ferreira de Oliveira, Torres, and da Silva Torres, “Vidas Negras: Um panorama sobre os dados de encarceramento e homícidios de jovens negros no Brasil.” pg. 87.
[33] Vargas, “The Pacifying Police.” pg. 185.
[34] “You Killed My Son: Homicides by Military Police in the City of Rio de Janeiro.” pg. 15.
[35] Vargas, “The Pacifying Police.”pgs. 198, 208.
[36] Lopes, “Brazil’s Military to Take over Security in Violence-Scarred Rio de Janeiro”; Gurmendi, “The Military Intervention in Rio de Janeiro and Human Rights.”
[37] “Ideia de Witzel de ‘abater’ quem estiver com fuzil é ilegal e não protege policiais.”
[38] Betim, “Rio de Janeiro com licença para matar.”
[39] Betim, “Sob Witzel, policiais já respondem por quase metade de mortes violentas na região metropolitana do Rio.”
[40] Betim, “As crianças que correm da política de terror de Wilson Witzel no Rio.”
[41] “Entenda como ficaram as principais propostas de Moro no pacote anticrime aprovado na Câmara.”
[42] “Entenda ponto a ponto as mudanças previstas pelo pacote anticrime de Moro.”
[43] Ibid.
[44] “Pacote anticrime de Moro é ‘banho de sangue’, dizem entidades e ativistas.”
[45] Arias and Barnes, “Crime and Plural Orders in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.” pg. 449.
[46] Cano and Looty, “Um estudo exploratório do fenômeno das chamadas ‘milícias’ no Rio de Janeiro” pg. 62; Cano and Duarte, No sapatinho pg. 12; Arias, “The Impacts of Differential Armed Dominance of Politics in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil” pgs. 275-276; Souza Alves, “‘No Rio de Janeiro a milícia não é um poder paralelo. É o Estado.’”
[47] Zaluar and Conceição, “Favelas sob o controle das Milícias no Rio de Janeiro.” pg. 15., “Repressão Política”; Souza Alves, “‘No Rio de Janeiro a milícia não é um poder paralelo. É o Estado.’”
[48] Cano and Duarte, pg. 13. Benmergui and Gonçalves, pg. 381.
[49] Arias, pg. 274; Cano and Duarte, pg. 12; Souza Alves.
[50] Cano and Duarte, pg. 16.
[51] Souza Alves, “‘No Rio de Janeiro a milícia não é um poder paralelo. É o Estado.’”
[52] Ibid, Olliveira, “As Ligações Dos Bolsonaro Com as Milícias.”
[53] Ibid, pgs. 98, 101, 102.
[54] Gortázar, “Caso Marielle lança sombra sobre a polícia, tribunais e a política brasileira.”
[55] Ibid, Olliveira, “As Ligações Dos Bolsonaro Com as Milícias.”
[56] Faro and Pereira, “Raça, racismo e saúde.” pgs. 272-275.
[57] Vargas, “The Pacifying Police.” pg. 185.
[58] Olavarria-Berenguer, “The Favelas of Rio de Janeiro.” Pg. 119.
[59] Ramsey, “Making Rio’s Pacification Work.”
[60] Monplaisir, “Coronavirus Pandemic Exposes Rio’s Longstanding Water and Sanitation Issues.”
[61] Anouk Aflalo Doré, “Covid-19 Unmasks the Privilege of Isolation in Rio de Janeiro and All Brazil.”
[62] Associated Press, “Brazil Becoming Coronavirus Outbreak Center as Hospitals Buckle.”
[63] Anouk Aflalo Doré, “Covid-19 Unmasks the Privilege of Isolation in Rio de Janeiro and All Brazil.”
[64] Edmund Ruge, “After Brief Peace in Quarantine, Violent Policing Returns to Rio Favelas.”
[65] Luisa Fenizola, “Solutions From the Favelas.”
