Afeni Shakur is best known as the mother of the hip-hop artist Tupac Shakur. What is less well known is that she was a member of the Harlem chapter of the Black Panther Party, a dedicated revolutionary who served time in jail for her political activities. Freedom Archives says her work “shaped the political discourse of Black Liberation movements in the 70s.” Visit their article on Afeni to hear excepts of her speaking.
In 1968, 21 members of the Harlem Chapter of the panthers were arrested on alleged bomb conspiracy charges, with bail set at $100,000. The following is part of a letter that Shakur wrote from prison in January 1970, decrying the colonial jail system and the entire U.S. state apparatus that has oppressed people of color since colonization arrived on this continent, and brought the first enslaved Africans shortly thereafter.
Featured image: Afeni Shakur speaks at a Black Panther Party Rally. Image via Freedom Archives.
By Afeni Shakur
We know that you are trying to break us up because we are the truth and because you can’t control us. We know that you always try to destroy what you can’t control. We know that you are afraid of us because we represent a truth of the universe. We are not being tried for any overt act nor for [the] attempt to commit any overt act–we are being tried for bringing within our minds the focusing of the ideas of centuries and trying to bring this knowledge into a workable plan to liberate our people from oppression. We are being tried only because we know you and because we are not afraid of you. We know of your history of lies, deceit and slavery. We know that you now have 80% of the world in slavery. We know how you turn nation against nation, tribe against tribe, brother against brother. We know that you are blood-thirsty, pitiless and inhuman. We have seen you justify the most inhuman crimes–the worst of which was the destruction of men’s hearts and minds. We know of your greed. We know that 10,000 army bases does not make this a “free world” except free for your exploitation and imperialism. How many civilizations have you destroyed?
In this country we know that we are not 2nd class citizens–we know that we are not citizens at all. We know that the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments did not liberate us–that they only legalized slavery and expanded the Dred Scott decision to include the Indians, Spanish speaking and poor whites. We know that things have not gotten any better–but only progressively worse. We know that this is the rich man’s courts, laws, and justice. It is his skies, and air–we can only look at it and breathe it if he says so. We know that wealth is not the fruit of labor but the result of organized protected robbery. But you teach the poor workers to be honest. We know that the Almighty dollar which everyone is taught to revere is only guaranteed by slavery and exploitation. We know that we live in a world inhuman in its poverty. We know that we are a colony, living under community imperialism. The U.S. that we see is not one of freedom, beauty, and wisdom, but of fear, terror, and hate. This is a nation of your laws, run by your police, and based on protecting your economic strength. The poor are politically, economically and legally non-existent that is why in jail, 80% of the inmates are non-white and all are poor. Yet even your sociologists and criminologists admit that 80% of these are innocent.
We see that inhuman treatment but are told that we do not. We see men beaten to death in jail but are told that they died of “natural causes” but we are liars. Just as we are always presumed guilty. We heard the judge tell us that “The law didn’t apply to us,” but it isn’t in the record–and of course we lie. We are born criminals and liars. We know we are innocent but we are liars. The people know we are innocent but they don’t count. The prisoners know we are innocent but they too are liars. The guards and even the captains of the guards know we are innocent but they can’t testify. They will lose their jobs. We can prove we are innocent. But we wonder does it really matter. We can prove it in detail and we will, but just in general the charges against us in this indictment are ridiculous and are contradictory to our basic beliefs. We have never been asked as a people whether we wanted to be governed by your God, your laws, your justice, your customs, your speech, dress, and ethics. We do not. We have no respect for them. We have no respect for your laws, taxes, your gratitude, sincerity, honor and dignity–you have no respect for them yourself. You don’t respect us–thus we don’t respect YOU…
Lost among the wall-to-wall press coverage of allegations of Russian interference in US politics is a recent revelation that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) received 1,310 reports of rape and sexual assault of immigrant detainees by ICE officials between 2013 and 2017 alone.
On July 17, Emily Kassie of the New York Times published a short documentary with interviews with two women who were sexually assaulted by guards at immigrant detention facilities in Texas and Pennsylvania.
