Docu about favela Dona Martha in Rio de Janeiro

'Cocaine: Leo and Ze' (2004) documentary about a favela in Rio that has to deal with a lot of drugs related crime. The movie is directed by the British filmmaker Agnus MacQueen. The favela where the movie whas shot is named Dona Martha and is one of the favela's that is walled recently by the by Rio's authorities.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0845974/

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jan/06/brazil-rio-slum-barrier

http://observers.france24.com/en/content/20090608-rio-shantytowns-walled-eco-borders-favelas

Misdaad en Straf: Ad Verbrugge

Dit artikel bevat een bespreking van het essay “Zinloos” geweld: Misdaad en straf in een tijd van cultuurverlies, (2004) geschreven door de Nederlandse filosoof Ad Verbrugge. [1] Hoewel ik Verbrugge soms een wat moraliserende of conservatieve toon vind hebben bied zijn essay goede argumenten in relatie tot het onderwerp publiek domein en de rechtsstaat. Ook laat het zien wat de relatie is tussen vrijheid en gemeenschapszin. Verbrugge is er onder andere van overtuigd dat zonder gemeenschapszin het rechtssysteem haar betekenis verliest.

Ad Verbrugge begint zijn essay met een intelligente definitie van vrijheid waarin gemeenschap een belangrijke rol speelt: ‘het [is] van belang te beseffen dat eenieder van ons pas werkelijk vrij kan zijn, doordat hij leeft in de werkelijkheid van een zedelijke gemeenschap waarin die vrijheid als een recht van iedereen wordt erkend. Dat ik niet louter in naam, maar in werkelijkheid beschik over mijn eigen lichaam en mijn eigendom en ook bescherming daarvan geniet, heb ik niet aan mezelf te danken, maar aan de gegeven werkelijkheid van een levende gemeenschap waarin mij dit recht is geschonken en waarin ik omgekeerd de plicht heb dit recht op me te nemen en anderen te doen toekomen, om dit recht aldus werkelijk te laten zijn. In een toestand van rechteloosheid of slavernij is deze vrijheid niet gerealiseerd en beschikt iemand dus ook niet werkelijk over zichzelf of zijn bezit als een algemeen erkend en dus geldend richt binnen de gemeenschap.’
Verbrugge benadruk dat de straf die een misdadiger krijgt wanneer hij de wet overtreed niet louter genoegdoening van het slachtoffer en is uiteindelijk ook niet het motief voor de strafmaat. ‘De misdadiger heeft immers niet alleen een misdaad begaan jegens het slachtoffer, hij heeft ook een misdaad begaan jegens de gemeenschap waarin de persoon – en dus ook hijzelf en het slachtoffer – dergelijke rechten en waarden hebben gekregen.’ De straf is echter ook bedoelt om ‘de werkelijkheid van het recht’ uit te drukken. Het is de belichaming van de wil van de gemeenschap, gerepresenteerd door de uitspraak van de rechter. Verbrugge benadrukt dat de straf niet in de eerste plaats een verzoening is tussen slachtoffer en dader, maar ‘uitgaande van deze gedachtegang verzoent het slachtoffer zich dus primair met de gemeenschap’. Dit omdat het slachtoffer ‘door de handeling van de misdadiger [is] genegeerd in de werkelijkheid van zijn vrijheid.’ Dit werkt twee kanten op, ook voor de misdadiger, hij heeft zich namelijk door zijn misdaad ‘afgezonderd van de gemeenschap’ en is daardoor dus niet vrij meer. Het is juist door de straf dat hij zich weer als vrij mens in de samenleving kan bewegen. ‘In ieder geval moet duidelijk zijn dat het straffende recht als uitgangspunt niet de vergelding van het gevoelde leed van het slachtoffer of morele verbetering van de dader heeft. Dergelijke fenomenen zijn hoogstens bijverschijnselen van zijn eigenlijke betekenis, namelijk dat het straffende recht de werkelijkheid is van de algemene wil van een gemeenschap, zoals die in het recht is uitgedrukt. Zonder straf is het recht niet werkelijk en blijven de waarden van de gemeenschap iets abstracts-vrijblijvends, iets dat slechts in gedachten bestaat.’ Het bestaan van een rechtvaardig rechtssysteem wil volgens Verbrugge nog niet zeggen dat mensen werkelijk in vrijheid kunnen leven. Volgens hem is ‘iedere misdaad tegen de persoon een misdaad tegen de mensenrechten.’ Dat betekend dat er dan ook niet zo veel verschillen zijn tussen ‘totalitaire regimes’ en de ‘gewelddadige getto’.
