Honorable Brazilian magistrates. I address this message to your collective knowing that many togados do not need to read or hear what follows below. But I notice, with increasing indignation, anomalous behavior in some of their peers. Such a practice has the marks of tyranny, impossible to accept calmly in a democratic regime. Imprisonment and coercive conduct to presume people's guilt rather than innocence are dangerous. In a similar matter we come to the banality of various facts that generate public opinion colonized by propaganda, whether official or private. The use of humiliation is an effective technique to terrorize citizens. The Brazilian people have already been garroted by two fierce dictatorships that used the state's monopoly on physical force to exhaustion, trampling on people's dignity. Many families keep memories of their members arrested, tortured, exiled, censored, expelled from positions or jobs by agents who enforced that monopoly.
In recent days, a brute power has turned against the national campuses and, in them, the arrogant will of those who imagine protecting collective existence has resurfaced. I remember past events, figures who anticipated what is happening today in the state sphere. The dictatorship established in 1964, through soldiers, humiliated the venerable figure of Professor João Cruz Costa, at USP, demanding that he sing the national anthem as “proof of Brazilianness”. In the practice of that savagery, we had no new traits, since National Socialism forced those opposed to Hitler to sing nauseating stanzas of Horst-Wessel Lied. All those who disparage Brazil and talk about educational achievements in South Korea don't even remember: that country used the methods and ideas of a great Brazilian professor, Anísio Teixeira, who was persecuted and humiliated by bailiffs. Even today, his death is shrouded in thick shadows, such is the climate of repressive secrecy that prevailed at the time. With the Brazilian dictatorship, the hunt for intelligentsia raised a thinker who had supported the 1964 regime, but was frightened by the brutality of those who said they had committed the crime against the constitutional order to “combat subversion and corruption”. His name was Tristan of Athayde. He defines the campaign against university students as “cultural terrorism”. His denunciations narrate the infamies committed in the name of supposed moral values, used as an excuse for the murder of freedom. Cultural terrorism returns in Brazil in the XNUMXst century, at the hands of those who should protect rights, especially the right to think.
On that same date, the impeachment of teachers and scientists and the rape of campuses by armed police force took place. Resistance to such procedures was raised by another venerable figure, rector Pedro Calmon Muniz de Bittencourt, an essential name for the examination of national history. When henchmen threatened colleges and institutes run by him, based on the usurped monopoly of force, the academic leader uttered phrases that yesterday, today and always should illuminate judicial decisions and the practices of his police. Said the Magnificent Rector: "Here, these military officers don't enter, because entering the University can only be done through an entrance exam.". Calmon was not only a master of historical knowledge. He mastered the language of Camões. With the term “beleguins” to indicate brutal police officers serving judges submissive to illegitimate power, the Rector summarizes the undemocratic history of our state institution, including the courts, handcuffs and revolvers that serve them.
“Beleguim”, although of uncertain origin, has a strong semantic link with the Spanish “belleguín”, “agent of justice” according to the Real Academia Española in its Dictionary. The term of use antiquated refers to un official public or an inferior minister who is in charge of imprisoning and instead of executing the kings and prisoners, which is dice corchete or sheriff of the same meaning. Calmon was completely right when he called those who invaded the campuses marshals. They acted on behalf of judges, many of them committed to the dictatorship established in the country since the first Institutional Act. And let us remember Pedro Aleixo’s question: the president may not abuse Act number 5, “but what about the corner guard?”. Today, the blame for attacks on civil rights does not belong mainly to the bailiffs, but to those above them who decide in the courts.
Not all Brazilian magistrates, at the time, bent their necks. Hermes Lima, Evandro Lins e Silva and others resisted and were persecuted, impeached and exiled. When the ban on habeas corpus, few togas stood up in defense of law and justice. When it comes to bailiffs and judges, it is always good to remember, with Father Vieira, that even they can be rescued for the common good. Let us listen to our ethical oracle: “One of the most risky professions for not being fair is that of ministers of justice, that is, those who sentence it, or those who defend it, or those who write it, or those who execute it; but everyone, if they do it with purity of heart, can be saints. Saint Erebert and Saint Thomas of Canterbury were chancellors; S. Hierotheus and S. Dionísio Areopagita, judges; S. Pudente and Santo Apolônio, senators; S. Fulgêncio, attorney for the royal farm; Santo Ambrósio, São Crisóstomo and São Cipriano, lawyers; S. Marciano, S. Genési and S. Cláudio, clerks; Santo Anastásio and S. Ferréolo, criminal judges; Saint Apronianus and Saint Basilides, henchmen or bailiffs; and even in the most vile exercise of executioners were Saints Cyriacus, Saint Stratonicus, and others” (All Saints Sermon). Let us not despair, then. Even judges who march only behind the strongest armies can follow the path of attrition and contrition. How many? Mystery.
