Brazilian Legacies by Levine Robert M

Author:Levine, Robert M.
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-315-50383-7
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

Crime without Punishment

James Brooke recalls the Brazilian fable about a sixteenth-century Portuguese bishop who wanted to encourage skeptical peasants to settle in far-off Brazil. Addressing his devout flock, the cleric decreed, “No sin exists south of the equator.” Five centuries later, Brooke adds, modern Brazil at times seems to have incorporated this motto as its moral cornerstone.31 More than any other attribute, impunity, guaranteed by differential justice—as it were, crime without punishment—has plagued Brazil’s legal system.

Impunity and preferential treatment for privileged lawbreakers, together with frequent police complicity in disdaining the law, have compounded the dilemma. According to the Comissão Pastoral da Terra, a religious group working in behalf of the rubber workers, of 1,684 recorded murders in the region over the previous three decades, only 29 were ever brought to trial. In the wake of the 1992 massacre of 111 prisoners in São Paulo’s Carandiru prison, depositions filled 10,800 pages of official record, but not a single step was taken against any of the accused policemen who precipitated the deadly riot. Prisoners ruled within the walls of penal institutions. Rio de Janeiro’s Bangu Penitentiary, constructed to hold the most dangerous criminals in the country, was said to be ruled by three inside gangs, the Comando Vermelho, the Terceiro Comando, and the Falange Jacare. In Porto Velho, Rondônia, at the other end of the country, the army had to be called in to guard prisoners because penitentiary guards simply walked off the job in demand of higher wages. Within the prison, chaos reigned, with inmates taking out private revenge on other inmates with impunity.

Brazil employs 7,000 judges for its 150 million citizens; Germany, with 80 million, has 120,000. Brazil’s Supreme Tribunal of Justice (STJ), with thirty-three judges, faces a backload of 34,000 cases. The police are equally burdened: each police official in São Paulo averages a caseload of 2,000 unsolved crimes to investigate. According to investigative journalists, judges known to have sold favorable verdicts to persons charged with crimes, including narcotics trafficking, are not punished. One judge charged $10,000 just to agree to meet with a lawyer seeking a writ of habeas corpus for his client, the director of a multinational firm. The writ was signed before the lawyer’s airplane touched down at São Paulo’s Garulhos airport.32 At the other end of the system, 95 percent of incarcerated prisoners have no money to hire their own lawyer. The class differences between everyday criminals and influential men accused of abusing public trust are so enormous that the system remains paralyzed. So quickly did people give up any hope that Farias and Collor would be brought to justice that P.C., who blithely continued to expand his business empire as the revelations of his venality piled up, became a kind of perverse folk hero, a Brazilian D.B. Cooper, who according to barroom legend jumped from an airplane carrying the loot from a bank robbery and made good his escape. During the 1993 Carnival, two Rio samba schools and one in São Paulo depicted Farias in their Carnival floats—floats the size of those in Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.

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