The Third Bank of the River by Chris Feliciano Arnold

Author:Chris Feliciano Arnold
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Picador

15

OPERATION WOLFPACK

July melted into a hellish August. Throughout the Amazon basin, wildfires burned uncontained, wisps of smoke visible from space. In the northeastern rain forest, German and Brazilian scientists inaugurated a 1,066-foot-tall climate observation tower that pierced the haze, spilling a river of data. Researchers analyzed the flow like doctors monitoring a patient’s breathing: carbon, water, wind, cloud formation. They debated what the numbers portended for the hydrologic, the canopy, the human species, distress signals from an ecosystem in flux, storm surges tearing at the canopy of the interior rain forest, while drought on the margins disrupted rainfall patterns as far away as São Paulo.

The security crackdown in the streets of Manaus continued unabated. On the prison road outside the city limits, the FDN took dominion of its new cell blocks, bending their PCC rivals into submission. Memories of the Bloody Weekend weren’t so easy to control. A single one of the stories would have been nothing out of the ordinary—a cop caught in the crossfire of a robbery, a murder at IPAT, a turf war in the streets—but the confluence of bloodshed had caught attention nationwide, and even overseas, stories implicating the police, validating the human rights watchdogs who didn’t seem to understand that all lives do not have equal value in Brazil, that good citizens have the right to clean streets.

Extermination groups have been a phenomenon in Brazil since the military dictatorship, a “purifying” force not unlike the torrential downpours that polish the city overnight during the rainy season. Three decades into the country’s democratic experiment, vestiges of the military dictatorship tingle like phantom limbs. Brazil still relies on compulsory military service to fill the ranks of its armed forces and paramilitary police—the enforcement branch of its dual police structure. The Polícia Militar, the only police force in the world still operating from barracks, enforce law on the streets. Drawn mostly from the working class who lack the means or connections to avoid serving, PM recruits are trained to fight enemy combatants, not to protect communities. They are ordered to apply force liberally to the threats of a given era: leftist guerrillas in the 1960s and 1970s, gang lords and vagabonds in the 1980s and 1990s, and now the powerful syndicates that have been spawned in the prison-industrial complex. What hasn’t changed over time is their biblical sense of justice: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. As a paramilitary institution, the PMs can operate with almost complete immunity. Misconduct and crimes committed by PMs while they are on duty are investigated and prosecuted under an internal tribunal system that has historically overlooked—and at times condoned—abuse, extortion, torture, and extrajudicial killing.

The Polícia Civil are tasked with detective work, investigation, and prosecution. The bar for entry is higher—most civil police have college educations—but that only means that corruption and abuse take more sophisticated forms, like the extortion of drug traffickers by Colonel Cardoso and his men. “Military police are idiots,” according to one detective who preferred to remain anonymous.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.