Police strike and corruption in Salvador

It has been a strange week – the strangest I have ever experienced in Salvador. It is not uncommon that different workers go out on strike here in Brazil, some times it is the teachers, other times it is the public servants, the nurses or the factory workers. This year I have also learnt that the police force several years in a row have gone out on strike just some weeks before Carnival. This year was no exception.

It is against the Brazilian law for Polices to go on strike and an order to arrest about 10 of the strike leaders was soon issued. About 2000 men in the Bahian Police force joined the strike, and they didn’t just leave the streets disserted, smaller groups of policemen in civil clothing also agitated the population and stopped busses on the street and demanded people to walk. In the journals there was pictures of men dancing in the streets, pointing guns in the air.

At the same time many areas in the city suffered from armed robberies and plundering of stores and houses. As a result – two days on to the strike the streets lay disserted and people stopped going to work with fear to be assaulted on their way there. I never experienced such a strange feeling on the streets of Salvador where the roads are normally crowded and noisy. The Governor of Bahia did not see any other way out than to call for the help of President Dilma who sent the national military guard to protect the population of Bahia and to arrest the strike leaders.

The strike leaders occupied a state building at CAB – The Administrative Center of Bahia (where I have been doing my Internship during the last few months and were I still doo some work) and the military surrounded the area. Soon the whole administrative center was cut off for ordinary people and no one could go to work. I got a feeling of a city on the verge of war. Men clad in green and armed up to their teeth suddenly patrolled the streets.

In Boca do Rio we where horrified to hear that five homeless people had been killed, or more precisely executed, by policemen during one of the first nights of the strike. We got even more horrified when we realized that one of the people killed was an old friend of my boyfriend – Alan do Rap, a person widely known in the area as a true rap talent – once he sang with Blondie in front of 30 000 cheering spectators.

Now the policemen has left the occupied building and most of the strike leader have been captured. Today we read in the newspapers that five policemen that for several years executed several people in different areas of Salvador in exchange for money have been identified and arrested – acused of the murders here in Boca do Rio during the first days of the strike.

Hopefully at least some parts of the corrupt and lawless sections of the Bahian police force are already behind bars by now.