Saturday, November 27, 2010

"Anti-drug" military operation in Rio denounced as state collaboration with the mafia Terceiro Commando

In an article today, Brazilian blogger Fernando Marcelino denounces the recent operation in a favela (slum) of Rio de Janeiro as nothing but an operation to consolidate the institutionally intertwined mafia Terceiro Commando as the monopolistic force in drug trade in Brazil.

This I'd say is nothing new and most, if not all, police and military operations worldwide that are presented as war against narco-trafficking are in fact selective attacks against groups that try to work outside of the police/state protection networks.

But it's always interesting to know some specifics, as all this world is highly secretive.

Fernando goes further than just this: he denounces the favelas, particularly in the very socially segregated city of Rio, as true concentration camps of Capitalist Globalization. This is why the state intervenes violently once and again against them, often killing random civilians, invariably poor defenseless people, in order to prevent the contradictions assembled in this urban periphery of the Capitalist monster from overflowing into the overall social system.

Variants of this criminalization and violent exorcism of the misery generated by Capitalism are building of walls that enclose the ghettos, use of vigilance devices such as police cameras or spy robot airplanes (drones). But the most explicit form of criminalization of poverty is police invasions of the slum neighborhoods in full force, presented by the media propaganda machinery as struggles of good versus evil.

All this, I have to add, is not essentially different of what Israel does in Gaza or Mexico does in the many supposed fights against narcos. It is not different of what the USA does when it invades Haiti or when it does promote opium as cash crop in Afghanistan or the cocaine industry in Colombia and Peru, with the occasional selective attack against individual farmers or dissident gangsters for mere image and business reasons.

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