In Gameleira, in Pernambuco, two councilors have been assassinated this year.
One of them, José Ednaldo Marinho, was executed near the Municipal Chamber.
Two candidates and three political campaign workers killed, one councilman shot, four politically motivated crimes in the span of a month.
This is just the recent balance of the escalation of violence in the metropolitan region of Rio de Janeiro during the electoral campaign.
At the beginning of October, Mauro Miranda, candidate for councilor in the municipality of Nova Iguaçu for the PTC, was executed in a bakery.
Ten days later, in the same city, the DEM candidate Domingos Rocha Cabral, known as Domingão, was murdered outside a bar.
At the end of the month, it was the turn of Renata Castro, a militant who was campaigning for a candidate for Magé councilor and was killed with 14 shots when leaving home.
This last Tuesday, one of the 15 shots against the car of the Rio de Janeiro councilor Zico Bacana (PODEMOS) was right by scratching in the head.
And Rio de Janeiro is far from being an exception.
This Monday, Ricardo de Moura (PL), candidate for councilor in Guarulhos, in the metropolitan region of the State of São Paulo, was attacked while chatting with voters live on the Internet.
The transmission captured the exact moment in which he was hit by two shots, which, according to the police, hit him in the arm and right leg.
Moura survived what her colleague Adriana Afonso, a mayoral candidate, described as "an attack."
The author of the shots has not yet been identified.
Last weekend, at least six cases of assaults or attempted homicides against candidates were registered throughout the country, according to the monitoring of the Center for Security and Citizenship Studies (CESeC).
This Wednesday, the car of Solange Freitas, PSDB candidate for mayor of São Vicente, on the São Paulo coast, was shot at.
She was accompanied by advisers, but no one was injured because it was an armored car.
The perpetrators of the attempted murder have not yet been identified.
Solange is a well-known Brazilian journalist, she worked for 30 years as a reporter on the São Paulo coast, 15 of which on TV Globo de Santos.
All of these episodes are a portrait of the political violence that continues to plague the municipal elections in Brazil.
This year alone, 82 militants and candidates were assassinated, according to a survey by researcher Pablo Nunes, who coordinates the CESeC.
In addition to deaths, the study also mapped 170 assaults from January to October.
“The degree of violence against people who are killed for defending their flags is still dramatic.
The proximity of the elections caused the number of cases to increase since July, but the first months of 2020 had already been very violent, ”says the political scientist.
In 2016, according to an investigation published by the newspaper
Estado de S. Paulo
, there were 100 deaths throughout the entire electoral year.
The first homicide recorded in the monitoring, the execution of Mayor João Schwambach (MDB), on January 9, left the population of Imbuia, in the interior of Santa Catarina, in a state of shock.
The politician was killed with two shots in the vicinity of the mayor's office.
The shots came from the gun of the driver José Cardoso, who allegedly committed suicide after the crime.
The police closed the investigations without discovering the motives for the murder.
So far, the month with the highest record of political violence was September, which kicked off the electoral campaign, with 13 cataloged homicides.
Second state with the most deaths (eight), Rio de Janeiro is experiencing an intensification of electoral disputes in areas controlled by militias, especially in Baixada Fluminense, where nine politicians had already been assassinated in 2016, the year of the last municipal election.
In recent cases, the police are investigating the victims' possible relationships with paramilitary groups.
Domingão, from the DEM, had been arrested in July along with his brother, who is a military policeman, on suspicion of leading a militia in Nova Iguaçu.
For his part, Lauro Miranda had in his file a conviction for illegal possession of weapons.
Because of the murders that occurred in the city, the civil police created a working group to combat organized crime in the Baixada.
"The idea is to suffocate the militia and allow a clean election, with the candidates circulating and the people voting freely," explained Secretary Allan Turnowski.
In the first operation of this working group, in mid-October, 12 suspected members of militias were killed.
The works are coordinated by Commissioner Giniton Lages, responsible for the arrest of the alleged executors of Councilor Marielle Franco (PSOL) and her driver Anderson Gomes.
More than two years after the crime, the authorities still failed to identify the masterminds.