An ICE agent was driving one immigrant woman from T. Don Hutto detention center in Texas after she was released on bond. Kassie wrote: “After gathering her belongings, she was escorted to a loading area fenced with razor wire and placed into a cage inside a van. The driver was a male guard named Donald Dunn. Shortly after leaving Hutto, Dunn pulled off the road.
“‘He grabbed my breasts … He put his hands in my pants and he touched my private parts,’ she said. ‘He touched me again inside the van, and my hands were tied. And he started masturbating.’”
Many women who seek asylum in the US are escaping sexual assault and rape at the hands of their persecutors—in many cases the US-backed police and paramilitary forces of Central America.
Kassie interviewed another asylum seeker who was 19 years old when a detention center guard raped her. “‘I didn’t know how to refuse because he told me that I was going to be deported,’ the asylum seeker said. ‘I was at a jail and he was a migration officer. It’s like they order you to do something and you have to do it.’”
Cristina Parker, communications director for the Texas immigrant rights nonprofit Grassroots Leadership, told the World Socialist Web Site: “It’s terrible to say, but this report doesn’t shock me. Those of us who know these facilities thought, ‘That’s about right.’ It’s a common thing we hear. It’s been a problem. It’s not just at [T. Don] Hutto [detention center], it’s endemic and pervasive in the system.”
The corporate media has largely ignored the reports of widespread rape and sexual abuse by US immigration officials. The New York Times buried Kassie’s video shortly after it was published, while the Washington Post made only a passing reference to it at the conclusion of an article summarizing the day’s news. Otherwise, the story was not covered in the bourgeois press. The fascistic abuse of immigrants has been drowned out by the hysterical anti-Russia campaign dominating the airwaves.
“It’s disturbing that this doesn’t get more coverage and isn’t met with more outrage,” Parker said. “The media is more interested in the reality television show that is our current federal administration and not the impact that it’s having on individuals and human beings on the border. Even though immigration has fallen off the national radar, only a fraction of the children separated from their parents have been reunited. The detention system is operating at a mass scale.”
The bulk of the reports of rape and abuse were made from 2013 to 2017—mostly during the Obama administration. In an effort to cover up widespread abuse, ICE found roughly 60 percent of the abuse claims to be “unsubstantiated.”
“I do not believe there is a culture of abuse, for the past six years it’s been less than 1 percent of our population that has reported an incident,” Philip Miller, former deputy executive associate director of ICE, told Kassie.
Hundreds of thousands of people have passed through immigration detention centers in recent years, indicating that tens of thousands have been raped or assaulted. The legal doctrine of “qualified immunity” makes it extremely difficult for inmates—especially immigrants—to file lawsuits against guards.
The total number of assaults is much higher than the number reported, as most detainees are too fearful of retribution to step forward.
The report comes one month after the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) sent a letter to ICE demanding internal records about two immigrant women who were sexually abused by a prison supervisor at T. Don Hutto detention facility in 2017.
In addition, the letter states that four immigrant detainees saw the supervisor “on multiple occasions, masturbate in the dorm area while staring at detainees in a lewd manner.”
An ACLU report released in May exposed widespread physical and sexual abuse of detained immigrant children from 2009 to 2014. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents forced one 16-year-old girl to strip and “forcefully spread her legs, and touched her private parts so hard that she screamed.”
Employing the depraved and brutal language of fascist thugs, agents put another child in a room and said, “Right now, we close the door, we rape you and f*** you.” A male and female agent forced another child to get naked while they watched her for 15 minutes, threatening to lock her in a room with a large male inmate to force her to be “his wife.”
Kassie’s documentary, which deals with complaints brought by both adults and children, proves that the abuse did not stop in 2014. Among the exposures included in the ACLU report is the fact that the Obama administration actively covered up the abuse of immigrant children.
Responding to a complaint by one immigrant child in 2014, an Obama administration inspector wrote, “Are we sure we want to open this given the huge amount of more serious complaints we have?”
