Repressive violence and authoritarian drift of the neoliberal state

 
Neoliberal Capitalism at a Dead End

 By Leopoldo Lavín Mujica: The National Institute of Human Rights (NHRI) has filed 2,066 complaints and there are only 25 formal cases for violations of Human Rights that occurred in the period opened by the Social Rebellion of 18 / O. "Many of these cases are due to the improper use of the riot gun during demonstrations, where it is not easy to determine those responsible," Sergio Micco, its director, told the press. And he added: "The slowness of the system has become our greatest obstacle and it is imperative that the State prioritize the investigation of human rights causes."

Rebellion reissues this article published a few weeks ago where it provides a theoretical framework to understand the problem of repressive violence by the Piñera government against the social movement.

Chile broke world records in the exercise of police violence against its people and now, in times of pandemic, it breaks records in health negligence.

In the coming months, governments that apply neoliberal policies will have to be guarded against because they practice a new type of authoritarianism: they act with proven repressive reflexes and shield themselves with the use of so-called “non-lethal” weapons for the “maintenance of public order”. This is the conclusion reached by researchers concerned about the increase in police violence in societies in crisis.

France had for a year of demonstrations - mainly from the popular Yellow Vests movement - 25 cases of eye mutilation, 5 protesters with shattered hands and 300 wounded with serious bruises to the head by police weapons designated as “non-lethal” as the "Riot shotgun".

In Chile, during the demonstrations after the rise in the subway fare and the Citizen Rebellion that emerged on October 18 from multiform social unrest, the case of Gustavo Gatica, the student attacked by the uniformed police in Plaza de la Dignidad during the demonstration on November 8 and that he was blinded after the Carabineros shot him in the face with a weapon called "riot control", confirms "the chilling fact that the number of people injured in the eyes by rubber bullets is not only a record in the history of Chile, but it is also without precedent in the world ”(1).

Let us recall for a moment the statements of the president of the Chilean Society of Ophthalmology, the doctor Dennis Cortés, before the Human Rights Commission: «when we talk about this at an international level, making an exhaustive review of the number of cases of patients who have lost an eyeball for the use of non-lethal weapons, the number is also very alarming and we sadly lead this figure, "he said. And he added, "Doing a review of the last 27 years, taking all the published series regarding people who were damaged with non-lethal weapons in demonstrations or conflict areas -and I am including Palestine, Jerusalem, Gaza, among many others- in total are more than 1,900 injured by pellets, and of them 300 had eye injuries. "We have almost half that number in two weeks." (two)

At that time, at the end of 2019, a global comparative glance already showed the gravity of the situation, months before the police repression against the anti-racist movement generated in the US with the murder of African-American Georges Floyd on May 25. spent in Minneapolis, and three weeks later by Rayshard Brooks (June 12) in Atlanta, both at the hands of police from those respective cities.

In terms of comparative data with social protests in other countries, Chile provides numbers that illustrate undeniable police brutality: more than 5,000 detainees, almost 2,500 injured according to the Red Cross and 31 fatalities between October and December 2019. In addition to torture in cells of police stations and police vans. Along with sexual harassment of male and female detainees, confirmed by reports from organizations competent in human rights violations.

It should be added that these acts of violence carried out by the Carabineros de Chile by direct orders of the Interior Ministry are not related to the year of protests in France, the five months of protest in Hong Kong, the two weeks in Catalonia, the week in Lebanon and one in Ecuador, and now, the most recent and anti-racist in the US ruled by Donald Trump.





"The police assassinate, the media mystify, the justice acquits." L. Mujica Brutal police policy and practices are directly intertwined. In the US racism and structural social inequality go together. And police violence tolerated and reinforced by politicians through centuries of racial discrimination leads a black citizen of the State of Georgia, quoted by a Canadian journalist from the daily La Presse, to say that “police officers are trained at the Academy to be paranoid. Everyone has a gun in the US, and they always have their guns drawn. They are hyper anxious. " Situation analogous to that of other police forces in the world.

In Chile, France or the United States, be black, poor, immigrant or citizen willing to exercise the democratic right to demonstrate against racism, inequalities, social injustice and hunger - and it is the message that the hard-liners want to send in the State and the police headquarters - is to expose yourself more and more individually or collectively to gun violence: to lethal ones like service pistols, and to "non-lethal" (riot shotguns or the "taser" in the US in individual arrests).

It is a constant that must be revealed because the hegemonic media trivializes this violence directed against the people. The fact is that in large citizen demonstrations, law enforcement agencies attack "non-lethal" weapons at the slightest pretext and on any occasion. And this is how the list of mutilated and dead lengthens more and more.

What does this escalation mean?

