President of the Brazilian Institute for Human Rights

ABSTRACT: The real problem of Brazil are extrajudicial executions. The death penalty is unlawful.

Between 1985 and 1991 more people have been murdered in Rio de Janeiro than American soldiers died in the seven years of the Vietnam war. Extrajudicial executions are Brazil's real problem. In 1988 a member of Parliament of the extreme right proposed to introduce the death penalty in the Constitution. "Human life, a universal value of democracy, cannot be decided upon through a referendum, an apparently democratic method in which a population that is shocked by violence hopes to find a solution in the death penalty. Certain issues cannot be the object of a vote, because they are achievements of humanity and civilization".

("HANDS OFF CAIN", 1 February 1994)

Is the death penalty ethically acceptable? To answer with a peremptory "NO", I will rely on Montesquieu, quoted by the eminent Brazilian jurist Fabio Konder Comparato. "Often a legislator that wants to rectify an evil concentrates his attention only on punishment; his eyes are open only for this objective, and remain closed in front of its disadvantages. Once the evil has been punished, what is visible is only the severity of the legislator, but the result of this severity is a defect of the State: the consciences have been corrupted and accustom themselves to despotism. There are two kinds of corruption; one is when the population does not obey the laws, the other is when it is corrupted by the laws themselves. This last evil is irreparable, because it mixes with the remedy".

In Brazil, in 1988, an extreme right MP proposed to resort to a referendum to introduce an amendment in the Constitution which was rejected by Parliament owing to its anti-juridical nature and the ethically unacceptable aspect.

The Constitution decides that there will be no death penalty except in the event of a declared war. The amendment suggested to add to this article: "robbery, kidnapping and rape followed by death". A universal value of democracy such as human life cannot be decided through a referendum: it is an apparently democratic method whereby a population shocked by violence hopes to find a solution in the death penalty. Certain issues cannot be the object of a referendum, because they are achievements of humanity and civilization. Especially since the Constitution itself establishes that it cannot be amended on the question of individual rights and guaranties. At present, the atmosphere of violence and the homicides have increased owing to the exacerbation of the social crisis: the campaign to fight misery and hunger, for life, has been very strong, and has involved, from the North to the South of Brazil, all the classes of the population. Brazil has one of the highest concentrations of yield in the word, and the curr

ent inflation (40% a month) reduces the minimum salary to a scant $100.

At the moment a revision of the Constitution is being made, and in all the versions appeared there is no change of the text on the death penalty.

The atmosphere we live in leads people to worry about daily problems, about how to survive, about the violence and the civil war. Between 1985 and 1991, more people have been murdered in Rio de Janeiro than American soldiers died in the seven years of the Vietnam war or in the guerrilla in Peru. The death toll of the civil war in Rio is of over 70.000 people; in Vietnam 56.000, in Peru, with Sendero Luminoso, 25.000.

The abolition of the legal death penalty finds no echo in Brazil. I would like to introduce a controversial issue in relation to the subject of the death penalty, ie the inclusion in the "Hands Off Cain" program of the irksome issue of extrajudicial executions, of the death squadrons, of the military police and of the parallel police forces, whose crimes, while judged by a military tribunal, remain unpunished, of the gunmen, of the drug traffickers, of the generalized violence that kills people in Brazil more than in a war.