The CBP responded to the ACLU report by claiming allegations of abuse are “unfounded and baseless.” Reports of sexual assault “equate allegations with fact,” the report said.
None of the leaders of the #MeToo movement have made public statements about the US government’s rape and abuse of the most impoverished and oppressed. While figures such as actresses Rose McGowan, Asia Argento, Ashley Judd and former State Department official Ronan Farrow engage in endless acts of self-promotion on Twitter, their pages remained silent about Kassie’s report.
The #MeToo campaign has no interest in the fate of refugees who are the victims of US imperialism’s wars in Central America, Africa and the Middle East. The focus of the wealthy initiators of that anti-democratic campaign is not on halting “abuse of power,” but advancing their own careers and inflating their own bank accounts.
Claudia Patricia Gomez Gonzalez was shot and killed by border patrol after crossing the border in Laredo, Texas on May 23, 2018. The border patrol agent who fired the shot fatally wounding Gomez Gonzalez remains on administrative leave.
Claudia Patricia Gomez Gonzalez, 19 years old, was from the Maya Mam community of San Juan Ostuncalco, Guatemala. She held a degree in accounting, but had not been able to secure a job.
Cultural Survival condemns this excessive use of force against another human being. We urge US immigration and border patrol agents to respect the rights of Indigenous people and all people who migrate, especially their right to life, regardless of their immigration status. Above all else, immigrants are people, and are protected under international human rights and humanitarian law. No human being is illegal; and no one should be executed while they are searching for a life free from poverty and violence. Indigenous lives matter.
Guatemalan officials have called for an “exhaustive, impartial investigation” into the killing, and denounced the violence as an excessive use of force, adding a call for respect to the rights of Guatemalan citizens and all those held by immigration control, “especially with respect to life.”
Article 1 of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) states:
“Indigenous peoples have the right to the full enjoyment, as a collective or as individuals, of all human rights and fundamental freedoms as recognized in the Charter of the United Nations, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and international human rights law.”
UNDRIP Article 7 states, “Indigenous individuals have the rights to life, physical and mental integrity, liberty and security of person.”
On May 27, a group of 300 Guatemalans held a vigil in Los Angeles demanding investigation into the death of Gomez Gonzalez, reported Prensa Libre. At least 25 people spoke at the vigil in a variety of Indigenous languages. “Guatemalans are dignified people, who all carry dreams. Our compatriot had a dream and it was cut short. Xelajú lost a daughter, a good and honorable woman,” said Luis de la Vega at the vigil.
Walter Batres, of the Network of Guatemalan Migrants, one of the organizers of the vigil, noted “We want to make a tribute to her life, we want to be heard, to ask for justice and demand that the Guatemalan government take steps as well to clarify the facts.”
Intercontinental Cry has been reporting for almost exactly two years now on the escalating state-sponsored violence in Nicaragua, while many otherwise informed people remained stubbornly, loyally, and piously in denial – clinging to the romantic Sandinista, anti-imperialist, revolutionary narrative… It’s charming; it really is. And, that’s why it has become so dangerous.
The recent mass uprising in Nicaragua is youth-led with decentralized leadership, much like the ‘Occupy Movement’ to the north – and, it has received some of the same criticism of the Occupy Movement regarding the lack of organized leadership. Yet, who is to blame a generation who grew up under a growing dictatorship for wanting their movement to be proactively more egalitarian, in practice not just propaganda?
Many of the original Sandinista fighters are the ones who are losing their retirement pensions right now; there is a broad consensus that the Ortega-Murrillo family dynasty does not embody the original Sandinista values and ideologies.
The mass current mobilization has even been termed a ‘Nicaraguan Spring’ – which fully transcends any standard dichotomy between the ‘left’ and the ‘right’. It is challenging not just a dictatorship, but entrenched ideas about an ideologue figurehead who has concentrated power within his personal family to dangerous extremes and has support networks throughout the ‘pink tide’ socialist countries of Latin America as well as with Russia, and possibly even China and Iran1.
