Brazilian death sparks fury on eve of Black Consciousness Day
RIO DE JANEIRO — A Black man died after being beaten by supermarket security guards in the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre on the eve of Friday’s Black Consciousness Day observations, sparking outrage after videos of the incident circulated on social media.
A short clip showed one guard restraining Joao Alberto Silveira Freitas just outside the doors of a Carrefour supermarket while the other pummeled him with repeated blows to the face. A store employee stood to the side filming. Other clips, shot afterward, showed a guard kneeling atop Freitas’ back.
Dozens of protesters entered a Carrefour in Brazil’s capital, Brasilia, on Friday morning, chanting, “Black lives matter!” One held a sign reading: “Don’t shop at Carrefour. You could die.”
Inside another Carrefour in Rio de Janeiro, protesters shouted, “Carrefour killer!” as a Black man lay still atop the conveyor belt of a checkout. They forced the store’s closure.
In Sao Paulo, protesters smashed the front window of a Carrefour, scattered goods from shelves all over the store’s floor and set a fire that employees hurried to extinguish.
Store closure
Carrefour released a statement lamenting Freitas’ “brutal death” and said it will end its contract with the security company, fire the store manager who was on duty and close the Porto Alegre store out of respect for the victim.
The men who beat Freitas have been detained and are being investigated for homicide due to the victim’s asphyxiation and his inability to defend himself, said Nadine Anflor, the civil police chief for the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul, where Porto Alegre is the capital. One of the men was a temporary military police officer who was offduty, said Rodrigo Mohr, head of the state’s military police.
The two spoke on a Twitter videoposted byGov. Eduardo Leite, who highlighted recent state policies enacted to combat racial intolerance.
“Unfortunately, on this day in which we should be celebrating those public policies, we come across scenes that leave us all indignant due to the excessive violence that caused the death of a Black citizen at the supermarket,” he said.
Black Consciousness Day is observed as a holiday in many parts of Brazil. In Rio on Friday, a group of people participated in a celebration with Afro-Brazilian dance and music in the working-class Santa Marta favela. Members of a samba school performed a ritualistic “washing” of the steps leading up into the hillside neighborhood.
Racial violence
Black and mixed-race people account for about 57 percent of Brazil’s population but constitute 74 percent of victims of lethal violence, according to the Brazilian Forum on Public Safety, a nongovernmental organization. The percentage is even higher, 79 percent, for those killed by police.
Protesters in Brasilia also gathered Friday outside a governmental institution that promotes Black culture to denounce its chief, Sergio Camargo. Camargo, who is Black, has denied the existence of structural racism in Brazilian society and called the Black Lives Matter movement “lefty garbage.”