http://internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?page=imprimir_articulo&id_article=5429
International Viewpoint - online socialist magazine
http://www.internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?article5429
Temer, we charge you
Brazil /
Sunday, 25 March 2018 / Insurgencia /
Insurgencia is a current within Brazil’s PSOL (Party of Socialism and
Liberty) that organises supporters of the Fourth International.
The president and his party-gang are directly responsible for the
economic crisis and the violence that tears the social fabric of Rio de
Janeiro and which also allowed the political assassination of Marielle
and Anderson.
Dear Mr. (unelected) President of the Republic Michel Lulia Temer,
We charge you with historical and conjunctural guilt in the barbarous
execution of the human rights activist, from the black social movement,
from the women’s social movement, a Rio de Janeiro city councilor
Marielle Franco and that of the worker Anderson Pedro Gomes.
The lives of our Mari and our Anderson are not the first, nor will they,
unfortunately, be the last lives – young and hardworking – that Your
Honored Presidency helps to strike down. Your economic and security
policies at the head of the country, in total continuity with the
trajectory of Your Excellency as Secretary of Security of the government
of São Paulo, has been outstanding in the international field due to its
lethal productivity.
As thousands cried, outraged with the death of the two comrades on the
night of March 14, murders and slaughters of young people, especially
black (or nonwhite) people and workers, this is bitter food in the daily
life of the poorest neighborhoods in the big metropolises from the north
to south of the country. Just as the commissioned murders from peasants,
landless, indigenous and quilombola leaders are trivialized by your
side. [1]
The difference is that this is a political assassination, in a big city,
of an elected representative.
Marielle was silenced, among many other reasons, because she denounced
the policy of a systematic extermination of black and poor youngsters
from the favellas, the mass incarcerations, the equally vicious killing
of police officers, and the abandonment of the families of the victims
of the “two sides”, by you and your caste’s contempt for the lives of
the most vulnerable. She would use her beautiful and brave mouth to
speak through the speakers of the movements and of the City Hall to
point out the ones who are responsible, in the midst of this stupid drug
war based on the sheer repression of the user and small trafficker, on
pointless and badly planned (police) operations and on electoral stunts.
Your guilt in these matters is not news, Your Honor. Your Excellency did
not pull the trigger of the sophisticated machine gun for sure. Perhaps
by now you are even taking action to find those who had her and Anderson
killed. But your party-gang, formerly PMDB, now again MDB, was the one
who squandered, through scams of corporate tax benefits and large
bribes, Rio’s public infrastructure and basic social services to the
citizens of the state of Rio de Janeiro. [2] While your Excellency acted
as a “decorative” vice president to the PT president (your words, sir,
your words), your accomplices here created one of the greatest economic
and social crises ever experienced by Rio. Experts predict that it will
take the state, maybe, 3 years to start recovering from the damage.
As if this structural background were not enough; it was your party-gang
comrades who fertilized, for two and a half terms, the weeds of crime
amongst the police and turned a blind eye to the militias installed in
the communities. It was they who presented the inefficient Unidade de
Polícia Pacificadoras (UPP’s) (claiming “we are simply going to retake
these territories and then enter with the social initiatives”, who can
forget this?) as a panacea for evil that they did not fight and never
had any intention or program to fight. [3]
None of this would be quite so appalling if Rio were an island of misery
in an ocean of recovery and a sea of prosperity. However, you and the
MDB are well aware that this is not what this is all about. Perhaps
memories are failing, but you and your party – as can be found in books
and university courses – were protagonists of a broad articulation
between political, judicial, business, financial and media forces that
brought about the very questionable impeachment of Dilma Rousseff, in
2016. The immediate pretext was so called dodgy accounting, but the main
issue for your coup bloc, we remember, was “to save the country from one
of the greatest economic and social crises ever lived.”
