WUNRN
CITIZEN JOURNALISM &
WOMEN FILMMAKERS EXPOSE REALITIES IN THE FAVELAS/SLUMS OF RIO in BRAZIL – FILMS
AS WITNESS
The Complexo do Alemão favelas in Rio de Janeiro. Credit
Sebastián Liste/Noor Images, for The New York Times
By MATTHEW SHAER - FEB. 18, 2015
The favelas of Complexo do Alemão, one of the largest urban slums in
Brazil, spill across 700 hilly acres in the North Zone of Rio de Janeiro, not
far from the city’s international airport. Bounded on three sides by bustling
highways and on the fourth by a forested ridge, Alemão can no longer grow
outward, and so it has grown upward instead, in increasingly unstable
conglomerations of quadruple-decker concrete boxes. “The grandfather builds the
first floor, the son the second, the grandson the third and the great-grandson
the fourth,” residents like to say. Rebar sprouts from the rooftops, awaiting
the installation of the next story and the next generation that will occupy it.
One evening last April, Arlinda Bezerra de Assis, a 72-year-old resident of
Alemão, stepped out the front door of her family home and into the neighborhood’s
tangle of alleyways, her 10-year-old grandson in tow. For hours, the police had
been battling with drug traffickers, but the clatter of gunfire seemed to have
subsided, and de Assis, who was known in Alemão by the honorific Dona Dalva,
wanted to return her grandson to his mother.
Moments later, she was found lying on her back on the pavement, bleeding
from a pair of bullet wounds. She was taken to a nearby hospital, where she
died of her injuries. Her grandson, shielded by her body, was unhurt.
A quarter-mile away, a 25-year-old favelado named Raull received a
text message from a friend, alerting him to the shooting. (For security
purposes, Raull asked that I use only his first name.) He stuffed his phone
into his pocket and walked to the scene of the incident. Later, the police
would label de Assis’s death an accident: She had the bad luck to wander into
the midst of a firefight, a commander told a local newspaper. But as Raull made
his way through the crowd, he heard a different story. The fatal shots, witnesses
told him, had been fired by a police officer who mistook de Assis and her
nephew for gang members. Once the officer realized his error, they said, he
sprinted to his squad car and sped away.
Raull grew up on the eastern end of Alemão. As a boy, the closest thing to
a local government he knew was the drug-running syndicate Comando Vermelho,
which exercised near-complete control over the favelas. But in 2010, the
government announced its intention to rid the favelas of organized
crime. That November, more than 2,000 soldiers and police officers descended on
Alemão. Comando Vermelho was driven underground, replaced on the streets by the
police.
Rio’s drug gangs routinely kill civilians and police in the favelas,
but at least the favelados understood the traffickers’ rules. “There
were places you didn’t go and things you didn’t do,” Raull told me. “With the
police, it was different. It was an occupation. There weren’t any rules. And
people were dying.” According to Amnesty International, roughly 2,000 people
are killed every year by the Brazilian police, often in a manner — bullet
through the temple, entry wound in the back — that resembles a planned
execution. Police shootings in Alemão are so common that they barely register
outside the favelas. “Four or five bodies show up, six bodies, maybe it
makes the news,” Raull said. “One body? Never. The media doesn’t care what
happens here. They’d rather not think about it.”
In Alemão, Raull had heard stories of undercover cops executing residents
suspected of having ties to drug traffickers, of heavy-caliber bullets ripping
through the hollow walls of local homes and killing sleeping children. “Most of
our friends from childhood are dead,” he told me. “For us in the favelas,
we think, O.K., we are assured of a violent end, one way or another.” From
this, Raull had derived a guiding principle for his own life: “You give back
what you can, while you can.”
He spent several years trying to figure out what, exactly, he had to give
back. He volunteered at an Alemão youth center and joined the local offshoot of
the global Occupy movement. Then, a month before de Assis’s death, he and
several friends formed a media collective they called Papo Reto, or “straight
talk.” No newspaper or television reporters would set foot in Alemão, so they
would take it upon themselves to report the news from their favelas.
Their intention was to draw attention to the conditions in Alemão — the
blackouts, the curfews, the suffocating police presence — and to warn residents
to avoid particularly volatile areas. Some of Papo Reto’s members were
part-time stringers for newspapers in Rio; others, like Raull, were activists
armed with little more than their smartphones and tablets.