Absolute vrijheid is volgens Verbrugge geen vrijheid. De ‘verabsolutering van de individuele vrijheid’ leidt uiteindelijk tot asocialiteit. ‘Wanneer (…) radicale individualisering overal om zich heen grijpt, desintegreert de gemeenschap die de voorwaarde is voor iemands werkelijke vrijheid. In het ontstaan van levenssferen waaruit het gemeenschapsgevoel verdwenen is, wordt ook het recht – als uitdrukking van de algemene wil van een gemeenschap – abstracts: iets dat niet meer werkelijk wordt geleefd, maar nog slechts als een juridische ‘spelregel’ bestaat. Een scherpe conclusie is dan ook: ‘individualisering tendeert naar een asociale samenleving, een ethos dat zich onder andere manifesteert in geweld. [Het publieke leven is dus van groot belang, ook voor het in stand houden van het rechtssysteem. Dat kan mijn conclusie zijn van deze opmerkingen van Verbrugge. Juist de publieke ruimte kan een fysieke representatie zijn van het gemeenschapsgevoel. Wanneer er geen gemeenschapsgevoel meer is in de maatschappij zal ook het straffen weinig zin hebben. Dit helemaal het geval wanneer we kijken naar clanmatige organisaties of gangs. Dit soort organisaties opereren buiten de gemeenschap en hebben vaak hun eigen regels en mores. Misdaad wordt dus niet gezien als misdaad tegen de gemeenschap maar tegen iets dat ‘daarbuiten’ zich afspeelt. Straf is nu geen noodzakelijke afzondering uit de maatschappij om rehabilitatie mogelijk te maken maar in de ogen van de misdadiger een betekenisloze daad – om de eenvoudige rede dat de misdadiger geen deel uit maakte van de gemeenschap. In een gesegregeerde samenleving is het onmogelijk om met straf ‘de werkelijkheid van de wet’ uit te drukken. Simpelweg omdat zowel dader als slachtoffer geen deel meer uitmaken van de maatschappij. Straf verwordt nu tot louter vergeling. Het wegvallen van gemeenschap maakt het recht inhoudloos.
Het gebrek aan gemeenschap wijdt Verbrugge in eerste instantie aan het wegvallen van het gezin als stabiele factor en het aanleren van het ‘sociale’. De afwezigheid van volwassen rolmodellen zorgt er voor dat het kind niemand meer heeft om zich aan te spiegelen. ‘Reeds Aristoteles heeft duidelijk gemaakt dat de mens slechts door goede opvoeding en gewenning tot de deugd als zijn hoogste zelfontplooiing kan komen.’
Concluderend kunnen we zeggen dat het vertrouwen in het rechtssysteem het gevolg is van de afbrokkelingen van gemeenschapszin. Alleen in een maatschappij die ‘samenleeft’, kan misdaad ook als zodanig worden opgevat, anders blijft het een private zaak tussen dader en slachtoffer. Misdaad kan alleen dan publiek worden wanneer er een algemeen vertrouwen is in de rechtsstaat. Alleen op die manier krijgt straf haar betekenis en dient het als middel tot rehabilitatie om terug te keren in de maatschappij. Een samenleving die volledig gesegregeerd is, waar het leven zich afspeelt in geprivatiseerde ‘security bubbles’ daar wordt ook het vertrouwen in de rechtsstaat uitgehold.

[1] Ad Verbrugge, “Zinloos geweld: Misdaad en straf in een tijd van cultuurverlies, in: Tijd van onbehagen: Filosofische essays over een cultuur op drift, 2004, pp 11-41.

City of Walls: Summary Chapter 4. THE POLICE - A LONG HISTORY OF ABUSES

This chapter deals about the history of the Brazilian police and its dark history. Caldeira writes about the many bad things that the police did. To illustrate the police violence I give some numbers: ‘in 1991 the military police killed 1140 people in the state São Paulo during “confrontations with criminals”; in 1992, that number was 1470. This includes 111 prisoners massacred inside the Casa de Dentação, São Paulo’s largest prison.’ 87.5 percent of these killings occurred in the city of São Paulo and its metropolitan region. To compare: in 1992 the Los Angeles police killed 25 civillians in confrontation, New York police killed 24 civilians. Respectively 2.1 percent of the number of deaths in LA and 1.2 percent of the deaths in NY. [For my projects the extensive details Caldeira gives about this subject are not so interesting. JvB]

Caldeira, T.P.R. City of Walls: Crime, Segregation and Citizenship in São Paulo, University of California Press, 2000, p138-157.

