MC Leonardo Pereira Mota told Artememoria that police continue to criminalize funk bailes in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. What exactly does that police targeting involve? And are there groups that try to stop this from happening?
DefeZap is one an organization in Rio that informs the public about these patterns of police violence and also tries to hold authorities accountable for state violence – including the violent repression of popular culture.
Guilherme Pimentel is a lawyer and one of the founders and directors of DefeZap. In this interview, he breaks down what happens when police break up a funk baile, the action that people can take, and the roots of police violence in Brazilian history.
Read on.
Artememoria: Let’s start by laying out a bit of context about your organization.
Pimentel: The name of the organization is DefeZap, which is a combination of the words defesa [defense] and WhatsApp. In Brazil, “Zap” is a nickname for WhatsApp, so DefeZap comes from that combination.
The organization was founded in May 2016. We’ve been around for almost two years now. We receive denunciations of state violence in Rio de Janeiro’s metropolitan area. When those denunciations come with evidence, we take on the case. What does that mean? The people who sent the evidence do not have to identify themselves. We make sure the evidence reaches the institutions responsible for controlling the police. And then we work to monitor those institutions.
As it happens, we have two kinds of cases. We have the individual, factual case that a citizen hands to us. But then we also start to notice that certain cases repeat and form patterns. The specifics are different, but the cases follow a pattern, and we take a special look at those patterns. One of the patterns we have identified is the violent repression of cultural events in favelas, particularly in funk bailes.
In just the past year, we’ve received ten cases with evidence of that kind of violence. We know that it’s just a fraction of the cases that take place.
Artememoria: How do you know that?
Pimentel: I’d been working with human rights for over 10 years. I saw that the destruction of bailes was a regular occurrence, a systematic violation of the law by the police, so much so that in 2015 I brought together the professionals that organize bailes and started to record their accounts. I collected 34 accounts, taking out names and some details so as to not put anyone in danger. I only stopped collecting testimonies because they were infinite.
Artememoria: Are these accounts more or less recent?
Pimentel: Yes. If I’m not mistaken, they were all from 2001 to the present. Because of those accounts, I know this happens. Every weekend, in some area of Rio, this happens. In at least one area, if not five or six in one single weekend.
Artememoria: What exactly takes place?
Pimentel: We’ve found four patterns of this kind of violation of the law by the police. The first is the most common. The police arrive at the baile in their infamous armored trucks and drive over the sound system, destroy all of the equipment, and then leave. That could happen before, during, or after the party. At any moment. In one of the cases, in fact, the police used a grenade. They drove the truck over the sound system and threw two grenades to destroy the equipment.
Another pattern is shooting equipment. The police stop in front of the speakers, take out a gun, and destroy everything. And then another pattern involves fire. The police make a huge bonfire with the sound equipment.
In the case of setting equipment on fire, there was a case that surfaced in the press in 2015. It happened in São Gonçalo. The police arrived in the middle of a baile, arrested all of the people there, and forced them to hold hands and walk around the sound system bonfire chanting, Eu amo o 7o Batalhão (“I love the 7th Police Battalion”). That’s torture.
The fourth and final pattern is the use of a knife. The police cut the cables on the equipment and leave.
Overall, it’s clear that there is a pattern of the police destroying equipment. It almost seems as though they’re angry about something. They seem angry about something.
So, we knew this was going on, but we didn’t have any proof. DefeZap met with the owners of the sound equipment, the people who organize and produce the bailes. We did a sort of workshop, an orientation about how to act in these situations and collect evidence while staying safe. Ever since, DefeZap has started getting evidence. That way, we can ensure that the public prosecutors actually hold the police accountable. These actions are egregiously illegal.
Artememoria: What’s been the result of those cases?
Pimentel: The problem is that the justice system is very slow. Right now the cases are still open.
Artememoria: How many cases are there, currently?
Pimentel: We have at least six. But those cases are still in the investigation stage [in Procedimento Aprobatório do Ministério Público]. They haven’t yet been tried in court. The public prosecutors are still collecting various elements to make the case. We’re following the process and we’ll see what happens.
And so, that’s our work. It’s two-pronged. One part is to inform the public and collect information about what’s going on. In this case, that involved a kind of training so that no one would put themself at risk. And then the second part is to act on the cases that actually take place, to monitor the institutions responsible for those cases and such.
But this is a clear pattern. You have some police battalions that repeat these kind of actions more than others, but it’s an institutional pattern. This is not localized. The violence takes place independently of the specific police battalion, which means that a larger system is responsible.
The repression of bailes is one of the overall patterns that most repeats. It’s starting to surface in the press, but one of the problems is that it’s still nearly invisible. You have violence that occurs at ta huge scale, but then no one knows that it’s happening. And then you show people the videos of what’s going on and they’re shocked, like what the hell is that. That’s the overview of the issue as it stands today.