Within weeks, Papo Reto had become a kind of signal tower for the
community. Members of the collective received videos and photographs of police
raids and bullet-riddled vehicles from Alemão’s residents via the smartphone
messaging application WhatsApp. Papo Reto disseminated the images through group
chats on the same software, or on Facebook and other social media.
This simple act could have great repercussions. After de Assis’s death,
Raull posted witness testimony to Instagram and Facebook, alongside photographs
of onlookers congregating under the harsh glare of the streetlights and a
six-second clip of the pavement still slick with de Assis’s blood. By the
following afternoon, all of Alemão was ablaze. Buses were overturned and
torched. Waves of enraged favelados swept through the neighborhood,
demanding justice for de Assis. Television networks sent reporters to Alemão
the next day, but soon, the crowds had thinned, the fires were extinguished and
de Assis seemed all but forgotten. Papo Reto might have been able to stir up a
riot, but justice remained out of reach. Raull took to social media to vent his
frustrations. “A favela sangra!” he wrote: The favela bleeds.
Almost 5,000 miles away in New York, Raull’s posts caught the attention of
Priscila Neri, a 35-year-old filmmaker and activist. Neri moved from São Paulo
to Queens as a child and speaks accentless English and Portuguese. For the past
six years, she has worked as a program manager at Witness, a human rights
organization that helps train and support amateur journalists around the world.
She had been following the Papo Reto photographers’ work since the previous
month, when a member of the collective, Betinho Casas Nova, uploaded a video
that appeared to show the police firing live ammunition into a crowd in Alemão.
“This was the precise profile of the activists we wanted to partner with:
people inside the favela, documenting their reality,” Neri told me. “But
it was simultaneously pretty terrifying, because the risk they were facing was
so large.” She dispatched a Witness contact in Rio to track down Raull and find
out if he would be interested in working together.
Witness had an ambitious agenda. As professional-grade camera technology
has grown cheaper and easier to use, and as foreign journalists have found
themselves increasingly targeted in conflict zones, the work of “citizen
journalists” has become a vital source of international news. (A significant
share of the photographs coming out of Syria, for instance, are now shot by
nonprofessionals.) But Neri and her colleagues were in the process of
developing a much bolder vision of what citizen journalism could become. They
believed that the footage shot by local residents in the world’s most dangerous
places could be used not just to draw attention to acts of violence but also to
put the responsible parties in prison. It was a novel vision for how criminal
justice could evolve in the era of the smartphone, and the young members of
Papo Reto seemed like the perfect partners.
Witness is headquartered in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, in an immense brick
building it shares with several other nonprofits, including the Museum of
Contemporary African Diasporic Art. The space is decorated with stills from
films that Witness has worked on and maps from areas in which it is active:
Africa, Asia and the Middle East. When they’re not in the field, the 32 Witness
employees work out of a bullpen of cluttered cubicles, monitoring the arrival
of new videos or talking via Skype with far-flung activists and citizen
journalists. There is an editing bay, a small studio and a “museum” of old
devices, like bulky camcorders and aluminum-bodied manual cameras, that serve
as reminders of Witness’s origins in the pre-smartphone era.
Witness was founded in 1992 by the musician and activist Peter Gabriel, the
Lawyers Committee for Human Rights and the Reebok Human Rights Foundation. (In
2001, it was spun off as an independent nonprofit.) Gabriel had long been
interested in creating a nonprofit devoted to citizen video, but he was never
able to stir up much interest. Then on March 3, 1991, a 31-year-old plumber
named George Holliday walked onto the balcony of his Los Angeles apartment and,
with his new Sony Handycam, captured footage of a group of Los Angeles Police
Department officers beating an unarmed man named Rodney King.
Holliday’s tape is sometimes referred to today as the first viral video:
the backdrop to a week of the worst rioting Americans had seen in a generation.
Two L.A.P.D. officers were convicted of violating King’s civil rights, and a
jury awarded King $3.8 million in a civil suit against the city, based largely
on Holliday’s video. For lawyers and activists, the judgment was proof that the
way certain criminal acts were documented was about to change drastically.
In its early years, Witness mostly worked to distribute video equipment
abroad and to teach people how to use it. Local partners documented sex
trafficking in Eastern Europe, forced government evictions in Cambodia and
violence against women in Zimbabwe. By 2010, however, the camcorders that had
made citizen journalism possible in the first place had given way to a second
and more sweeping advancement: the near omnipresence of the cellphone camera.