City of Walls: Summary Chapter 3. THE INCREASE OF VIOLENT CRIME

‘The increase of violent crime is the result of a complex cycle that involves such factors as the violent pattern of reaction of the police; disbelieve in the justice system as a public and legitimate mediator of conflict and provider of just reprisal; private and violent responses to crime; resistance to democratization; and the population’s feeble perception of individual rights and its support for violent forms of chastisement [Dutch: tuchtiging, JvB].’
‘The majority of occurrences of larceny [Dutch: diefstal, JvB], robbery, and physical abuse, then, are not reported to the police. People either do not trust the police to deal with conflicts and crime, or they fear them because of their well-known brutality. Similarly, the justice system is perceived as ineffective by the majority of the population.’ In the southeast region of Brazil, 50.71 percent did not used the justice system after they were involved in a conflict.
Torture is something that is applied very often by the civil policemen, especially for the poorer suspects. The rich sometimes pay the police to find the people who robbed them, contrary to the poor who are neglected when they are being robbed. The upper-class also sometimes pay the police to torture the suspects.
Caldeira want to make clear that the statistics reporting crime are not so reliable. This because of the corrupt police, but also because the people do not report all of the things that happen to them. Another reason why the statistics are not accurate is because of the different branches in the organization of the police apparatus.
‘Increases in violence have been lower in the center, where the wealthier population lives, than in the outskirts, where the majority of the population is poor. (…) the rates of crimes against property are highest in the upper- and middle-class neighborhoods, whereas the rates of homicide are highest in the poorest districts of the city.’ (…) A recent study (…) showed that the districts with the highest incidence of homicide had a bad quality of life and a predominance of low-income families. (…) the districts with the highest murder rates were mostly very poor’ or lived in deteriorating central districts of the town. ‘The lowest rates were among middle- or upper-class districts in central areas.’ However, the districts with the highest robbery rates where also the wealthy and central districts. The increasing amount people that is in possession of a gun (legal and illegal) is significantly increasing. Caldeira sees this a sign that people ‘increasingly taking the task of defense in their own hands. Also the increasing trade in drugs is followed by more violence, ‘however, such claims are difficult to confirm because of the lack of concrete information.’
In order to understand they way crime works in a city like São Paulo Caldeira uses the following explanations:

1.) ‘crime is related to factors such as urbanization, migration, poverty, industrialization, and illiteracy.’
2.) ‘it is connected to the performance and characteristics of the institutions in charge of order: primarily the police, but also courts, prisons, and legislation.’
3.) ‘cultural elements such as the dominant conceptions about the spread of evil and the role of authority, and the conceptions about the manipulable body.’
4.) ‘the widespread adoption of illegal and private measures to combat criminality.’
5.) ‘policies concerning public security and patterns of police performance: the violent action of the state’ makes the situation only worse instead of controlling it.

The problems with criminality are not easily solvable with more investment in public security. The expansion of investment that started in 1984 did not effect the increase of crime and violence. We should also take in consideration that the ‘delegitimating of the judiciary system as a mediator of conflicts and [the] privatizing the process of vengeance’ only makes violence and crime worse.
Caldeira about the relation between poverty and crime: ‘The association of poverty and crime is always the first to come to people’s minds in discussion about violence. Moreover, all data indicate that violent crime is unevenly distributed and affects the poor especially. However, inequality and poverty have always marked Brazilian society, and it is hard to argue that they alone explain recent increases in violent criminality. Further, this argument often misrepresents violent criminality by allowing the view that poverty and inequality lead to poor people’s criminality. In reality, if inequality is an important factor it is not because poverty correlates directly with criminality, but rather because it reproduces the victimization and criminalization of the poor, the disregard of their rights, and their lack of access to justice.’ (p. 137) Also the behavior of the police is one of the reasons according to Caldeira, not so much their number of officers or their equipment. [My own experience close to the school was also very frightening. JvB]

Caldeira, T.P.R. City of Walls: Crime, Segregation and Citizenship in São Paulo, University of California Press, 2000, 105-137.

