SÃO PAULO LETTER: Families of victims want the federal government to investigate nine bloody days in May 2006, writes TOM HENNIGAN
WHEN PAULO Alexandre Gomes was in prison he got his niece’s name tattooed on his arm. It was to remind him of his family outside who were waiting to help him get his life back on track after teenage kicks led to crime and jail.
But it probably cost him his life.
Paulo left prison and was going straight, making a precarious living selling drinks from a cart on São Paulo’s streets. But one night in May five years ago he went to buy drugs in a favela near his home and has not been seen since.
He is more than likely a victim of the explosion of violence that terrorised Brazil’s most populous state between May 12th and 20th, 2006. It started when São Paulo’s main criminal organisation, a prison gang known as Primeiro Comando da Capital (First Command of the Capital, or PCC), attacked the state, killing off-duty police and prison officers and launching co-ordinated rebellions in 74 prisons.
The authorities were caught off-guard by the ferocity of the gang’s offensive which left 43 of their men dead. But the rank and file quickly struck back with a vengeance. In poor communities dozens of young men were shot dead in what police said were confrontations with criminals. Dozens more were killed by death squads which for a week operated with impunity in neighbourhoods saturated with police.
Shortly before Paulo disappeared two of his friends were beaten up by police officers who searched them for prison tattoos. A neighbour’s intervention saved them but Paulo’s family believe he was not so lucky. He is one of four people whose families and human rights groups say police “disappeared” that week along with 493 people who died. Human rights groups in Brazil say the majority were victims of the state in the biggest peacetime massacre in the country’s modern history. The postmortems of more than 100 of those killed in supposed confrontations with police show clear evidence of summary execution. Many had criminal records, often for petty crime.
Many did not. In May 2006, being poor and black was enough reason for a young man to be shot dead on his way home from work in São Paulo.
In the five years since, the state’s authorities have shown no desire to investigate the evidence that their own security forces ran amok, instead focusing on cases where police and prison officers were victims. There may well be an ulterior motive behind this.
A report published this week by human rights group Global Justice Brazil and the International Human Rights Clinic of the Harvard Law School says one of the principle motives for the PCC’s attacks was anger at police corruption. Rather than investigate and prosecute the gang, police officers were shaking down its leaders.
Frustrated at the failure of the state government to investigate, the families of victims want the federal government to step in. So far it has not done so. This is in stark contrast to its policy of pushing for a truth commission to investigate the crimes of the military dictatorship which left power in 1985. It is not surprising that there is strong backing within the current administration for such a commission.
Several key members, including President Dilma Rousseff, were themselves victims of state repression. Many of the dictatorship’s crimes remain unresolved. Decades later, families are still hoping against hope for news of what happened to “disappeared” loved ones.
Now the government wants to provide them with answers to go with the financial compensation they received from previous administrations.
But for the families of May 2006 there is no such support, even though more people died in those nine bloody days than were killed or disappeared by the dictatorship during its 21 years in power. The fact that many of these victims died at the hands of agents of a supposedly democratic state does not seem to cause outrage within government or Brazilian society.
It is hard not to be struck by the fact that while most of the dictatorship’s victims were white and middle class, those of the police in 2006 were poor and largely of African descent. “Many poor young black men were exterminated by the state. Who wants to investigate this? It is as if they just disappeared from the face of the earth,” says Paulo’s sister, Francilene Gomes.
She has waged a relentless campaign with families of other victims for a proper investigation into the events of five years ago. They have made little headway.
“Five years on we still have no answers. We have been forgotten.”