Camcorders were useful, but they were also expensive, finicky and
conspicuous. Cellphones, on the other hand, were cheap, durable and easily
concealed. What a cellphone camera lacked in fidelity, it made up for in ease
of use and ubiquity. Activists no longer had to run home to grab their video
cameras; they had them in their pockets already. And distributing the videos to
a global audience, thanks to the explosion of social media, was a matter of a
few clicks.
Cellphone imagery was vital in sustaining the Green Movement protests in
Iran in 2009: The shooting of Neda Agha-Soltan, the Iranian woman who was
killed by state security forces in what was declared “probably the most widely
witnessed death in human history” by Time, was one of the first images of such
global impact to be captured on a phone. During the Arab Spring demonstrations
in 2010 and 2011, protesters took their phones with them everywhere they went,
documenting their struggles in shaky footage that felt far more visceral than
anything professional news crews were capturing.
But when Witness surveyed human rights lawyers and protesters, they
encountered a recurring set of frustrations. Activists worried that amid the
deluge of amateur videos, the most important clips were sometimes being
ignored. And what was the point of risking your life to gather direct and
inconvertible evidence of wrongdoing if the perpetrators were allowed to walk
free?
Kelly Matheson, the lead of Witness’s Video as Evidence program, has
thought a great deal about that question. Matheson, who grew up in Iowa, has
the singsong cheer of a native Midwesterner and an unflappable optimism
uncommon among longtime human rights workers; you can hear the exclamation
marks in her voice. “My roots are in Iowa, but my feet are all over the world,”
she is fond of saying.
Originally trained as a lawyer, Matheson left her practice in environmental
law in 2003 to pursue an M.F.A. in documentary filmmaking. When Witness started
the Video as Evidence program two years ago, she began scouring the legal
record for precedents, of which there were a handful. In 2013, Larry Krasner, a
lawyer in Philadelphia, defended a man named Askia Sabur, who was charged with
assaulting a police officer. Krasner located a cellphone clip, shot by an
eyewitness, showing that Sabur was the one who had been assaulted. The judge
admitted the video as evidence, and Sabur was exonerated.
There was an international precedent as well. A decade earlier, Witness
partnered with a nonprofit in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ajedi-Ka, to
assemble footage of interviews with child soldiers who had been recruited by a
local militia. The footage was presented to the International Criminal Court,
which later convicted the militia leader Thomas Lubanga of war crimes and
crimes against humanity. “We were unable to dispute the visual images or deny
the sound,” a presiding judge at the court later said. Matheson told me that
the Lubanga case proved that video could be used to “fill an evidentiary gap.”
But cases like those were rare. Too often, witnesses’ videos were shaky to
the point of ambiguity or lacking in metadata that would have helped confirm
their veracity. In 2012, four police officers in São Paulo were charged with
murdering a 25-year-old suspected car thief. A bystander used a cellphone to
film one of the officers. But defense lawyers argued that that gunshot was
actually an accidental misfire and that the victim had sustained his other
wounds in a previous firefight. All four officers were acquitted.
And the instincts of camera-wielding activists were often a liability.
Citizen journalists “do incredible work,” Peter Bouckaert, Human Rights Watch’s
emergencies director, told me, “but often with a political agenda, and we need
to make sure we filter that out.” Two years ago, I traveled to Reyhanli, a Turkish
city on the western border of Syria, to interview rebel-aligned Syrian
activists, who showed me photographs and videos supposedly depicting atrocities
committed by Bashar al-Assad’s government or on its behalf. One clip, of two
men being decapitated with a chain saw, had clearly been repurposed. It turned
out to be an old Mexican drug-cartel video dubbed in Arabic.
Even scrupulous activists typically shoot for maximum emotional impact;
their intention is to incite outrage from their audiences. Evidentiary work
requires a more detached eye. “It’s instinctual to shoot that puddle of blood
or the body lying on the ground,” Matheson told me. “It’s not instinctual to
turn around and get a badge number or the location of a communications tower.
If you’re strictly a media activist, you’re not going to show the world a
communications tower. It’s not going to make the news. It’s not going to
mobilize anyone. But from a legal sense, you need those details.”
Matheson set about drafting a set of standardized guidelines that could be
used in training seminars or handed out in index-card form to activists in the
field. Tight shots are important, she wrote, but 360-degree panning shots are
also necessary: You want to document as much of your surroundings as possible.
