M94 Frente 3 de Fevereiro

Manifesto of Frente 3 de Fevereiro (2004)

Frente 3 de Fevereiro (Third of February Front) are a Brazilian direct-action art collective founded by artists, cultural practitioners and academics angered by the longstanding problems of police violence and racism in their country. Their name is significant, as it marks the date of the mistaken killing in 2004 of a black student dentist called Flávio Ferreira Sant’Ana by the São Paulo police. Their first public intervention was to place a plaque on the spot where Sant’Ana had been shot, inscribed: ‘Who polices the police? Police racism’. At the same time they issued the following manifesto, which proclaimed their horror at the killing and their determination to raise awareness of racial injustice.

The group use art as a political tool, taking their cue from performances and happenings from the 1960s and 70s – such as the radical interventions of Artur Barrio (M43), who sought to evade censorship by the Brazilian authorities through spontaneous street actions – and they present new forms of protest through artistic research projects, public interventions, the mass media and experimental community projects. They gained international recognition in 2007 with their video artwork Zumbi Somos Nós (We Are Zumbi) which depicted the lives of Afro-Brazilians (Zumbi was the leader of a large settlement of escaped African slaves in late seventeenth-century Brazil, and is a national hero among modern Afro-Brazilians).

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Through this manifesto, we of Frente 3 de Fevereiro wish to declare the grave risk facing society as a whole. On 3 February, Flávio Ferreira Sant’Ana was brutally murdered by the São Paulo State police. This heinous crime not only highlights police violence, but also indicates the dangerous relationship between police stop and search and the racial bias underlying the definition of who is or is not a suspect. These events also show the lack of control that civil society has over those that should be keepers of the peace.

So-called ‘racially motivated stop and search’ is no more than a euphemism for police racism (91% of young black men from São Paulo State have been stopped by the police – Datafolha, 2004), as their actual, day-to-day conduct is based on black members of the public being the preferred suspect for any criminal activity. That conduct arises from a mindset instilled early on in Brazilian socio-cultural education, which covers topics ranging from the etymological root of the word ‘negro’ and its negative connotations (someone of the negro race, black, dirty, grimy, very sad, grim, evil, slave – from the Dicionário Aurélio) to the discriminatory effects that this mindset has on the daily lives of our society.

Flávio’s death shows the deep schism between individual rights (enshrined in the Constitution of 1988) and day-to-day reality. This case clearly reveals the true conditions in which we live. In fact, the so-called ‘multiracial democracy’ does not exist. Racial discrimination is just camouflaged. In turn, society gives the discriminatory role to a ‘third party’, creating the illusion that the Brazilian population is exempt from racist behaviour. This ‘third party’ is institutionally embedded in the police, which ironically has a considerable number of black policemen in its ranks. This points to the urgent need to change the social parameters in place, where the young black male is ‘confined’ (almost completely) either to the role of enforcer (policeman) or offender (crook), with no other accepted social role that falls outside these two parameters.

Thus Brazil has created one of the cruellest and most efficient racial discrimination mechanisms, as the system excludes any possibility of questioning the existence of racism in Brazilian society.

For these reasons, we of Frente 3 de Fevereiro want to break this veiled silence, asking society to stand up for this urgent situation, and condemn the blind eye that the justice system, the state and the media would have us turn to the issue of racism confronting the public.

From the fundamental principles [of the Brazilian constitution]

Article 3:

IV – promoting the well-being of all, without preconceptions of origin, race, sex, colour, age and any other form of discrimination.

Article 5:

XLII – acts of racism constitute a crime, subject to a custodial sentence by law, without bail or suspension.