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In this week´s edition of News from Brazil:

• Governments “Foment a Climate of Terror,” Says Amnesty International
• Amnesty Criticizes “Political Game-Playing” in the Brazilian Debate about Security

Governments “Foment a Climate of Terror,” Says Amnesty International
by Pablo Uchoa, of the BBC Brazil, in London

Civilian populations on the entire planet are being threatened by powerful governments and armed groups that foment a climate of terror to secure their power, Amnesty International said.

In its annual report, the non-governmental organization diagnosed what it called “the politics of fear” created in 2006 “a world dangerously divided.”

“The politics of fear is feeding a spiral of human rights abuse in which no right is sacrosanct and no one is safe” said Irene Khan, Secretary-General of Amnesty International in her note to the press.

“The ‘war on terror’ and the war in Iraq, with its catalog of abuses of human rights, created profound divisions that cast a cloud over international relations and made it more difficult to resolve conflicts and protect civilians.”

In the view of the organization, there is an ‘arch of instability’ that extends from Pakistan to the region known as the Horn of África, where Somalia and Ethiopia are located, and extends to the Middle East. This would be a swathe of “failed states.”

At the same time, the international community has shown itself “indisposed” or simply “powerless” in the face of conflicts like the one that a year ago had set the militant group Hezbollah and Israel against each other and that left more than a thousand dead.

Domestic fear

The organization emphasized that in many countries there is a “political agenda dictated by fear,” that amplifies the chasm between “those that have and those that do not, between ‘them’ and ‘us.’”

Badly conceived strategies for fighting terrorism have done little to reduce the threat of violence or to secure justice for the victims of attacks, but have done a great deal to prejudice human rights and the concept of a nation of law.

On this point, the organization especially criticized the U.S., which “demonstrates no reluctance with respect to the global network of abuses that is being created in the name of combating terrorism.”

“It is indifferent to the misfortune of thousands of imprisoned and their families, to the damages caused to international law, to human rights and to the destruction of its own moral authority, which has never been so low throughout the world,” the Secretary General of Amnesty criticized.


Priorities

The organization borrowed a word more utilized in the area of environmentalism, “sustainability,” to propose its vision of public security.

“Sustainability demands that each superpower renounces the tradition of supporting its circle of dictatorships and abusive regimes. Human security is better attained by means of institutions that promote respect for human rights,” said the report.

Irene Khan asked that governments and politicians throughout the world dedicate themselves to the subject of human rights with the same enthusiasm that has been recently demonstrated with respect to the subject of climate change.

“In the same way that global warming demands action based on international cooperation, the deterioration of human rights can be combated only by global solidarity and respect for international law,” she affirmed.


Amnesty Criticizes “Political Game-Playing” in the Brazilian Debate about Security
Pablo Uchoa
From BBC Brazil, London

The organization Amnesty International criticized what it calls “political game-playing” in the debate over public safety in Brazil.

On releasing its annual report in London, the organization that campaigns for human rights affirmed that radical sectors of the media and conservatives representing the elite are feeding the so-called “politics of fear,” which results in a climate of social confrontation.

“Rio de Janeiro is the perfect example of the ‘politics of fear’ concept. There have been decade after decade of neglect by governments that failed to invest in public security, and today, for lack of this political investment, a climate of fear has been created that results in ever more violent responses,” affirmed the organization’s spokesperson in Brazil to BBC Brazil.

“One sees politicians clearly reinforcing an ever more repressive and discriminatory rhetoric. The political use (of the security debate) is a serious attack on the long history of the campaign for the protection of human rights in Brazil.”

A World Divided

The line of attack on the “politics of fear” gave the organization’s annual report its tone. Amnesty’s Secretary General, Irene Kahn, stated that powerful governments and armed groups disputing political power create a “divided world” in which civilian populations are literally caught in a crossfire.

The part of the report that refers to Brazil includes the following passage: “The attempt of certain authorities to define the public security problems as a war resulted in the ever increasing adoption of military tactics by state police forces.”

“The poorest communities, that receive the least state protection, were twice victimized, since they are affected by a greater concentration of violent criminality and at the same time they suffer from the repressive and unjust methods used by the police to combat the criminality.”

Examples cited in the report include the political debate following the attacks by the criminal group First Capital Command (PCC) in São Paulo, in May last year, and the combat of drug trafficking in Rio de Janeiro.

It is not the first time that the organization has criticized, for example the use of the so-called “Big Skull,” the armored vehicle used by the Rio Police to enter shanty towns controlled by drug traffickers.

“I just returned from Brazil where I saw the indiscriminate use of the Big Skull in the poor neighborhoods, which enters into favelas shooting, at times of the day when children are still out on the street," said Tim Cahill.  "Responses such as this, each time becoming more rapid and violent, are discriminatory against the poorest communities."

However, there have been some advances in Brazil over the past year, such as legislation for the criminalization of domestic violence and the development of programs against torture and defense of human rights.  But the biggest problem is public security, in which there is a consistent lack of effective police policy.

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