BRAZIL-HUMAN RIGHTS: Middle-Class Teens Burn Indigenous Man

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Apr 21 1997 (IPS) - Brazil has once again been shaken by an incident of gratuitous violence, this time committed not by military police, but by a group of middle-class teenagers who burnt an indigenous leader to death.

With deep burns on 95 percent of his body, 45-year-old Galdino Jesus dos Santos died Monday at a special hospital unit for burn victims in Brasilia.

On a visit to the capital, where he participated in celebrations of the National Day of the Indigenous on Saturday and protested against government indigenous policy, Dos Santos was dozing at a bus stop that night, after losing his group and being unable to return to the place he was staying.

“We were just playing around”, “we thought he was a bum”, said the teenagers, two of whom are sons of judges. All five were arrested by the police on Sunday, only a few hours after the crime.

The young men were driving around when they saw Dos Santos sleeping at the bus stop. They doused him with a flammable liquid, set him alight and fled.

But a witness, Nairo Magalhaes, chased them and wrote down the license plate number, thanks to which the police were quickly able to locate the teenagers. Although several passer-bys rushed to help, Dos Santos suffered fatal burns.

Dos Santos’ murder came only two weeks after Brazil and the world were shaken by TV broadcasts of videotaped images of brutality committed by miltary police in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo.

Interim Justice Minister Milton Seligman said he expected a quick trial, because the police investigation had already been concluded. He called the incident “an offence to Brazilian citizens.”

The governor of the Federal District, Cristovam Buarque, declared three days of official mourning, which coincided with the commemoration of the 37th anniversary of Brasilia’s founding on Monday.

The governor called the incident “an unjustifiable crime against the local and national population, against indigenous people,” and also against the prominent and respectable families of the young men themselves.

Dos Santos was a councillor, the third in the hierarchy of the Pataxo indigenous group, that lives in the southern part of the northeastern state of Bahia and is fighting to recover its land, which has been invaded by large landowners.

The young men, in custody without the right to bail, are facing up to 30 years in prison due to the cruelty and gratuitousness of the crime, and the fact that it involved the murder of an indigenous person.

The police are holding the teenagers in cells isolated from the rest of the prisoners, fearing an atttempt at lynching due to the indignation and horror caused by the crime.

In Brasilia, the phenomenon of vandalism and violence committed by gangs of middle-class youngsters is not new. Four years ago, a 16-year-old was killed by a group of fellow martial arts students.