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On the evening of Thursday the 19th of November, Joao Alberto Silveira Freitas was beaten to death by supermarket security guards in Brazil.
Freitas, a 40-year-old Black man, was punched in the face multiple times by two security guards at a Carrefour supermarket in Porto Alegre. One of his killers has been identified as an off-duty military police officer, and both are being investigated for homicide. The store has since fired the manager who was on duty, ended its contract with the security company, and is closing the shop out of respect for the deceased.
Video footage circulated rapidly online, as some clips showed Freitas being kneeled on by security. Protests have been sparked nationwide, with activists storming a Carrefour store in the capital Brasilia, chanting: “Black lives matter!” One demonstrator held a placard that read, “Don’t shop at Carrefour. You could die.”
In Porto Alegre, where Freitas died of asphyxiation, protesters distributed stickers of a bloodstained Carrefour logo. Hundreds of kilometres away, in São Paulo, demonstrators threw rocks at the windows of a Carrefour store. They pulled the door down, raided the building, and strewed products through the aisles.
Alexandre Bompard, chairman and CEO of Carrefour, has described the footage of Freitas’ death as “unbearable”. He is unwilling to stop at “internal measures” towards the security company, so is pushing for a total review on employees training regarding “security, diversity, and tolerance values”. Bompard notes that he has asked his staff in Carrefour Brazil to cooperate with the police, “to get to the bottom of this odious action”.
Freitas was a father of four. He was buried while wearing a white shirt, while his coffin was covered in the flag of his favourite football team. His partner, Milena Borges Alves, explained: “I just want justice. I just want them to pay for what they did to him.”
Figures from across the political spectrum have expressed their condemnation at Thursday’s event. Brazilian journalist Octavio Guedes tweeted: “The correct name of what happened at Carrefour is MASSACRE”. He continued, “The entire society must react, or we are, one more time, complicit in our silence. MASSACRE!”
Former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has called for the interruption of this violent “cycle”, while former justice minister Sergio Moro stated: “Racial violence can’t be tolerated. Let those who kill be rigorously punished.”
There is little clarity regarding the events that led to Freitas’ death. Alves told police that a confrontation had taken place between a member of staff and her husband while shopping. Freitas reportedly made an unspecified gesture at the employee, while news site G1 claimed he had threatened to punch the worker.
Freitas was killed on the evening before Black Consciousness Day, which has been observed in Brazil since the 1960s. The aim is to "to celebrate a regained awareness by the Black community about their great worth and contribution to the country", while members of the Black movement organise educational entertainment for children predominantly of African descent. This particular date is set aside to acknowledge the death of Zumbi dos Palmares: a heroic figure in the African fight against the slave trade, and one of the last kings of Quilombo dos Palmares - a settlement inhabited by Afro-Brazilians who had fought to free themselves.
While President Jair Bolsonaro denies that racism exists, Black Brazilians are three times as likely to be victims of homicide, Black and mixed race people account for 57% of the Brazilian population, yet represent 74% of victims of lethal violence, and 79% of people killed by police are Black or mixed race. Brazil was notaby the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery, only doing so in 1888.