But I think it’s important to clarify one thing. If you look at Brazilian history, you have the period of dictatorship. There was censorship, persecution, the suspension of rights, including the right to assembly. Any gathering of people was viewed as a threat and was criminalized, particularly for marginalized groups, black people, and people living in favelas. But it’s also important to recognize that this did not begin with dictatorship. The dictatorship was more of an intensification of an authoritarian strain in Brazil that began before the dictatorship.
Brazil was founded on authoritarianism. Portuguese Latin America is a single block. It stayed unified because a lots of Brazilian blood was spilled. It’s not random that we have the map we do. Go to President Vargas Avenue, one of the central avenues here in Rio, and you’ll find the Caxias Palace. Who was the Duke of Caxias? He was the pacifier of Brazil. That is, he repressed revolts throughout Brazil and killed a lot of people. He’s considered one of the people responsible for the Brazil we have today.
Brazil exists between two opposite national projects. One is an authoritarian vision of Brazil, which originated in the colonial era and still exists today. But you also have another project working towards a different national identity, a democratic one. That democratic project has the organizations that work with the people, defend citizens, and defend democracy. That doesn’t negate Brazil. It affirms that Brazil can be better. We need to rise above the bad that exists this country.
This is the tension that you see in the case of Caxias and that you see today in national politics, in our justice system, etc. This is the dispute that marked and continues to mark Brazil. It is in this context that authoritarian parts of Brazil feel they have the right to do what they do with funk bailes.
Artememoria: Speaking of continuities, the state has repressed other forms of popular, Afro-Brazilian art, such as capoeira and samba, throughout Brazil’s history. Is there a similarity in that kind of repression and what’s going on with funk today?
Pimentel: Totally. Funk is not the problem. If you go to a New Year’s party for the state government, funk will be playing at that party. Everyone there will be dancing. If you go to a New Year’s party for any business, they will also play funk. And again, everyone will be dancing.
So what’s being banned here is that people of a specific social class become visible, that they take on the role of protagonist, that they say what they want to say. Because that has such amazing potential. Firstly, it places you in the world in a way that isn’t marginal. You become someone who asserts something. You assert the right to your body, the right to have fun, to have sex, to be treated well, despite everything. You propose that for a people in a social strata reserved for bad treatment or subservience. So those assertions make authoritarian sectors worry.
What we have today, as I see it, is a criminalization of the favela and of popular culture, especially black culture. Authoritarian Brazil dominates our institutions. Many of our institutions are designed to repress and contain, to maintain inequality. It’s a project of social control.
Artememoria: Can you elaborate on more specific parallels in how the police have controlled samba, capoeira, and funk? How did the police crack down on samba and capoeira?
Pimentel: Through arrest. Vagrancy was a crime, so the person who passed through the streets, unemployed but with a guitar over their shoulder, that’s the malandro who played samba, was seen as criminal. The capoeirista was also seen as someone dangerous. Everyone was grouped into the category of dangerous. Fear is what motivates all criminal policy. Fear is determined by a demand for order, which is in turn determined by whoever is in power.
The fear that forms the basis of criminal law was very present in the Portuguese royal family. What was that context? In 1808, the royal family cowered in Europe during Napoleon’s invasions. Napoleon getting close to the Iberian Peninsula, and so Portugal was in trouble. The entire royal court got on a boat and came to Brazil. And they arrived in a place where the majority of the population was enslaved black people. In 1804, just four years before their arrival, Haiti’s revolution had taken place. Enslaved people took power and declared independence against Napoleon’s France, the same empire that the Portuguese monarchy was fleeing. So imagine how afraid the royal court was when they got to Brazil. They made a huge public security apparatus, and it was an apparatus meant to repress the people. It was specifically designed to target black and poor Brazilians, to stop internal revolts. It was not a project meant to protect the public.
From then to now, there was a declaration of independence, the creation and promotion of a republic, periods of democracy, the civil-military dictatorship, and now, once again, democracy. But the problem is that the institutions didn’t undergo major changes when the political systems changed. For example, the internal norms and structure of the military police were established under the military dictatorship. They didn’t democratize along with Brazil. They continue as an internal, institutional culture. No police academy teaches how to destroy sound systems. No commander will explicitly say go there, and when there’s a baile, shoot it out and torture the partygoers. But the young policemen learn from the old. It’s violence that carries through in practice.
The country still lives in its original state of fear.
This interview, translated from the Portuguese by Lara Norgaard, was edited and condensed for clarity. All photos, illustrations, and graphics are from the DefeZap organization and were used here with permission from Guilherme Pimentel.
For in-depth articles about police violence in Rio, you can take a look at DefeZap’s Bolhetim.
