Analysis: Police violence, a disorder difficult to eradicate in the Americas

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Police violence in the Americas is a seemingly insurmountable disease that has penetrated the entire region despite constant calls for control and respect for human rights. Countries such as the United States, Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia, and Chile have been the scene of episodes of extreme use of force, leaving dozens of victims in their wake.

COLOMBIA UNDER THE SPOTLIGHT

In recent years, protests in Colombia have included the names of Dilan Cruz, Javier Ordóñez, and, in recent days, Marcelo Agredo and Santiago Murillo. All of them died in demonstrations that were supposed to be peaceful or due to the Police’s action, the Mobile Anti-Riot Squad (Esmad).

The problem of police brutality persists, increasingly aggravated, while a part of society demands changes in a police force that depends on the Ministry of Defense.

“There is a structural phenomenon in Colombia, and it is that due to the armed conflict and the war against drug trafficking we have confused the difference between the military and the police,” explains the political analyst Sandra Borda, who compares this to what happened, for example, in the racial protests in Ferguson (USA), when the police began to use military equipment.

In Colombia, “too much of the army is seen in the streets”, when it should not have been “so present in the daily life of the citizens”, and then the police assumed “a supremely military doctrine and methods”, with an “extremely defensive” attitude, in which the “citizens are the enemy”, says Borda, associate professor at the Universidad de los Andes.

The current protests in Colombia, which have left 42 dead according to the Ombudsman’s Office or up to 47, according to the NGO Temblores, are the exacerbated expression of the 2019 national strike and a social situation that has worsened with the pandemic, with increasing poverty and a part of the youth isolated from the labor market.

THE INFLUENCE OF THE UNITED STATES

The United States has been in the last year the protagonist of the largest wave of racial protests after the decade of the 60s of the last century following the death in May 2020 of the African-American George Floyd at the hands of a white police officer, which has generated a wide debate on police violence against minorities.

The impact of U.S. culture on the rest of the continent also comes through the militarization of its police forces, usually armored with high-caliber weapons and war equipment, according to civil rights attorney V. James DeSimone, who specializes in police violence in Los Angeles.

“I do not doubt that if other countries feel that the United States can or is treating its own people in this way, with certain levels of oppression and even the use of lethal force on individuals, when it happens in Central and South America, (the countries) are not going to encounter any resistance from the United States,” DeSimone reflects in an interview.

According to a Princeton University study published in the scientific, militarized police units in the U.S. are most often deployed in lower-income communities with a large proportion of African-American residents, even after controlling for local crime rates journal PNAS.

TORTURE ON THE STREET

For DeSimone, one of the main problems in the U.S. and the continent is the normalization of defensive police tactics that constitute torture, such as electro-shock guns, also known as tasers tear gas.

“If you cause physical violence to someone who does not represent a threat, it constitutes torture: Amnesty International says that the use of tasers against someone who is in a passive position is torture,” explains the expert.

These violations of international standards in the U.S. “can somehow influence other countries to violate these accepted standards as well,” DeSimone added.

BLOOD IN RIO

A violent police operation carried out last Thursday in Rio de Janeiro in a favela of the city left 28 civilians dead, who the authorities alleged were all criminals and one policeman dead.

The action was considered the “biggest massacre” in the history of the city and once again raised the alarm about the abuses of the uniformed services in the country since most of the civilians killed were young people, blacks, and favela residents, of which only three were related to the purpose of the operation.

Experts consulted in Brazil agreed that the high rate of police lethality is not only a problem of Brazil but of several countries in the Americas, due to common factors such as high rates of violence, drug trafficking, lack of professionalization of uniformed officers, social prejudice and an inefficient justice system.

Added to that is the wave of conservative politics that promotes violence as the solution to problems and a society that normalizes and endorses these ‘iron fist’ practices.

“This more populist wave tends to elevate violence as a powerful issue and to see it as the solution to social problems,” said Rafael Alcadipani da Silveria, a public security specialist at the Getulio Vargas Foundation.

