What were you doing on a Saturday night, November 28, 2015? You were probably having fun with relatives or friends. Five black adolescent and youth were doing the same in an economy car, in a district of Rio de Janeiro suburb, going to a pizzeria, until they were shot by military policemen.
Did they all die just for being black, young and for being in a region of the city considered dangerous?
The Map of Violence 2014 brings macabre data: 154 daily homicides, totaling 56,337 murders in 2012, without considering those who have disappeared. The numbers reveal a face of Brazil hidden by an invisibility that is consequence of naturalization: a certain part of the population is having their lives brutally shortened.
The verses by Alberto Caeiro, Fernando Pessoa heteronymous, could well illustrate this genocide: “If, after I die, they want to write my biography, nothing is simpler. There are only two dates – my birth and my death”.
After all, if we take a distance from the context where this poem was written, its verses could be announced by any Brazilian black teenager or youth, between 15 and 29 years old, poor and male. They represent 53.4% of the total of murders, but the country social forces do not see this tragedy in its whole dimension.
A counterpoint to this situation is the facing of infant mortality: the integrated action of State agents, research institutions and civil society, particularly the Pastoral da Criança (apostolate for children) and child and adolescent defense councils, has made Brazilian infant mortality significantly fall since the 1980s.
2015 data from the federal government show that mortality rate of children below five years old has fallen 65% between 1990 and 2010, and the number of deaths per each thousand born alive fell from 53.7 to 19.
We are taking care of our children, but we let them die in adolescence or youth. In the social imaginary field, there is a reason for that: when we see a poor child with demands, we feel indignation and a desire to protect; the youth in the same situation causes fear and apprehension.
So, deaths do not occur naturally, they are not a “fact of life”. They happen, first of all, because the murderers feel free to kill, unpunished, and they are socially supported. We must overcome this terrible imaginary, it’s urgent.
Society consensus around infant mortality theme was the basis for the improvement of rates, as well as the fact that the problem integrates a world agenda defined by the United Nations. The same must occur with the murder of youth, and it is up to the government to do something about it.
We must spread the indignation until it becomes part of the imaginary and this violence will no longer be accepted. Only through mobilization will we be able to push legal channels, imply the Judiciary and Legislative, push to have a more efficient police, focused on ensuring public security to all citizens. This is the chief Brazilian tragedy of today.
Eliana Sousa Silva
Director and founder of NGO Redes da Maré, researcher in public security and visiting professor at the Institute of Advanced Studies at USP