The renewed imperialist presence of Russia in Nicaragua – which is impossible to neatly abstract in terms of its impact on the current political climate – poses increased threats as well. Russia has been participating in an ongoing process to remilitarize Nicaragua; and, such activity has long been recognized by regional analysts as potential preparation for this current mass dissent. How Russia’s role there will evolve in this context is somewhat worrisome and hard to predict. Their alliance with the otherwise impoverished country is more important to them than might be assumed.
Hence, Putin has in recent years: initiated a new ‘drug war’ on the ground there; provided ‘security’ for developments in President Daniel Ortega’s infamous plans to build an inter-oceanic canal with the help of a Chinese billionaire; and, has installed a secretive ‘surveillance center’ with satellite capabilities to monitor activity in almost all – if not all – of the Americas. Even people who live and work in the surrounding area of the center in Nicaragua do not seem to understand its true or full purpose.
At risk of burying the lede, it was important to consolidate some context for the Indigenous struggles in Moskitia (an autonomous, pluri-ethnic region which Nicaragua has a complicated relationship with…to put it lightly) which have been simmering at a slower, but consistently oppressive and violent, burn for years now.
This ‘complicated relationship’ included recent accusations that the Nicaraguan government willfully allowed a large chunk of traditional Indigenous (and uniquely biodiverse) territory of tropical rainforest to burn without proper response. The Nicaraguan government turned down help from neighboring Costa Rica to put out the massive forest fire. Many attributed this to a continuance of their longstanding efforts to expand the agricultural frontier into the autonomous Indigenous territory which is home to the second largest tropical rainforest in the Western Hemisphere – considered the ‘lungs of Central America’.
The impact of the loss of this rainforest cannot be understated. And, amid the chaos surrounding the massive fire, there were reports of roads being built into previously respected, and lawfully protected Indigenous Rama territory, which would in the future further facilitate resource extraction activity on their land.
How does all this tie into state propaganda about mental health?
To begin unpacking that, in February of 2018, the pan-South American socialist state-run, media outlet, TeleSUR, ran an article claiming that a “mysterious madness was crippling” Indigenous Peoples in this region where Sandinista forces have been trying to nationalize and gain control of the vast natural resources for decades.
The article – and its premise – was beyond tacky, especially considering the deep and nuanced political undertones it was attempting to manipulate.
According to TeleSUR, “Nicaraguan anthropologists insist traditional techniques are best to treat the ‘grisi siknis’ outbreak; and, “Western medicinal treatments” cannot cure it.
At first blush, it all may sound really noble and anti-imperialist…until one realizes they are, on one point, attempting to displace the region and Peoples’ historic and autonomous relationship with the United States – which was advocated for by the late (AIM) American Indian Movement leader, Russell Means.
As recently as 2013, Mayanga and Miskito Peoples in the region called on President Barack Obama for support in their fight to preserve their ancestral territories and the crucially biodiverse tropical rainforest.
During the Contra Wars, the U.S. also provided limited support to the Miskito, who were defending their ancestral territory from the Sandinista (and in some instances fleeing to refugee camps in Honduras – a practice which has unfortunately resumed in recent years and is perhaps escalating conflicts now – according to claims in another recent TeleSUR article which could not be independently verified — with Honduran authorities).
As Means put it, here was a chance for the U.S. government to: “For the first time in its history…ally itself with an Indian cause”.
Back to the recent propaganda of note…While it implies on the surface that the Nicaraguan state is validating a traditional Indigenous healing approach where there has been an ‘outbreak of insanity’… if one reads further, the article doesn’t actually concede that traditional medicine – as it is implemented by traditional regional healers – is wholly sufficient, either…
According to the article, it took a Nicaraguan physician who had studied Indigenous cures, for it to be properly treated – by him, of course.
A ‘western psychologist’, interestingly, might diagnose the symptoms of ‘grisi siknis’ as a unique form of PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder). The Indigenous Peoples of the region have surely endured more than their share of trauma at the hands of the now ruling FSLN party in recent decades – which, again, has come to a significant head in the past month of country-wide unrest.
