#DEMILITARIZE – video series shows the effects of the militarization of Brazilian society

The urgent need to demilitarize, not only the police, but society itself, is the focus of the new Justiça Global video series, #DEMILITARIZE. The images and testimonials were collected in São Paulo, Salvador and Rio de Janeiro, from 2013 to 2015. It is through this time frame that Justiça Global seeks to show that the continuous growth of repression, deaths and imprisonment do not occur by chance, but reveal rather the implementation of a state project that directly affects the black and poorest population and that, through the culture of fear, captures minds and bodies for the advancement of militarization as an output for urban violence.

In the first video, «The Police State», we followed the first occupation of the Favela Complex of Maré, the implementation of community policing in Bahia, inspired by the UPPs of Rio de Janeiro, and the performance of police units specializing in deaths, such as Rota, São Paulo .

In the second video of the series #DESMILITARIZE, «Racism and State», we perceive how the structure of the country was forged over the exploitation and death of the black population. Not only the police, but also the prosecution and the whole criminal justice system operate within a logic in which black people do not have their rights assured. Cases such as Cláudia Silva Ferreira’s, who had her body dragged by a Military Police vehicle for kilometres in a main road of Rio de Janeiro, and other victims of institutional violence are remembered in a message that reverberates through the centuries of oppression and racism.