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Debt fuels child deaths

’A boy comes along and robs the shop, so you give him a thump. Another one comes along and steals something else. If you don’t do anything and let them go on stealing, you lose your job. It’s no use playing about with some of these kids, you’ve got to kill them’.

These are the words of a Brazilian newspaper stall owner and ex-death squad member. In the eleven major cities of Brazil, an estimated 300 street children have been murdered by death squads between January and March this year.

According to a new book launched in July, the main people behind the rising number of street child murders are the death squads, made up of ex-criminals, police and shop owners. Touted as protection agencies for shop owners and citizens, and paid bounty money for their work, they are often treated with impunity by the law. In Brazil: War on Children, Gilberto Dimenstein says that when investigations into the killing epidemic are begun, the death squads just adopt a lower profile and bury the dead children in secret cemeteries instead of leaving their bodies on the street.

Children cannot be buried if they are not claimed by a member of the family, so non-governmental organisations have begun a system of getting people to adopt dead children so that they can be buried.

The government estimates that there are some seven million children living or working on the streets of Brazil. Some live there permanently; others go home from time to time. They come to the city to look for work to support themselves and their families. A 1988 survey showed that 54% of street children live in families where the income is less than US$35 per month.

Sue Branford, a writer and broadcaster on Brazil, points to the third world debt crisis as a major factor in creating this escalating poverty and violence cycle. She called the US$20bn debt which Latin American countries have to pay to the World Bank each year ‘totally immoral’. ‘Until this drain is taken away’, she said, ‘governments cannot tackle the social conditions of their people’.

In Brazil, she continues, the poverty is made even more shocking because the rich elite consume so conspicuously. Although the government created a Ministry of the Child in 1990 and has a National Plan for the Prevention and Reduction of Violence against Children, this is inadequate while the underlying social structures remain the same.

Cristina Sganga, who has worked with street children in Brazil, agrees, saying that although the Collor government appears to be more open about human rights violations, many think this is more a foreign relations publicity stunt than a genuine will for change.

She says that although the Statute of Children came into force last year, she recently saw a policeman beating up a street girl who had been sniffing glue. He was threatening to arrest the girl. Sganga and other street workers tried to intervene, telling the policeman that, due to the new legislation, he could not arrest the girl when she had committed no crime. The policeman appealed to the gathered crowds, saying he was being stopped from doing his job. The crowd cheered and the policeman arrested the girl anyway. ‘The new legislation is simply rhetoric unless the judges, police and people are educated to adopt a new attitude’, says Sganga.