Safatle: If the State acts like the PCC, how does it expect to judge it?
"If the State acts like the PCC [First Command of the Capital, a Brazilian criminal organization], deciding who lives and who dies, how can it expect to judge it?" asks Vladimir Safatle in his column this Friday. "Understanding how the Brazilian government works is understanding how it manages disappearances and the right to kill. This is its true form of government. With one hand it massacres part of its population, with the other it reminds the other part that fear lurks and that it is necessary to 'be even tougher'," he writes.
247 - "If the State acts like the PCC [First Command of the Capital, a Brazilian criminal organization], deciding who lives and who dies, how does it expect to judge it?" asks Vladimir Safatle in his column this Friday. "Understanding how the Brazilian government works is understanding how it manages disappearances and the right to kill. This is its true form of government. With one hand it massacres part of its population, with the other it reminds the other part that fear lurks and that it is necessary to 'be even tougher'," he writes.
The text was Published in Folha de S.Paulo.
"'There were no saints there.' It was with this statement that the governor of Amazonas publicly commented on the massacre that occurred in a Manaus prison. In fact, there were no saints there, as, it seems, there are none in any other place in the sublunar world."
It's possible the governor's statement meant something else. Perhaps something like: "Those who were there were subhuman, there's no reason for us to be concerned about their deaths." This is a strategy that Brazilian governments have long avoided implementing, driven by a segment of the population itself.
This is about plundering entire masses of people, devoid of any form of humanity. If they die, there will be neither names nor stories. There will only be numbers: 60 dead prisoners. You will never know who they are, whether they were there for murdering their ex-wife, son, and relatives, or for selling half a dozen marijuana cigarettes.
Killing these "60 prisoners" is seen, in essence, as a sovereign right of the State, just as killing "111 prisoners" at Carandiru was a sovereign right without major consequences or traces being left behind.
No, it wasn't a gang fight that produced the massacre in Manaus, but a deliberate and calculated policy of managing death, carried out on the drawing boards of omission, neglect, the perpetuation of medieval conditions, and complicity.
The Brazilian state acts like the PCC (First Command of the Capital), sovereignly deciding who will live and who will be left to die. How does it expect to judge them?