Paul Rocher, young economist and graduate in Political Science from Paris in his recent book “Gasear, Mutilar, Submit. Non-lethal weapon policy ”gives forceful answers to the phenomenon of state violence. (3)

The underlying thesis of Rocher's book maintains that in periods of social crisis states perceive a “crisis of the maintenance of order where the State itself fuels the brutality of its police by endowing it with an increasingly powerful and varied military arsenal - to great satisfaction of arms dealers, manufacturers and intermediaries ”.

Paul Rocher dismantles the justifying rhetoric of police violence with "non-lethal" weapons that emanates from governments, the interior ministries and the police hierarchy, the logic of which is rarely questioned in the hegemonic media.

Paul Rocher shows in his book for sale this June in France that the massive recourse to weapons designated as non-lethal is the mark of an “authoritarian statism” that less and less tolerates any type of manifestation of social discontent in a period characterized by a greater social decline, and popular resistance to neoliberal measures. And in an interview, Rocher emphasizes that the post-pandemic situation can be worse and that "the use of non-lethal weapons does not humanize the maintenance of order, but on the contrary, brutalize it." (4)

These weapons, conceived as "defensive", form in practice "the artillery of the ongoing neoliberal offensive", says Rocher, who concludes that "the exercise of the right to demonstrate is increasingly restricted by the States. And that the popular social sectors that live in a context of increasingly violent repression, and with a growing panoply of offensive weapons, spontaneously come to consider the need for popular self-defense. ”

As an example, in an interview on YouTube, Rocher explained that older adults who participated in the Parisian demonstrations against the reform of the pension system carried, forced by repressive circumstances, when they participated in marches, masks and anti-gas glasses. (4)

The use by the police forces of euphemistically called “non-lethal” weapons in state order discourse such as electric shock lumas (the “Taser”), tear gas, rubber-coated steel bullets (the “pellets”). ”In Chile), pepper spray, tankers, shields as a weapon of aggression, cars launching waters that attack with highly harmful substances are increasingly used in western states. The entire panoply of weapons, the purpose of which would be to discourage protesters from expressing their discontent, occupy an increasingly important place in repressive devices and in national budgets.

In his already cited book, Paul Rocher explains that "non-lethal weapons are aimed at hitting, gassing, and shooting, while also traversing spaces more quickly."

It should be noted that the trivialization of its use by the media system and the lack of analysis showing the structural function of the repressive apparatuses in Chile, prove that the power discourse that says that it is a normal and "constitutional" way of protecting the democracy, the private and public property of the destruction, abuts in the absurd. On the contrary, these weapons designated in the police-military jargon as non-lethal contribute to the "brutalization" of the maintenance of order.

These weapons trigger violence rather than smooth it out: such is Rocher's line of argument. At the same time that it gives free rein to the police and media speeches that minimize it and at the same time, in practice, exacerbate it. Tear grenades have proven to be deadly. Its use is said not to seek to mutilate or kill the "target". It is with this presentation of the arms manufacturers and their buyers that the person who shoots them is absolved of all responsibility. The weapon would not be to kill; the police are not responsible, and the hierarchy ensures impunity.

Another researcher, the French Grégoire Chamayou in his book Theory of the Drone (5), insists that it is the manufacturers who put the label of "non-lethal weapon". "The non-lethal is not verified by anyone," he adds. But they are also lethal weapons, such as the tear gas bomb that on October 23 at dusk, launched by police, without provocation from any of us who gathered in the vicinity of what would be called Plaza de la Dignidad, passed a few centimeters above me. head. Something lower strips me.

It is as in the case of products from the pharmaceutical industry, “the manufacturers of anti-riot weapons dominate the conditions of the test or effects and the effects of their products, which politicians from the interior ministries and the police leaders will buy later without "testing" Chamayou affirms.

"Non-lethal" weapons and culture of violence against the people

Paul Rocher narrates that various types of tear gas were tested on British police in the 90's. In (abstract) test conditions, softened, which did not correspond to reality. Even so, several guinea pig police were seriously injured.

Manufacturers assume that weapons will work on the idea of ​​non-lethality. Furthermore, the conduct of the shooter is carried out in a culture where the hierarchy protects excesses and impunity. In demonstrations, in France as in Chile, shouts of revelry and jokes have been heard in law enforcement platoons when protesters are wounded. And the grenades are aimed at people.

The researcher states that since the 90s there has been an increase in police weapons and arsenals. "Shooting faster and reflecting later is the logic," he says. Legality is not such, but unconscious parliamentarians do not react and fail to fulfill their oversight role in the face of State action. And they even approve, pressured by opinionologists and "defenders of the Order" laws of repressive use and criminalization of social mobilization. Meanwhile, politicians and police hierarchies seek to establish a separation between members of the police and the people who demonstrate. It seeks to prevent communication by creating a warlike climate. In such conditions, the autonomy of the police force takes place, which obeys its own dynamics of violence production.

