While the country was experiencing the biggest health crisis in a century, Bolsonaro passes the “steer” on migration policies, with help from the military.
Authors: Alexandre Branco Pereira, Karina Quintanilha
Originally published in portuguese (23/07/2021), The Intercept Brazil: https://theintercept.com/2021/07/23/deportacao-trabalho-escravo-governo-exercito-migrantes-desastre-humanitario/
There are still people who believe in the fable of Brazil as a country that welcomes immigrants. If it is true that the country has a long tradition of selective policies of welcoming white migration, which vary according to the political-economic interests of each era, the current crisis has made clear the close relationship of migration policy to the modus operandis of State racism. Inherited from a slave-owning and colonial regime, it constitutes the identity of a country built on the extermination of black and indigenous populations.
Although the racist geopolitics of criminalization of immigrants and refugees is part of the tragic tendency of neoliberal capitalism, the way in which migratory control manifests in the Bolsonaro government draws attention. In the wake of the impacts of the 2008 global crisis in Brazil, sociologist Patrícia Villen already warned: “It is in moments of crisis – already announced as a historical certainty for the coming years in the country – that the truth of immigration is revealed”.
Despite being out of the spotlight, immigration laws and decrees have gained numerous legal aberrations under the extreme right-wing government. In 2019, for example, Ordinance 666 was issued, later replaced by Ordinance 770, the authoritarian rubble of former Justice Minister Sergio Moro, which instituted summary deportation, resuming the idea of “dangerous persons” in the country’s migration policy in defiance of the Federal Constitution (1988) and the Migration Law (2017). In addition, systematic violations of migrants’ rights, especially at the borders, were evidenced during the pandemic.
Not coincidentally, one of the first measures adopted by the government with the arrival of covid-19 was to prevent the entry of people from Venezuela by land routes, while keeping open and without any sanitary control the air borders with the main countries that, at the time, were the focus of the disease. Such policies contrasted, in their appearance, with the migration policy implemented in the north of the country, whose name, which bears the nickname of a military operation, Operation Acolhida (“Operation Welcome“), in force since 2018, barely conceals its ideological purpose: “socialism excludes, Brazil welcomes.”
Over more than a year of the pandemic, an avalanche of discriminatory measures has been engineered by infralegal means – administrative norms that do not go through deliberation by the Legislative Branch and grant the prerogative to legislate to the Executive Branch -, hindering the guarantee of rights set forth in the Migration Law, the Refugee Law, and international treaties, such as the Cartagena Declaration on Refugees (1984).
In practice, the Brazilian government temporarily suspended the right to request refuge through Ordinance 120, of March 2020, a measure that has been reissued in at least 30 ordinances regulating the closing of borders due to the covid-19 pandemic, affecting mainly migrants entering the country by land, instituting specific discrimination against Venezuelans and overloading the justice system.
After pressure from human rights organizations, a new infralegal regulation (Portaria 655/2021) was published on June 23 (2021), eliminating discrimination against Venezuelans as a way, in part, to reactivate Operation Welcome and justify the expense of the massive presence of the Armed Forces in Roraima. However, the device maintains the restrictions on the right to request refuge, and migrants who entered by land during the period when the discriminatory ordinances were in force, especially Haitians, remain in a legal limbo and have been prevented from regularizing their status, threatened with deportation.
The Brazilian government has also promoted record deportations during the pandemic – a 5,700% increase in 2020 over 2019 – and has even entered into an alliance with Donald Trump to forcibly return undocumented Brazilians from the United States in degrading conditions. In Brazilian border cities, the press reported cases of Bolivian migrants being deported after seeking health care – in a flagrant violation of the universality of SUS and indicating the existence of a dangerous link between health professionals and security forces. At the same time that deportation is naturalized, the undocumented policy is also naturalized.
Image of a notification from the Federal Police to a Haitian who entered Brazil during the pandemic by land, treated as a “clandestine”, under threat of deportation. Image: Personal File
Despite the suspension of deadlines until September 2021 for those who had their documents expire during the health crisis, migrant organizations and collectives have warned about the systematic difficulty in making appointments with the Federal Police, as well as the criminalizing treatment of undocumented people, classified as “clandestine” in official documents, contrary to the Migration Law.
