“Black lives matter” in Brazil too | Tra …

From Brasilia

A painting over 150 meters long and about 10 meters high on the main avenue of San Pablo proclaims, with white capital letters “ # BLACK LIFE COUNTS “. For about ten hours, a group of visual artists printed the slogan which occupies almost the entire width of Avenida Paulista.

The currency that gained worldwide fame after the murder of George Floyd in the United States fEU acclaimed in marches held since Friday in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and other major Brazilian cities to condemn death of Joao Alberto Silveira Freitas, a 40-year-old black man, executed by two security guards in the south of Porto Alegre, capital of Rio Grande do Sul.

The crime at a Carrefour branch sparked rare national outrage in a country that appeared to have normalized racial violence.

In general, murders of this type lack visibility or give rise to demonstrations that are confined to the neighborhood or favela where the victim is from.

Amnesty International reported that black men accounted for 72% of the 59,000 murders in Brazil in 2015, a statistic that may have worsened in recent years due to the actions of President Jair Bolsonaro, who encouraged easy initiation and Police impunity associated with decrees authorizing the sale of weapons. According to Amnesty, a young black man is violently killed every 23 minutes in Brazil.

Joao Alberto Silveira Freitas, “Beto”, four children, black, was arrested for a minor incident while his wife stood in line at the Carrefour checkout after 8pm on Thursday. Half an hour later, the portly man was lying dead in the supermarket parking lot after being spun and suffocated by the two private guards (one is also a police officer) supported by other employees of the French parent company.

“The way they killed Beto is similar to American (George) Floyd, they squeezed his neck with their feet, he passed out and kept beating him.” In the United States the people rebelled, here we say enough, it’s over, we no longer tolerate racism who oppresses us for centuries, they will have to understand that black life matters ”, explodes Izamel Ferreira da Silva, leader of the black movement of Porto Alegre in dialogue with PageI12.

She took part in the demonstrations, several a day, organized in Porto Alegre, which will celebrate next Sunday the waiver for the mayor’s office between Manuela D’Avila, of the Communist Party of Brazil and a candidate from the left front against the conservative Sebastiao Melo, of the Brazilian Democratic Movement.

There is outrage and security in the words of Izamel Ferreria da Silva. “Beto’s murder is making us sick, we are not going to forgive him, it will last, we will go on and continue to protest, enough racism.”

Bolsonaro’s reaction to the crime ranged from irony to demagoguery. He first said he was “color blind” and did not distinguish between black and white, then he said the only colors in his country are “green and yellow” (from flag) and in front of his colleagues in the Group of 20, he alluded to an imaginary international conspiracy that wants to use racism to sow national division.

“Bolsonaro is a hypocrite, the racists are the first to say that in this country there is a mixture of races, that black and white coexist harmoniously in this society, but blacks do not enter university, blacks are a minority in political positions and we are in the majority in prisons and favelas ”, lists Ferreira da Silva, one of the leaders of the Brazilian socialist group Negritud.

“In Brazil, the police don’t look the same between a black man and a white man. I myself saw a white person steal something from a shelf in a market without anyone approaching them. One time a guard accused me of stealing and showing him that I was I made a mistake, I took my clothes off, then I apologized Why were you wary, because I am black?

The assassination of Joao Alberto Silveira Freitas has mobilized activism in several Brazilian cities. In some, the demonstrations took place in front of Carrefour agencies, where acts of violence took place.

The case also had national and international repercussions. Former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said he was “overwhelmed” by the images of the crime of this “black man (…) racism is at the origin of all the abysses of this country”. Formula 1 world champion Lewis Hamilton, who repudiated Floyd’s death in the United States five months ago, said at the weekend that Porto Alegre’s assassination caused “the loss of another life black, we must fight for it Stop “.

The UN argued that the crime, which occurred a day before Brazil’s National Black Awareness Day, highlighted “the various dimensions of racism”.