Find geographic landmarks that can’t be faked, she suggested: mountains,
familiar buildings, street signs, clock towers. Make sure the date, time and
GPS data on your camera or phone are accurate. Say that information aloud, at
the beginning of the video, in case the metadata becomes corrupted. If you’re
filming anonymously or surreptitiously, write the location and time on a piece
of paper, and hold it directly in front of the lens for at least 10 seconds.
And as soon as you return home, it’s ideal to upload the clip to an encrypted
storage service in the cloud.
Matheson stressed the importance of so-called linkage evidence —
license-plate numbers, military-uniform patterns, close-ups of official
documentation — that could be used to place individual perpetrators in a chain
of command. Without linkage evidence, you had an individual actor: a rogue cop
or soldier who might as well be acting in a vacuum. With it, you had the power
to hold responsible an entire police unit or army battalion.
Witness’s first Video as Evidence trainings, in late 2013, took place in
the Middle East and were aimed at documenting the war crimes and government
crackdowns that had spiraled outward from the Arab Spring. A year later, the
organization decided to expand the program to Brazil, focusing on the country’s
epidemic of police violence.
As a test case, Brazil had a great deal to recommend it. Brazilians have a
fraught relationship with their national police force, one that dates back to
the military dictatorship that ruled the country until the 1980s. In some
corners of Brazilian society, the police are revered. “Tropa da Elite,”
or “Elite Squad,” a 2007 film that chronicles the exploits of a police
anti-gang task force, is among the most popular films in South American
history. In others, they are regarded with fear and distrust. The vast majority
of the thousands of people killed by the police in Brazil every year are young
and black, and officer convictions are practically unheard-of.
But unlike, say, Syria, Brazil is a functioning democracy, with a legal
system in which cases could theoretically be brought to trial. If Witness
wanted to establish a beachhead for successfully prosecuting human rights
abuses with video evidence, the place to do it was Rio de Janeiro.
One afternoon in January, I accompanied Victor Ribeiro, the 33-year-old
videographer who serves as Witness’s point man in Brazil, and a local media
activist named Patrick Granja, whom I hired as a fixer, to a demonstration
against a nationwide increase in public bus fare, the second fare hike in two
years. After the first, in 2013, hundreds of thousands of young Brazilians took
to the streets in several cities in protest. As the demonstrations spread, they
came to encompass a wide range of grievances: government corruption, the
skyrocketing cost of hosting the 2014 World Cup and the growing sense that
ordinary Brazilians would benefit little from the tournament.
The police, unaccustomed to dealing with such large crowds, responded with
what was widely seen as disproportionate force, and at least one protester was
killed. Ribeiro was arrested and spent 10 nights in prison on charges of
setting a police kiosk on fire; he was exonerated, he said, after producing a
video showing he never went near the location in question.
Ribeiro predicted that at some point the police would turn on the crowd.
They wanted to be on hand when it happened. “Tonight, this protest will be on
the news, but I doubt any of the big television stations will show the police
doing anything wrong,” Ribeiro said. That was what his camera was for.
We were standing in a square in downtown Rio, in front of the stately City
Hall, a thousand or so protesters milling around us, balaclava-clad anarchists
alongside college students in faded denim and neon tank tops. “They won’t last
once the tear gas starts,” Granja predicted of the students. He had brought
along a flak jacket, a gas mask and a bicycle helmet.
The plan was to march from the square in front of the City Hall to the main
train station, Central do Brasil, and back again, a round-trip of several
miles. Helicopters, belonging to the police and to local news networks, hovered
overhead. More protesters arrived, and so did more police officers, some of
them in riot gear, wearing armor and carrying shotguns and assault rifles.
As the sun dropped behind the mountains, I watched the first demonstrators
make their way through the entrance of the train terminal. Inside the
concourse, the police were waiting. Protesters hurled glass bottles against the
wall. Out on the main boulevard, a man wrapped his fist in a Brazilian flag and
punched out the window of a passing car, then disappeared under a police baton.
I felt a hand tugging me backward; it was Ribeiro. A tear-gas canister
dropped onto the pavement where I had been standing. A cop slammed a kid in a
Malcolm X T-shirt against a wall. Business owners were locking their doors and
pulling heavy metal grates down over their windows.
Closer to City Hall, where the march began, the street narrowed. Someone
lit a pile of trash on fire. An anarchist lobbed a long fluorescent light bulb,
which shattered against the awning of a nearby restaurant. The police surged
forward. There was enough tear gas and pepper spray in the air that it was hard
to breathe. I watched Ribeiro duck into an alleyway, camera held aloft.
