21 techniques of silent killing

There is no complexity or opacity in the death gears powered by Bolsonaro

Conrado Hübner Mendes

A government decision or public policy can be judged by how much it kills. It does not just kill as a side effect, for miscalculation of risks, for tragic cost-benefit choices that seek lesser harm. It does not just kill in intricate, multifactorial and time-consuming causal chains. It kills in simple, quick and palpable causal relationships, by deliberate choice for the greater evil ("greater", of course, if the order of values gives some weight to life).

Bolsonaro did not invent our death devices, legally facilitated and legitimated for a long time in the Brazilian state. Police lethality and the massive violation of rights in prisons, under judicial, political and social approval, are the most blatant examples of a widespread phenomenon.

Bolsonaro has taken these lethal devices to another level. And he also coated them, like no one before, with an ideological veneer composed of a delinquent version of freedom—freedom without society, without solidarity and without responsibility. Freedom without other constitutional rights. Freedom for those who have power and are lucky.

Manaus' cemitery during the coronavirus pandemic - Bruno Kelly - 7.mai.21/Reuters

"Necropolitics", a term by Achille Mbembe, offers a fruitful concept to show this poorly disguised facet of state action and omission. The ability to "dictate who can live and who must die" ranges from reforms to reduce social protection to more direct killing. The term became widespread when a figure so viscerally linked to death became president under the promise of uncivilizing politics, breaking up the state and fighting diversity.

The frame of "necropolitics", though, is perhaps too broad to highlight specificities of the current government, to show what Bolsonaro has added that is different in quality and intensity.

"Democide" would be an alternative conceptual candidate. It has been adopted by the literature in two ways: some authors define it as state acts that kill citizens (Rummel, "Death by government"); others define it as killing a democracy itself (Keane, "To kill a democracy"). The ambiguity, curiously, helps to describe autocrats, as they tend to kill people and also democracy. Autocrats can be democides in a double sense.

We could also resort, as a metaphor, to the oriental techniques of instantaneous murder, which the book "21 Techniques of Silent Killing" seeks to systematize. Bolsonaro's government decisions have killed for many of these techniques, in and out of the pandemic. A little attention to science and journalism allows one to quickly build a list of 21 examples.

In the pandemic, these actions have killed: 1) attack against common-sense health measures (such as distancing and face-masks); 2) campaign for ineffective alternative treatments; 3) app that prescribes chloroquine even for stomach ache; 4) the encouragement of public crowding that, despite preventable deaths, would accelerate collective immunity; 5) harassment against doctors for the adoption of protocols riddled with quackery.

On the topic of vaccine: 6) deliberate delay in vaccine purchase; 7) disinformation campaign about vaccine efficacy; 8) failed vaccine delivery; 9) delay in childhood vaccination already approved by technical bodies; 10) ministerial technical note affirming the efficacy of chloroquine and the ineffectiveness of the vaccine; 11) ministerial decree that, against the law, defends optional vaccination of children and opposes vaccination passport.

But silent killing also transcends the pandemic: 12) closing of the Mais Médicos program; 13) closure of the AIDS Department; 14) creating obstacles to legal abortion and women's reproductive health; 15) incentive, against the law, to arm the population; 16) repeal of safety rules at work and reduction of inspections; 17) amnesties for land grabbers; 18) the elimination of environmental inspection.

People have also been killed by intoxication: 19) mining that dumps mercury in rivers in the Amazon; 20) release of pesticides that contaminate the water; 21) continuity of asbestos extraction for export. We have not even entered into the policies of deepening inequality and poverty, which create unnecessary ideological noise to detect the singular malignity of the Bolsonaro's government.

The link between individual authority behavior and lethal consequence, in these examples, is neither complex nor opaque. It is not multi-vector or multi-author. It is not the product of ineptitude. They dispense with deep investigations or above-average intellectual equipment. The architects of legal irresponsibility are part of the same team.