BarbassoEvery Wednesday, a farmers’ market sprung up in the cobblestoned square facing my Rio de Janeiro apartment. The clank and bang of vendors building makeshift stalls woke me up at dawn, and their beckoning calls kept me company as I worked: Watermelon! Figs! Strawberries to sweeten your mother-in-law’s temper!

Around 11 a.m. on these days, I rolled away from the computer, took the elevator down, and stepped outside, across the street and into the square, among the bright green heaps of lettuce, the dark collards still smelling of wet soil, and the fragrant architecture of tropical fruit: pyramids of mangoes, three for 5 reais; ramparts of apples; pineapples whose prickly crowns fell to the clean sweep of the vendor’s machete; papaya so large I carried mine cradled in the crook of an arm, as if it were a baby.

I am a journalist. In 2010, I had moved to Brazil—the country where I had been born, but left as a child—as a correspondent for a news agency. The headlines drew me back. Brazil’s economy was booming, the middle class was expanding, the social inequality that had long marred the country was shrinking a bit. In quick succession, the country would host the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics, international events that would test this new Brazil and thrust it into the spotlight. If the old joke had been that Brazil was the country of the future, and always would be, the future seemed upon us. How would the country hold up? What did it all mean? As a reporter, it was the place to be.

But I had also come for this: to walk in a market where everyone spoke the language of my childhood, to be greeted with a kiss by the elderly merchant with a sweeping white mustache, to lose myself in this city, and find out what it meant to be of this place, a Brazilian in Brazil. That cozy square with its familiar faces, its black-and-white mosaic walkways and its view of the Sugarloaf peak was an anchor in this bewildering city.

On one particular Wednesday, a clear fall day in March of 2014, I made the full round of the market and was passing the flower stalls, with their jarring reds and pinks, when I saw the way out was blocked. Up ahead, just beyond the stands, was the street, and beyond it, residential buildings. My building. Now all I could see was a dense cluster of shirtless men, men in tank-tops, well-coiffed women with their grocery carts, maids in uniforms, all of them standing, shoulder shoving against shoulder.

I couldn’t see anything, but I heard the voices that overlapped above. Their words sent a flush of adrenaline tingling into my fingers: “Beat him up. Teach him a lesson. Give him what he deserves.”

The bags of produce slung on my shoulders and arms made me an awkward mass. Bumping and apologizing, I pushed to the front. Then I saw them: two men and a teenager. The guys held the boy, shoved him back and forth. They were yelling something. I strained to hear.

One man managed to wrap his arm around the boy’s neck and grab the loose fabric at the collar of the boy’s shirt in a tight grip. His other fist struck the child on the head. The kid flailed, flung his arms about his face, pedaled his legs in the air, kicking wherever he made contact.

What happened? I asked no one in particular. Someone said the boy had robbed a woman, taken her purse. Around us, voices egged the men on. “Show him! Tie him to a post,” one man said. This last taunt was a reference to a homeless kid suspected of robbing people in the neighborhood who was stripped, beaten, and chained by his neck to a light post by vigilantes that January, two months previous. It happened there in Flamengo, my neighborhood, just around the corner from this market with its neat geometry of tropical fruit and its buckets of flowers.

I looked around for the man who spoke. He was standing at the edge of the crowd; thick-necked, stripped to the waist, with a round, hard paunch protruding over his board shorts, he could have been any of the vendors, anyone in Rio. His face was split in a grin.

This was one of the most trying aspects of life in this city: the violence that crackled just under the surface. It could erupt in unpredictable ways, as when the bus driver intentionally jostled passengers or swiped a biker after being trapped behind the wheel for too long with too little pay; or in routine revolts, as when workers facing long commutes stoned or burned the suburban trains that broke down with them—again. It also had harsher manifestations: Brazil’s stubborn homicide rate, which refused to budge despite the optimism and prosperity of the last decade, and the lethal police force. In the state of Rio de Janeiro alone, officers had killed 1,500 people over five years.

There are explanations for this culture of violence. As a journalist, I’d interviewed experts, written them down: the inequality that remains among the highest in the world, in spite of improvements; the inefficient court system, which makes impunity the rule; the corruption of law enforcement agencies; the complete lack of trust in government institutions.

But it is this particular strain of violence—the mob lynching—that leaves me grasping. Every day, at least one person is lynched in Brazil. I read this in an interview with a sociologist, José de Souza Martins, who studies the subject. Since 2011, he’s tallied over 2,500 cases. There are no official statistics, but according to a news agency’s compilation, the majority have been cases of vigilantism fueled by anger and impotence, a twisted desire for justice and release. But numbers and definitions do not help me make sense of it—not of the horror of the public thrashings and not of the social acceptance of the phenomenon.

When the teenaged boy was beaten and chained by the neck to a post in January, a controversial television commentator, Rachel Sheherazade, had called it “collective self-defense.”

“Since the local government is weak, the police demoralized, and the legal system a failure, what is left to the good citizen but to defend himself?” she had asked.

Neighborhood watchdog sites and online forums had overflowed with comments, some calling for calm and many others praising the aggressors.

“Wake up you idiots … people in Flamengo know he’s a THIEF who robs elderly ladies and women every day. What they did wasn’t enough,” one man had written.

“A good criminal is a dead criminal,” posted another, offering up an old refrain.

Reading these messages, it struck me: The people saying these things are my neighbors. They jog by me in the park, nodding their good mornings, and queue up with me at the bank. They are the same people who belly up to the stands at this farmers’ market, pressing their fingers lightly into the flesh of avocados, testing for ripeness.

I thought of this as I stood at the edge of the market in March, the plastic straps of shopping bags cutting into my forearms, the trampled remains of spoiled fruit souring under the noonday sun.

I wanted to do something, say something, stop them. I walked toward the men and the boy, who were pushing the boy inside the gate of one of the buildings. I was terrified—for the boy; for all of us standing there, on the brink of something; and for what that something said about the country I’d come searching for, about Brazil.

Once we were face-to-face, though, the words didn’t come. I reverted to habit, as if I were just a journalist on the job and this were another incident I had to cover. I asked them their names.

They looked up. We’re police, one of the men said. Go back to your house.

Maybe they were off-duty police. Maybe they weren’t. In Rio, this provided not reassurance but its opposite: it was a reminder there was no help for that boy, from law enforcement or anyone else. The crowd knew this; the two men knew it, even the teenager. Standing there with my bags of produce, my giant papaya, and my presumption—what was I going to do, take their names? Denounce them? To whom? Who cared?—I felt deflated, but also exposed and ridiculous in my naïveté.

And I did turn away and head to the gated entrance of my building, aware that this shard of violence was embedded in me now, as it was in my city, my country, my home.

 
Juliana Barbassa is an award-winning journalist and author of the book Dancing with the Devil in the City of God: Rio de Janeiro on the Brink.

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*Photo courtesy of World Pulse.

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