EXPLOSIVE MIX

Robson Rodrigues da Silva, anthropologist and researcher at the Laboratório de Análise da Violência da Universidade do Estado do Rio, asserts that other countries have already advanced in the reformulation of their criminal justice systems, but Brazil has not.

“We have verified that there is an explosive mix of factors that generate such violence. One of them is violent criminality that is often used to protect illicit markets and drug markets,” he said.

THE FALSE CHILEAN OASIS

Although Chile was considered the Latin American “oasis” until the protests at the end of 2019, the discredit of the security forces began to brew a year earlier when young Camilo Catrillanca was shot dead by police while riding a tractor through a Mapuche community in the south.

Many analysts consider that the Catrillanca case was the seed of what a year later would become a wave of cross-cutting outrage unparalleled since the end of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship (19973-1990), with massive protests lasting for months, leaving some thirty dead and thousands injured, many of them with eye trauma.

The cases of Gustavo Gatica and Fabiola Campillai, the two people who were blinded by police gunfire, went around the world and led the UN, Amnesty International (AI), and Human Rights Watch (HRW) to denounce human rights violations.

The government of President Sebastián Piñera took some time to recognize that the abuses were not “isolated cases”, as it claimed at the beginning of the crisis, and promised to reform the Carabineros, Chile’s uniformed police force.

AGAINST WOMEN IN MEXICO

In Mexico, police violence and abuses by security institutions have been commonplace for several decades. The most remembered act in this country is the massacre of hundreds of students in Tlatelolco, on October 2, 1968, at the Army’s hands.

The most recent occurred on March 27 when Salvadoran migrant Victoria Esperanza Salazar, 36 years old and resident in Mexico on a humanitarian visa since 2018, was killed by four municipal police officers in the resort of Tulum, Mexican Caribbean.

And in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, police brutality reappeared in the country with the death of young Giovanni Lopez in early May 2020. He was 30 years old and was arrested for allegedly not wearing masks in the state of Jalisco.

In the report “Mexico: the era (anger) of women”, presented by Amnesty International last March 3, the organization found police repression in different women’s mobilizations against gender violence, which marked 2020, in the states of Guanajuato, Sinaloa, State of Mexico, Quintana Roo and Mexico City.

HUNDREDS OF CASES IN VENEZUELA

In Venezuela, cases of police violence in recent years number in the hundreds. They are attributed, fundamentally, to the Police Special Actions Forces (FAES), a group created in 2016 that the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet, recommended dissolving when she blamed it for numerous disappearances and extrajudicial executions throughout the country. However, President Nicolás Maduro responded with unconditional support for the troops and their actions.

Among the most prominent cases of victims of the brutality of the State security forces (the Armed Forces assume Police duties when the Government deems it necessary, as in the 2017 or 2014 protests) is the murder of David Vallenilla, who was shot coming from the La Carlota military base on July 22, 2017, when the young man was 22 years old.

Another notorious case was that of Juan Pablo Pernalete, who died at the age of 20 as a result of a tear gas bomb thrown by the Bolivarian National Guard, as reported by the then-Attorney General Luisa Ortega Díaz; the charge was denied by the Government, arguing that the young man had been killed with a gun by “the right-wing itself”.

A case that also remains in force is that of the murder of Óscar Pérez, an insurgent policeman who in the 2017 protests decided to position himself on the side of the citizens protesting against the Government, calling to remove Maduro from power. According to the Executive, Perez launched several grenades from a police helicopter against two government buildings in Caracas, but no deaths or injuries were ever reported from the alleged attack.

Perez took refuge in a town near the capital, where state security forces shot him in January 2018 along with 6 other people.

More recently – July 4, 2019 – 16-year-old teenager Rufo Chacón was blinded when he received part of the ammunition from the guns of two police officers, who were trying to disperse a protest to demand domestic gas by shooting. The agents were arrested, but it was never known if they were tried or what happened afterward.

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