Strange Fruit: Brazil, Necropolitics, and the Transnational Resonance of Torture and Death

Abstract

This article critically interrogates the epidemic of death squad murders in Salvador as a phenomenon uniquely imbued with multiple layers of racialized, gendered, sexed, and classed meaning, simultaneously territorialized as a continuous part of the landscape of inequality and black suffering in Brazil and transnationally and cross-temporally defined by its connections with the geopolitical landscape of torture, the United States' war on terror, and legacies of colonialism and slavery in the Americas. The article examines resonances between death squad murders in Bahia, the transnational exchange of torture practices between the United States and Latin America, the contemporary use of torture against “terrorist” bodies by the United States (exemplified by Abu Ghraib), and the legacy of anti-black lynching in the United States. Through this discussion, the article suggests that the geography of death in Brazil has everything to do with transnational necropolitics that target the black/queer/terrorist/female/other body.

Keywords:

• Brazil
• death squads
• necropolitics
• race
• U.S. Imperialism

Notes

“Todo camburão tem um pouco de navio negreiro …”

Here and throughout this article I use the term “black” to refer to the term “negro” in Portuguese. This term is both a racial classification and a socio-cultural-political one, much like the term “black” in the United States and similarly emerges from pan-Africanist discourses. Despite a long controversial history, the term “negro” is now popularly used across Brazil. Government agencies, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), the education system, and most major television and newspaper outlets now to refer to all people of African descent, regardless of color classification, as negros. For a more detailed discussion of racial classification in Brazil, see for example Fontaine (1985); Sheriff (2001); and Telles (2004).

I borrow this terminology from Jasbir Puar's conversation on assemblages and identity (Puar 2007). Puar proposes that we should think about identities as assemblages (as opposed to intersections) that challenge traditional notions of time, space, and identity politics.

The Cultural Dynamics special issue “Managing Crisis: Post-9/11 Policing and Empire” explores the many of these issues in its collection of essays on the meanings of empire, policing, and the scandal.

Joao Costa Vargas takes an engaged look at Brazil and genocide in the African diaspora in his essay, “Genocide in the African Diaspora.” This idea was also previously analyzed deeply by Abdias do Nascimento (1976).

My work with React or Die! and Choque Cultural philosophically follows in the footsteps of engaged researchers who emphasize the importance of collaborative research methods in ethnography. See for example Hale (2008).

The word “chacina” can be literally translated as “slaughtering” (Michaelis 1989). However, this translation does not fully define the way the word is used in popular discourse. Chacinas are almost always associated with summary executions by the police, death squads, drug traffickers, or gang members. For this reason, I chose to leave the word in Portuguese throughout the article.

It was not until 2005 that Bahia officially recognized the existence of death squads and the state's need to address the issue. That year, the Secretaría de Segurança Pública created GERCE. The taskforce was short-lived. The Secretary of Public Security—SSP, BA, suspended it abruptly in April 2008. After the suspension of GERCE, the State Ministry of the Public (MPE, Ministério Público do Estado) created NUGE, Núcleo de Combate a Grupos de Extermínio, one day after GRECE was abolished (D'Eça 2008). During its active years, GERCE imprisoned twenty-five people and denounced thirty death squads, many of whom were directly associated with the police (Cirino 2007a).

Peripheral neighborhoods are the low income neighborhoods located on the outskirts of Brazil's major urban cities where the majority of black residents reside. I prefer the term “periphery” (which translates directly to periferia in Portuguese) than “favela” because of the latter's negative connotations.

abertura política, the official transition period from the dictatorship to democratic autonomy in Brazil that began in 1979 and extended until 1985 when the new constitution was ratified.

Here Borges refers to the massacre that happened in the Baixada Fluminense region in Rio de Janeiro in 2005.

R.S. Rose notes that although some estimates put the total of killings by the White Hand up at 160, O Dia only corroborates 91 assassinations. It is hard to tell whether the White Hand was a myth invented as a publicity stunt or an actual death squad. Rose attributes the murders to the infamous Rio death squad the Esquadrão da Morte (2005: 257).

The term povão literally means “the people” but is taken to mean the working-class masses.

I define hegemonic racial epistemology as the notion of the hierarchy of races along a sliding scale from white to black, European to African.