The mobilization of the police did not prevent the murder of Renata Castro, a leader linked to a traditional political clan in the city, the Cozzolino family (PP), who was campaigning for the policeman Pablo Vasconcelos (PSL), candidate for councilor.
In the same week that she was executed, Renata had denounced on social media and to the Federal Police that she was being threatened by two councilors, Clevinho Vidal (PCdoB) and Felipe da Gráfica (PTB), who rejected the accusations.
In August, the candidate for councilor Tía Sandra (PSB) was killed by traffickers from the municipality.
"Politics is contaminated by violence and organized crime, as is the case in Rio de Janeiro with the phenomenon of the militias," observes Renato Sérgio de Lima, director-president of the Brazilian Forum on Public Security, who believes it necessary to regulate the candidacies of police and security force agents, in a higher proportion in the right-wing parties.
“It is legitimate for police officers to be candidates and want to represent their colleagues.
The point of tension is the corrupt faction that wants to take over the state for criminal interests.
When the right of the police to be a candidate is not regulated, a toxic environment is created in which the interest to represent the sector and the militia behavior end up mixing ”.
Family and military ties
Earlier this month, Councilor Zico Bacana (PODEMOS) survived a shooting that killed two militants from his campaign and scratched him on the head during an event in western Rio.
In 2008, Zico had been subpoenaed in the investigation of a parliamentary commission on the militias, accused of being the head of a paramilitary faction in the region.
The ex-police officer always denied the accusations and was never charged.
Now, after surviving the attack, he said he had been the victim of a "cowardly attempted murder," but is ready to resume the election campaign as soon as he recovers from his injuries.
“They want to stop democracy and my work as a representative of the people, but they are not going to succeed.
I will be back on the streets shortly, ”he said in a video released by his campaign committee.
The next day, there was another attack against a candidate for councilor, this time in the north: Simone Sartório (Patriota) was ambushed and her car was shot, but she was not injured.
In Paraty, the candidate for the city legislature for PT Valmir Tenório did not have the same luck as Bacana and Sartório.
He was assassinated on the afternoon of last Wednesday.
The police are investigating the three suspects in the crime for possible links to drug trafficking.
"Violence in municipal elections is a problem that threatens democracy throughout the country and is now reaching Paraty once again," the Working the Future coalition, led by the PT, said in a statement, demanding a rigorous investigation. of the assassination and that the patrol is reinforced until the election.
In Minas Gerais, tied with Rio de Janeiro in the second place of the States with the most political homicides in 2020, the execution in daylight of the candidate for councilor Cássio Remis (PSDB), in Patrocínio, in Alto Paranaíba, had repercussions national because it was also recorded live during a
live
broadcast by the victim herself.
The author of the five shots was the former Secretary of Works, Jorge Marra, brother of the current mayor of the city.
He has been in prison since the end of September and has just been charged with murder, illegal possession of weapons and robbery, due to the theft of Remis's cell phone.
The Civil Police, however, ruled out that it was a political crime.
"Despite the fact that some politicians tried to influence [during the investigations], our action is independent," said regional commissioner Valter André.
Pernambuco, in turn, holds the record for murders linked to politics.
There were 13 deaths since January.
Gameleira, with 30,000 inhabitants, had for example two of its councilors executed.
The motivation for the crimes is still being investigated.
“It is a state that has long been listed as one of the places where there are more attacks against politicians.
In the cities of the interior, political rivalries pass from father to son and violence is reproduced from generation to generation, ”says Pablo Nunes.
In Itambé, on the border with the state of Paraíba, known as the “Frontier of Fear”, businessman Adson Mattos was assassinated for denouncing and criticizing politicians in the region in August, a decade after the execution of his cousin Manoel Mattos (PT), who was a councilor and human rights activist.
For Renato Sérgio de Lima, the warlike atmosphere of division of the national political scene recalls the recent conflicts on the eve of the elections in the United States and favors the brutalization of regional attacks.
“Brazil has a history of violent resolution of its electoral contests.
For this reason, political violence is not a novelty ”, says the researcher.
“Currently, we are mimicking what is happening in the United States.
Such a polarization of society that makes people feel free to eliminate the enemy.
The trivialization of hate speech authorizes politics to continue claiming victims ”.