With this in mind, it becomes apparent there is a form of ‘gaslighting’ (manipulative psychological abuse which Psychology Todaydescribes as a tool of dictators) happening in this state-sponsored propaganda.
In Moskitia, ‘grisi siknis’ is recognized by traditional healers as a behavioral contagion limited to the isolated communities in the region. The communities have been long isolated as they endured many forms of ongoing attacks; and, while the manifestation of a unique set of post-traumatic stress symptoms – or, what is perhaps better described as an impact of ongoing traumatic stress – can be viewed in either more clinical or more holistic terms, if one’s worldview encompassed the overall phenomenon in purely ‘supernatural’ terms (as at least some Indigenous Miskito Indigenous healers do), then through this lens it would take on an optic of all-out spiritual warfare. And for many Miskito, it does.
Bullet holes from an assault rifle attack on the home of the Indigenous Miskito Elder, pictured above. Colonos arrive in the territories with sophisticated weaponry which many Miskito claim to bear serial numbers traceable to the Nicaraguan government. (Photo: Courtney Parker, 2016)
It is disturbing to ponder how many people may have been manipulated to internalize this grotesque attempt at ‘gaslighting’ the Miskito Peoples. The article attempts to confer to the masses that ‘collective madness’ is just somehow ‘common’ among this particular Indigenous group.
‘This particular Indigenous group’ – the Miskito – just also happen to be the most politically organized, out of all other Indigenous or other ethnic groups in the pluri-ethnic autonomous region of Moskitia, or elsewhere in Nicaragua.
Their political party, YATAMA – which is an acronym which translates into English as ‘Sons of Mother Earth’ – is one of the only remaining strongholds of opposition to the FSLN in that region (which some have estimated holds up to or above 80% of the colonial borders of Nicaragua’s remaining natural resources, which the region’s Indigenous Peoples have stewarded and protected during their long-standing tenure there).
While it is true that symptoms of the culturally specific designated mental illness include panic and are often accompanied by acts (or delusional attempted acts) of violence – more specifically, they are often attempts at defense from an unseen attacker. What the article doesn’t say is that this behavior is being exhibited in a community that has long suffered ‘invisible’ (to the rest of the country and world) acts of violence from settler and state forces.
A bullet grazed right over the head of the Indigenous Miskito elder pictured above during the attack from Colonos in 2015. The attackers promised to return and inflict more deadly violence if they did not vacate their lands and home. (Photo: Courtney Parker 2016)
In this manner, the propaganda present in the TeleSUR article was also an attempt to legitimize the ongoing colonization efforts from settlers known as ‘Colonos’ (which translates simply from Spanish to ‘colonizers’) who arrive from the country’s interior regions or the Pacific coast. In recent years, these armed intruders have placed the frontier areas under a violent siege, sometimes claiming illegal land deeds – even though all property in Moskitia is communal – to the legally autonomous territories.
The framing of this mental health issue — which is considered unique to Miskito communities — deflects attention from the intolerable acts of violence the settlers routinely commit. It is further, an ostensibly blatant attempt at collective ‘victim blaming’.
It seems painfully obvious that the news outlet, which receives direct fiscal support from the Nicaraguan state, is trying to delegitimize the most politically powerful group of Indigenous Peoples – who are, again, the main challenge to the FSLN dictatorship in the region – who have no choice but to fight back against the heavily armed intruders to protect their families, communities, and sacred, ancestral (and legal) territories, and portray them as (or worse, convince them they are) ‘crazy’ and/or ‘insanely and unreasonably violent’.
A young Miskito girl in a frontier community stands in front of a group of community defenders who have been forced to take up primitive, make-shift weapons as they attempt to defend their families, land, culture, and the carbon-mitigating rainforest. (Photo: Courtney Parker, 2016)
IC spoke with a family who had recently fled the frontier community of Santa Clara while in Bilwi, where they had recently been displaced to, in 2016. They described how hard it was to make a living and feed their family in the more urban area of Bilwi (also known as Puerto Cabezas).