A representative episode of the selective migratory control of the Bolsonaro government was the invasion, by the Federal Police, of a reception center maintained by the Pastoral of Migrants in Pacaraima, a city on the border with Venezuela, in March (2021). Wielding heavy weapons and anonymized by the use of hoods, the police agents sought to deport 55 women and children hosted by the shelter on the grounds that they had entered the country irregularly and were crowding together in disregard of the sanitary rules in force.
According to the newspaper, the person in charge of the shelter, Sister Ana Maria, was taken to the police station to give a statement, accused of crime against public health – at the same time, Bolsonaro was going to the STF to prevent governors from adopting restrictive measures to combat covid. After the action, the migrant women and children were referred to the guardianship of Operation Welcome.
Exploitation of migrant labour
Operation Welcome, commanded by the Brazilian Armed Forces from Roraima, predates the Bolsonaro government, having been initiated during the Michel Temer administration. The reception policy – or, in this case, a form of militarization of the humanitarian response under the responsibility of the Ministry of Defense and that came to be headed by former Minister of Health Eduardo Pazuello – actually contributes to making an emergency situation chronic under the pretext of relieving the pressure on a state with little structure to receive migrants.
Treated internationally as a case of a successful humanitarian response, the Operation actually serves to hide the fact that, in the three years it has been in effect, no other structured response has been built in terms of public policy capable of mitigating the situation of vulnerability of these migrants.
The shelters remain largely temporary containers, something that holds a peculiar symbolism about the situation of these migrants in the country – like Itamar Vieira Júnior’s narrative about the black populations in his book “Torto Arado” (Crooked Plough), the houses need to be temporary as a sign of disposability and the desire to make their presence ephemeral and the marks it produces on the earth.
As we investigate the reality of these immigrants internalized (sent to) to cities that do not even have a history of migration or any minimum structure for the sustainable insertion of these people, it is noticeable the abandonment and lack of co-responsibility regarding the guarantee of minimum rights of the “internalized” people on the part of the armed forces (FFAA), the federal government, or the international agencies partners in their implementation – namely, the IOM and the UNHCR. In addition to Venezuelan workers under extremely precarious conditions, there has also been an indiscriminate transfer of Warao, Pemon, and Taurepang indigenous people from Roraima to other states, disregarding the fact that these indigenous people have long circulated through the territory. In this case, the forced displacement serves as a guarantee of unassisted deterritorialization, urbanizing and monetizing their relations under the guise of “integration”.
The internalization done by Operation Welcome has been collecting cases of labor intermediation for precarious jobs and even complaints of labor analogous to slavery, reiterating a historical trend, verified in the country, of association between migration and slave labor. In January 2020, a Venezuelan migrant was freed from this working condition in Ceará after being internalized with the support of billionaire businessman Carlos Wizard Martins, an unusual partner of the Operation who even moved to Roraima in 2019 to work with the federal government. Wizard was responsible for the internalization of 25% of the migrants assisted by Operation between 2018 and 2019.
In May of this year, Ambev and Heineken were fined for using slave labor in the state of São Paulo at Sider, an outsourced transportation company: 23 migrants (22 Venezuelans and one Haitian) were rescued after living for months in the back of their trucks, with no right to housing and no access to drinking water. The job vacancies had been intermediated by Operation Welcome.
In July, a new similar case at Cia Verde Logística, a partner of Britânia, BRF Foods and Mondelez, with vacancies prospected by the Operation submitted migrants to work days of up to 24 hours without any extra pay. The migrants who questioned the situation were summarily dismissed without being paid anything. The case was denounced to the Public Ministry of Labor, which is still investigating.
The absorption of “interiorized” Venezuelans, as well as Haitians, to meet the demand for more precarious jobs in meat packing plants, a focus of contamination and deaths by covid-19, like Seara, in Mato Grosso do Sul, which was prosecuted after the contamination of 1,033 employees, also stands out. It is worth remembering that the billionaire agribusiness production chain, which has absorbed a large part of internal and international migrant labor, is frequently implicated in slave labor allegations, even involving giants in the sector such as JBS.
