Black Women against the Land Grab: The Fight for Racial Justice in Brazil

5. “Picking Up the Pieces”: Everyday Violence and Community

117 5 “PICKING UP THE PIECES” Everyday Violence and Community In socially excluded communities women live out their lives against the backdrop of constant criminal and police violence. The impact of this violence on their lives is complex and profound , yet their stories are rarely heard. In a debate that has traditionally centered on gun violence, the focus has invariably been on young men—the overwhelming majority of those involved in gun crime, both as perpetrators and victims. This report focuses on the largely untold stories of women struggling to live their lives, to bring up their children and to fight for justice amid police and criminal violence. Amnesty International, Picking Up the Pieces: Women’s Experience of Urban Violence Dona Iraci: Die While Fighting Six years before the January 2008 police operation, on Saturday, September 21, 2002, at about midday, residents of the Gamboa de Baixo neighborhood were terrorized by yet another extraordinary police invasion that has marked the Gamboa de Baixo community as well as political history. Caravans of fully armed military and civil police descended on the community searching for drug dealers, beating everyone in their path. Women abandoned their wash pans and rushed with their children into their homes, and young men with identity cards in hand were violently pushed against the wall and searched. The police pressed guns close to young black men sweating from fright. Rita closed her steel gate and sat on the floor in her living room. She was too frightened to move and feared that any movement or sounds might stir reaction from the raging policemen already breaking down her neighbors’ doors. Unlike what the population above Contorno Avenue imagines and the media portrays, police invasions in Gamboa de Baixo 118 “PICKING UP THE PIECES” are never expected, nor are they perceived as normal policing. They are considered arbitrary and random acts of violence that can have deadly consequences. On that Saturday, while children were playing, women were washing clothes, and men were cleaning their boats, the whole community stopped. Most residents stayed inside their homes or stood on their doorsteps paralyzed while they watched the police take over. Iraci Isabel da Silva (called Dona Iraci) ran out of her house, located near one of the entrances to Contorno Avenue, and saw a policeman beating her ten-year-old grandson, who was playing in front of her door (Figure 16). She confronted the policeman and told him to let go of her grandson. The policeman screamed at her, and when she screamed back, he threatened to beat her, too. The violent confrontation went on for several minutes, until she finally suffered a heart attack . Dona Iraci died that Sunday morning at the age of forty-five, and as is customary in Bahia, she was immediately buried on Monday. She was the treasurer and founding member of the neighborhood association , the mother of six adult children whom she had moved as small children from the interior of Bahia to Gamboa de Baixo, and the wife of her childhood sweetheart. TheviolentlossofcommunityleaderDonaIraciisrepresentativeof police violence in Gamboa de Baixo and throughout Salvador’s black communities. Dona Iraci’s individual act of courage in her last fight against police terror mobilized local residents in the wake of her death. The neighborhood association founded the Council for the Defense of Gamboa de Baixo with the participation of activists from other neighborhoods , human rights groups, black movement organizations, and scholar-activists. Inspired by the antiviolence politics of the former U.S.-based Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, the organization linked their struggle to other black neighborhoods in Salvador, as well as to the global black struggle against police abuse. In meetings they began to document personal stories of police abuse, and they wrote letters to public officials demanding radical changes in police tactics. One of the first documents they produced was an open letter to the Brazilian public that was published in the local newspaper and in an online Afro-Brazilian national magazine. The letter begins by describing the violent death of Dona Iraci and continues by linking police “PICKING UP THE PIECES” 119 violence to a long history of socioeconomic and spatial marginalization and violence in Gamboa de Baixo: This history of aggression dates back to 1960, when Contorno Avenue was constructed, segregating the community of Gamboa in relationship to the rest of the city, which perpetuated the violence of “amnesia” by state agencies...