But the answers created by that coup to the crisis has been an enduring
nightmare for those at the bottom of the heap, your Excellency. You
froze federal investments and wages for 20 years! You’ve been trying
hard to destroy an 80-year labor law. You have been cutting social
programs to a minimum. You can make environmental disasters even worse,
because you do not comply with even the fragile laws we have regarding
these issues. You and your banker finance minister strangled the state
budgets – most notably that of Rio de Janeiro. To Rio, they practically
prescribed suicide: payment of wages in several installments, retirement
pensions and other pension benefits, an increase in contributions,
increase of rates, end of state universities, the privatisation of the
Companhia Estadual de Águas e Esgotos, CEDAE, the state water and
sanitation company. And zero, let’s not forget, zero investment.
You, Excellency and your party, MDB are therefore directly responsible
for the frightening picture of the economic, social and violence crisis
that ravages Rio de Janeiro. It is not coherent that one who wants to
run for election (because of course you are not a candidate for
re-election) evades responsibility. At this darkest hour, it is for the
first representative of the nation to accept the responsibility for the
stupid idea of trying to regain a popularity that he never had through
the very serious step of ordering federal and military intervention in Rio.
Gee, Mr. President, even with all the reactionary logic, the
fundamentalism and the venality of your allied base, you did not manage
to get the 308 votes necessary in the National Congress to approve the
Retirement Pension Reform, did you? You should confess that, to escape
this defeat and in desperation to gain the swing in the polls needed to
elect your most faithful collaborators this year – to save them from
prison bars thanks to new parliamentary immunities – Your Excellency
decided to play with fire. Literally.
Setting yourself up as a mediator might have been too much. Perhaps Your
Excellency has crossed the line in the typical politicking of your
party-gang, regardless of which country it happens in – as is
characteristic of the overwhelming majority of the political
representation of Brazilian businesspeople. Your actions will not create
a solution to violence in Rio, but the escalation of war between
criminal factions, between corrupt and uncontrolled factions of the
security forces, now with the increased danger of their proximity to the
Armed Forces.
By insisting on the same policy with no way out on the war on drugs,
mass incarceration and the extermination of black people, putting the
Armed Forces in direct confrontation with the traffickers, you gain
applause and are responsible for the worst uncontrolled actions that
have arisen since 2013 in this country. The worst of what has arisen in
the streets, in politics and in the institutions around Your Excellency.
Your Excellency can go down in history as the one that initiated the
Mexicanization of Rio de Janeiro and Brazil. Think twice, Mr. President,
is this is how you are planning to be elected?
For our part, we will follow the hundreds of thousands who have been
taking the streets of Brazil and the world – yes, the world! – rising
indignantly against the brutal execution of our companions.
One does not have to be in left-wing to be outraged and come out to the
streets. It’s not necessary to be against federal intervention. It is
not necessary to have taken to the streets before. In fact, nothing is
necessary, except to object to the violence and the situation that
allowed the tragedy to happen and to demand a thorough investigation.
But we will tell everyone what we know; that Marielle was, in fact,
against the ‘war on drugs’ because she knew that it was this policy that
ultimately killed her black and poor brothers and neighbors from Maré
and from so many favelas in Rio and Brazil. We will announce the that
the last article that Marielle wrote was against federal intervention.
That Marielle was a Human Rights fighter with capital letters. That
Marielle was a black, bisexual and socialist woman. A socialist, indeed
and a top quality militant of the Socialism and Freedom Party (PSOL). We
are very proud of that. And we’re sure she’d like everyone to know.
Marielle and Anderson live! Black lives matter! Down with Pezão,
governor of the state of Rio. Down with Temer! Demilitarize the police!
End federal intervention now!
[1] quilombolas are settlements created by escaped slaves in Brazil
[2] See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazi... for information on the
twists and turns of the PMDB and MDB
[3] Police Pacification Units, abbreviated UPP, is a so called law
enforcement and social services program in the state of Rio de Janeiro,
which sets itself the aim of taking back territory supposedly controlled
by drug dealers