"Peace is not so nice as you think; it is generated by violence; it embodies violence; and it in turn generates violence." Discuss.

Although endemic to all societies, structural or indirect violence is particularly visible in countries where poverty is rife, for example when the poor die because they cannot afford treatment for illnesses that would rarely be fatal in the developed world. Where there is great disparity between rich and poor, as is the case in Brazil, this violence is embedded in institutional structures that prioritise the privileged rather than the disadvantaged social classes. The latter are hungry and cannot afford proper health care or education, nor do they have recourse to a fair criminal justice system; rather, it progresses from a position of “systematic suspicion” and favours the rights of the middle class (Scheper-Hughes 1992, 227).

Scheper-Hughes’ book on everyday violence in Brazil takes this indirect violence a step further by illustrating the actual, or direct, violence inherent in the unequal structures that threatens the country’s poor through “disappearances”, “pest control” death squads and organ trafficking (Scheper-Hughes 1992, 218). Whereas under military dictatorship disappearances were reserved for so-called subversives, the lowest social strata as a whole are now threatened. Scheper-Hughes suggests that disappearances are not an aberration but that a state of emergency has become the norm.

Fifteen years after her study, this violence still exists: in the 2006 World Report, Human Rights Watch noted that police violence in Brazil is systemic and widespread, “disproportionately affecting the country’s poorest and most vulnerable populations” and that indigenous “people and landless peasants face discrimination, threats, violent attacks, and killings as a result of land disputes in rural areas” (Human Rights Watch 2006, 168, 170).

In Brazil as elsewhere, the same violence that is considered unacceptable when carried out by a hooligan might well be condoned when carried out by governmental officials (Allen 1997, 102).

Furthermore, in granting impunity to perpetrators, authorities encourage violence, whether in the form of social injustice and discrimination or outright persecution. That the institutional structures serve the middle class to the detriment of the lower class comes at a price not only for the underprivileged: in Brazil, the poor are considered “dangerous” due to their desperate need, which poses a “threat to the artificial stability of the state” (Scheper-Hughes 1992, 219, 224), and the middle classes claim to live in constant fear of attack and theft.