On the president's desk, a license to kill.

The bill that transfers the trial of members of the Armed Forces acting in GLO (Guarantee of Law and Order) operations to the Military Justice system has been approved by the National Congress and is now awaiting presidential sanction. This change represents an affront to the Constitution and a rarely seen threat to human rights. The transfer of responsibility to the Military Justice system occurs despite the fact that the victims of any crimes (such as homicides and torture) are civilians and that the crimes committed are covered by the penal code, which governs the decisions of the criminal justice system. What are the problems with this proposal, whose purpose is to protect members of the Armed Forces?

a) Protect them from what? From the risk of suffering injustice if judged by the common justice system? No, this could not be the answer, because it would correspond to an unsustainable accusation against the country's criminal justice system. The possibility of failure always exists in a system run by human beings, but this hypothesis applies indiscriminately to defendants, whether they are civilians or military personnel.

b) Or is the issue a different definition of what constitutes the crime in question? Yes, this is the only plausible answer. Military crimes presuppose that military actions are being judged in a conflict environment of a military nature, whose paradigmatic reference is war. There are norms and limits for the use of violence and lethal force in war, but are different of the laws that govern actions and impose limits on them in civil settings—for example, on the streets of Brazilian cities, in vulnerable neighborhoods and territories of Brazilian cities.

Therefore, what is being debated is the nature Regarding operations carried out by the Armed Forces in our own country that may affect Brazilian citizens, including innocent civilians. In war, collateral damage, however undesirable, is accepted; these are known as "casualties," negative but eventually necessary occurrences, since they are justified because the ultimate goal is paramount and constitutes the main parameter of evaluation. The question that remains is: What purpose could be more important than the life of a citizen? The real issue here is the value of the life of an innocent Brazilian man or woman.

c) Another relevant point: if the new law is enacted, we will be indicating – that is, authorizing and suggesting – the routinization of a measure that was originally conceived (in the Constitution), and should continue to be understood as absolutely exceptional, the GLO (Guarantee of Law and Order). There are reasons for this:

c.1) GLOs are not effective for public safety, except in extraordinary circumstances: fortunes are spent and the initial situation returns as soon as the GLO is suspended, as was seen in Rio de Janeiro, in the favela complexes of Maré and Alemão, for example.

c.2) Young soldiers, generally trained in infantry, are prepared to wage war, not for predominantly police-type approaches.

c.3) These boys expose themselves to high risk.

c.4) Furthermore, the GLOs (Guarantees of Law and Order operations) represent a tacit declaration that the police are incompetent to deal with the challenges of public security. If this is the case, then resources should be invested in their improvement and our legislative expertise applied to their structural reform.

c.5) Finally, but no less importantly, it is well known that transforming the Army into a public security institution means subjecting it to conditions that in other countries have made the Armed Forces vulnerable to corruption on an unprecedented scale. Recent Mexican history, for example, bears witness to this.

It is no coincidence that military commanders oppose the trivialization of so-called Law and Order Guarantee operations. After all, they know perfectly well that these operations can serve political purposes and attract media attention, but are doomed to failure. Experienced military officers are the first to recognize that the Armed Forces are not police forces and cannot replace them – and that GLOs are functioning as a smokescreen to prevent the reform of Article 144 of the Constitution from being included on the agenda, that is, the structural transformations of the institutional architecture of public security and the police model. However, military commanders favor transferring crimes eventually perpetrated by military personnel in GLOs to the realm of Military Justice because they are aware that, if the Armed Forces are to act, the nature of their action and the parameter for evaluating their intervention are the norms governing war protocols. In other words, the commanders of the Armed Forces know that GLOs (Guarantees of Law and Order operations) correspond to the suspension of the rule of law in the targeted territories and the establishment of a state of exception. Therefore, coherently (but dramatically damaging to democracy, or what remains of it), they demand a redefinition of the conditions under which acts of war can be judged as criminal. What escapes the considerations of the military commanders is not only the priority of human rights and respect for the rule of law, even and especially in vulnerable territories, stigmatized by racism and class perspectives. What escapes them is the fact that criminal justice, including the Public Prosecutor's Office, has already been acting as if it were military justice, in practice, whenever the acts under judgment are perpetrated by police officers in favelas and peripheries throughout Brazil. And this is evidenced by the data on lethal police brutality in the country. Even underestimated, they indicate that six people are killed by police actions every day. How many of these cases lead to charges being filed by the Public Prosecutor's Office and result in convictions by the courts? Information is scarce, but sufficient to lead us to the conclusion that the punishment is derisory.

For this reason, the necessary rejection of transferring crimes committed by the military in areas targeted by GLOs (Guarantees of Law and Order operations) should not be naive, suggesting that criminal justice has honored the rule of law, the Constitution, and human rights. Beneath this dispute, making it politically acceptable and naturalizing it, lie the tragic and always neglected inequalities and the shameful structural racism. The ongoing debate and decisions are symptoms of the greatest of all crimes against humanity: the historically constituted organization, heir to slavery and still in force, of Brazilian society.

Originally published on the website Justifying.