Brazil: Genocide of Black and Indigenous Workers

The Progressive Labor Party has always said that racism is an essential aspect of worldwide capitalism. A case in point is the murder of poor black young people in Brazil, which is such a common occurrence that it rarely gets reported. Last fall, however, there was sharp struggle in Sao Paulo after the “accidental” killing of 17-year-old Douglas Rodrigues by a cop responding to a noise complaint. Douglas was simply walking on the street with his 12-year-old brother.
Brazil’s President, Dilma Rousseff, admitted that the same violence that killed Douglas is suffered by “thousands of other black youth.” Human rights organizations, including the National Council for Equality, demanded urgent measures against “the genocide of Brazil’s black youth.”
There are more than 60,000 violent deaths each year in Brazil. According to the Institute of Applied Economic Investigations (IPEA), black or biracial victims account for two-thirds of them. The homicide rate in the black community is 36.5 per 100,000 residents, more than double the white homicide rate. According to the IPEA, this murder epidemic reduces the life expectancy for black youth and workers by more than 20 months.  
Moreover, these victims keep getting younger. In the 1980s, the average homicide victim was 26; today, the average victim is 20. In 2010 alone, according to an investigator from the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences, 35,000 black people in Brazil died from violent acts. He wrote, “These numbers should be worrisome for a country that appears to not have ethnic, religious, border, social or political conflict. The number of violent deaths represents a much higher volume than those of many of the regions of the world that go through armed struggle.”
Criminalizing Black Youth
Raquel Villadino, coordinator for the Program for the Reduction of Lethal Violence among Teen and Youth in Rio de Janeiro, criticized the fact that only eight percent of the country’s violence prevention programs include racial data. “Racism is a structural element of the fatality of black youth,” Valladino said. “We are not only facing a process of criminalization of poverty, but, particularly of black youth.”
Over the last few years, violence against working-class youth there has intensified. Millions of black youth are out of school and unemployed. Since their lives are of little value to the exploitative capitalists, they are more vulnerable to becoming victims of violence.  But racism towards black youth and workers in Brazil is not limited to physical violence. They are also victimized by structural poverty. According to federal government data, 68 percent of the 81 million Brazilians in poverty are black or biracial.
Racism also affects healthcare. According to Psychologist Crisfanny Souza, a member of the National Network of Social Health Control of the Black Population, “All the rates of health of black women are worse than those of whites. Black women are given fewer breast exams and receive less anesthesia during childbirth.”
A black child is 60 percent more likely than a white child to die before the age of 18 of infectious or parasitic disease, and 90 percent more likely to die of malnutrition. The public healthcare system is not prepared to deal with diseases faced by the black population, including hypertension, sickle cell anemia or type 2 diabetes.
While slavery was abolished in Brazil in 1888, racism continues to oppress black workers and youth. Despite a 2012 affirmative action law to increase the number of poor and black students in public universities, the top universities are still monopolized by middle- and upper-class students from the prestigious private school system. Public primary and secondary schools continue to deteriorate.
Death and Inequality
Brazil’s indigenous communities are especially vulnerable to racist violence. According to the Missionary Indigenous Counsel, a group linked to the Catholic Church, violence against indigenous communities increased by 237 percent in 2012. These incidents include homicides, death threats, assassination attempts, assaults and sexual violence. In many cases, these attacks were instigated by landowners seeking control of land. In the last decade, 563 indigenous people reportedly have been assassinated — all of this in a society that glorifies itself as racially mixed.
In May 2013, the television network Globo commemorated the 125th anniversary of slavery’s abolition with a satirical skit poking fun at the abolitionist movement. Douglas Belchior, a history professor, attacked Globo TV’s racism, pointing out that more than seven million Africans and their descendants were kidnapped and killed during the 388 years of Brazil’s slavery.
The history of slavery in Brazil is one in a long list of crimes against humanity by the capitalist system worldwide:
The killings of hundreds of innocent men, women and children in Pakistan and Afghanistan by the U.S. imperialists’ drone attacks;
Wage and benefit cuts of up to 50 percent for workers in Detroit, while President Barack Obama gave millions to the auto bosses;
More deportations of U.S. immigrant workers than under any previous administration in U.S. history;
The most intense segregation in U.S. public schools since 1968, with Obama leading the charge for hyper-segregated charter schools;
Police killings of black youth, including Ramarley Graham, Shantel Davis, Kimani Gray, and Rekia Boyd — to name only a few.
Workers of the world must fight racism and the capitalist system that creates it. Justice for this system’s victims will only come with capitalism’s destruction. And capitalism will only be destroyed when the international working class join the revolutionary PLP. Only then will we smash racism and sexism, and the division and exploitation of the working class. Only then can we end inequality. This is PLP’s fight. Join us!