The
Conquest of Rights, the Murder of Marielle Franco and Latin America
By
Ivonaldo Leite
Many
times, the person who is labeled as an outsider may have a different view
of the matter. He/she may not accept the rule by which he/she is being judged
and may not regard those who judge. Probably, the story of Marielle Franco, the Brazilian human rights activist
who was murdered in Rio de Janeiro, is like this.
But it
is also a story that has been repeated in several countries of Latin America. A lot of people have been persecuted and
killed in this region just because they defend their rights. For example, the
deaths of peasants and young people demonstrate a typical situation of societal
fascism in some parts of Latin America.
As the
sociologist Boaventura Santos has pointed out, societal fascism is a set of
social processes by which large population bodies are irreversibly kept outside
or thrown out of any kind of social contract. They are rejected, excluded and
thrown into a kind of Hobbesian state of nature, either because they have never
been part of any social contract and probably never will; or because they have
been excluded or thrown out of whatever social contract they had been part of
before.
As a
societal regime, fascism manifests itself as the collapse of the most trivial
expectations of the people living under it, and it promotes actions of savagery
on a growing scale. From a historical-sociological point of view, what we
call society is a bundle of stabilized expectations from the subway schedule to
the salary at the end of the month or employment at the end of a college
education. Expectations are stabilized by a set of shared scales and
equivalences: for given work a given pay, for given risk a given insurance. The
people that live under societal fascism are deprived of shared scales and
equivalences and therefore of stabilized expectations. They live in a constant
chaos of expectations in which the most trivial acts may be met with the most
dramatic consequences. As Polanyi predicted several years ago, one
possible future is, unfortunately, the spread of societal fascism. In regards
to this, it is very revealing that the President of a country like the United States
supports the idea of providing weapons to schools and considers immigrants
to be inferior people.
In the
past, fascism was a political regime; the state itself
became fascist. Actually, it’s different, now social relations may become so;
the danger is the rise of fascism as a societal regime.
The
story of Marielle Franco and other women who have been murdered, as well as the
history of young people and peasants who have had the same destiny, shows the
big risk of claiming rights and citizenship in many regions of Latin America.
It is a risk produced by several factors; but, in recent times, societal
fascism and external interference in countries of the region have generated an
increase of levels of social instability in Latin American nations. The
perception of external interference in the region is not the outcome of any
conspiracy theory. On the contrary, it is the result of the finding of a
concrete fact in the context of the global geopolitical dispute involving Latin
America. In this way, there are pieces of evidence that allow an objective
analysis to reject the idea of mere coincidence in many political and economic
events in these times.
In 1891,
José Martí published an essay called Nuestra América (‘Our America’). For
Martí, Nuestra América is at the antipodes of Anglo-Saxon America. It is the
America mestiza. He affirmed: “There is no race hatred because there are no
races”. This sentence anticipates the idea that “Latin America is a small
humankind, a miniature humankind.” In 1928, Brazilian poet Oswald de Andrade
published his Anthropophagous Manifesto, and emphasized: “Only what is not mine
interests me. The human adventure. Earthly finality”.
The
“contextualized cosmopolitanism” of such thoughts, as a historical expression
of Latin American identity, is the bearer of hope for the conquest of rights
and, at the same time, it is the guardian of the memory of the many Marielle
Franco's. The achievement of rights (and their maintenance) is the most
important political task of the next decades in Latin America.