City of Walls: Summary Chapter 2. CRISIS, CRIMINALS, AND THE SPREAD OF EVIL

The Paulistanos interviewed by Caldeira, think that the spaces of crime are marginal, often related to favelas and cortiços. The solution to solve these problems are strong institutions and strong authorities.
Plano Collor was a plan that was developed to make the inflation decrease. However, it didn’t help, it even make the inequality bigger. Especially the middle-class was hit by the increasing inflation, their savings where frozen by the government and after a couple of months the value had decreased enormously. This caused among many people the distrust of the government. For other people it was a reason to stick to a hope for a strong government that could change all this, or even to look back with nostalgia towards Getúlio Vargas or the military dictatorship.
The interviews Caldeira took with three poor working-class men reveal the pessimism of these people. To the question about what kind of rights people have one of them answers:

‘What rights? None. Only the right to go to work, to come back home and sleep in order to go to work the next morning. The poor man spends four hours in the traffic to get to work, two hours to go two to come back’.

They are very negative about the politics of Collor.
A very telling expression related to public space is the next one:

‘My salary is only enough for eating. It’s not even enough to go the amusement park to take Maria [his wife, JvB] to play on the Ferris wheel. If I spend in transportation to the park, then I won’t have money to go to work the day after. So I stay home, it’s better, I stay home…’

[This quote really shows the depressing consequences of poverty, these people are really excluded from the economically determined spaces. ‘You have to pay for the public life’ the architect Charles W. Moore in an article with the same name. JvB]

Another very good point Caldeira makes is about aestatics and appearance. The middle-classes often refer to the poor as being more lucky than they are because they are only in the realm of necessity and therefore they don’t have to care for their appearance. Caldeira sees this as one of the many prejudices the middle-class has about the poor. (I think she is totally right in that.) She refers to the dialogues at 2.9 about the fashion. [I think we can also stress this argument to the realm of architecture. To create a real city the public buildings should be more than just products of necessity; they need to become human artifices to speak in Arendtian terminology. Arendt writes: ‘Nowhere else does the sheer durability of the world of things appear in such purity and clarity, nowhere else therefore does this thing-world reveal itself so spectacularly as the non-mortal home for mortal beings.’]
When it comes to social distance there are several ways of creating borders: The most obvious one is to create a physical border, by making a fence. Another way is ‘derogatory conceptions’ [Dutch: geringschattende opvattingen, JvB] about the poor, for example to emphasize that they are not part of the consumer society.
The fact that the poor have television is often seen as wrong but the richer part of the society. They say they can better spent it on a refrigerator, something that is more neccecary but also a lot more expensive. However, in many cases the television is the only form of leisure the poor have, and it is their connection with the outside world.
[The following interview shows the vulnerability of democracy in Brazil:]

‘We used to think that the lack of freedom and the censorship [during the military regime, JvB] were bad. Today I think that the military regime should come back. For example the case of kidnapping. It’s absurd the lack of security that one feels. I’m nobody, I don’t have many assets [Dutch: heeft iets met geld te maken, JvB], but Iám afraid that suddenly some guy gets my son in order to ask a ransom of five million. I’m scared to death… Anyone may be kidnapped, because now kidnapping has become the fashion. Why? Because of impunity [Dutch: straffeloosheid, JvB]. We were talking about the military regime: when the Al-5 was introduced do you remember? [Al-5 whas the most repressive period of the military regime.] Bank robbery ended… It is impunity which makes us feel insecure.’

Kidnapping is the biggest fear people have in higher social classes.

Very interessting conception about the walls comes forward in an interview Caldeira did with three women from Morumbi. A fragment:

‘[Interviewer:] Why do you prefer to live in a house instead of in one of the condominiums?
O: Freedom. To me, freedom first of all, and then the contact of too many children that I would be unable to prevent [in order to] control the friendships of my children. (…) The famous fear of drugs. My sister-in-law lives in a condominium: all day long you have children from here, there, everywhere. You don’t know who the children belong to…
M: Because the houses are not enclosed, the house doesn’t have walls… Only the condominium’s wall, but the house has only the grass, and in a while it is already another house. American-style.
O: All open, and you don’t know the contact your child has. How are you going to keep them separate? You don’t have a wall, how are you going to say , “No, my son, you receive the friends at home that I think are better, I am going to select these friends”? (…) There are cases of a child robbing another child’s house in order to steal dollar to buy marijuana. I won’t name names, but there are cases… in a condominium.’

