Several thousand people demonstrated, Thursday, May 13, in Brazil against racism and police violence, a week after a bloody police operation in a favela in Rio de Janeiro, which left 28 dead.
“No bullet, no hunger, no Covid. The black people want to live! »: Protesters, who wore sanitary masks against the coronavirus, called for an end to discrimination against black and mixed-race people, the day Brazil commemorates the end of slavery in 1888.
In the parade in Rio de Janeiro, placards proclaimed “Against genocide, the rebellion is just” or “Justice for Jacarezinho”, the name of the favela where the murderous raid was carried out. According to the police, it was to dismantle a group that recruited children and adolescents for drug trafficking, theft, kidnapping and murder.
“It’s a policy of genocide”
According to associations for the defense of human rights, this anti-drug operation was the deadliest ever carried out in the favelas of this Brazilian metropolis, where the most disadvantaged populations live, mostly black.
“What we are seeing is that black people are the ones who die the most, the people who die the most by guns, who are the most unemployed and who are the least vaccinated. It is a policy of genocide, a policy of death ”a protester, Dara Santana de Carvalho, told Agence France-Presse. “We are here to demand an end to the black genocide, to demand vaccines, jobs and equal rights”, added another protester, Alexandro de Santos Visosa.
Similar protests, organized by the Black Coalition for Rights, also took place in Brasilia, Salvador and in the country’s economic capital, Sao Paulo, where 500 people gathered, some with “Dehors Bolsonaro” signs, the far-right president.