WITNESS’ partnership with Coletivo Papo Reto began in 2014. Upon learning that communities on the frontlines of police violence in Brazil were embracing the potential of video and social media to speak out—and at great personal risk—WITNESS’ Latin America team offered resources surrounding safety and security. In collaboration with WITNESS’ representatives in Brazil (Senior Program Manager Priscila Neri and Brazil Program Coordinator Victor Ribeiro), Papo Reto also pulls together teams of allies including activists, public defenders, and lawyers, to critically consider how to use visual documentation for advocacy, protection, and evidence.

At our weekly staff meeting, WITNESS staff, partners, and allies gathered to hear Papo Reto co-founders Raull and Renata speak about life in Complexo do Alemão, as well the collective’s process, challenges, and accomplishments fighting impunity in the favelas. The media is littered with stories depicting Raull and Renata’s community as one plagued by drug trafficking and violence, reinforcing a mainstream narrative that fails to account for the full experience of those who live in the community. Raull described the “war on drugs” and legal systems as racist tools of containment and control over poor communities in Brazil. As an example, he invoked the case of Eduardo de Jesus, a ten-year-old boy who was fatally shot in the head in 2015 by a police officer who supposedly mistook his phone for a gun as he played on his front stoop.

In the aftermath of Eduardo’s murder, Papo Reto was the first on the scene and quickly began filming and taking photographs to preserve critical evidence. Papo Reto’s presence and cameras prevented the police from tampering with the crime scene, a common tactic used to mask extrajudicial killings. Their involvement also initiated a forensic analysis of the scene, something Raull remembered as “the first forensic analysis of a killing in a favela that I’ve ever seen in my 28 years of living in Complexo do Alemão.”

Without Papo Reto’s visual documentation, certain victories would not have been possible: the preservation of the evidence and an in-depth investigation (rare), as well as the ultimate conclusion that Eduardo was indeed killed by police fire (even rarer). However, the officer was never brought to justice in the courts of law. Eduardo’s story speaks to the paradigm of police activity in Rio; officers are rarely held accountable for their actions, and the statistics citing frequency are shocking.

“In Brazil,” Renata informed the room, “one young black person is killed every 11 minutes.”*

“And the reality in Brazil is that a person is killed several times,” Raull explained. “First, they are killed by the actual bullet. Then, they are killed by the media narrative, which parrots the police version of events by describing that person as criminals and assassinating their reputation. And finally, they are killed by the legal systems that fail to hold perpetrators accountable.”

In the event of extrajudicial deaths like Eduardo’s, or the ongoing illegal invasions of private residences in Complexo do Alemão, Papo Reto both receives and produces documentation of violence, and uses it to publicly demonstrate the impact of these violations on the residents—with the ultimate goal of creating accountability and change. For the collective, mobile phones are “weapons of defense and protection.” Members burn through phones rapidly, filming continuously and tirelessly to capture the truth, often amassing a series of explicit and clear videos that can be used as evidence.

This summer, Papo Reto celebrated an important victory, when a collection of video footage was used as evidence in court to indict two high-level commanders for their responsibility in the unlawful invasion of private homes. This case is a significant success, considering the widespread impunity for abuses committed by police in favelas.

In contrast with the mainstream narrative of his community, Raull describes Complexo do Alemão as “a place with a lot of power and amazing ideas—a space of resistance for poor and black families,” who fight every day to combat the larger, very intentional, systems that seek to profit from the lives of marginalized residents. Raull and Renata are also quick to clarify that for them, “it’s not a choice to be an activist.” The violence faced by residents of Complexo do Alemão is a reality, and the documentation of that violence is a matter of daily survival.

“I am most scared of giving up and not fighting for a better tomorrow,” Renata explained, a sentiment that Raull echoed with resounding confidence: “I just need to know that you are with me, and for you to know that I am with you. I believe in that.”

Our session concluded with Renata asking all in attendance to please share the following message: “Stop killing our youth – the extermination of black youth in Brazil needs to end.”

Follow Coletivo Papo Reto on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

*Officially, police were responsible for 920 killings in 2016 in the city of Rio de Janeiro alone, and post–Olympics, that number continues to rise; the number of police killings was 78% higher in the first two months of 2017 compared to the same period of 2016. However, as is also true in the United States, statistics tend to be unreliable. Reporting of extrajudicial killings by police end up masked as “deaths by resistance,” with terms like “stray bullets” used to deflect accountability. Activists believe that the actual number of people killed by police in Brazil is as high as four or five times the official count; in 2014, the BBC reported that the Brazilian police kill six people each day.

Featured image: Raull and Renata on the subway in New York City, September 2017.

This week the extermination of the black residents in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro continued.

Police operations in the north of the city left at least 13 people dead as a result of “stray bullets.” Additionally, about 2,500 children went without classes because of these clashes, an operation that mobilized at least 500 police officers.

Photo from her Facebook page.

Maria Eduarda Alves da Conceição, 13, was one of those victims murdered yesterday. She was hit by three shots while playing basketball in her physical education class at the Municipal School of Jornalista Daniel Piza in Fazenda Botafogo. Maria Eduarda was a talented basketball player who collected medals at school Olympics and teachers saw a promising future for her sports career.