The Bolsonaro government is, as has been argued by many, the spearhead of a colonial fascism that structures the formation of Brazil as a country. If we call Nazifascism the political and racial violence of extreme right-wing groups when practiced endogenously to relatively racially homogeneous white groups, it is important to remember that it was a method widely used in the European colonial architecture of the Americas, Africa and Asia. As an example, it is no mere coincidence that the father of Nazi military officer and Gestapo founder Hermann Göring, Heinrich Göring, was governor-general of Namibia, a late German colony, applying against African populations the same techniques of mass extermination that would later become commonplace in European territory. Needless to say, one historical process is called the Holocaust, and another is called “progress.”
It is no different from what is happening in Brazil, a country built on the indigenous massacre and the slave regime that produced the largest transatlantic traffic in history. So it must be said that Brazil, especially its elites, are not necessarily xenophobic. As stated by sociologist Svetlana Ruseishivili, the dream of the Brazilian elite is not to be Brazilian, but to emulate an unattainable European whiteness, as evidenced by the discourses surrounding the expulsion of Cuban doctors by the Bolsonaro government. We are not a country averse to difference and immigration per se, but a country, as Lélia Gonzalez brilliantly argued, that rejects its non-white constitution and represses the fact that it is a black and indigenous country, a “Améfrica Ladina.”
Bolsonaro himself, like millions of Brazilians, has migrant ancestry: his family comes from the Veneto region of Italy. Thus, it must be said that it is not just any migration that is socially uncomfortable in the country, but the black and indigenous ones – or, in the words of the president-elect, “the scum of the world.” Selective xenophobia has a name that we sometimes find difficult to give it: we call it racism.
The feelings of fear and discrimination, inherited from the racial structure of the Brazilian formation, have been frequently reported by non-white migrants, either in the work environment or in the access to public services, as evidenced by the struggle for the guarantee of emergency financial add at the Caixa Econômica Federal branches by migrants.
In São Paulo, the murder of Angolan worker João Manuel, a gas station attendant, is perhaps the most barbaric expression of how state racism manifests itself socially. According to witnesses, his Brazilian neighbor, before stabbing him to death in the East Zone of São Paulo, declared: “You foreigners come here to steal our jobs. You foreigners shouldn’t get anything (in reference to the government’s emergency aid in the pandemic)”. We know, however, that not just any migrants, to avoid the pejorative denomination foreigners, are the target of this kind of violence, especially when we remember which immigrants actually needed the emergency income granted by the Brazilian government.
A few months after this brutal racist crime, still without the proper answers given by the justice system and without any reparation to João Manuel’s widow and three daughters in Angola, the unjust imprisonment of the Togolese street worker Falilatou Estelle Sarouna, who was arbitrarily detained for six months, gained visibility. Falilatou was arrested in the context of “Operation Anteros“, which investigates an alleged transnational online scam and extortion scheme. The arrest without evidence, on extremely flimsy charges, took place in the judicial process that arrested the largest number of people in Brazil’s history, and detained an unprecedented number of immigrants, mainly African women. This is part of a broader process of criminalization of migration, a new way of operating Brazilian mass incarceration.
To face such a loss of rights, political articulations between organized groups of migrants and Brazilian allies multiply in dialogue with social movements, specially women’s and anti-racist struggles around the world. In this context, migrant struggles in Brazil unfold in three main axes of action: 1) the broad mobilization for migratory regularization and confrontation of the undocumented policy, which generated the #RegularizaçãoJá campaign and initiatives to pressure the state to guarantee migrants’ access to emergency aid; 2) the fight against invisibility with the inclusion of nationality in the covid-19 forms, in face of the inexistence of data on the impact of the disease on migrant populations, and by the wide vaccination of migrants regardless of whether or not they have regular documentation; 3) and confronting racist violence, like the mobilization #VidasImigrantesNegrasImportam e #LiberdadeParaFalilatou.
These mobilizations have been a hope to the unfavorable conjuncture in Brazil, pointing to collective political exits materialized in the articulation between Brazilians and immigrants in the search for alternatives to the crisis, and for a world without borders of any kind that the thinker Achille Mbembe talks about.
Our way out, therefore, is to deny the logic that created the inequalities we witnessed during the pandemic and beyond, and to have the courage to propose a truly new world.
Free translation: Karina Quintanilha in collaboration with Vilma Sielawa.