[What this interview makes clear is the walling of the houses do not only function as barriers to prevent people from the outside to enter your domain, but also to lock the children in. The wall makes it possible to control the friendships of your children. It is the housekeeper who decides what the best company is for the children. The most ironic thing about this is that person ‘O’ her argument to live in a house is because of freedom it offers. The expression ‘How are you going to keep them separate?’ also gives the impression that children need this kind of wall in order to protect them from the temptations in the outside world. The house has become a space of preventative rehab. JvB]

Caldeira, T.P.R. City of Walls: Crime, Segregation and Citizenship in São Paulo, University of California Press, 2000, p53-101.

City of Walls: Summary Chapter 1. TALKING OF CRIME AND ORDERING THE WORLD

Caldeira explains that in São Paulo the talking about crime and violence started to change the urban landscape and the public space. This kind of talking has a simplistic characteristics, ‘relying on the creation of clear-cut oppositional categories, the most important of which are good and evil.’ She explains that the experience of violence can change your entire vision about society and the city, the fear is something that can stay the rest of your life. The world becomes divided in a ‘before’ and a ‘after’ the crime where the ‘before’ is strongly romantisised and the ‘after’ is ‘life like hell’.
‘Crime offers a language for expressing the feeling related to changes in the neighborhood, the city an Brazilian society.’
The thinking in categories and stereotypes is in many cases simply not correct. However, the people use it in order to symbolically reorder the world they live in. People don’t understand anymore the situations they have to deal with, and because of that they use simplifications of criminals such as ‘nordestino’, ‘people from cortiços’ or ‘favela’s’. Maybe this ‘talk of crime’ ‘generates order, it is no a democratic, tolerant egalitarian order but its exact opposite. Democracy is about openness and the indeterminacy of boundaries, not about enclosures, rigid boundaries or dichotomies. In the field of crime, barriers are embedded not only in the discourses but also, materially, in the city’s walls, in the residences of people from all social classes, and in technologies of security. Prejudices and derogations not only are verbal but also reproduce themselves in rituals of suspicion and investigation at the entrances of public and private buildings.’ The building of walls in São Paulo has the strongest connection toward the process of democratization after the military dictatorship.
‘From the 1940s to the end of the 1970s … Brazil became a modern country through a paradoxical combination of rapid capitalist development, increased inequality, and lack of political freedom and respect for citizenship rights. São Paulo epitomizes [Dutch: belichamen, JvB] these paradoxes. … São Paulo has become a symbol of a poor but modern industrial consumer society, heterogeneous and deeply unequal.
The drop in fertility rates, that already started in the 1970s effected also the growth of the population in the city. Growth rates dropped from 4.5% in 1940s, 3.8% in 1970s, 2.0% in 1980s, between 1991-1996 0.4%. [We can say that SP is a consolidating metropolis in matters of growth.] One of the possible explanations for this is the accessibility to mass media that exposes the ‘model of a modern middle-class family with a working wife and a few children’.
[For interesting data about the distribution of wealth see p47,48.]
Caldeira merciless breaks the image of Brazil as a ‘racial democracy’ into pieces: ‘the income of people of color is only around 65 percent of that of the white population’, ’68 percent of the urban households below the indigent line had either a black or a prado head of household, while black or prado households represent only 41% of all urban households’.
‘The increase in violence, the failure of the institiutions of order (especially the police and the justice system), the privatization of security and justice, and the continuous walling and segregation of cities’ shows that the process of democratization after the end of military dictatorship is ambiguous in its outcome. One the one hand there are free elections, freedom of expression, end of media censorship, ect, but on the other hand violence had increased. ‘This increase in crime and violence is associated with the failure of the justice system, the privatization of justice, police abuses, the walling of the cities, and the deconstruction of public spaces. Caldeira is convinced that it is violence and the talk of violence ‘counteracts democratic tendencies and helps sustain one of the most unequal societies in the world’.

Caldeira, T.P.R. City of Walls: Crime, Segregation and Citizenship in São Paulo, University of California Press, 2000, p19-52.