A riot-police officer had a girl in a chokehold, her feet aloft and
kicking, her face a mask of panic; she couldn’t have been older than 18. As he
hauled her away from the crowd, he lost his balance and toppled backward, the
girl falling on top of him. Protesters pressed in, and the police pushed them
back. Ribeiro nosed his lens into the scrum. One officer, hidden behind a
plastic riot helmet, leveled his shotgun at the chest of a demonstrator. “Run!”
someone yelled as stun grenades scattered around us. Granja grimaced; I saw
that he had blood on his thigh.
We regrouped 20 minutes later at a restaurant on the square. Ribeiro’s
camera lens had been broken by the police, but the memory card seemed to be
intact. Granja had been hit with shrapnel from a grenade. Ribeiro asked if we
could call it a day; it was getting late, and he wanted to have the video up
online first thing the next morning.
These street clashes, occurring in well-trafficked public spaces and
involving relatively affluent and media-savvy young protesters, were easy
enough for Witness to document. Harder by several orders of magnitude was
gathering video evidence of the violence in the favelas. There, the
police operate with near impunity, outsiders are unwelcome and the very act of
holding up a smartphone makes you a target. “It’s very difficult for a
nonresident to march into a favela and start taking pictures,” Ribeiro
told me. “Impossible, basically.” That was what made a group like Papo Reto so
valuable.
The negotiations between Witness and the collective had been delicate and
slow-moving. “In the favelas, there’s a general distrust of NGOs,”
Priscila Neri told me, “because so often you have a group swoop in and take the
credit and dash back out again.”
Finally, late last year, Ribeiro arranged a sit-down at the community
center in Complexo do Alemão. Neri and Matheson were on hand, along with
Ribeiro and four members of Papo Reto. For almost two hours, Witness
representatives asked the collective members about the digital platforms they
used, their security precautions and the kinds of equipment they had. Of chief
concern to Neri and Matheson was the safe storage of data. Much of the material
Papo Reto collected was not being encrypted or archived at all, only posted to
Facebook and WhatsApp, where it could accidentally be deleted or otherwise
lost.
And although the group had excelled at collecting videos from the aftermath
of shootings, it had done little to organize them. “One of our first
suggestions was to create a database,” Neri told me, “to see the bigger
patterns of police violence. Right now, you have a lot of stars in the sky, but
you want a constellation.”
A month after the initial meeting, I was invited by Ribeiro to attend a
video-as-evidence training session with Papo Reto. But hours before we were due
in Alemão, the plan was scrapped. A high-ranking member of Comando Vermelho had
been killed in a shootout in another favela, and the syndicate had
declared a mandatory two days of mourning, during which no outsiders came and
went from Alemão.
We tried again two days later. Granja drove. His car, a subcompact Chevy
with battered doors and a drooping exhaust pipe, careened across the outskirts
of Rio proper, past acres of parched, furrowed earth, which were the only
visible remains of a favela that had been torn down by the government in
preparation for last year’s World Cup. The glow of the city center receded
behind us.
We arrived in Alemão around 10. Down by Rio’s beaches, there had been a
breeze, but as we ventured farther inland, the air grew turgid and thick; even
standing still it was impossible not to break a sweat. Overhead, gondolas
shuddered by in a perpetual loop — ghost trams with no one inside. The city
government had built five stations in the favelas several years before,
in hopes of attracting tourists. But the recurring violence has kept visitors
away, and the neighborhood residents preferred to use cheaper motorbike taxis.
Granja parked his car, and we made our way up a short slope. The police
were out in force, as they always are in Alemão, their semiautomatic rifles in
firing position, aimed at the passing foot traffic. We found a cafe and sat on
plastic stools around a banquet-style table. I recognized the area from a Papo
Reto clip showing a line of police officers firing their weapons into a crowd
of favelados.
A few minutes later, Lana and Raull showed up. They were clutching their
electronic devices — a tablet for Lana, a tablet and a smartphone for Raull —
in front of them, as if they might offer some protection. It had been, Raull
said, “a bad few days.” The police had stopped a member of Papo Reto and ripped
up his press card. Another had come home to find his apartment turned upside
down.
Raull is stocky and heavy through the shoulders, with lacquered black hair,
an immaculately maintained goatee and a practiced bombast that makes him appear
much taller than he actually is. He has the Hawaiian word “aloha” tattooed on
his neck and “acreditar,” or believe, on the inside of his right
forearm. He was wearing a flat-brimmed baseball cap with a marijuana leaf
emblazoned prominently on the crown. (“More gangster rapper than reporter” is
how one of his friends describes him.)
