Wednesday’s Wise Women of Acari.

Marilene Lima de Souza (1950-2012)

It was 1985 in Brazil when 21 years of military rule ended, it would seem that democracy has not brought an end to violence and it would seem that the victims are poor children and the perpetrators are death squads and police officers.
The minors who are murdered are from the favelas. The children and young people work on the streets to supplement their families overstretched income.  Unfortunately it not always honest work; rather more prostitution, drug trafficking and petty theft.  As the crime rate increases so the  police are put under pressure to remove the undesirable street children and believe that they are doing a service to the community having no consideration to the mothers and the remaining family.
On the July 26th 1990,  eleven young people including  seven children from the favela at Acari in Rio were taken by the ‘police’ and held for ransom.  While the negotiations were being carried out so the children were ‘disappeared’; and their bodies have never been found.  The mothers began to search for the children and justice. They were known as the Mothers of Acari. Even the mothers in their struggle were subject to persecution, slander and death threats.  One of the mothers Edmeira da Silva was murdered and there is evidence surrounding this that relates it to the Acari massacre.

Marilene Lima de Souza mother of Rosanna de Souza Santos one of the missing children pressed Amnesty International to ask that Brazilian State to relook at the inquest into the death of Edmeira da Silva.  Although Rosanna didn’t live in Acari she was kidnapped among the others and her mother Marilene was one of the most active mothers and suffered as a result not just from the assaults previously mentioned but also from depression and anxiety.  She remained active, with the Network against Violence; a project coordinated to provide psychological help to families of victims of state violence, until she died of a brain tumour in 2012.