[66] Guimarães, “Favelas serão as grandes vítimas do coronavírus no Brasil, diz líder de Paraisópolis.”
[67] “Menina de 8 anos morre baleada no Complexo do Alemão.”
[68] Rocha, “Death of 8-Year-Old Agatha Felix – a Tragic Example of Brazil’s Impunity?”
[69] Goiz, “Das teorias racialistas ao genocídio da juventude negra no Brasil contemporâneo: algumas reflexões sobre um país nada cordial” pg. 24; McCoy and Lopes, “As Police Shootings in Rio Rise, Children Are Caught in the Crossfire.”
[70] Conceição, “Abdias Nascimento e o genocídio do negro brasileiro”; Smith, “Battling Anti-Black Genocide in Brazil,” pg. 46.
[71] Smith, “Battling Anti-Black Genocide in Brazil,”pgs. 44-45.
[72] Also known as “Reaja ou será Mort@/o/a,” their name varies to reflect gender inclusivity because of the gendered structure of Portuguese. I am taking the lead of Christen Smith in using “Mortx,” the most recent and most gender inclusive iteration of their title.
[73] Smith, “Introduction” pgs. 7-8; “Quem Somos.”
[74] Coletivo Kilombagem, “Reaja Ou Será Morto, Reaja Ou Será Morta.”
[75] SMITH, “Introduction” pg. 9.
[76] Jones, “Black Lives Abroad,” pg. 846.
[77] “VI Marcha Internacional Contra o Genocídio Do Povo Negro Ocorre Na Bahia.” Clarke, “Youth Marked to Live Campaign Launched to Reduce Homicides of Black Youth.”
[78] Pina, “Símbolo da seletividade penal, caso Rafael Braga completa cinco anos.”
[79] Tsavkko Garcia, “Rafael Braga Vieira é uma multidão de jovens negros, pobres e perseguidos.”
[80] “Relatório Final CPI Assasinato de Jovens,” pg. 32; Ibid, pgs. 22 and 26.
[81] Ibid, pg. 31.
[82] Ibid, pg. 131.
[83] Associação Nacional dos Centros de Defesa da Criança e do Adolescente et al., Denuncias de asesinatos de jóvenes afrodescendientes en Brasil.
[84] Ibid.
[85] Gould, “Marcha contra o genocídio negro e por Marielle Franco reúne milhares em São Paulo”; “Em todo país, manifestantes vão às ruas para denunciar execução de Marielle Franco.”
[86] Macedo, “The Killing of Marielle Franco on the UN Radar.”; G1 Rio, “Caso Marielle.”
[87] Reist, “Finding Marielle Franco’s Killers”; Adler, “Bolsonaro diz que pediu troca do comando da PF do Rio em investigação de ‘caso Marielle’”
[88] “Ativistas das Américas e da África se reúnem no Brasil para encontro da Coalizão Negra por Direitos”; “Moro diz que pacote anticrime pode ajudar no caso de Marielle Franco.”
[89] “Movimento negro denuncia internacionalmente ‘licença para matar’ de Moro” ; “Denúncia Sobre Flagrantes Violações de Direitos Humanos No Bojo Da Proposta Do Pacote Anticrime, Apresentado Ao Congresso Nacional Brasileiro, Pelo Ministro Da Justiça e Segurança Pública, Sérgio Moro, Do Governo Jair Bolsonaro,” pgs. 6-10 ; Ibid, pgs. 3-4.
[90] “Comissão da OEA recebe movimentos negros para denunciar pacote anticrime de Moro.”
[91] Sistema Penal y denuncias de violaciones de derechos de las personas afrodescendientes en Brasil.
[92] Fichino, “Movimentos de Favela do Rio de Janeiro denunciam Wilson Witzel à ONU por execução da menina Ágatha no Alemão.”
[93] Sistema Penal y denuncias de violaciones de derechos de las personas afrodescendientes en Brasil.
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