On the resistance of women, yesterday and today, in the face of state violence in Brazil

On the resistance of women, yesterday and today, in the face of state violence in Brazil

We finally agreed to meet on the corner of our streets that don't intersect. 

Ana Martins Marques, “Cartografias” in: O livro das semelhanças, 2015, p. 40.

Preliminary note: This bulletin derives from the LASInTec online panel Tortura e contra-insurgência no Brasil do milagre: tecnologias violentas de produção da obediência (Torture and counter-insurgency in the Brazil of the miracle: violent technologies for the production of obedience), from the LASInTec Cycle of Online Conversations Segurança, violência e autodefesa: a quem é dado o direito de matar? (Security, violence and self-defense: who is given the right to kill?), with Amelinha Teles (Journalist and writer/União das Mulheres) and Rosalina Santa Cruz (Service Work Faculty/PUC-SP).

During the civil-military dictatorship in Brazil (1964-1985), many women were involved in the various forms of resistance and self-defense that were activated against the authoritarianism then normalized by the Brazilian state. Examples include participation in workers’ and teachers’ associations, mothers’ clubs, student movements, legal or clandestine press and communication vehicles, and even presence in armed groups and guerrillas, such as Araguaia and VAR-Palmares. However, as if the systematic effort to erase the history of resistance were not enough, the record of the actions of women who mobilized against the Brazilian state and its founding and continued violence is even more neglected. 

This observation was made by Amelinha Teles, a journalist, writer and founder of the União das Mulheres (Women’s Union) who was forced into hiding because she was a member of the Union in the decades of 1960s and 1970s, the press of the Communist Party of Brazil (PCdoB). Amelinha was violently arrested and tortured, along with her life partner, her two young children, her sister Criméia and other militants in the resistance to the dictatorship by the Bandeirantes Operation (OBAN), instrumentalized by the legal provisions of Institutional Act No. 5 of 1969. With a vivid memory and impressive objectivity, Amelinha recounts in detail the torture she witnessed and suffered even in front of her children, Janaína and Edson, and points out that the torture, as well as the kidnappings and disappearances of militants, were part of a state policy on the continent, for which Brazil served as an initial laboratory. Returning to the times of resistance to the civil-military dictatorship in Brazil, Amelinha always reiterates the position of women in this struggle, affirming the emergence of a feminist movement in the midst of the resistance of that period, as she explained, together with Rosalina Santa Cruz, in the book Da Guerrilha à imprensa feminista: a construção do feminismo pós-luta armada no Brasil (1975-1980)¹. Despite this effort at memory and history, even today women are often forgotten or relegated to secondary positions in the history of social movements and anti-authoritarian struggles. 

Also a participant in resistance movements to the dictatorship, and imprisoned and tortured by the Brazilian state, Rosalina Santa Cruz, as a former member of the urban guerrilla group VAR-Palmares, is one of the women who took part in actions to combat the dictatorship’s authoritarianism, then operated through the national security law. It is worth reiterating that national security, doctrinally crystallized by the Brazilian state with the armed and security forces, is anchored in conservative values, the preservation of patriarchy and a racist and exclusionary social order. Having participated in an armed struggle movement, she acted according to the codes of conduct typical of revolutionary combat activity – mostly thought up and operated by men. She recalls how she faced not only the Brazilian dictatorship, but also the sexism in the own these spaces of the military organizations and clashes (mainly mobilized around the state), and also how she endured the violence of torture with advanced techniques practiced by agents of the state², many of whose names were revealed in the National Truth Commission. These tortures involved rape, mutilation, aggression and psychological and physical humiliation directed at her as a woman and her fellow fighters. 

In this field, another story that is often forgotten is that of Helenira Resende de Souza Nazareth, in which case she is the result not only of machismo, but also of the racism that prevails in Brazilian society, including in the political field known as the left. Preta, as she was known, was a student activist at the University of São Paulo in the 1960s and held the position of vice-president of the National Union of Students (UNE), at the time a prominent political organization in Brazil. Later, he became a member of the Araguaia Guerrilla, part of the organization of the rural armed struggle against the dictatorial regime. In these spaces of political action, she faced sexism and racism also from within the resistance movements, until she was disappeared by the Brazilian state after four operations by the Armed Forces in Araguaia (in particular the Army), responsible for exterminating guerrilla members between 1972 and 1975, and kidnapping and torturing thousands of local residents. 

