Violent Protests in Brazil After Black Man Beaten to Death at Carrefour Store

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – More than 1,000 demonstrators attacked a Carrefour Brasil supermarket in the southern Brazilian city of Porto Alegre on Friday after security guards beat to death a Black man at the store.

The brutal killing, which has sparked protests across Brazil, occurred late on Thursday, November 19th,  when a store employee called security after the man threatened to attack her, cable news channel GloboNews said, citing the Rio Grande do Sul state military police.

Amateur footage of the fatal beating and tributes to the black victim were published on social media. He was identified in local media by his father as 40-year-old João Alberto Silveira Freitas.

News website G1 later reported that an initial analysis by the state forensics institute indicated the cause of death could be asphyxiation.

In Porto Alegre, protesters on Friday afternoon handed out stickers depicting the Carrefour logo stained with blood and called for a boycott of the chain. They held up a banner in Portuguese reading “Black Lives Matter” and signs calling for justice for Beto, a nickname for the victim.

The protest turned violent on Friday evening as the demonstrators smashed windows and delivery vehicles in the supermarket’s parking area. A Reuters witness saw police firing teargas at the protesters.

In São Paulo, dozens of protesters smashed the front windows of a Carrefour store with rocks, pulled off the front doors and stormed the building, spilling products into the aisles before dispersing. In Rio de Janeiro, roughly 200 shouting protesters gathered outside of another Carrefour store location.

November 20th is honored in many parts of Brazil as Black Awareness Day. Brazilians like to think of their country as a harmonious ‘racial democracy’ and conservative President Jair Bolsonaro denies the presence of racism. But the influence of slavery, abolished in 1889, is still evident.

Black Brazilians are almost three times as likely to be victims of homicide, according to 2019 government data.

“The culture of hate and racism needs to be combated at its source and the full weight of the law should be used to punish those that promote hate and racism,” Rodrigo Maia, the speaker of Brazil’s lower house of Congress, wrote in a tweet.

Source: Reuters