Repressive weapons and periods of social crisis

Rocher provides historical information. During the revolts in the colonies in 1920-1944 against the British empire, Winston Churchill said that "terror must be inspired for the colonized for their own good." It was the context of the emergence of non-lethal weapons and the use of tear gas during the 20th century.

In 1930, during a period of great economic depression and the dismissal of workers by employers, in the USA, tear gas was used to avoid press photos of brutal beatings of police officers on horseback.

Today, the panoply of weapons used by the police aims to terrorize the sectors that, in contexts of social and economic crisis generated by neoliberalism, demand changes to the current order or resist neoliberal measures imposed by governments. "The fact is that in neoliberalism the population suffers and is ready to protest," explains Rocher.

This happens in a context of cities marked by social inequality, in cities that separate residents from wealthy neighborhoods, who view the police with sympathy, and popular sectors in their communes, districts or neighborhoods, which are hit by police violence. and deficiencies of all kinds.

This is how repression is normalized. A right-wing and fascist culture surreptitiously permeates the police forces which, themselves out of town, consider that same town as the "enemy". A subjective factor to which President Sebastián Piñera knowingly contributed in his peremptory declaration of "we are at war against a powerful and implacable enemy" on October 20 (6). We well know that the supposed ad hoc “enemy” was the people of Chile who mobilized as a priority to demand a new Constitution.

It should be emphasized that most of the analyzes made by jurists and lawyers who are experts in Human Rights disdain what a long political tradition calls “the class character of the State”. And in doing so, they do not put the proper emphasis on the State as an apparatus of repression at the service of a sector of society and the use of force with unspeakable objectives in moments of social, economic and political crisis. Many jurists and historians are content with a cursory glance at the state because a deeper critique forces to consider the reasons for the impotence of political institutions such as parliament, the power of the business oligarchy in political decisions and the determining weight of antagonisms. social in liberal democracies. Political factors and realities that are crudely revealed in difficult economic periods. Analyzing these more political aspects implies not only understanding the importance for a democracy of being able to accuse those responsible for the violations and condemn them to severe penalties, but also helps to consider the means so that this does not happen again.

"The more the state uses non-lethal weapons, the less the state is democratic and accompanies the repression with the discourse of the 'legitimate monopoly of violence,'" says Paul Rocher. When asked about solutions, the young researcher proposes “1. change the dynamics imposed by social structures that generate violence; 2. the prohibition of these so-called non-lethal weapons (*); 3. create popular control commissions on arms and on the training of police forces; 4. the dissolution of non-reformable police bodies.

Studies show social dynamics in the police forces. Police recruits are attracted to violence under the mystifying cloak of "Order" and then this trend or attitude is reinforced by the rules in force in the institution to turn it into behavior where the prevailing culture is the scheme where the people is perceived as a dangerous enemy. Perception induced by the police hierarchy that enables behavioral derailment. The entire command structure provides a guarantor of these behaviors.

And if you add to this that the institution separates police or police from the town, you are facing a self-fulfilling prophecy that is reinforced by the construction of stereotypes to interact with the protesters. And the reaction to young people is worse. This is how the police themselves define a situation that justifies the type of repression. And therefore the response of those who exercise the right to manifest and practice self-defense. But the groups that practice it are demonized as they tried to do with the First Line in Chile. “Policemen equipped with state-of-the-art repressive technology lead to equipping and protecting protesters to attend a march. Protesters react and adapt, ”says Rocher.

The street responses to the authoritarian state

The French researcher's study insists on the organizational forms of almost spontaneous resistance that arise to face the violence of "authoritarian statism". There is the phenomenon of "politicization of the wounded that has led to additional politicization or awareness of non-lethal weapons." The wounded from the demonstrations in France have organized into "Assemblies of Wounded and Mutilated". The courage of free-lance journalists covering the protests is celebrated and they have created a group called "Reporters In Cholera". Stresses the importance of "Street doctors and nurses in struggle"; the constitution of groups "Let's disarm them!", specifically dedicated to producing material and reflection on the forms of police violence and the weapons used (lethality, costs, manufacturers, budget amounts). It is also highlighted as a form of resistance the spontaneous reflections developed by the citizens to film and send live the scenes of police violence to social networks. It is a way of dealing with the trilogy enunciated by various European collectives: "The police kill, the media mystify, justice acquits."

The Government of Chile has not only revealed itself in two and a half months of an inept and totally incompetent viral pandemic to assume the tasks of sanitary protection of the people of Chile assigned to it by the Constitution, for which reason it has been awarded, due to its lack of Strategic forecast before the arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic, which nevertheless gave it time to prepare, the responsibility of spreading the contagion and making the virus lethal to unsuspected degrees.

This same government, unable to protect its own people from a viral pandemic, has been the same one that brutally repressed it; Worse still than the French government, that of Trump and that of the other states that defend by all means the interests of the capitalist oligarchy, have been capable.