How an Internet Rumor in Brazil Killed Fabiane Maria de Jesus

10 years ago | Posted in: Laws | 4759 Views

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Saturday, May 3, Fabiane Maria de Jesus, 33 years old, was coming back home at the Morrinhos neighborhood, outskirts of the city of Guaruja, Sao Paulo’s coast. The housewife, mother of two daughters – a 12 and an one year-old – suffered from bipolar disorder, but with medical treatment she was doing alright.  While Fabiane was returning from church, where she had forgotten her bible, a group of a hundred people ganged up to attack her. After tying her hands with a piece of wire, for the next two hours she was beaten and dragged through the streets. Rescued by some cops, two days after the attack, Fabiane ended up dying.

Fabiane Maria de Jesus, a dona de casa assassinada no Guarujá pelo falso boato. Fonte: Wikipédia

The motive behind the collective rage was a rumor about the existence of a woman, who was allegedly kidnapping children in the region to use them in witchery rituals, published by the profile Guarujá Alerta(Guaruja Alert) in Facebook– a profile that publishes services and news related to the police sector. Just days before the lynching, the page, which has more than 24 thousand followers, uploaded for a few hours the police sketch of the assumed kidnapper.

However, as published by the same profile, the local police had no registers of children who went missing or kidnapped. But it was already too late. The tale of the children’s kidnapper was already out the web and had become a hunt through the city.  The police sketch disseminated by the Facebook profile was made by Rio de Janeiro’s police back in 2012, during the investigation of a case about a woman who tried to steal a baby from the mother’s hands. A month before Fabiane was killed; the same sketch was running through Recife, Pernambuco, related to the suspect of another children kidnapping case.  Fabiane was born and lived her entire life at Morrinhos, where also lived most of her relatives. That was not enough to stop her death, another one added to the series of lynching that took place in the country since the beginning of the year, as reported by Global Voices.

“It is nobody’s fault! It is internet’s fault!”

Captura de ecrã de um vídeo que circulou na internet.

With the help of the vídeos recorded during the lynching, the police manageto identify six suspects of participating on it. According to A Tarde newspaper, a group of friends of one of the suspects, reunited to protest across the police department, yelled:

Quer prender todo mundo? A culpa é de todo mundo! A culpa é de ninguém! A culpa é da internet!

Do you want to arrest everybody? It’s everybody’s fault! It’s nobody’s fault! It’s the internet’s fault!

The reactions online, following up the case, criticized the Facebook profile that posted the hoax. Users accused the page’s administrators of being “as guilty as those who had beaten and killed her” and having “their hands dirty with blood”. The person responsible for Guaruja Alerta deposed for the police and said he was available to anything necessary to help with the investigations, but he also claimed “not having any responsibility” in the episode of the “allegedly kidnapper of a huge lie created in the city”.  Neverthless, as written by Luiz Francisco Carvalho in an article about Fabiane’s murder:

O caso do Guarujá mostra que a internet potencializa a reação histérica de massas. A repulsa eventual e a punição de um ou outro envolvido não são capazes de conter a epidemia.

Guaruja’s case shows that the internet potentializes the hysterical reaction of the masses. The eventual repulse and punishment of one or other individual involved are not capable of stopping the epidemic.

Aside the internet role, the traditional media function was also questioned before the current wave of lynchings. As Marcelo Freixo, state deputy from Rio de Janeiro, wrote in his Facebook:

Maior é a responsabilidade daqueles que usam seus espaços privilegiados de fala, como programas de TV, para incentivar e, em certa medida, legitimar esses atos bárbaros. Foi o que ocorreu quando moradores do Flamengo agrediram e prenderam um adolescente negro a um poste, em fevereiro deste ano.

Greater is the responsibility of those who use their privileged space of speech, as TV shows, to encourage and, in a certain measure, to legitimate these barbarian acts. That is what happened when residents from Flamengo (neighborhood) pummeled and trapped an afro-descendant teenager into a pole, in February, later this year.

