Features of Human Rights: Cleansing of Favelas

 Fabricio Guerra

Mr. Zhou

GPHC

5 November 2020

Over-Policing in Brazil's Favelas

    Brazil is a very difficult country to understand in a historical context, especially if your views are euro-centric. To put it very, very briefly, the government has little care for the nation's poor, which mostly consists of black and mixed people. Slavery was abolished in a gradual process as the Catholic Church began to support its abolishment, and then was completely outlawed in 1888, freeing 700,000 slaves in the process. Now that about half of Brazil's population was freed, there had to be a huge amount of infrastructure built so that these freed people could have basic needs, such as housing. However, the government never started such operations, and left all freed people to their own will. So, they began to build slums, the first of which began in northern Rio de Janeiro (Fun Fact: Favelas started when soldiers coming back from rebel suppression in the north had nowhere to go, so they built the first Rio Favela right in the middle of Rio). As the 20th century went on, and economic urbanization began to take effect, these favelas began to expand more and more and appear in different cities, such as Sao Paulo. During the 1970s the production of drugs began to spread more and more in South America, and the dense and maze like structures of the favelas made a perfect hideout for drug dealers and producers. During the 1980s and 1990s, the United States began to get more and more involved in the illegal drug trade in South and Central America, killing off most drug cartels in Mexico and Colombia, which meant that more and more production was coming from Brazilian Favelas. In 2014 the majority government party was caught in the biggest scandal in South American history, and this led to a complete government reform. In 2010, a change in president and different policies led to a huge crime outbreak, and as the government reformed itself violent crimes such as armed robbery and murder began to skyrocket. Most crimes stemmed around drugs, and those were heavily linked with favelas. So in order to combat this huge crime outbreak, the government started to send in kill squads to hunt down drug rings and kill them (this wasn't necessarily a new thing, kill squads were also heavily used in the 1990s and became widely criticized but was stopped as the new presidency in 2003 created a lot of jobs, quelling high crime). As police and military cracked down on favelas, they were breaking several inherent human rights of the people living there. Racism plays a huge part as well, a black person walking alone a night could render them suspicious and they could get shot and killed. On average, the police were killing about 5 people per day in the favelas. As these police officers invade homes and kill whoever they deem suspicious, they are breaking one of the most -- if not THE most -- important article of the UDHR: Article 3 - Everyone has the right to life, liberty, and security of person. If the government cannot respect even the most basic rights due to arbitrary murders, how can they expect to exist as a whole?


Sources

universal-declaration-human-rights

https://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/slavery-brazil

https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/BRA/brazil/crime-rate-statistics

https://www.rioonwatch.org/?p=21350


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