HUMAN RIGHTS-BRAZIL: At Least 2,000 Summary Executions a Year

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Apr 19 2001 (IPS) - Although there is no death penalty in Brazil, at least 2,000 people a year are victims of summary executions at the hands of the police or “death squads”, according to a report submitted to the United Nations Human Rights Commission in Geneva Wednesday.

The “Report on Summary, Arbitrary or Extrajudicial Executions” was drawn up by eight non-governmental organisations (NGOs), including four international groups.

The rough estimate of “at least 2,000” was the result of an examination of the 13,917 homicides reported by the press in the first half of 1999, of which 1,148 – or 8.25 percent of the total – were extrajudicial executions. The six-month total was then doubled.

However, such figures only refer to murders covered by the media in 18 of Brazil’s 27 states. An estimated 46,600 murders were committed throughout the country in 1999. Based on the proportion of 8.25 percent, summary executions would number closer to 3,840, the report adds.

One of the document’s aims is to bring about a visit to Brazil by the UN Special Rapporteur on Summary Executions Asma Jahangir, said Maria Luisa Mendonça, co-director of the Centre for Global Justice, which helped draft the report.

The NGOs that drew up the document are hoping it will have repercussions similar to the stir triggered by the report on torture, released Apr 11 by UN Special Rapporteur on Torture Nigel Rodley.

A mission to Brazil headed by Rodley in August and September documented “systematic, widespread” and growing use of torture in Brazil’s prisons and police stations.

Denunciations of torture in Brazil are not new. Indeed, human rights groups have long complained about the practice. However, the UN report gave them an official air, and obliges the government to comply with international conventions to which it is a signatory, said Mendonça.

Brazil’s Secretary of State on Human Rights, Gilberto Saboia, said the government remains open to any UN investigation on such questions.

The killing of criminals or suspects at the hands of police or private individuals working in death squads – frequently off-duty police officers – is a phenomenon that has long marred Brazil’s human rights record, according to experts.

The statistics provided by the report, compiled from press clippings by the National Human Rights Movement, held the civil and military police responsible for 81.79 percent of the 1,148 extrajudicial killings registered in 1999. Of the rest, death squads were blamed for 16.9 percent, prison personnel for 0.96 percent, and the armed forces for 0.35 percent.

In Sao Paulo, Brazil’s largest city, police and the press tend to report “chacinas” or collective killings, usually of young men, in poor neighbourhoods in the metropolitan region. In the past few years, nearly 100 such mass killings have been reported.

The killings go unpunished, because local residents keep silent due to fear of reprisal, or because they support the vigilantes, who are treated as heroes in many neighbourhoods.

Rio de Janeiro accounts for the largest proportion, 22.56 percent, of the summary executions referred to by the report submitted to the UN Human Rights Commission, which is currently holding its annual sessions in Geneva.

But murders in Rio de Janeiro tend to receive little attention, because they generally take place in the poor outlying neighbourhoods, and rarely affect the wealthy tourist areas on the southside of the city.

One of the cases mentioned by the report was the January 1999 murder of a 14-year-old boy who was shot in the back of the neck by two police officers in Santa Bárbara d’Oeste, near Sao Paulo, because he entered a club where a party was being held, without an invitation.

Police officers implicated in summary executions are not usually brought to trial, even in cases in which there are eyewitnesses and no doubt as to the identity of the perpetrator.

The NGOs recommended that the government put military police under the jurisdiction of civilian courts. They also called for stiff sanctions in such cases, and autonomy for police forensic institutes in order to guarantee the independence of reports on the cause of death.

Extrajudicial executions are fuelled by the vision, shared not only by police but among society as a whole, that crime must be fought with violence, protested Green Party parliamentary Deputy Fernando Gabeira.