Portugal records surge in racist violence as far
right rises
Campaigners call for urgent institutional response
after attacks and death threats targeting MPs, academics and activists
Mia Alberti
in Lisbon
Mon 28 Sep
2020 05.00 BSTLast modified on Mon 28 Sep 2020 13.34 BST
Over the
summer, Mamadou Ba, the head of an anti-racist organisation in Lisbon, received
a letter. “Our goal is to kill every foreigner and anti-fascist – and you are
among our targets,” it read. A few weeks later, it was followed up with a
message telling him to leave Portugal or let his family face the consequences.
That message was accompanied by a bullet casing.
Ba’s
experience is one of a growing number of racist incidents perpetrated across
Portugal that have led the European Network Against Racism (ENAR) to call for
“an urgent institutional response”.
In January
this year, a black woman and her daughter were assaulted because they didn’t
have a bus ticket. In February, two Brazilian women were attacked by the police
outside a Cape-Verdean club, and in the same month, the Porto football player
Moussa Marega, born in Mali, abandoned a game after fans shouted racial slurs.
The worst
attack took place on a Saturday afternoon in July, when a black actor, Bruno
Candé, was murdered after a man shot him six times in the back with a rifle in
what ENAR has described as “an explicitly racially motivated crime”.
“In recent
months, there has been a very concerning rise in far-right racist attacks in
Portugal, confirming that the hate messages are fuelling more aggressive
tactics that target human rights defenders from racial minorities,” the
organisation said.
Ba, who
heads the NGO SOS Racismo, agreed: “There has been an obvious escalation in
violence – a clear result of the growth of far-right terrorism in Portugal over
the past few years.”
Last year,
the Portuguese commission for equality and against discrimination received 436
complaints regarding cases of racism, an increase of 26% on 2018.
ENAR traces
the rise back to last October’s general election, when Portugal – like many
European countries, including neighbouring Spain – saw the re-emergence of the
far right. In Spain’s case it was Vox; in Portugal’s, it was the Chega (Enough)
party, whose leader, André Ventura, won a seat in parliament.
Since then,
according to ENAR, “far-right activists have been emboldened to commit racially
motivated crimes against people of colour in Portugal”.
Ventura,
known to have ties to other far-right extremist groups, has appointed former
members of neo-Nazi groups to leadership positions in his party – although he
later claimed not to be aware of their backgrounds. He has also called a female
MP running against him a “Gypsy candidate” and defended the “drastic reduction”
of Muslim communities in Europe.
“Ventura is
growing because he is saying in public what many Portuguese think in private
but don’t say,” said political scientist António Costa Pinto. He adds that
while the Portuguese electoral system meant that Ventura could take a seat with
just 1.29% of the votes, “he is giving a voice to many people”.
Costa Pinto
noted that Ventura’s political agenda is similar to that of many other
far-right leaders across the world – not least in his railings against the
“typical political elites and corruption”.
Ventura’s
programme also focuses heavily on the fight against crime – “usually
personified by Roma or Afro-Portuguese [people]” – says Costa Pinto.
But despite
all the tough talk, reminiscent of the rhetoric deployed by Brazil’s president,
Jair Bolsonaro, government data shows that crime in Portugal has actually
decreased steadily by 20% over the past 12 years.
Chega did
not reply to a request for comment, but Ba says the party’s advent is already
having an impact. “We’ve always said there were always a lot of far-right
supporters in Portugal, but no far-right leader,” said Ba. “Now André Ventura
has become an institutional megaphone of racism in parliament.”
The Black
Lives Matter movement is currently trying to start a debate about racism in Portugal
– an issue that was never addressed during the period of decolonisation that
followed the Carnation Revolution in 1974 – and Ventura is leading the
opposition.
Following
the killing of Candé, the black community in Portugal organised the biggest anti-racism
rally ever seen in the country. The Chega leader responded with a
counter-protest in which he was seen doing the Nazi salute while holding a
banner reading, “Portugal is not racist.”
When
protesters tried to remove some statues of colonial figures, a “Ku Klux Klan”
parade was staged outside Ba’s NGO, which was graffitied with swastikas and
racist slurs. Death threats were sent to activists such as Ba – but also a
number of academics and MPs.
“I never
imagined this much violence,” said Joacine Katar Moreira, one of the three
black female MPs elected to parliament almost a year ago. “I think if someone
had told me it was going to be this way, I’d never have run for office.”
The MP, who
was born in Guinea-Bissau and has a stutter, has been the target of harassment
and ridicule since her election, including from Ventura, who told her to “go
back to her country” when she took office.
“We’re
seeing the beginning of the normalisation of racist hate speech. There is a
normalisation of racist attacks and there is even a political-institutional
legitimisation [of these behaviours],” said Katar Moreira.
“I entered
parliament at the same time as an anti-democratic MP, and the target of attacks
on a national level for several months was not the fascist, anti-democratic MP.
It was the black, female MP with humble beginnings.”
Despite the
growing number of discrimination complaints, hardly any have resulted in a
conviction. Between 2014 and 2018, the number of convictions for the “crimes of
discrimination and incitement to hate and violence … is less than 3”, according
to police statistics provided to the Guardian.
ENAR noted
that “a lack of institutional response only reaffirms the historical sense of
impunity for perpetrators of racist violence and denies the urgent need to
address racism in Portugal”.
Katar
Moreira said there was a “huge resistance” to talking about racism in Portugal
because people get “truly offended when we say we are in a structurally racist
society. They think we are offending them individually.”
Ba called
it a “state of denial”, and argued that current laws were insufficient to fight
discrimination effectively.
“There is a
kind of lethargy,” he said. “We either change the laws to make them more
effective, or we’ll be in trouble because the ease with which André Ventura
managed to grab the most nefarious and obscure sentiment of the old regime
could really be the gasoline that fuels the growth of the extreme right.”
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