I asked Raull if he ever worried that he was too exposed. After all, he
used his real name on Instagram and Facebook and often uploaded videos from
other favelados to his account, in order to protect the security of the
members of his network. He shook his head. “Exposure, being public, is its own
kind of security,” he said. Still, he said, what he was most eager to learn
from Witness was “proper security protocols.” At demonstrations, the police
often pointed their weapons at him first. He could not help feeling that he had
become a marked man.
Other human rights activists I spoke to worried that citizen journalists
like Raull might not even be aware of all the risks they were running. “If the
work is intercepted,” Bouckaert told me, “there’s a great danger of people
being picked up, jailed, killed. And I do think human rights groups sometimes
underestimate the sophistication of the surveillance tools available to
governments in some of these areas.” He recalled visiting the office of
Abdullah al-Senussi, Libya’s feared intelligence chief, shortly after the
overthrow of the Qaddafi government and marveling at the equipment on hand and
the extensive dossiers on activists, replete with social-media records and
email data.
Several groups have tried to solve the surveillance problem from a
technological perspective. Bouckaert is developing a digital-video-preservation
vault. Two engineers from the Medical College of Wisconsin, Brian Laning and
Bonnie Freudinger, recently won a United States Agency for International
Development grant to work on the International Evidence Locker, a free
smartphone app. Photos collected on the app are automatically location-, date-
and time-stamped, encrypted and securely sent to two separate protected
servers, Freudinger told me. They can also be submitted anonymously. Witness is
developing its own software, too.
With Witness’s guidance, Raull and his associates had started taking more
precautions in their own work. They stopped posting videos in which it was
obvious where the video was shot from — from which the police might be able to
identify the residence of the shooter, for instance. They had started working
in groups. The next step would be to learn how to encrypt files.
The training would be time consuming, Raull said, but worthwhile. “Because
the effect multiplies,” he said. “As more people learn about what we’re doing,
they’ll send us videos, and we’ll be able to show more of the truth.” He
mentioned a plan that he was discussing with Ribeiro to reach out to the young
men who drove motorbike taxis in Alemão. The drivers covered large swaths of
the favelas every day, and all of them carried smartphones.
Lana said that her mother thought she was “crazy” for associating with Papo
Reto, but she told her mother she was proud of what she was doing. “More and
more videos appear every day,” she said. “It’s a process. But it’s something
good, and the more evidence we can produce, the more we can show the outside
world what’s happening here, the better it can get. You can dream.”
It’s not a crazy dream. Last year, a 38-year-old favelado named
Cláudia da Silva Ferreira was shot in the neck and torso in Rio’s Complexo da
Congonhas favelas during a shootout between the military police and
gangs and loaded, unconscious, into the trunk of a patrol car. On the road, the
trunk opened and Ferreira’s body tumbled out; she was dragged about 1,000 feet
and was pronounced dead shortly after that at a hospital. Another driver filmed
the incident with a cellphone camera and sent the video to the local newspaper
Extra. Government officials were forced to denounce the actions of the police,
and the three officers involved were arrested. They are now awaiting trial.
The International Criminal Court, meanwhile, is conducting investigations
in several regions where citizen-produced video evidence could be crucial. In
Nigeria, prosecutors are looking into allegations that the militant group Boko
Haram has committed crimes against humanity. Already, hours of cellphone
footage of the group’s movements have been uploaded to YouTube. And in July,
the court upheld a decision to have al-Senussi tried in Libya on charges of
murder for his role in putting down the anti-Qaddafi protests. Bouckaert told
me that activist footage of the protests would likely be entered as evidence by
the prosecution. Similarly, if Assad is ever toppled in Syria and brought to
trial, the court will have hundreds of hours of tape to work with.
Two weeks after I returned to the United States, I received an email from
Ribeiro. The police and traffickers were again fighting in the alleys of
Complexo do Alemão, and the residents of the favelas were spending much
of their time indoors. On Facebook, I looked at the most recent work that Papo
Reto had posted. In their videos, tracers streaked through the night sky, and
platoons of armored police officers marched through the streets. A final
photograph showed a boy lying in a hospital bed. Bandages covered his torso;
the caption explained that he had been caught in the crossfire, taken a bullet,
but survived. “[He] is recovering,” the post read. “Everything will work out!”