Brazil & Southern Cone - August 2011 (ISSN 1741-4431)

The assassination in mid August of a Rio judge, famed for her tough stance against the city’s militia groups, has sent shivers through the judiciary.

Patricia Lourival Acioli, aged 47 and a mother to three children, was shot 21 times by masked gunmen on motorbikes as she pulled up outside her home in the municipality of Piratininga, Niterói, on 12 August. Lourival Acioli was well known for her aggressive criminal sentencing, in particular against militia members. Comprising former and off-duty police and fire officers, in recent years the militias have rivalled Rio’s drug gangs for criminal violence, drug running and extortion in the city’s favelas. Earlier this year, her name was discovered on a ‘death list’ confiscated from a jailed militia leader.  Her family said she had been receiving death threats for five years.

According to the daily O Globo, Lourival Acioli had sentenced more than 60 military police officers in her local jurisdiction of São Gonçalo over the past ten years. On 16 August the daily reported that two days before the murder, a civil police officer from the anti-drugs unit (Dcod) had warned the federal police of an assassination plot against the judge. A week before her death, Lourival Acioli herself had apparently informed the military police central command that she had been threatened by officers stationed at São Gonçalo (7º BPM) and Niterói (12º BPM).

Brazil’s justice minister, José Eduardo Cardozo, asked the federal police (PF) to investigate after receiving a request from the chief justice of the federal supreme court, Cezar Peluso. “Cowardly crimes against magistrates are an attack on the independence of the judiciary, the state and Brazilian democracy", Peluso declared in a statement. Gilmar Mendes, Peluso’s predecessor, agreed: “I believe it is extremely serious. Certainly this suggests that organized crime is becoming much more daring. We should really be very concerned”.

The incident prompted questions as to why the judge apparently had no security detail. Manoel Alberto Rebêlo dos Santos, the president of Rio de Janeiro’s court of justice, said that Lourival Acioli had dispensed with court-mandated police security in 2007. Her family countered that the judge did not trust the military police officer assigned to protect her.

According to the national council of justice (CNJ), there are at least 100 magistrates living under varying degrees of threat in Brazil, of which 69 have had their lives threatened and 13 are subject to ‘situations of risk’.  Paraná is the worst affected state, with 30 judges under threat, followed by Rio de Janeiro with 13 and Bahía with 10.

José Carlos Machado, the secretary general of Brazil’s association of federal judges (Ajufe), called on the government to do more to protect the judiciary. “The Brazilian state has to get organised, just like the criminals have organised”, he stated, calling for specific legislative measures to provide judicial security. “If Brazil wants to attain first world status it needs to respect the judiciary as a state power”, he stated.

Governor Sérgio Cabral, who insisted to Justice Minister Carodozo that Rio’s local civil police could handle the investigation, has led an aggressive security crackdown on the city’s criminal culture in preparation for the 2014 FIFA World Cup and the 2016 Olympics. Despite reform efforts, including improved pay, police corruption remains endemic. In February, Rio’s latest civil police chief resigned following yet another major corruption scandal in the force. The city’s secretary of public security, José Mariano Beltrame, replaced him with Marta Rocha, the city’s first female chief of police.

• Amnesty weighs in
  On 16 August, Amnesty International said that the assassination of Judge Lourival Acioli underlines “the profound problems with police corruption and the spread of organised crime.” “The death of a judge who was simply doing her job is an attack on the state of law and the judicial system in Brazil”, stated Patrick Wilcken, the NGO’s Brazil representative. He called for a thorough investigation and warned that “the police, municipal and state authorities have closed their eyes” to the illegal activities that sustain organized crime and police corruption in Rio. He cited the militias’ continued operation of transport, gas and electricity service networks “with impunity”.