Her future was interrupted by an operation led by the 41st BPM (militarized police force) which is already known by local residents and human rights organizations as a veritable extermination group.

The case of Maria Eduarda is important in deconstructing the “stray bullet” narrative of the press and the police, particularly because she was shot three times, according to the expertise of the Legal Medical Institute.

Responsible for about 20% of all deaths resulting from police operations in the city, the 41st BPM is the same group that fired 111 shots at five young people of Costa Barros in November of 2015. They are also the subject of an Amnesty International report “You Killed My Son”, that was published two years ago and details nine cases of execution in Rio’s Acari favela.

Also this week, local residents filmed these same policemen firing on men who were already injured or dead, laying on the ground in front of the same school where Maria Eduarda was killed, as shown in the video [Graphic Content] on our partner Coletivo Papo Reto’s Facebook page.

Still from Facebook video showing police fire at two men lying on the ground [Graphic]

https://youtu.be/kAOt3R9l-QY&w=640&h=480

“Of the 56,000 homicides in Brazil every year, 30,000 are young people aged 15 to 29.That means that, at this very moment, a young person is most likely being killed in Brazil. By the time you go to bed, 82 will have died today. It’s like a small airplane full of young people crashing every two days, with no survivors. This would be shocking enough by itself, but it’s even more scandalous that 77 per cent of these young people are black.”

Check out this post or this New York Times Magazine feature on us to learn more about how we’re working to expose police violence in Brazil. We also co-authored to a report with partner organization Article 19 about how video can be better used for justice and accountability in Brazil. And here you can find a host of resources in Portuguese.

We set out to develop an app, called CameraV, that could capture more information (metadata) and do so securely (through encryption) so that your authenticated media can more quickly make it to audiences that matter and in a format that could be trusted.

Al Jazeera reports on the app we co-developed with The Guardian Project in their new documentary “The Bigger Brother”. The piece highlights a beta test of CameraV conducted in Rio with our partners at Coletivo Papo Reto. You can watch the documentary here:

This report is part of a seven-part series from Al Jazeera called “Rebel Geeks” profiling people and organizations who are “challenging power structures and offering a different vision of our technological future.”

For more information about the app, go here and to download it, go to the Google Play Store. (The app is currently only available for Android.)

Coletivo Papo Reto documents police violence in Complexo Do Alemao, a favela in the northern section of Rio that has been occupied by military police for over two years as part of “pacification” policies put in place in advance of the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics in Brazil. The increased police presence in favelas has led to a surge in police violence, with large numbers of cases of extrajudicial killings, violence, and impunity documented and reported.

The full article is available here in Portuguese.

Coletivo Papo Reto was also featured in an English-language video by Fusion earlier this year.

Featured image via BBC Brazil.

Panelists discussed the power of the image and self-representation in deconstructing oppressive structures and empowering peoples of African descent. The panelists included Raull Santiago from Coletivo Papo Reto, Celso Athayde, founder of Central Union of Favelas in Brazil, Macdala Prévot, a Haitian filmmaker and graduate of Ciné Institute, Thomas Allen Harris, an American filmmaker and the director of “Through a Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People”, amongst others.

Raull Santiago, a 26-year old Brazilian activist, spoke about the specific way racism operates in Brazilian favelas and how Rio de Janeiro  marginalizes many of its inhabitants and then often blames them for larger municipal  problems. This, he said, leads to public policies that only address favelas as a public security issue, and never as the vulnerable areas that they are, lacking investments in health care, education and public spaces. “We are not discussing the roots of problems, but we [who live with the results of these problems] are being punished [with militarization], in the worst way possible”, Santiago recounted about the controversial military occupation in the favelas, that was intended to pacify the areas by removing control from the gangs.

“When I was young, I would always hear at school that the blacks were descendants of slaves. But when I became more involved in the movement and the struggle, I learned that that wasn’t the case: blacks are descendants of kings, queens, princes and princesses who arrived enslaved in our country,” said Santiago.

“We are seen as the problem by the ones who don’t live there [in the favelas], but we are creating solutions inside of our communities.” Santiago also spoke about the necessity of allowing space in the social debate for the people from the favela to tell their own stories and denounce violations of their rights.

As Haitian filmmaker Macdala Prévot put it during her speech, “I must be true to myself and show who I am; If I don’t do it, somebody else will do it for me.”

The panel was a part of Papo Reto’s one-week visit to New York, during which they spoke at a panel hosted by WITNESS and moderated by journalist Amy Goodman. They also participated in a debate at the Americas Society with Professor Carl Hart from Columbia University, Rene Silva from Voz da Comunidade and Patricia Marino from Humanitas 360. The Papo Reto representatives also exchanged experiences with We CopWatch, and filmed the police on the streets of New York. To round out the trip they were invited to Brazil Foundation’s Gala, where they spoke about state violence in Brazilian favelas and received an award along with WITNESS for their work in Brazil.

Featured image: Screenshot of recording of Raull Santiago speaking on the UN panel.