While Bilwi is also home to a more ‘urbanized’ – or ‘urban-acclimated’ – population of Miskito Peoples, the refugees from the frontier are used to being able to live off the land and provide for their own food and shelter from it. Some individuals in the incoming waves of refugees have never used money; many children arrive without shoes; and, numerous children and adults speak only their Native tongue and no, or limited, Spanish.
Prior to the mass, country-wide uprising, there was a huge shake-up (which IC also covered) and outright revolt surrounding charges of electoral fraud waged on the FSLN after recent elections in Moskitia. One IC contributor recently documented the claims through independent sources. Investigations into the full extent of the fraud and activities amounting to voter suppression are still underway.
During this time, one of the only Miskito-speaking media outlets – the YATAMA political party’s community radio station – was burned to the ground by ‘Sandinista youth gangs’.
These such ‘gangs’ are now being recognized as state-sponsored paramilitaries by Nicaraguan analysts, as their violent and focused (it is said, directed) activities have become more widely scrutinized while they continue to inflict terror upon expanded regions across Nicaragua at this time.
For now, it is important that as the international human rights bodies are looking to Nicaragua – finally – and seeing the true nature of the Ortega-Murillo dictatorship… that they be reminded of the still marginalized struggle of the Indigenous Peoples and other ethnic groups residing in Moskitia, in the Northern Caribbean coastal area.
It was here that the journalist, Angel Eduardo Gahona, was shot in the head while live-streaming the country-wide protests in Bluefields, Moskitia. The incident made international news, but with no recognition of how this shocking act of violence, amidst the recent gross abuses of government force, occurred in the traditionally Indigenous-led, pluri-ethnic, autonomous region which has a name of its own: La Moskitia2.
On a final and sobering note, two men have been arrested and transported to the capital city of Managua – charged with the assassination of Gahona. They are two Creole men, native to Moskitia, named Brandon Lovo and Glen Slate.
According to the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas, the victim’s own family is protesting this accusation and related charges. Members of the family have claimed the only people within range to shoot Gahona that night were Nicaraguan militarized state police – who had recently trumped up their presence in the region following the unrest after the fraudulent election, even before the countrywide protests commenced.
Juan Gahona told the Knight Center:
“PERSONALLY, I RULE OUT ANY POSSIBILITY I CAN LINK THESE GUYS TO ANGEL’S MURDER. WHY DO THEY HAVE TO TAKE THEM TO MANAGUA? THE CERTAIN THING IS THAT THEY TRANSFER THEM, TORTURE THEM […] AND MAKE THEM SAY THINGS THAT AREN’T, OUT OF FEAR, BECAUSE OF THREATS”.
Amnesty International released a new report on another massive outbreak of deadly violence from government forces and paramilitaries (as Nicaraguan analysts have come to call some pro-government mobs) on student protesters, Monday, May 29, 2018. Find their latest assessment of the situation, here.
1 Iran at one point expressed interest in garnering a stake in the Nicaraguan government’s canal plans as they were being facilitated by a Chinese billionaire, which was – tellingly – to contain no treaty of neutrality or ‘maritime peace clause’ as is central to activity which may take place within the Panama Canal.
2 Traditional linguists insist it is more proper to spell it as ‘La Muskitia’, on grounds that there was no ‘o’ sound in the most ancient version of the Native tongue, but the above spelling has been largely embraced by its inhabitants.
Less than two hours before she was murdered on the evening of March 14, Rio de Janeiro city councillor Marielle Franco was speaking at a roundtable of black women activists about “young black women moving the structures.”
As Franco was leaving the site, a car pulled up to the side of her own vehicle and fired nine shots into it. Franco and her driver, Anderson Pedro Gomes, were killed on the spot. The councillor’s press officer, who was in the backseat, was hit by glass fragments and injured but survived.
Bearing all the hallmarks of an execution, the attack has sent shockwaves through Brazil including social media. Nationwide protests have been scheduled for the next couple of days. More than 70,000 people and organisations have confirmed their presence in the demonstration in Rio de Janeiro.
