There are not enough words to describe the horror that causes us the massacre of more than 130 poor young black men murdered by the Rio de Janeiro police, with the excuse of attacking drug trafficking.
It was an urban war operation in which the state government mobilized 2,500 armed military police for the war, in addition to the sending of armored personnel and helicopters to attack the favela complexes of Penha and Alemão, in the northern zone of the city, an area with a strong concentration of poor population. There are two sets of favelas with more than 150 thousand inhabitants, with a huge population density.
The government of Rio said there were 60 dead, but the population of the favelas took to the squares more than 50 bodies that were not in the official count, leaving doubts about how many were murdered. So far, the number is over 120. [ed. now currently 132]
The reactions were not expected, from human rights organizations to the United Nations, which are said to be “horrified” by the massacre. In addition to the data, there are relevant facts.
The Palestinian genocide in Gaza is the mirror where we must look at ourselves, the oppressed peoples and people of the world. For those at the top, a period of indiscriminate hunting is opened to the “surplus” population, because they have guaranteed impunity. Now more than ever, Gaza is all and everyone. It can be Quito, San Salvador, Rosario or Tegucigalpa; the Colombian Cauca or Wall Mapu; perhaps the mountain of Guerrero or the communities of Chiapas. Now, we are all in the crosshairs of a capitalism that kills to accumulate faster.
They say drug traffickers with the same insensitivity with which they kill Palestinians, Mapuches or Maya. They’re just excuses. Arguments for the urban middle classes. But recent history tells us that they are creating laboratories for genocide.
In quiet Ecuador, when the peoples defeated them in the 2019 uprising, they reacted by freeing criminals from prisons transformed into extermination spaces, where the media showed inmates playing football with the head of a beheaded.
In Cauca, open-pit mining and drug cultivation have exacerbated paramilitary violence against the nasa and misak communities that resist and do not surrender, making the region the most violent of a violent country.
In the Mapuche territory, both in Chile and Argentina, the powers decided that those who do not submit should be called “terrorists”, with the result that today there are more Mapuches prisoners than during the dictatorships of Pinochet and Videla.
In Mexico, everything is clear, so clear that the media and governments don’t want us to see, masking violence with speeches that just mention their complicity. The systematic violence in Guerrero and Chiapas should be a cause for scandal.
In Rio de Janeiro, a sociologist often says that drug trafficking is not a parallel state, but the state actually existing. Including all the governors of the last decades, with his entourage of mafia businessmen, deputies and councilors who form a power inherited from the squads of the death of the military dictatorship.
Gaza puts us elsewhere in the face of other challenges. The first is to understand that death is the raison d’être of the capitalist system. The second is to understand that this system is integrated by the right and the left, the conservatives and the progressives. The third is that we must organize to protect ourselves, because no one will do it for us.
The world we knew is falling apart. We mourn for these young people murdered in Rio, for those bodies stretched out on the tarmac.
Let us turn our tears into rivers of indignation and torrents of rebellion.
Raúl Zibechi
Source: https://desinformemonos.org/gaza-es-rio-de-janeiro-gaza-es-el-mundo-entero/
[Machine Translated and refined by Organise]