Amelinha and Rosalina’s book contains stories about the workers' strikes of 1968. The authors point out that the presence of women in this event is little considered. They recover the militant trajectory of Conceição Imaculada de Oliveira, a worker who, in the 1960s, worked in the industrial hub of Contagem, Minas Gerais, and was a member, among other organizations, of the União das Mulheres in the Metallurgical, Mechanical and Materials Industries of Belo Horizonte and Contagem (cities in the state of Minas Gerais). As a member of the union’s board of directors, Conceição organized the metalworkers’ strike in Contagem in 1968, considered to be the first major strike of the dictatorial period. With great repercussions, the strike was challenged by the then Minister of Labor, Colonel Jarbas Passarinho, who, after failed negotiations with the strikers, authorized the invasion of the industrial hub by army troops on April 24 of that year, triggering strong repression against the workers and the arrest of trade unionists. Despite the military violence employed, the strikers resisted and managed to obtain part of their demands.

As survivors of this intolerable violence by the Brazilian state during the civil-military dictatorship, Amelinha and Rosalina, as intellectuals who think about Brazil, show how the agency of such struggles, articulated with the strong presence of women, was also responsible for the development of a series of feminist movements and actions that exposed the urgency of women's issues even before redemocratization: reproductive freedom and the fight against the criminalization of abortion, the free exercise of sexuality and affective relationships, labour issues, the making explicit of regular sexual violence, among other fronts of struggle. These are struggles that have paved the way for debate and action on them to emerge today. In the midst of the horror of torture and disappearances, life insisted and, as a result, a strong network of solidarity between prisoners, ex-prisoners, mothers, sisters and companions of militant men and women exiled or killed and kidnapped by the Brazilian state was formed and remains latent today. 

An important source of women’s presence and activism in the face of violence by the Brazilian state goes back even further: the actions of Maria Lacerda de Moura at the beginning of the 20th century. A teacher and writer, Maria Lacerda de Moura took part in feminist associative movements, worked with the labor movement and was a militant in the anarchist movement in the early 20th century.

A teacher and writer, Maria Lacerda de Moura took part in feminist associative movements, worked with the labor movement and was a militant in the anarchist movement in the 1920s and 1930s, especially in São Paulo³.

During this period, she also lived in an agricultural community in Guararema, in the countryside of São Paulo, in which anarchist immigrants, mostly from Spain, France and Italy, organized a collectivist and self managed sociability based on the fight against fascism (such as Integralism in Brazil); militarism (European and the Varguist Estado Novo); clericalism (a hallmark of Brazilian social morality); and the bourgeois way of life (expressed above all in the structuring of the family)⁴. From this experience, Maria Lacerda de Moura would consolidate her reflections on anarchist education⁵ and on the condition of women in Brazil, reflections that at the time were considered radical even among feminists⁶, because they did not interfere with the demand for participation in electoral suffrage, and dealt with issues such as free love and sexual practice, prostitution, motherhood and the right to divorce, family emancipation.

Considering the conservatism, reactionarism and militarism so present in the formation of the Brazilian state, it is not surprising that Maria Lacerda de Moura’s experience in Guararema ended with police intervention by the Estado Novo against the farming community. This repression, which took place in 1938, was responsible for the arrests, deportations and judicial implication of several of the residents, culminating in the closure of the self-management and antiauthoritarian experiment in the midst of the spread of Nazifascism in Brazil and around the world.

With this history of security actions that frequently and ostensibly objected to the emergence of resistance, it is also not surprising that, in democratic times, the violence of the Brazilian state, with its misogynistic trait, continues to increase the records of this type of repression. Although it has been scaled back, it is remarkable how the use of legal and military means previously aimed at controlling insurgencies is now being disseminated to contain certain sections of the population that are seen as refuse, with the massacre of black people being the spearhead of this policy.

A recent example shows how the production of violence in Brazil is based on a militarism that combines racism and misogyny as an extermination strategy, often backed by legal provisions. In February of this year, the second trial of military police officer Victor Cristilder Silva Santos and municipal civil guard Sérgio Manhanhã, who were involved in the Osasco and Barueri massacres on August 13, 2015, took place in Osasco, a city in the metropolitan region of São Paulo. The massacre killed 23 people in the slums of the two cities, most of whom were black. It was carried out by security agents belonging to the Military Police of the state of São Paulo and the Civil Guard of the city of Barueri. After the episode, the agents were identified, tried, convicted and imprisoned, but Victor and Sérgio managed to have their trials overturned in an appeal to the Court of Justice. At the retrial in February, they were acquitted, a result that reversed their previous convictions, even though the evidence indicated that they both took part, if not directly in the executions, at least in the planning of the massacre⁷. This is not to say that the police should be punished, as this would in no way alter the continuity of these events and regular police lethality. However, the comings and goings of the judiciary in the face of executions carried out by state security agents (police and military), when reported, make it clear what they are for and how the vaunted universality of the Law serves the specific interests of maintaining order and guiding those who should be detained, imprisoned and killed.

