We are seeing with sadness and revolt the last attacks committed by the Israel State to the Palestinian people, especially in the Gaza Strip. More than a hundred persons, including lots of children, were murdered in the military offensive, while a considerable part of the world stand still in front of that criminal and genocide aggression against the Palestinian fight for liberty.

We are a Communities and Movements Network against Violence that acts in Brazil, in the city of Rio de Janeiro, that has more than 10 millions inhabitants, which 25% live in “favelas” (slums), clandestine lands divisions, occupied buildings and lands, under viaducts and marquees of commercial stores and financial institutions. Most of this poor population is descending of enslaved Africans, or original people who had your lands taken by the European colonist. As well your lands were taken by the British colonist and later by the Zionists.

Palestine is more than 7.600 kilometers far of our city. Despite all this distance, when we watch videos about Gaza or refugee fields, immediately we perceive how much they are seemed our favelas and peripheries. The same children taking the streets and alleys with theirs improvised plays and tricks, together with open sewer and ruins. The same people speaking high and lively. The same effort to survive and to be happy in poor conditions. But, also, the same violence and State terrorism executed by police and military forces on our communities, in particular over our youth.

In Brazil, we only obtain access to the true news of the slaughter that Israeli forces of security come making against Palestinians, with more details and without distortions, through the independent media, that have not commitment with the global corporations of communication, allied of the Zionist’s community of information. Through these alternative media, we knew, for example, about the murders of Palestinian children, the most girls, committed by Israeli forces. This touched us deeply, because in Rio the policy has shot and killed children of 6 to 12 years.

These deaths and slaughters have more in common of what it seems at the first sight. The state policy of Rio, and the municipal guard of the city come receiving “special training” from Israeli’s military and policemen. The government of Lula, president of Brazil, also made accord with the State of Israel so that the Mossad trains the intelligence services and the National Force of Security. The current governor of Rio, Sérgio Cabral, is making an agreement with FBI to train policemen. Therefore is not a coincidence that the methods of slaughter and infanticide used by Israeli soldiers against the Palestinian people are so similar to the used by the Brazilian policy against our poor people, our children and our youth.

They have something in common against our Palestinian and Brazilian people: the racist intentions of criminalize the non-white and poor youth of peripheries of the world. Either in banlieues of Paris, either in the quarters of immigrants in Germany, either in London, where the brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes was murdered by the police for “terrorism suspicion”, either in the Palestinians lands occupied by Zionist State. As our children and our youth mean the future and hope of freedom for our peoples, also mean a threat for intentions of oppression, domain and exploitation.

In this perverse objective, the language used to stimulate and justify the genocide becoming very similar in the whole world. They call our young people criminals and terrorists and our communities caverns of terrorists. When we leave Brazil, a great concentration of favelas in North Zone of Rio, The Complexo do Alemão, was being victim of a police operation of almost one month, which already had made 14 fatal victims and 53wounded by fire guns. The governor Sérgio Cabral declared that the operation would go to continue because the favela would be a “focus of terrorists and evil’s people”. They are the same words that the Zionists use against the Palestinian youth and communities.

Few days ago, Matan Vilnai, the Israel Defense vice-minister, threatened the Palestinian people with a shoah (holocaust), showing how Zionists already incorporate the mentality of the nazi whom caused so suffering for Jew people. Here too, the governor Sérgio Cabral, on October 2007, revealed his fascist mentality up against the favelas, while defended the abortion for the women who lives in our communities as a way to combat the criminality. In his words, the favela “is a factory which makes marginal”.

But, although the attacks and the deaths, and the lies of the oppressing States, our hope survive because it has resistance. The fight of Palestinians, who resists by all forms, serves as stimulation for us, because demonstrate that, even against the cruelest oppression, we have how fight, resist, survive and prepare the way of liberation. Our fight isn’t so organized and strong as yours yet. The similarities still are the suffering. When we see in TV the Palestinian manifestations after the bombings and invasions by Zionists soldiers, what more we identify with our reality are the scenes of many women crying, shocked and despaired, holding or helping her murdered children, brothers or husbands.

However, the image of these women brings us hope, because in Rio was also from the fight and pain of the women which we start to organize our Network. Women of the poor communities who had your family and friends executed by the policy or exterminate groups. Joined to those women, communitarian militants, left’s activists, social movements and human right’s defending organizations. With the sprouting of the Net, some activities a little more organized (but still isolated) had been able to meeting, firm alliances and strengthen mutually in the fight against the State violence and genocide against our communities.

These alliances and solidarity bows are the same that we search and offer here, in the scene of peoples’ fight against the lords of the war, the money, exploitation and death.

Freedom for Palestine!
Say no to the genocide of oppressed youth!


Communities and Movements Network against Violence

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, March 3, 2008