Teen’s killing stirs Black Lives Matter protests
RIO DE JANEIRO — When Rafaela Matos saw police helicopters over her favela and heard gunshots, she fell to her knees and asked God to protect her son, Joao Pedro. Then she called the boy to make sure he was OK.
“Be calm,” Joao Pedro wrote back, explaining that he was at his aunt’s house and everything was fine, Rafaela said. Minutes after he sent the message, police burst in and shot the 14yearold in the stomach with a highcaliber rifle at close range.
Joao Pedro Matos Pinto was one of more than 600 people killed by police in the state of Rio de Janeiro in the first months of this year. That’s almost double the number of people killed by police over the same period in the entire U.S., which has 20 times Rio’s population. Like Joao Pedro, most of those killed in Rio were black or biracial and lived in the city’s poorest neighborhoods, or favelas.
As the Black Lives Matter movement brings hundreds of thousands to the streets around the world, demonstrators outraged by Joao Pedro’s death one month ago have been organizing the largest antipolicebrutality demonstrations in years on the streets of Rio.
Still, the protests are nowhere near the size and public impact of other countries. To protesters, their struggle to gain momentum in the country where more than half the population is black or biracial, with a police violence problem that far overshadows other nations, is evidence of the depth of racism and complacence.
“They kill teenager after teenager in their homes every day. We’re here because we need to be,” 19yearold civil engineering student Joao Gabriel Moreira said at a June 10 protest in Duque de Caxias, a poor city in the Rio metropolitan area. He said he had never protested anything before this year.
“Kill a young black man in a favela, it’s seen as normal — he must be a drug dealer,” Moreira said. “Racism has always been veiled in Brazil. That’s why so few of us are here. If Brazil had racial consciousness, this street would be filled.”
Rio de Janeiro police initially said they were pursuing a criminal in a joint operation by civil, military and federal police officers when they shot Joao Pedro on May 18. There was no sign of illegal activity at the house in the Salgueiro complex of favelas, according to Eduardo Benones, a federal prosecutor investigating the operation.
Rio police killed a record 1,814 people in 2019, according to official data — triple the number five years earlier. The 2020 death toll is on track for a repeat.
Both President Jair Bolsonaro and Rio state Gov. Wilson Witzel won election in 2018 with campaigns that emphasized law and order, and both have said police should be able to kill criminals with almost no legal constraints.