Even though it wasn’t an official operation by the state security forces, the episode of the Osasco and Barueri massacres, as well as its legal consequences, show how the production of violence in Brazil connects legality and illegality by continuing the extermination that is the foundation of Brazilian society, operated by racism and misogyny. After the massacre and its grisly aftermath of black bodies, or almost black bodies because they were so poor, riddled with hundreds of rounds of ammunition that came from weapons belonging to the state, a gathering of women came together and began to follow the legal processes that followed the episode. This was a gathering of family members, mainly mothers, of those killed and wounded in the massacre, mostly black women living in the favelas, who organized themselves to hold demonstrations throughout the legal proceedings, always drawing attention to the brutality of the episode that massacred their children. These demonstrations, however, were used by the defendants’ defense, in the second trial, to delegitimize the accusatory argument by indicating a political content in them (as if the executions were also not guided by a policy). The defense pointed, above all, to the relationship between Zilda Maria de Paula, one of the Mães de Osasco de Barueri (Mothers of Osasco and Barueri Movement), and journalists and other movements of mothers of people murdered by agents of the State⁸.

The defendants’ lawyers also used a slanderous video in which the former prosecutor of the São Paulo Public Prosecutor's Office, Ana Maria Molinari, appears to associate the Mães de Maio (Mothers of May Movement) with the so-called organized crime faction Primeiro Comando da Capital (First Command of the Capital – PCC). Mães de Maio is an organization made up of the mothers of hundreds of people killed in May 2006, in a sequence of attacks carried out randomly by security agents in the state of São Paulo. Its aim is to fight for the memory of this episode and to accompany its legal developments, and for this reason it has linked itself to human rights organizations. It has never had any contact with the PCC, which, according to research and material published in the press, is the organization responsible for drug trafficking in the state of São Paulo, among other legal and illegal businesses. As a component program of the contemporary regime of illegalisms, the PCC has extensive connections with official state agents, especially in the field of security and the judiciary, as academic research and press reports also showed.

The acquittal of the defendants at the end of the trial gives us yet another example of how security democracy operates in Brazil. In other words, it resizes and expands the targets of rationalized violence in order to continue the daily massacres that repeatedly add to the record of the war that is taking place in the midst of the civil peace enshrined in the 1988 Constitution. In this way, with the help of the legal devices of the democratic state, it recomposes the marked trait of machismo and misogyny that always seeks to annul resistances operated by women. 

However, just as during the dictatorship, when groups of mothers organized themselves to seek information about their imprisoned and missing children and to prevent attacks on demonstrators, the struggle of these mothers of young people executed in massacres exposes the terrorism of the Brazilian state – today manifested in its democratic-security configuration – and affirms a counterposition to the perpetuity of this violence⁹. As in the past, resistance in the midst of the war waged by the state and its government strategies against the population shows how the voices and cries of women who revolt are decisive in challenging the violence that is a constitutive feature of any state, whether dictatorial or democratic under the rule of law. 

¹ TELES, Amelinha; SANTA CRUZ, Rosalina. Da Guerrilha à Imprensa Feminista: a construção do feminismo pós-luta armada no Brasil (1975-1980). São Paulo: Intermeios, 2013.

² Many of the torture techniques were imported by French generals such as Paul Aussaresses who used torture methods against militants of the National Liberation Front (FLN) during the Algerian war of independence (1955-1962).

³ On the militant life of Maria Lacerda de Moura and the intersections between anarchy and feminism, see Margareth Rago. “entre o anarquismo e o feminismo: maria lacerda de moura e luce fabbri”, Revista Verve, nº 21, São Paulo: Nu-Sol, 2012, pp. 54-78.

⁴ Cf. Hypomnemata. Monthly electronic bulletin of Nu- Sol - Núcleo de Sociabilidade Libertária do Programa de Estudos Pós-Graduados em Ciências Sociais da PUC-SP no. 243, March 2021.

⁵ Cf. Hypomnemata. Monthly electronic bulletin of Nu- Sol - Núcleo de Sociabilidade Libertária do Programa de Estudos Pós-Graduados em Ciências Sociais da PUC-SP no. 236, July 2020.

⁶ Cf. Hypomnemata. Monthly electronic bulletin of Nu- Sol - Núcleo de Sociabilidade Libertária do Programa de Estudos Pós-Graduados em Ciências Sociais da PUC-SP no. 240, November 2019.

⁷ Ponte Jornalismo. PM e GCM acusados de envolvimento na chacina de Osasco são absolvidos; mães se revoltam. 26/02/2021.   

⁸ Ponte Jornalismo. Dona Zilda, Mãe de Osasco: do trabalho doméstico à defesa dos direitos humanos. 08/03/2021.

⁹ Cf. “Memória, verdade e resistências à violência de Estado hoje”. LASInTec-Unifesp.