The comparisons between the killing of Genivaldo de Jesus Santos this week and the killing of George Floyd two years ago this week are as uncanny as they are unavoidable. Here is how Sky News reported it on Friday:
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Videos showing a Brazilian man dying while trapped in the boot of a police car have sparked anger and protests in Brazil.
The footage shows a handcuffed Genivaldo de Jesus Santos being bundled into the boot before officers released a gas canister inside and leaned on the door. They kept Mr Santos trapped inside as clouds of gas escaped from the vehicle.
After a short time, he stopped screaming and his legs – which had been hanging out from underneath the door – were motionless.
Mr Santos’s wife, Maria Fabiana dos Santos, told news service Globo.com: ‘I don’t even call it fatality. That was really a crime – they acted with cruelty to kill him.’
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Of course, this cruelty will surprise no one who read or watched reports about the way Brazilian authorities were ethnically cleansing favela-dwelling Blacks to prepare for the 2016 Rio Olympics.
I lamented back then that the international community was reacting to this racial gentrification for sport the way white Brazilians invariably reacted to all issues concerning Black Brazilians. In “Rio Olympics: the Opening Ceremony,” August 6, 2016, I summed up my lament as follows:
I have no doubt that, once competition begins, all issues in Rio will be flushed into its sewage-infested waterways, where it seems every other kind of waste ends up.
And so I was not at all surprised when, despite grandiose promises, Black Brazilians saw no improvement in their general welfare after Brazil hosted those Olympic Games. I duly lamented again in “Rio’s Olympian Hangover Ends in Bankruptcy,” August 21, 2017.
Not to mention that Black Brazilians will tell you that, unlike Black South Africans, they are still living under racial apartheid – even if Brazil’s is not codified the way South Africa’s was. But this headline to report by no less an authority than NPR on November 9, 2014, speaks volumes:
- In Brazil, Race Is A Matter Of Life And Violent Death
In any case, all of that compels this question: Given the uncanny and unavoidable comparisons between these two infamous murders of Black men at the hands of the police: Why isn’t Genivaldo’s murder inciting the same international outrage George’s did?
That said, there seems little reason to hope that the military-style, right-wing government of Jair Bolsonoro will deliver “Justice for Genivaldo”. And sadly, there’s no reason to hope that the populist government of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva – who seems poised to unseat Bolsonaro later this year – will do so either.
Because nothing betrays how much Lula has lost his way quite like him aping Bolsonaro and Trump by blaming Biden and NATO for Putin’s genocidal war in Ukraine…
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Rio hangover…