The same old question

Luiz Leitão

The  letter  left by Rio de Janeiro school’s gunman  who killed 13 people  on Thursday morning, 7  April  2011 doesn’t make much sense, or even none, at first sight. He seems to express the wish that his house be used in the benefit of animals. Shows a love for animals that doesn’t match with his atrocity against humans, mostly kids.

Many will try to explain the episode analyzing his personality, talking about  how easy it is to obtain one or many guns, which here in Brazil are not bulk sold like in the US or in neighbour Paraguay, where a sub machine gun can be bought like bread, and  re-sold in Rio, Sao Paulo or elsewhere for tenfold the original price. Gun trafficking is more profitable than drug dealing.

Who will record the readiness to make pass these artifacts through our frontiers, with or without the connivance of customs agents and cops?

Shall the useless claims for death penalty return? For the hardening of penalties, already hard enough themselves, but prejudiced by the Law of Penal Executions and by the Penal Process Code?

Our Congress has just maintained, in a scene game between the Senate and the House, special inprisonment regime for authorities and those who made the grade, as if high school education should not mash people further responsibility. No politician has ever been condemned by the Supreme Court, and it is very much unlike one of them will ever be.

We maintain the privileged court for "authorities", notwithstanding the fact that they cause even more harm, indirectly killing by far more people than those thirteen victims of Nilopolis tragedy in Rio de Janeiro, something we would never imagine could take place in these hereabouts; things of American, used to these carnages which fatally occur from times to times, without any changes in sight there, thanks to the powerful NRA lobby.

No changes there, nor here. The insanity that made this psychopath take thirteen people’s lives is the very same that keeps privileges to the powerful, of untouchable lawmakers who attack homosexuals – and cowardly retreat from the racist illations, once racism is imprescriptible crime in Brazil, so, someday they would perhaps be judged. They charge against gays, boosting the assassin rage of dozens of gangs which only in São Paulo are over twenty, which pursue by their insane logics "different" people: black, homosexuals, northeastern, prostitutes.

Don’t waste time trying to understand what’s explicit since very long in the “white”, “clean” impunity of our mostly disgusting political agents. It’s just like the same as that of the assassin who committing suicide got rid of being thrown into a filthy jail. Who knows if he had right to “special imprisonment”, he would think twice before blowing his head himself?

Here’s the list, dear readers, of the many first class, orwellian citizens who travel in the legal Brazilian “bad trip” accordingly with Article 295 of the Penal Process Code: State Ministers, State or Territory Governors or interveners, the Federal District Mayor , his secretaries, mayors of any city, aldermen and Police chiefs; Congressmen, members of The National Council of Economy and of State Houses,  citizens inscribed in the "Merit Book"; Armed Forces officials and military (police) of States, Federal District and Territories; judges; those who have a University diploma; religious confessional ministers; ministers of Account Courts; citizens who have acted as jurors, except when excluded from the list for incapacity to exert the function; civilian guards of States and territories, either active or retired, police sheriffs.

President Dilma Rousseff will now have the opportunity to veto the law.

Luiz Leitão da Cunha, journalist  luizmleitao@gmail.com