ISTO E (Brazilian Equivalent of Time Magazine)
Jan. 7, 2004
Goodbye, Kids!
Exclusive for Isto E: Lawyers of Brazil (Alagoas Branch) and NGO's (Non Government Organizations) denounce execution of street children by extermination groups in Alagoas.
In Rat's Market, a collection of "streets" strewn with garbage and dotted with stands selling everything, including little girls for hire - n this (inferno) a group of percussionists and capoeira dancers of Ere (African word for child - Ed) an NGO crated 10 years ago in Maceio, beats it's drums and dances its (African) rhythms, surrounded by crowds of poor children born in the slums that circle Maceio. Wearing orange shorts and black T-shirts, Isaias, Jucy, Andreia, Chico, Luciano and Junior, all former street children, demonstrate the rhythms of their African heritage.
Jose, Ana, Rebecca and many more hug their glue bottles and their stubs of discarded cigarettes as they give the musicians and dancers their full attention. For at least this moment, they too would like to sing, to dance, to smile. Later on, crowded among huts infected with all kinds of disease, up against the railroad tracks of the old Maceio/St.Lawrence express line, a group of 20 make up their nest for the night. (This place and a similar -sized group are given a 10-minute exposition in the film Letters from Brazil - Ed).
There's a girl of 14, pregnant, compulsively sniffing at her glue container, a boy who has survived a bullet in the head, fired by a policeman; a think little kid who aspires to becoming a soccer star; the group leader who, like all the rest, designates all his disappeared friends with the same prefix: "finado" meaning deceased. Finado Labirinto! They grabbed him at dawn asleep on a park bench in Sinibu Square (centre of Maceio). Nobody's ever seen him again. Findao Jose Heleno da Silva too, grabbed by three guys in their car right on the street in downtown Maceio. "Findao Nel was imprisoned in Holy Week. He's never shown up here again." Another fellow added, "Finado Alan was sleeping on the street with me. Once day I found his body parts all riddled with bullets, right there," pointing to a dark corner.
"We were playing soccer. A policeman came, parked his car, didn't say a word. He went pau-pau-pau! That was the end of finado David," another one added. Cocada, Anjinko, Gallego, Buda, Carlos tartaruga - all were seized on the street and later shot. Bolinko, Careca and Robinho died by the knife. Mocarrao and Le Bou were burned. Amendoin and Paulo were decapitated. Their bodies litter the streets, show up in sewage canals, on a sandbank, or in some weedy corner in Pontal.
Many times there isn't even a body, just the remembrance of friends with whom they lived and sleep. Angela, Gambia, Morgana, Bonita, Labirinto and so many others simply disappeared. Investigations made by the Order of Lawyers of Brazil and by NGO's like Ere and the national movement Meninos e Meninas da Rua (Boys and Girls of the Streets - Ed) reveals the reality of which few people are prepared to take note: that children keep turning up as "finados" on the streets of Alagoas, almost never registered on police files. Conservative estimates put the number on such disappeared at at least 60, children between nine and 17.
Most of them are guilty of some small infraction - infractions that carry in their wake their own "justice," that of extermination squads who kill with impunity. The Order of Lawyers of Brazil, through their commission in Defence of the Child along with the Forum of Tutelary Counsellors have done research who numbers are much more frightening than these estimates. Their numbers reveal that 329 youth of destitute families were killed in Alagoas from January through November 2003. Many had been executed.
Social omission - "we're infested with extermination squads," says Gilberto de Medeiros, president of the Order of Lawyers of Brazil's Commission for Defence of the Child. "And the street children are the perfect victims," says Cristina Nascimento, CEO of the NGO Ere. Most of them are undocumented and live - and die! - known only by nickname, nicknames being the streets' registry for this new generation of the excluded.
In the document "Extra-judicial executions in Alagoas," delivered in November 2003 to a special UN report made by the Pakistani researcher Asma Jakangir, the Order of Lawyers of Brazil identifies the killers as "ninjas," as "hooded" ghosts, as "motorcycle killers" who do their work in the slums of the periphery of Maceio. "Everything suggests that these groups are led by policemen, both civil and military," stated Paulao, the president of the state legislature's Human Rights Commission.
Cleanup!
These killers are in the service of merchants, of plantation owners and of local politicians doing what is euphemistically called "street cleaning," states Federal Deputy Luiz Couto, spokesman for an investigative commission on extermination groups and private militias in the Northeast. Groups like the "ninjas" or "executors of justice in Uniao," a group of officers and soldiers of the 2nd battalion of the military police stationed in Uniao dos Palmares.
