Thread by @mariliacout

1 / The murder of Brazilian civil-rights activist Marielle and the proto-fascist Bolsonaro’s presidency: the MILITIAS connection. A few days ago, as a result of a police investigative task force, two suspects in Marielle’s murder were apprehended:
insightcrime.org/tag/brazil-mil…

2 / Many countries have militias – paramilitary organizations operating in the interface of criminal organizations and institutional law enforcement and armed forces.

3 / Country specificities are important. In the USA, the term “militia” may be misinterpreted since “well-regulated militias” are predicted in the 2nd amendment.

4 / Regardless of how discordant with constitutional law scholarship the American militias are, they are very different from Brazilian or Colombian militias. In Brazil, they are not a new phenomenon but they grew exponentially in the past years.
bit.ly/2Hu8vRf

5 / They are mostly constituted by former or active duty law enforcement servicemen, with access to weapons and to the legislative, judiciary and executive branches.
bit.ly/2VYdfCJ

6/ They have broken the cartels’ monopoly at the slums but their partnership with Transnational Criminal Organizations is well known.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazilian…

7 / Once seen as welcome vigilantism by naïve and conservative segments in Brazilian society, their real criminal and power agenda is now clear.
theguardian.com/world/2018/jul…

8 / Understanding the militia phenomenon in Brazil is crucial to understand the rise of Bolsonaro to the country’s presidency as much as understanding the unprecedented growth of evangelicals during the past 3 decades.
jacobinmag.com/2018/11/brazil…

9 / Bolsonaro’s slogan – “a good delinquent is a dead delinquent” – comes from his lifelong ties with these clandestine organizations, the militias. This is also why it is not likely that the far-right will need a military coup d’Etat to consolidate their power.

10 / The amalgam of militias and evangelical fanaticism are quite enough to ensure an increasingly authoritarian federal government with a parallel growth in police brutality while operating in a democratic institutional skeleton.

11 / It may look and smell like a violent dictatorship but it is not. Not yet. It looks like a duck, it swims like a duck, it quacks like a duck but it is still, formally, a democracy.

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