'Makes you sick': fury in Rio as pregnant 24-year-old killed amid police raid
Flávia Milhorance in Rio de Janeiro
Thu 10 Jun 2021 05.00 EDT
Kathlen Romeu’s death marks latest fatality among Black favela residents as police clash with drug gangs
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Flávia Milhorance in Rio de Janeiro
Thu 10 Jun 2021 05.00 EDT
In early June, Kathlen Romeu posted a photo of herself and her boyfriend on a Instagram, with a caption announcing that she was pregnant. “I am discovering myself as a mother, and I am scared thinking about how it is going to be,” the 24-year old interior designer wrote on 2 June. “I laugh, I cry and I am afraid.”
Just a few days after writing those tentative, hopeful words, she was dead: another victim of Rio de Janeiro’s relentless conflict between police and drug gangs.
According to the city authorities, she was struck by a single stray bullet during a confrontation between officers and criminals.
But the death on Tuesday of yet another young Black favela resident during a raid by heavily armed police has prompted an outburst of fury in Brazil – and fresh calls for a rethink of the so-called war on drug gangs.
In the past year, Rio has seen a dramatic upsurge in deadly police incursions into the favelas – despite a supreme court order to halt such operations during the Covid pandemic.
More:
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/jun/10/makes-you-sick-fury-in-rio-as-pregnant-24-year-old-killed-amid-police-raid
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Racist police violence endures in Jair Bolsonaro's Braziltests against racism and police violence following George Floyd's killing by a white officer in the US. Anti-black racism has deep roots in Brazilian society.
Date 10.06.2020
Author Joao Soares
Tens of thousands of Brazilians joined the international pro
. . .
Deadly police brutality
Some of Brazil's most violent policing takes place under the shadow of Rio's Sugarloaf Mountain. In 2018, a quarter of police-related deaths nationwide were registered in the state of Rio de Janeiro. The death toll in the first six months of 2019 alone was 1,075 — 80% of the victims were black. And the death toll for April 2020 was up 43% over 2019.
According to statistics compiled by Violence Monitor, a collaboration between journalists and researchers that tracks homicides in Brazil, 5,804 people were killed by police in 2019 — up from 5,716 in 2018. By comparison, the Washington Post newspaper put the number of police-related deaths in the US at 1,039 for 2019. Statistically, the state of Rio, with an average of 10.5 deaths per 100,000 residents, is second only to the Amazon state of Amapa, which averages 15.1 per 100,000, in a nationwide ranking of police-related deaths.
The Military Police (PM) are the most feared law enforcement agents in Brazil. "Their roots stretch back to colonial times," explains historian Luiz Antonio Simas. The force was founded in 1809, as a royal guard protecting Joao VI of Portugal, who had fled to the colonies to escape Napoleon.
"The elites at the time were terribly plagued by what was known as Hatianism," Simas said. The 1791-1804 revolution in Haiti — in which formerly enslaved people expelled French plantation owners, abolished slavery and declared independence — had scared Brazil's land-owning class. "Hatianism persists as a historic fear," says Simas. "The idea of suppressing blacks while protecting the property of a small group of elites is part of the PM origin myth." The logo of the PMERJ, Rio's PM force, still features a crown above crossed colonial pistols flanked by sugar cane.
More:
https://www.dw.com/en/racist-police-violence-endures-in-jair-bolsonaros-brazil/a-53769828