On Sep. 5, 2002, they forced four young locals to their knees and executed them. Sidronis Francisco da Silva, 15; Cisenando Francisco da Silva, 17; Thiago Holando da Silva, 18; and Mauricio da Silva, 19 were accused of petty crimes.
In another massacre on June 9, 2001, in the Santa Lucia area of Maceio four youth were executed by police. One of them, a young mechanic called David dos Santos, was on his way home. "I no longer have any fear," says his father, Jose. "The only fear I had was to lose my son." He's had to move as his house was broken into four times. Even a prisoner is being accused of a recent massacre. Two youth (15 and 17) accused of breaking into a video store were shot dead apparently by Franciscio Jose de Assis, known by his nickname Tico. It appears he was let out of jail, led the group of killers and then was taken back to his cell.
Secretary of Social Defence (Alagoas) Robervaldo Davino says that there was right up to and including the previous state government collusion of the state government with police exterminators but this has changed. According to him, 12 military police and six civil police have been discharged, many having been involved in homicides. "A crime committed by a policeman is hard to bring to light because a witness will think twice, three times, four times, before willing to testify," he explained. Alagoas has now witness protection program. About the extermination of poor youth in Alagoas, Davino prefers not to risk an opinion. "Yes, we have street children executed here but the number is not alarming," he believes.
Official numbers of homicides registered are about 75 state-wide, at least 10 percent of whom are children. The average age of the 75 is under 30, eight out of 10 are dark-skinned.
The Order of Lawyers of Brazil doesn't think there are clandestine cemeteries. But in July 2002 eight bodies and two skeletons were unearthed by chance on a plantation in the municipality of Marechal Deodoro. Victims are "uncovered" in other states as well as for instance the seven cadavers of youth between 17 and 22, in Palmares Pernambuco, June 2002. They had been imprisoned days earlier by civil police, accused of having robbed a sawmill.
Impunity - "We don't have any such doubt! The elimination of kids in this state is serious," says Sandra Ervalho, executive secretary of the Teotonio Vilela Commission for Human Rights. In February, the NGO she represents, Global Justice, sent a team to Alagoas. They returned horrified. Already in the taxi going from the airport to the city the became aware of the unofficial "laws" governing the subject: "there's no violence in Maceio," said the taxi driver. "The only people who die here are crooked politicians, women who cheat on their men, and kids who steal. Steal and you die," he said.
According to the Thematic Nucleus for Children and Adolescents of the Federal University of Alagoas, some 1,500 kids live on the Maceio streets. But Pastoral da Crianca (Church Outreach to the Child) says the picture is much worse than that; namely, than in Maceio there are 98,000 children from birth to age six that half of them live in conditions of "miseria absoluta," i.e. total destitution.
In Martitios Square facing the governor's palace and city hall, the street kids will sleep only in groups. "None of us know if we will wake up," says a 14-year old. "We keep telling people that it's the police who kill but nobody listens," adds a girl of 15.
"Impunity generate more crimes," says Atila Vieira Correia, national CEO of the Movement of Boys and Girls of the Street, and who has attended many of their funerals. Atila has lost count of the bodies he's been called on to identify, most of them having only a nickname. Very little follow-up investigation. Indignation has led Atila to traverse the streets for months on end compiling lists of dead and disappeared. In his document "Streets washed with blood" he names 106 just I Maceio in the past 12 months, most of them appeared to have been executed.
Another research, done by the Zumbi dos Palmares Centre for the Defence of the Child and Adolescent, in a document called "A decade of Violence," this frightening picture is confirmed. In the 90's, says this study, 706 children and adolescents suffered violent deaths in Alagoas.
Zumbi centre has recently stopped attending investigations into these deaths. "The little that comes to light is simply dismissed as no one will stand behind it in public," says Reginaldo dos Santos, CEO of Zumbi Centre.
Three months ago an internal, riot partially destroyed the provisional prison of youth awaiting trial. Since then 59 juveniles have been house With adult prisoners in two prisons in this comic-manic justice system of Maceio," he adds.
"Many that I once knew are no longer alive," says Laercio Gomes da Silva, 26, a vendor of vegetables in the open-air market. Since he was seven, Laercio has lived on the streets, polishing shoes and guarding automobiles. He's a survivor but he does not believe any changes will occur. "Poverty is enormous," he says. "And evil too. Wiping out street kids will never end," he sighs. He's remembering Severino da Silva and Biro-Biro and Possidonio de Araujo his friends who were killed October 1990. Their bodies found later in a cane field in Rio Largo. It was these deaths that awakened the various entities that now try to protect children, especially those marked to die.
"Considering this reality, the current discussion about lowering the age of juvenile crime vs. that of adults, is irrelevant," says Jose de Souza of the Tutelary Councils, "here we don't merely condemn minors, we kill them."