The ghosts of Brazil’s dictatorship are stirring in the wake of Brazilian President Michel Temer’s order for the army to take over policing in Rio de Janeiro.
There is no direct comparison between the Rio operation and the 1964 coup that brought two decades of military rule to Latin America’s biggest country. In this case, the military is not overturning a president — it is just taking charge of the security situation after months of escalating crime.
However, the echoes have been loud enough to force the government into extraordinary denials.
Photo: AFP
“I’m going to tell you how many marks I give the idea of a military coup: zero,” Temer told Radio Bandeirantes on Friday.
The center-right president went on to say that there was “no mood” in the military or population for a coup.
Earlier, Brazilian Minister of Defense Raul Jungmann said “there is no risk to democracy... On the contrary, we are strengthening democracy.”
Over the past decade, Rio residents have grown used to seeing camouflaged soldiers support the police in their battle against powerfully armed drug gangs.
About 8,500 troops arrived in July last year in an ongoing deployment to help with operations in favelas, or slums, the latest of which took place on Friday in western Rio.
During the 2016 Rio Olympics, troops focused on securing tourist areas, patrolling with rifles among the bathing-suit clad crowds of Copacabana and Ipanema.
However, the intervencao, as it is called in Portuguese, is different this time.
Now the army is not only helping out — it’s taking full charge, with generals replacing the entire civilian leadership of the police.
This has not happened anywhere in Brazil since democracy returned in 1985.
Facing an understandably nervous public, the government made what looked like an immediate public relations blunder by suggesting that mass arrests and mass searches might become the norm.
That would mean, for example, that an entire street, rather than a single house, could be subjected to an intense raid.
There was strong backlash, including from Brazil’s highest-profile anti-corruption prosecutor, Deltan Dallagnol.
The government has softened its message on the collective searches.
However, there are still widespread fears that military intervention will become a blunt instrument endangering poor and defenseless people in the favelas, while doing little to eradicate drug gangs.
A short video made by three young black men about surviving encounters with police — including advising against carrying a long umbrella that could be mistaken for a gun — went immediately viral on social media.
“The intervention in Rio is an inadequate and extreme measure that causes concern because it puts the population’s human rights at risk,” Amnesty International Brazil director Jurema Werneck said.
Temer on Friday made it clear that the army would use deadly force when justified, but rights activists, weary after years of botched police operations and stray bullets, have asked who will hold the soldiers accountable.
The army wants troops to be subject only to military courts, while the police it is working alongside have to face regular courts.
Adding a politically explosive twist to that already complex issue, Brazilian Army Commander General Eduardo Villas Boas this week said that he wants “a guarantee of being able to act without risking a new truth commission.”
He was referring to the Brazilian National Truth Commission, a body set up by then-Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff to examine human rights abuses committed during the military dictatorship.
Many saw the commission as a way to air painful memories and promote reconciliation, even if an amnesty meant that confessed torturers revealed in the commission’s final 2014 report could not be tried.
However, Villas Boas revealed the army’s nervousness and perhaps lingering resentment.
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