[Reader-list] an imagined dialogue from the favelas of Brazil

[Felipe Fonseca]

Indeed, a great deal of the connected elite tought
it was for real. Arnaldo Jabor is an idiot, but this
time he got it right. Marcola exists, and he does
read in prison, but his organization, PCC, is not
interested in revolutions or social justice (if the
prisoners were well-treated, PCC would cease to
exist).

f,
from Brasil

On 1/30/07, Rana Dasgupta <rana at ranadasgupta.com> wrote:
> THE BOYS FROM BRAZIL (from Harper's Magazine, December 2006)
>
>  From a column by Arnaldo Jabor, in the form of an imagined interview
> with an unnamed Brazilian prisoner, published May 23 in the newspaper "0
> Globo". The interview was believed genuine by some readers, and the
> interviewee was widely assumed to be Marcos Willians Herbas Camacho,
> known as Marcola, or "Playboy," an inmate in a penitentiary outside Sao
> Paulo and the leader since 2002 of the Primeiro Comando da Capital, a
> prison gang founded in 1993. Brazil's prisons house approximately
> 360,000 inmates, the fourth largest total in the world. Over four days
> in May, the PCC staged riots in Sao Paulo resulting in more than one
> hundred deaths. Translated from the Portuguese by Valeria Mogilevich.
>
> Do you belong to the PCC?
>
> I'm more than that: I'm a sign of the times. I was poor and invisible.
> For decades you never bothered to look at me. It used to be easy to deal
> with poverty. The diagnosis was obvious: rural migration, income
> inequality, a few slums. But the solution never arrived. What did they
> do? Nothing. Did the federal government ever allocate funds for us?
> People only heard about us when the slums collapsed, or from romantic
> music about "the beauty of the favelas at sunrise," stuff like that. Now
> we're rich, thanks to the multinational cocaine trade. And you guys are
> scared to death. Weare the late blooming 'of your social conscience. You
> see? I'm well read. I read Dante in prison.
>
> But the solution would be ...
>
> There's no solution, man. Even the idea of a "solution" is a mistake.
> Have you seen the size of the 560 slums in Rio? Have you flown over Sao
> Paulo's outskirts in a helicopter? A solution would require economic
> growth, a revolution in education, general urbanization - all executed
> by an "enlightened tyranny" that would leap over the paralyzed secular
> bureaucracy, its legislative accomplice, and the judiciary that
> obstructs punishment. This would cost billions of dollars and imply a
> deep psychosocial change in the country's political structure. Which is
> to say, it's impossible.
>
> Aren't you scared of dying?
>
> It's you who's scared of dying, not me. In fact, you can't come and kill
> me here in jail, but I can send people to kill you out there. We're
> man-bombs. In the slums there are a hundred thousand man-bombs. We're at
> the core of what is beyond solution. You guys are in the right, and I'm
> in the wrong, and in the middle is the frontier of death, the only
> frontier. We're already a new species, a wholly different animal from you.
> For you, death is a Christian drama: you die in a bed from a heart
> attack. For us, death is commonplace: we're tossed into a ditch. Didn't
> you intellectuals speak of "class wars"-"Be an outlaw, be a hero"?
> That's right: here we are! Ha, ha. You never expected these cocaine
> soldiers, did you?
> My soldiers are anomalies, products of this country's twisted
> development. There's no more proletariat, no pitiful or exploited
> masses. There's a third thing growing out there, cultivated from the
> mud, schooled on absolute illiteracy, graduating from prisons, like an
> alien monster hidden in the city's cracks. A new language has emerged.
> We're on the edge of a kind of postmisery that has begotten a new
> murderous culture, propped up by technology, satellites, cell phones,
> the Internet, modern weapons. It's shit with chips and megabytes. My
> soldiers are a mutated social species, they're the fungus grow¬ing on a
> big dirty mistake.
>
> What changed in the margins?
>
> Dough. We have it now. Do you think someone with $40 million doesn't run
> things? With that kind of money, prison is like a ho¬tel, an office. We
> are a modern company, we're rich. You guys are a bankrupt state,
> dominated by incompetent people. We have agile management methods. You
> are slow and bureaucratic. We fight on our own turf. You're on foreign
> soil. We don't fear death. You're dying of fear. We are well armed. You
> have a .38 caliber revolver. We're on the attack. You are on the
> defensive. You are obsessed with human rights. We are cruel and
> merciless. You have transformed us into superstars of crime. We have
> made clowns of you. The people in the slums help us, out of fear or out
> of love. You are hated. You are provincial. Our arms and drugs come from
> abroad-we're global. We don't forget you - you're our clients. You
> forget about us as soon as an outbreak of violence subsides.
>
> But what should we do?
>
> I'm going to let you in on something, even if it's not in my best
> interest. Hit the coke barons! There are representatives, senators,
> generals, even former presidents from Paraguay involved in cocaine and
> weapons traffic. But who will catch them? The army? With what money?
> They don't even have money to feed the recruits.
> I'm reading Clausewitz's On War. There's no success in sight. We are
> ravenous ants with access to antitank missiles. The only way to finish
> us is to drop an atomic bomb on the slums. Can you imagine, a
> radioactive Ipanema?
> You can succeed only if you give up defending normality. There is no
> normality anymore. You must be critical of your own incompetence. But,
> to be frank, you don't have an out. Just shit. And we already deal in
> shit. Listen, brother, there's no solution. As the divine Dante wrote,
> "Abandon every hope." We are all in hell.
>
> --
> Rana Dasgupta
> www.ranadasgupta.com
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-- 
FelipeFonseca
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