By Frei Betto on June 11, 2020
These were the last words of George Floyd: “I can’t breathe.” I cannot either. I can’t breathe in today’s Brazil, (mis)governed by military men who threaten democratic institutions and extol the coup in 1964 that instituted 21 years of dictatorship; they praise the torturers and the death squads. They set up a give and take with the notoriously corrupt politicians of the Centrão; they openly plagiarize the Nazis, using Jewish symbols; they plot in meetings of government officials how to act outside the law; they use bad language in official meetings as if they were in a den of criminals; they mock those who follow the protocols for prevention of the pandemic and they go out into the streets, indifferent to the 30,000 dead and their families, as if they were celebrating the huge death rate.
“I can’t breathe” when I see democracy asphyxiated – the military police protecting the neofascists and attacking those who defend democracy, the president who is more interested in releasing arms and ammunition rather than resources to combat the pandemic. Nor when I see the Ministry of Education directed by a semi-illiterate who threatens to repeat the Nazi Kristallnacht (the Night of Broken Glass), who proclaims that he hates indigenous people and proposes the imprisonment of the “vagabonds” of the Federal Supreme Court.
“I can’t breathe” when I see the commanders of the Armed Forces silent before a violently disordered president who makes no secret of the fact that his priority for the government is the protection of himself and his sons, all suspected of serious crimes and of complicity with professional killers.
“I can’t breathe” when faced with the inertia of those parties that call themselves “progressive” while civil society is mobilized in overwhelming demonstrations of indignation, and in defense of democracy.
“I can’t breathe” faced with these businessmen who, with their eyes fixed on profit and indifferent to the victims of the pandemic, apply pressure for their businesses to open immediately, while the hospital beds are full and the mass graves in the cemeteries gape like countless open toothless mouths of death.
“I can’t breathe” when in Brazil and in the United States they assault, imprison, torture, and murder citizens for the “crime” of being Black, and therefore “suspicious.” I’m short of breath when I see João Pedro, a 14 year old boy, lose his life inside his own home , shot in the back while he plays with his friends. Or delivery boys killed by police who treat us like imbeciles as they try to justify the deaths of so many unarmed civilians.
“I can’t breathe” when I think that the brutal crime committed against George Floyd is repeated on a daily basis, and that these killers remain unpunished because there is no camera to film them. Or when I see Trump, from the height of his arrogance, reacting to the anti-racism protestors by threatening to label them terrorists and calling in the army in order to silence them.
How can I get air to my sense of citizenship, my democratic spirit, my tolerance, seeing myself surrounded by Ku Klux Klan imitators, by generals faking it as Ministers of Health in the middle of a public health tragedy, by demonstrators who violate the laws of national security without consequences? By a stock market that rises while thousands of coffins are lowered into the graves that receive the bodies of the victims of the pandemic?
I have to breathe! We cannot let them suffocate civil society, communications media, freedom of expression, art, civil rights, the future of the generation condemned to live in this disastrous present time.
I do breathe, in spite of everything, when I read what designer Marc Jacobs posted on Instagram after the protest in Los Angeles destroyed one of his businesses. “Never let them convince you that broken glass or property is violence. Hunger is violence. Homelessness is violence. War is violence. Dropping bombs on people is violence. Racism is violence. No health care is violence. Poverty is violence. White supremacy is violence. Contaminating water sources for profit is violence. Property can be replaced, human lives cannot,”
I take for myself the words of Brazilian poet Cora Coralina: I want “more hope in my steps than sadness upon my shoulders.”
Source: Edicion Cero, translation, Resumen Latinoamericano, North America bureau