Brazil: Cops Occupy Workers’ ‘Favelas,’ Kill Youth

The working class in Brazil continues to pay a high price for having a  pseudo“leftist” government. These rulers work only to benefit the international capitalist class, spending the country’s international reserves to save Europe’s bosses from their financial crisis. Meanwhile, they continue to exploit Brazil’s workers.

During the first five days of November, 1,800 workers went on strike against LG Electronics, the Korean multinational, demanding the rehiring of ten workers fired for fighting to improve their miserable working conditions. In the state of Ceará, university professors and students have been on strike since November 11 against budget cuts.

Meanwhile, as pseudo-leftist president Dilma Rousseff talks of “democracy,” police in Rio de Janeiro occupied the favelas (slum neighborhoods) of Rocinha (which alone has 70,000 residents), Vidigal and Chácara do Chapéu. The action was justified as part of the Police Pacification Unit (UPP). The occupation began on November 13, to continue indefinitely.

The UPP, initiated by Governor Sergio Cabral in 2008 in the Santa Marta favela, is supposedly designed to expel drug-trafficking gangs from the favelas while installing community security systems. According to Rio de Janeiro’s town council, 29 of the city’s 605 favelas are already controlled by the UPP. Most are in the southern part of the city, where is also home to some of the richest neighborhoods. A good example is Rochinha, sandwiched between such luxurious neighborhoods as São Conrado and Leblon. Unlike most big cities, where the poor population is isolated on the periphery of the city, Rio’s poor occupy the hills throughout the city. The social inequalities are more obvious and transparent here.

Does it fight drug trafficking?

As usual, the capitalist-controlled media considers UPP’s military operation in Rocinha a ´´success,´´ praising the police and the residents’ acceptance of them inside the favela. Tomás Ramos, an advisor to State Deputy Marcelo Freixo (the human rights activist who recently fled to Europe after receiving seven death threats), says that many residents actually have mixed feelings about the UPP: “What they approve of is the end of frequent shooting between the drug-trafficking gangs and the cops, but they don´t necessarily approve of how the police manage the territory in which they live.”

In reality, the UPP’s mission is not to fight against trafficking or to reduce crime, but to control the favelas in economically strategic areas. Even Governor Cabral publicly acknowledges that the UPP cannot solve the drug problem. As he noted just before the first UPP occupation, “The [objective] is not to end trafficking; no one has been able to do that….The objective is to reach a civilized level of crime.”

Pacification for Sports

This UPP project was never designed to make the entire city safer. The pacification units are concentrated in wealthy areas of the city that are frequented by tourists, to protect revenues from the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics. They also occupy the favelas bordering these areas, like those around Maracaná, the scheduled site for the World Cup final. As Luiz Antônio Machado, a sociology professor at the State University of Rio de Janeiro, noted, “The big [sports] events were decisive for the creation of UPP.” Brazil needed to guarantee security in these neighborhoods to be awarded these games. “The objective,” Machado said, is to criminalize poverty and impose public order with a military occupation.

Meanwhile, little is done to develop social programs in these communities. While the police have sponsored some school sports and sweet-sixteen parties to gain acceptance by favela residents, no one is addressing the needs of poor workers. The government demonizes young people as criminals instead of pointing to the root of crime in Brazil and elsewhere: capitalist unemployment.

Cops Defend Property of the Rich

History shows that the police are in place to defend the capitalist state and the rich. The cops have yet to arrest a boss for stealing workers’ labor each day, but they are always ready to arrest striking workers for the “crime” of fighting for raises. The police in Rio are considered the most violent in Brazil. According to data from the security secretaries in each province, the Rio police killed three times as many people as the cops in Sao Pablo (who are also considered extremely violent) during the first half of 2011. In 2010, the Rio police officially killed 885 people in the province, half of them in the capital. Many were the poor children of the working class.

As CHALLENGE has pointed out (6/8/11), Brazil´s government has trained its forces within the United Nations’ MINUSTAH army in Haiti to prepare them to pacify its favelas at home. Brazilian bosses are using the UPP to evict and silence the poor and show a “friendly face” to the World Cup, excusing the murder of workers with stories about drug trafficking or terrorism. But workers’ potential power was evident as they rose up and organized the favelas to resist these evictions. Workers in Brazil and around the world need to join the PLP to build a society of true social equality, and to destroy this putrid system of exploitation and profit.