What happened to the Jesuits, defended by Father Vieira, is what happens today to rectors who are threatened and placed on the verge of suicide. “Who would have believed that religious people would be violently taken out of their cloisters and taken prisoner among bailiffs and swords through the public streets, and locked up with guards until they were banished?” (Epiphany Sermon). Who would believe that magistrates and their assistants would enter campuses hunting for rectors, taking them under lock and key, with guards, until they were exiled? Judges who see no limits to their power and abuse it desecrate the space where science is practiced and the true, the good and the beautiful are sought. From what they do on campus today, it is possible to visualize their student practice. It certainly wasn't brilliant, given the contempt they display towards knowledge and those who cultivate it.
The spectacles they generate, of a sadistic and unrestrained nature, testify to the uselessness of the so-called education and justice system in the country. And again, magistrates, I turn to the good Father Vieira. The reckless men “invented and formed Laws, set up courts, constituted magistrates, gave rods to the so-called Justices, with so many multitudes of major and minor ministers, and it was with such a contrary effect that instead of banishing the thieves, they brought them in from the gates. , and instead of extinguishing them, they multiplied them and those who stole in fear, and with sweets, stole under provisions, and with immunity. The Solicitor with the diligence, the Clerk with the pen, the Witness with the oath, the Lawyer with the allegation, the Judge with the sentence, and even the Beleguim with the chuça, all were ordered to keep each one in his own, and everyone lives from yours in different ways.” (Sermon for the Second Sunday of Lent). Cruel persecution of scientists and teachers does not abolish the corrupt fact but makes it worse, as it distracts the public from the exploits carried out by true thieves of the national coffers.
Honorable judges: bailiffs and their gangs, prisons and punishments do not bend the intellect that seeks the truth on campuses. As Spinoza teaches in the monumental Ethics demonstrated geometrically, “a thought is limited by another thought. But a body is not limited by a thought, nor a thought by a body.” It is a useless and ignorant task to use bodies of repressors to prevent thought. The mass of soldiers can arrest, commit suicide, exile, censor. But its action only occurs on the plane of bodies. Thought, the essence of the free university search, is not impeded by them. Not even for you gentlemen.
The magistrates who use force instead of reason, most likely quickly passed through ethical philosophy and doctrine classes. Perhaps they considered them mere academic “perfumes”. They did not meditate with Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas and other luminaries of thought. If you had perused slowly and attentively the writings that built justice and law, you would have read the following warning in the Laws, written by Plato:
“If a magistrate pronounces an unfair sentence when assessing a certain damage suffered, his responsibility towards the victim of the damage must be double the amount in question. Whoever so wishes can sue in the ordinary courts the judges who decided unfairly in the cases brought to them”. (*)
(Laws, 846b).
In our Brazil, how much should judges who authorize humiliation and abuse of force pay? Let Rector Cancellier's family members speak out, as well as other deans and teachers treated as if they were criminals, even before a trial and, even less, a verdict. Many Brazilian judges did not read the Laws platonic and were not warned about the damage they could suffer if they only operated according to the will to power, without going through the epikeia, justice in the proper sense. It is up to the people to pressure legislators so that abuses of many togas are punished. And the truculent beleguins should also be negatively sanctioned. Until then, citizens, who pay taxes to obtain prudent sentences, say in one voice: enough is enough! Magistrates who are deaf to the voice of justice may, sooner or later, be part of the biographical list of Atrocious Judges: Lives of Infamous Judges as Tools of Tyrants and Instruments of Oppression (Richard Hildreth, 1856) Whoever lives will see.
(*) Lucid comment made by an interpreter of Greek laws: “One can scarcely imagine a more dramatic remedy against judicial injustice than a suit for damages against the judge”(Glenn R. Morrow, “Plato and the rule of Law” in Vlastos , G. (ed.) Plato 2, a collection of critical essays, ethics, politics, and philosophy of art and religion).
