It’s Wrong, but that’s the Way it is. Youth, Violence and Justice in North-Eastern Brazil
| Author | Peter Anton Zoettl |
| Published date | 01 April 2021 |
| Date | 01 April 2021 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0964663920915967 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
It’s Wrong, but that’s
the Way it is. Youth,
Violence and Justice in
North-Eastern Brazil
Peter Anton Zoettl
Centre for Research in Anthropology, University of Minho (CRIA-UM), Portugal
Abstract
This article discusses the vertiginous proliferation of violence suffered and perpetrated
by juveniles in the state of Bahia, north-eastern Brazil. Based on documentary and
ethnographic evidence, it anatomizes the workings of law enforcement, juvenile justice
and juvenile custody. It argues that the strategies of the police, the criminologies put into
practice by the judiciary and the functioning of Youth Detention Centres collaborate to
foster, ratherthan curb, youth offending and the violence committed byand against young
citizens. Whereas prosecution and the dispensation of justice emphasize juvenile offen-
ders’ responsibility for their ‘decision’ to become a ‘bandit’, juvenilecustody, as a result of
deep-rooted clientelist practices, is dominated by precarious conditions of incarceration
which promote internal violence and the (self)ascription of a deviant juvenile identity. At
the same time, the Othering of large sections of youth from the urban periphery has
fuelled a viciouscycle of violence and counter-violence between members of drug factions
and police forces, resulting in an increasing illegibility of the state at its margins.
Keywords
Bahia, Brazil, gangs, police, trafficking, violence, youth, youth custody, youth justice
The hearings of the juvenile offenders, detained by the police the day before in the city of
Salvador, had already terminated wh en a woman entered the building of the You th
Prosecution Service and asked for permission to talk to the prosecutor on duty. Because
Corresponding author:
Peter Anton Zoettl, Centre for Research in Anthropology, Av. Forc¸as Armadas, Lisbon 1649-026, Portugal.
Email: pazln@iscte.pt
Social & Legal Studies
2021, Vol. 30(2) 272–290
ªThe Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/0964663920915967
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of her evident distress, she was shown through at once. As soon as the door of the
prosecutor’s office was closed behind her, the woman unceremoniously presented her-
self as the mother of the 13-year-old Jonathan who, a couple of days before, had shot
dead a plain-clothes police officer during an assault of a city bus which went awry – an
incident well known to all the persons present, as the case had attracted considerable
attention in the local media.
1
During the assault, the officer, who was commuting to work (he didn’t own a car, as
his family later reported to the press), had managed to shoot and subdue Jonathan’s adult
accomplice in the front of the bus. However, in the course of the struggle, the older
assailant’s weapon (a .38 revolver of the Brazilian brand Taurus) fell to the floor towards
the other side of the bus’s turnstile. Jonathan, who was by this time busy collecting
passengers’ cell phones and money at the rear of the bus, quickly ran to the front and,
despite being hit in the foot and in the arm by two shots from the officer’s weapon,
succeeded in snatching the .38 Taurus from the floor, firing two deadly shots towards the
policeman’s head and chest.
Working as a cleaner in the hospital where the officer arrived shortly afterwards,
already lifeless, Jonathan’s mother had coincidentally witnessed the suffering of the
policeman’s family at close range. Her compassion for the deceased and his relatives,
which she recounted in detail at the Youth Offending Services, however, soon became
mingled with fears regarding her own son’s destiny. Another youth, initially suspected of
being one of the assailants, was killed on the same day of the bus assault, just after
leaving the infirmary where he had been treated for a gunshot wound in the foot. As
Jonathan’s mother was anxious to stress, her son was willing to turn himself in, but
remained in hiding as she was fearful of ‘the eventual reaction of a normal policeman’, as
she called it.
The prosecutor assured her that Jonathan, once he presented himself, would be
accompanied by an official to the nearby station for juvenile offenders. As Jonathan’s
mother was unable to get hold of her son by phone, it was agreed that she would bring
him along the next morning. On the evening of that same day, however, Jonathan was
spotted by the military police
2
in the neighbourhood where he was hiding out and shot
dead as ‘he preferred trying to resist’ detention, as an officer of the homicide department,
cited in a note on the Public Security Authorities’ website, put it.
3
The fates of the 43-year-old policeman and 13-year-old Jonathan from Salvador (the
capital city of the state of Bahia) are paradigmatic of the issues I will address in this
article. In the first place, they point to the mounting dimension of youth violence and
youth offending in north-eastern Brazil, and the tender age of the juveniles involved.
Second, they exemplify the failings of public policies regarding marginalized youths, the
state’s lack of interest in dealing adequately with those who come into contact with the
juvenile justice system and the persistent institutional marginalization of juvenile offen-
ders who, eventually, are sentenced to serve a term in one of the state’s juvenile custody
institutions. Third, they give an idea of the senseless suffering caused by an endemic
illegibility of the state, particularly at its socio-economic margins, which makes it
increasingly difficult for citizens of all ages to tell the difference between ‘right’ and
‘wrong’, perpetrator and victim or state action and banditry, resulting in a ‘doubling’ of
Zoettl 273
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