The doctor asked to call João's family. They were waiting in the surgical center's waiting room, where João had been sent after suffering a heart attack in the early morning. His condition was critical.
"The arteries were quite compromised, so we performed a coronary artery bypass graft. It's a very simple procedure. The operation was a success."
Dona Maria breathed a sigh of relief. Her husband was safe and, with some care, would make a full recovery.
While following the news on the morning of October 28th, I must have heard
“The operation was a success,” at least ten times over. My brain, however, struggled to connect the phrase uttered by the champions of order to the images of the more than 70 bodies laid out in a long line, flanked by weeping women. There were many courageous “Marias” searching for a tattoo, a ring, a birthmark, that could indicate that this was Maria’s João and not Antonia’s João or Francisca’s João. Maria’s João had no head, no arms, but he had a tattoo, which was a passport to a dignified burial.
Ever since I saw that image, celebrated by proponents of the motto "the only good criminal is a dead criminal," I've been puzzled by the yardstick used by the so-called authorities to define the success of the operation sadistically called "Operation Containment." At the time the news of the massacre broke, I was rereading Carolina de Jesus's *Quarto de Despejo* for a class and couldn't help but reflect on how Penha and Alemão continue to be the "dumping grounds" of Brazilian society – and Morro da Misericórdia, an immense mass grave, from which the many Marias found a way to retrieve the Joãos who were theirs.
It seems to me that the success criteria used by the authorities at the end of last October do not apply only to this operation. The same discourse that defends extermination as the most effective way to combat crime was present in the Vigário Geral massacre, with 21 deaths, in 1993; in the Baixada massacre, with 29 deaths, in 2005; and in the Jacarezinho massacre, on February 6, 2021, with 29 deaths. According to the Group for the Study of New Illegalities (GENI) at the Federal Fluminense University (UFF), between 2007 and 2021, in the Rio Metropolitan Region alone, there were 593 massacres, with 2.374 deaths.
Although it cannot put an end to organized crime – because those at the top of the faction do not live in the community, and those below will soon be replaced – the formula keeps alive the hygienist ideology behind the need to maintain order, or rather, a given order. Conceived by doctors and sanitary engineers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, this policy aims to map and eliminate the so-called "dangerous classes," often black and poor, even today. Theories such as that of the physician Raimundo Nina Rodrigues, who attributed the propensity for criminality to skin color, have given the go-ahead for the imprisonment and death of those who disturb the republican order for at least a century and a half.
The discourse of cleansing – conceived as extermination – in the name of progress and order not only underpinned numerous urban intervention projects throughout the history of the city in Brazil, but also the very idea of res publica prevalent among us, with far more serious consequences. The transformation of destruction into a civilizational spectacle, of the vilification of communities into "successful operations," already appeared on the front page of the January 27, 1893 edition of the newspaper O Paiz : "The public administration had to be strategic; the raid, which could not be carried out on Tuesday, was carried out by surprise yesterday. It was a beautiful spectacle. The infamous den no longer exists." The euphoria with which the editors announced the demolition of Cabeça de Porco, a "gigantic, revolutionary work," which "the people watched in ecstasy," was barely contained: "as if, with the noisy blows, instead of stones rolling, beliefs were rolling, traditions were crumbling."
Long before the rise of organized crime in the late 1970s, authorities responsible for implementing public policies in urban areas were already using the hygienist argument to justify the concealment of undesirable elements. The demolition of Morro do Castelo in 1922 displaced population contingents to Morro do Pinto and Morro do Santo Antônio, the latter of which would also be the target of complete removal during the Guanabara state government of Carlos Lacerda in the early 60s. A few years earlier, on a Saturday in June 1958, the strategy was announced in the Correio da Manhã newspaper: “for the opening of the Perimetral and Diagonal Avenues, such undoubtedly bold works, special measures were taken, notably regarding the mass expropriation of the city's commercial center.” In 1961, it was Canindé Avenue's turn to be demolished to make way for the expansion of the Tietê River marginal highway.
On the other hand, between 1971 and 1974, during the largest meningitis epidemic the country had ever known, the military government adopted an inverse, albeit equally hygienist, strategy: it kept the impoverished population in the favelas, dying in droves, while the few vaccines were destined for the rich. A “successful operation,” marked by misinformation and the dissemination of fake news, which turned the favela into an open-air cemetery. Ten years after Zé Keti's song, the voice of the favela, which denounced that the people there were dying without wanting to die, Gonzaguinha, in the composition “Tá certo, doutor” (That's right, doctor), from 1974, pleaded: “Excuse me, excuse me: look, the boy with meningitis is passing by, move aside, move aside.” And the doctor? He continued to arrive too late.
What do the actions listed above and the 120 deaths in Rio de Janeiro in the last week of October have in common? All can be considered "successful operations" because they strictly adhere to the tenets of Brazilian-style social cleansing. All reveal the fact that citizenship remains a privilege of the few. Public security separates "good men" from "dangerous classes," who must be exterminated, not judged. The right to housing and privacy is denied to the poorest population, whose homes are invaded either by organized crime or, with equal or greater violence, by the police.
Not even the right that each person has to bury their dead, immortalized in the tragedy of Antigone and consecrated by so many cultures, is universal. Let Dona Maria try to find her João in the woods of Serra da Misericórdia and may she have the good fortune, amidst a scene worthy of Guernica, to find him with arms, legs, and a head.
This text does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Unicamp.
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