Recorded November 14, 2005
Below is the original description of the event.
Death squads are nothing new to the sugar plantation zone of rural Northeast Brazil, an area with a long history of self-styled justiceiros — often in the employ of the region’s sugar barons — taking justice into their own hands. What requires some explanation is the resurgence of extermination groups and death squads in the neoliberal, democratic, civil rights-oriented decades of the 1990s to the present day. In the plantation market town of Timbauba a state of siege and political anarchy peaked in the late 1990s when a particularly virulent death squad took control of the municipio. An unanticipated turn of events in 2001 led to the arrest of 14 gang members when a small group of local activists joined forces with a fearless judge and a tough-minded district attorney in a battle to wrest the town from the vigilantes. In the past year, however, death squad and vigilante attacks have resumed. Among the targets today are journalists and members of the activist human rights community themselves.