DISCLAIMER – Slums in Brazil and all of Latin America are clusters of extremely low HDI (human development index) and absence of the State. It is no surprise that Transnational Criminal Organizations take over, take control and rule. Most of the people who live there are peaceful and usually victims of violence. What you will read here is about extreme violence orchestrated by organizations whose business is violence and terror. The finger here is not pointed at individual men who live in social exclusion, but to the TCOs and the ideological cults. The “rape culture” is a result of “criminal cultures” and “ideology cultures” (and here I include the violent religious cultures as well). Will rape happen even if there is no criminal culture? Of course it will. The criminal mind is one of the stable things in our species: it is quantitatively rare, but it is catastrophic. But when rape and abuse are used as a means of social control and become institutionalized, then we have something else: we have a social phenomenon.
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So, let me start by giving you a culture-shock perspective. The University of Sao Paulo, one of the first ranked world-wide, in Brazil, is adjacent to a slum (the Sao Remo slum). There’s a fence that anyone can crawl back and forth if they want to.
I LIVED inside the USP all my life. My father was one of the founders (google him if you want: Jose Moacyr Vianna Coutinho). He’s a pioneer in the Geological sciences in Latin America. I learned how to beat those fences when I was 12.
Obviously, as anyone who has read anything about Latin America knows, reasonable-size slums are dominated by the TCOs (Transnational Criminal Organizations). In Sao Paulo, most slums (and drug, arms and human trafficking) is controlled by the PCC – First Command of the Capital. Both the PCC and the Red Command (that rules Rio de Janeiro) learned how to structure their organization when their leaders were incarcerated with the Guerrilla groups National Alliance, Brazilian Communist Party and others. It’s called the “Lenninist structure of the revolutionary army”. Many people who live in the slums actually idolize the criminals because they do “charitable work”. They also torture and kill journalists and anyone who tries to study and record their activities and their promiscuous relationship with the power – State, City, Federal and also University presidency power.
I was raped and tortured by the members of the PTSU, which translates as Unified United Socialist Workers Party (between 15-18). It was part of “shaping me” into an “organic intellectual” (sensu Gramci): a loyal, obedient, activist who can actually design propaganda if told to. And who will sleep with whoever they tell you to. It is “revolutionary obligation”. It hurts too much and I complained once (reported it as rape, they made a mock investigation, while the rapist laughed at me). They admitted it publicly, but they still claim I only came out to “attack the Left”. Rape was ok. As was leaving me hungry, or rotting on my own menstrual blood. Or forcing an abortion that pierced my uterus and bled for a month.
They work with the PCC to control drug trafficking at the USP, where I majored in Biology and Organic Chemistry, took a MS in Biochemistry and a Ph.D. in sociology of science.
The story was all over the press in 2011, 6 years after I attempted suicide. Other girls that were systematically abused for years in the “ideological” cults begged me to not mention their names. Some died.
At the USP – the super Ivory Tower University – many of my female friends were raped. Not like me, on an everyday basis. But by members of the PCC who climbed the fence from the slum. (Almost) nobody reported them. It was known that it was not a good idea to do it (not because of the University, that, at the time, had no security, but because the local police was paid by the PCC). Some did, and eventually we had some security.
One day, when I was 19, I was coming from the library at the Chemistry Institute and a guy from the slum approached me, holding what looked like a gun under his hoodie. He told me to approach and undress. But, you see, I HAD BEEN RAPED before. So I told him: “FUCK YOU. Shoot. You’re gonna have to screw a dead body, I hope you like it. Make sure I’m really dead.” He was probably bluffing. Or just went limp because rapists enjoy the victims’ terror. I was not in terror: I was in fight and kill mode.
That one didn’t rape me. I decided nobody else would. My life is really not that important. Not more important than the terror of surviving rape. But what if there were 10 of them? They would have raped me.
I can tell you one thing: nothing else would matter to me other than to kill every single one of them. Every – single- one.
So, think twice when you cry “rape”. Rape is one of the few things that can make you into a monster. After REAL rape, you will never be normal. You will never be a girl again. Because it is the ultimate violation of your dignity. NOBODY is “in doubt” of whether they were raped. They know it. They may choose to try and forget it. They may choose to think it was their fault. They may choose to kill themselves. It make take them decades to come out. But they know they were raped and their dignity was forever destroyed.
There is no comeback.