AND: A “democracy” of massacres: opportunism keeps silence in front of the massacres
We publish an unofficial translation of the article of A Nova Democracia that you can find here.
In a period shorter than five days, 45 people were killed in revenge massacres in the states of São Paulo (16 killed), Bahia (19 killed) and Rio de Janeiro (10 killed), committed by the military and civil police. It was also estimated that the number could be underrated, because there is still missing bodies because of the grade of terrorism against the masses done by the reactionary troops of the genocidal governors Tarcísio de Freitas (Republicanos/SP), Cláudio Castro (PL/JR) y Jerônimo Rodrigues (PT/BA).
In a interview to Agência Pública, the journalist Terine Husek Coelho showed that when a police officer dies in service, the possibility that a civilian dies the same day as retaliation is increased by 1,150%. Next day, it is increased a 350% and next week after the death, an 125%. This is what makes up the so-called revenge operations, that are a truly punitive operations. Publications celebrating the mass extermination were done by military in social media during “Operation Shield” of ROTA [translator’s note: first Shock Police Battalion of the Military Police of São Paulo] in the favelas of Guarujá, coast of SP, showing the level of sadism of those who are part of the repression forces of the old State. The State officials are also not free from as possibility: Tarcísio de Freitas stated in a press conference on 31st July that: “there was no excess, it was a professional actuation” and that he was “extremely satisfied” with the police action.
As we can see, it is a reactionary civil war. The logic of the operations itself are the logic of the reactionary war: the favela is fortified enemy territory that must be invaded by the force of guns; the local population is collaborator or enemies in disguise, to be neutralized by shocks of the terrorist order and interrogated under torture so they admit this condition; the goods of the local population are the enemy’s strategic reserve, they must be looted or destroyed. Is this the dynamic of operations or is it not?
This reactionary civil war promoted by the old State demonstrates, in fact, that for the popular masses, “democracy” does not exist. Democracy presupposes democratic rights and freedoms, such as the right to the presumption of innocence. Did the 16 dead in Guarujá have that right protected? Democracy presupposes the right to come and go: did the residents of Complexo da Penha have this right respected when police troops curtailed social life with their war operation?
Any defense of this old democracy, made by opportunism, is nothing more than a petite-bourgeois illusion or a rotten defense of this old order. So, the reality of the massacres proves to be the continuity of what was applied during the military regime, also because who defines the military doctrine of the Military Police is the Army command, through its body called “Inspetoria Geral das PMs”. The same practices, the same reactionary police, serving the same interests. A brutal reality that the PT governments never changed, but on the contrary, strengthened. Let’s remember that it was Luiz Inácio who authorized, for the first time in the country’s history, that the Armed Forces be activated with the assumption of combating the so-called “crime” with the “Arcanjo” operation, with the invasion of Complexo do Alemão and Penha and then your occupation. Dilma did no different thing and, in 2014, signed the GLO [Translator’s note: Guarantee of the law and order. Police Operation of the Armed Forces to reestablish the normality of the “law” and “public order”] that allowed the military occupation of Maré. It was with the pelego-mor [Translator’s note: a trade union leader who is in the service of the bosses and the State] Luiz Inácio that the UPPs [Translator’s note: Pacifying Police Unit. Project in Rio de Janeiro to institute a communitarian police in the favelas to struggle against those who “control the territory”] began to be implemented in the Rio’s favelas in 2008, with aid and millionaire funds. UPPs, which were strategically conceived by the reactionary Army with its experience in Haiti.
Anyone who wants democracy – not that democracy of massacres, but a true popular democracy – must, in the first place, recognize that today, with or without Bolsonarism, we live in a true dictatorship for the popular masses, while democracy prevails only in small palaces. As long as this situation prevails, the entire base for the extreme right and coupism will be in place. And, faced with this, opportunism is silent and consents.
