The government of Ana Júlia Carepa (Pará State, Northern Brazil) , once more, as happened on the "Operation Peace in the Countryside", that carried out terror and violence against the peasant families, is promoting an action that aims to "clear" the periphery of Belém city. This operation, called “Operation Reaction”, under the pretext to prepare the city to held the World Social Forum (Jan 27th – Feb 1st, 2009), is spreading violence, violation of rights and repression to the poor people of Pará State.

We are divulging a letter of Maria Adelina Braglia (see beloow), a Pará citizen, that angered and concerned with these repressive actions of the Ana Julia Carepa government, sent this to some organs (UNICEF, SDDH and OAB-PA) , questioning about the “ 'almost-ethnic-cleansing', carried out in the name of the ‘security’ of participants in the World Social Forum.

Dear friends,

Personal reports reveal that Operation Reaction, an operation of the Pará State police, has been detaining people for ‘investigations’. The fact that this is illegal in itself raises concern about this “land of rights”. Even more worrying, however, are the effects and results of this “almost-ethnic-cleansing” - carried out in the name of the ‘security’ of participants in the World Social Forum. “almost-ethnic-cleansing” because the detained are young, poor, black and brown, as are the majority of the habitants of this city. A dangerous silence surrounds this operation. The ‘upright citizens’ - perhaps exhausted by the rise of violence and the constant crimes involving murders – appear to believe that this is the cure for the open sore of poverty and abandon to which society has relegated the country’s future, the young.

It is also troubling that the organizations of civil society – OAB/PA (the Pará branch of the Brazilian lawyers’association), and the Pará Society for the Defence of Human Rights – are, through their silence, underwriting these arbitrary detentions for ‘investigation’. The motto ‘don’t attack your allies’ appears to have blinded those who should be in the front line to combat institutional violence, whatever its origin.

It is of great concern to learn that a similar operation, destined to guarantee ‘Peace in the Countryside”, carried out at the end of 2007, resulted in violence against rural workers and their families, especially the occupants of the Forkilha Farm, in the Municipality of Redenção. When they were heard in a public hearing in May 2008, these workers confirmed the violent actions of the State police and, as a consequence, 15 of them were mysteriously killed in the space of 6 months.

It is also difficult to accept that the command of this Operation Reaction is favourable to the recently re-appointed General Police-Station Authority, Raimundo Benassuly, infamous as responsible for this office at the time of the harsh denouncement regarding the detention of an adolescent girl, confined with male prisoners who tortured and raped her. When he was examined during the Parliamentary Commission for Prison Investigation, he defended himself by arguing “I’m not a forensic medical specialist. But this girl certainly has a problem, some mental deficiency. She at no time declared that she was a minor”. He certainly deserves the label of intellectually deficient, given him by the reporter Eliane Catanhede.

It is under these officials that Belém’s periphery is being ‘cleaned’, in order to prepare it for the WSF, by violating rights, storing young people who already have a ‘life sentence’ in the dirty police station cells - for if they really were criminals, they should be punished according to the law, instead of being subject to ‘investigation’ just before the event. This, then, is the preparatory atmosphere that the Pará Government and the Municipality of Belém have managed to ‘guarantee’ for the WSF, object of much hope and great expectations of the civil society organization.

Investigation of these denunciations should not be delayed.

Respectfully,

Maria Adelina Braglia

RG 4.540.936-5 SSP/SP

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PS: I've sent this letter to UNICEF, SDDH e OAB-PA. To contact the Lawyers Association of Pará I've used the email: Este endereço de e-mail está protegido contra spambots. Você deve habilitar o JavaScript para visualizá-lo.

January 15th , 2009