In February, Rachel Sheherazade, a newscast anchor, was notified by the Public Ministry, for saying on national television that the justice acts performed with one’s own hands were “understandable” – referring to the case of a minor tied up to a street pole [en] in Rio, last February.  For the professor of Communications at the University of São Paulo (USP), Eugênio Bucci:

A imprensa é uma instituição que busca não difundir, mas investigar os boatos, a partir de uma postura crítica. A imprensa, sim, pode e deve ser cobrada quando desobedece a esse imperativo. As redes sociais não têm esse compromisso. É claro que o aprendizado social com o uso das novas tecnologias imprimirá às redes uma série de novos cuidados. Elas tenderão a ser passíveis de responsabilizações, e tenderão a ter de observar parâmetros que talvez as aproximem um pouco da ética da imprensa, mas ainda estamos muito longe disso. Ainda vivemos um tempo em que muita gente toma por verdade comprovada qualquer tolice que apareça numa tela eletrônica. Mais ainda: no Brasil, vivemos um tempo em que as pessoas premidas por demandas mais dramáticas estão deixando de acreditar nas instituições, na justiça, no bem comum, no poder público. O ódio e a pressa, juntos, produzem o caos.

The press is an institution that seeks not to publicize, but to investigate the rumors from a critical posture. The press, yes, may and should be charged when disobeys this imperative. The social networks do not have this commitment. It is obvious that the social learning with the usage of new technologies will print into the web a series of cautions. They will have a tendency to be passive of responsibilities, and will tend to have to watch parameters that maybe put them closer to press’ ethics, but we are still far from that. We are still living an age when many people take for granted any non-sense appearing in an electronic screen. More than that: in Brazil, we live in an age when people pressed by the most dramatic demands do no longer trust the institutions, justice, common welfare, the public power. The hate and the hurry, together, can produce chaos.

Beyond the rage

Fabiane was innocent for a crime that not even existed, but, as asked by the newspaper El Pais: “what if she was guilty?”. The barbarian way of how she died would still shock the country? A week after Fabiane’s deceased, a 26 year-old manicure was tortured and murdered by a group of men, also in Sao Paulo. The first account of the crime said the crime’s motive was that the woman had allegedly stole a pack of cookies, later one of the suspects said she had stolen 27 thousand reais – around 12 thousand dollars – from his house. Deaths by lynching in Brazilian outskirts areas are leading to a series of reflections about the country’s actual portrait.To the researcher Ariadne Natal, from the Nucleus of Violence Studies, from the University of Sao Paulo:

não é qualquer pessoa que pode ser desumanizada e, portanto, linchada. As potenciais vítimas de linchamento carregam consigo a marca daquele que pode, em última análise, ser eliminado.

not any person can be dehumanized and, therefore, lynched. The potential lynching victims carry with them the stigma of those who can, ultimately, be eliminated.

Which already indicates the vulnerability of a social class to be the target of such actions. Within the middle class, who also commits crimes, there is “a more efficient protection net”, points Natal. While the whole country tries to make some sense of these tragedies, even though the failure of democratic structures is also behind such actions, Ariadne notes:

Numa democracia, o que se espera é que as pessoas se mobilizem para melhorar as instituições e não para fazer justiça de forma sumária, sem dar aos suspeitos o direito à defesa. E, com isso, no afã de tentar fazer uma suposta justiça, comete-se grandes injustiças. E mesmo que a vítima tenha de fato cometido algum crime, isso não diminui o aspecto lamentável de um linchamento.

In a democracy, what one expects is that people mobilize to make the institutions better and not to make justice in a summary way, without given the suspects the right to defense. And, with that, willing of trying to do a supposed justice, one commits great injustices. And even if the victim has indeed committed some kind of crime, this does not diminishes the lamentable aspect of a lynching.

 

Source: globalvoicesonline.org

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