Marielle Franco was elected with the leftist Socialist and Freedom Party (PSOL) in 2016 as the fifth most voted councillor in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil’s second-largest city with a population of over six million.
As a young, black, favela-bred lesbian woman activist, she championed several underrepresented demographics in Brazil’s institutional politics and was beloved by activists across the country.
Remembering a fierce critic and activist
Marielle Franco was born and raised in the Maré favela, the largest complex in Rio and home to 130,000 people. In 2005, Franco’s best friend was killed there during a confrontation between police officers and drug dealers. That episode drove her into human rights advocacy and activism against police violence.
A fierce critic of Rio’s deadly police, she had been appointed in late February 2018 as the main rapporteur for the commission of Brazil’s municipal assembly to monitor the ongoing army intervention in Rio de Janeiro.
Brazil’s army took over the city’s public security in early February in response to gang violence despite criticism from local non-governmental organizations and the United Nations’ Human Rights Council.
She had openly criticized the intervention and compared it to a similar operation in her native Maré favela during the 2014 World Cup.
Franco consistently spoke out, both from the pulpit and on her social media pages, against extrajudicial killings of Rio’s poor and mostly black favela residents.
Just this week, she made a series of posts on Facebook about the ongoing violence in the Acari favela:
This week, two young men were killed and dumped at a hole. Today, the police were walking through the streets threatening residents.
Franco called attention to a news story that reported five shoot-outs in the favela over the course of seven days:
Marielle last Facebook post was about the ongoing police violence in Acari favela. Photo: Screenshot/Facebook
Franco spoke out against Brazil’s lethal police
Police lethality in Brazil is staggering. In 2016, 920 killings by police were documented in Rio de Janeiro alone, up from 419 in 2012, according to Amnesty International. A report by Public Security Forum, a national research institution, counted 4,224 killings by police officers in the whole country in 2016, with 99 percent of them being men and 76 percent black. Many of those homicides may amount to extrajudicial killings, a crime under international law.
On social media, organisations, political parties and civil profiles used hashtags asking for a throughout the investigation of Franco’s murder.
Her political importance goes beyond the direct actions to combat violence suffered by black people from Rio. Marielle, while a black woman, represented millions of women without a political voice within the State, breaking a pact of exclusion of black people crystalized by the history of segregation in Brazil, masked by the myth of racial democracy.
There should not be any doubts about the context, motivation, and authorship of Marielle Franco’s murder.
Her party PSOL issued an official statement saying that the hypothesis of a “political crime” could not be discarded, since “she had just denounced a brutal action” by the police.
Marielle Franco grew up at Maré Complex, the largest favela in Rio de Janeiro. Photo: Mídia Ninja CC BY-SA 2.0
“We cannot wait another 10 years or think that I will be there for another 10”
Sociologist and public security specialist Luiz Eduardo Soares, a close friend to Franco, remembered how the attack echoes that of Judge Patricia Acioli, also killed in a drive-by shooting in 2011. Accioli had been overseeing a number of cases involving paramilitary groups (called ‘militias’ in Rio).
When, my god, will the people awake and understand that public unsafety starts at the most corrupt and brutal segments inside police forces, and that we cannot live with this haunting legacy from the dictatorship period anymore. Will we continue to talk about ‘individual misconduct’? What can we do now, besides crying?
During the black activists’ roundtable that Franco had joined hours before being killed, she said:
We have a movement pushing for more women in politics, in power positions, more women occupying decision making spots, because that is the only way of getting more qualified public policies.
Franco remembered two black women politicians who had come before her, ten years apart from each other, urging:
We cannot wait another 10 years or think that I will be there for another 10.
A bullet grazed right over the head of the Indigenous Miskito elder pictured above during the attack from Colonos in 2015. The attackers promised to return and inflict more deadly violence if they did not vacate their lands and home. (Photo: Courtney Parker 2016)
A young Miskito girl in a frontier community stands in front of a group of community defenders who have been forced to take up primitive, make-shift weapons as they attempt to defend their families, land, culture, and the carbon-mitigating rainforest. (Photo: Courtney Parker, 2016)
