11 Years, Many Marks: The Osasco and Barueri Massacre (2015)

All I have to say is that, as long as I am alive and healthy, I am here not to bow my head to the State. I will continue fighting for my grandson, my nephew, my godchildren, and for all of you. As long as I am alive and healthy, I will continue fighting. I will not bow my head to the State.

Member of the Movimento Independente Mães de Maio. Statement at the event marking 10 years since the Osasco and Barueri Massacre

In his 1995 open letter to the American poet John Ashbery, Waly Salomão says that “memory is an editing island” (Salomão, 1996). A phrase uttered by some random passerby, it lays bare how the representational function of language never has and never will be able to account for lived experience. Yet, from the terrible to the delightful, memory is what remains. “Life is not a screen and never acquires/the strict meaning/one wishes to imprint upon it” (Salomão, 1996).

The work we carry out alongside the struggle of the mothers of Osasco and Barueri against police violence is, at once, an bringing forth of memories of what was lived and what is known surrounding the tragic execution of more than 20 people on the border between the municipalities of Osasco and Barueri, in Greater São Paulo, and an obstinate re-editing of what many want to erase, forget, make disappear. We therefore insist on always remembering what they would like to see forgotten or simply relegated to the distant past. 

We are still here to remember and resist!

Everything we have done over these seven years of university extension work and activism –  the book, the conversations, the meetings, the podcast, the street demonstrations, the warm meals in contemporary zungu houses, such as that of Zilda Maria de Paula – does not seek justice, redemption, reparation, or public policy. The work carried out alongside the mothers and their association is directed toward transmutation, toward “transforming poison and rust into a piece of paradise, even if a god bursts forth to redeem the human burden” (Salomão, 1996).

This burden is not these mothers’ alone, but belongs to all of us, for memory is the raw material that stays, that remains, and that one does not wish to cast off, because lived life, as it is, is made, remade, edited, and re-edited, like a burden carried without drama, building memory among those who remain, until the final blow.

There is no judgment. They know that we know that this is the burden of those who survive by spilling the blood of others, and that no matter how many mass graves and clandestine cemeteries they build, there will always be those who obstinately build memory and refuse to let it be forgotten. We are here for that. Memory of struggle, resistances, permanences, obstinacies, insistences... Security policies and their police forces, which seek to care for and control everything, cannot penetrate the forms proper to remembrance and memory.

Even if they make the body disappear, these memories remain reactivated by us, “like someone pressing a button on the console/of an editing island.” (Ibid.)

The memory that resists is the raw material, the unprocessed material, that builds the refusal to be governed by policies of disappearance and forgetting surrounding the events they don’t want remembered. To struggle is to continually shed light on the extermination directed against one’s own.

Memory is always present, always current; this is not about remaining trapped in the past, interrogating it about what it still says about our present. And so 11 years have passed since the day police officers indiscriminately executed more than 20 people in the neighborhoods of Munhoz Junior and Jardim Mutinga, between Osasco and Barueri.

Eleven years since these mothers received the tragic news that would transform their lives forever. Eleven years since, through Zilda’s initiative and with the help of other mothers’ movements, such as Mães de Maio, the Associação 13 de Agosto was formed and these women’s struggle began – and never stopped.

And it is the present relevance of this struggle, in a country with the deadliest police force in the world, where thousands are disappeared, and with the planet’s third-largest prison population, alongside more than two hundred thousand people under ankle monitoring, that we must always speak of, always remember.

To activate memory as resistance in cities that have become gigantic gated communities monitored by security cameras, operating alongside the old murderous police forces as the police of the future – police that, using camera images and generative Artificial Intelligence programs, claim to be predictive.

For all these reasons, much has changed over the past decade in relation to State violence, Public Security policies in Brazil and, especially, in the state of São Paulo. In a very short period of time, governmental and bureaucratic authorities have come to celebrate, together with entities of so-called organized civil society, the decline of a series of violence indicators tracked by public-private reports, such as the Atlas da Violência [Atlas of Violence], of the Brazilian Forum of Public Security (FBSP).

The main and most celebrated of these is precisely the homicide rate per hundred thousand inhabitants, which is drawing ever closer to a number of deaths considered tolerable by the standards of contemporary political sociology in the West.

No one even hide anymore that it was a public-private partnership with so-called organized crime that made it possible to pacify prisons and poor neighborhoods, as has been well documented in specialized research and widely disseminated through the cultural products of entertainment companies, from films and documentaries to song lyrics.

All this was possible because the three fundamental elements of the criminal justice system continue operating at full steam in the twenty-first century.

They are: 1) the capacity to organize a delinquent milieu with its political profitability (obedience and popular adherence) and economic profitability (legal and illegal businesses and financial-market filtering that launders the money); 2) the production of varied police forces, state and private, that rationally distribute violence, lethality, and the capacity to control the city’s open environments; 3) an overcrowded prison system capable of producing fear and obedience and operating as a means of recruiting and managing the contingents of the reserve army of power that it itself produces, feeding back into a system of violence and political and economic profitability.

In plain terms, the so-called feeling of security is managed through indicators and discursive productions, but police continue to kill in and out of uniform; youth prisons continue to exist as laboratories for new forms of control; adult prisons remain overcrowded, now joined by a population monitored through ankle monitoring; and so-called organized crime remains the perfect discursive resource, one that justifies everything and subjects all social life to the imperative of security.

Notice that, in the name of fighting organized crime, anything is possible, whether nationally or internationally. These 11 years since the Osasco and Barueri Massacre must be remembered because the event brings together all these hallmarks of Brazilian securitarian democracy.

We at LASInTec have worked alongside the Associação 13 de Agosto for seven years, seeking to build memory and expose the truth of what remains the largest massacre in the state of São Paulo in terms of the number of people killed. We do so not out of some vague notion of justice, nor merely because we feel solidarity with the pain of these mothers, who had to bury their children so prematurely.

Our interest in the event and in the unfoldings of this brutal massacre stems from the fact that it is a synthesis of our contemporary democracy; because it points to decisive aspects of the violent forms of government that bear down on us and to how we must resist them.

As part of our university extension work, working alongside the mothers of Osasco and Barueri places us in direct contact with the effects of security policies. They also teach us how one survives and how one resists police violence and harassment by the State’s armed bureaucrats. As can be seen in the material we have produced with them over these years, the knowledge we produce about security policies today emerges from this struggle, from this insurgency.

That is why, for us, books, exhibitions, texts, panels, and all the material we produce are instruments of analysis and pieces of this living memory, recalling the past in order to speak of our present: they are acts of memory that take shape as acts of struggle.

In its dimension as academic research and political analysis, the history of this massacre and everything it encompasses – from the executions at Bar do Juvenal to the trials that acquitted police officers – produce a synthesis of what we have called, in recent years, securitarian democracy: not merely a form of government and/or a political regime, but the means through which freedom is currently shaped within neoliberal rationality, with its police citizenship, its extreme judicialization of life, and its varied forms of execution through a rational distribution of violence.

In short, the memory of these 11 years and these mothers’ struggle matter not because of the past, but because they are decisive for understanding our present and transforming our future.

References

SALOMÃO, Waly. Carta aberta a John Ashbery. In: Algaravias: câmara de ecos. São Paulo: Editora 34, 1996.