W eeks before he was murdered, Victor Hugo Orcasita presented his wife with a letter describing his last wishes.

Orcasita, a union leader, had been pushing for better conditions at his workplace, a mine in northern Colombia owned by a subsidiary of the Alabama-based coal company Drummond. Then the death threats started coming in. He believed that the armed strangers who had started appearing around the mine’s cafeteria would soon make those threats a reality.

“He foresaw his death,” said his widow, Elisa Almarales Viloria.

On March 12, 2001, paramilitary gunmen dragged Orcasita and another union leader, Valmore Locarno, from a company bus as the men returned home from work. The gunmen shot Locarno on the spot and carried Orcasita off in the bed of their pickup truck. His body was found the next day. He’d been shot in the head, his teeth knocked out.

The miners’ union was convinced that Drummond was involved in the murders. They suspected that the company was secretly paying the paramilitary group that executed their leaders. Ultimately, a Drummond food service contractor who ran the mine’s cafeteria was convicted of plotting the murders and sentenced to 38 years in prison.

To make the case that the company was complicit in the killings, the union turned to Terry Collingsworth, a lifelong human rights attorney based in Washington, D.C.

Victims suing multinational corporations for alleged crimes committed abroad face steep odds. Collingsworth has made a specialty of these uphill battles, devoting his career to holding companies accountable in American courts for human rights abuses overseas. In his struggle with Drummond, he collaborated with activist groups, spoke out in the media, and wrote letters to Drummond’s business partners accusing the company of “hiring, contracting with, and directing” the paramilitaries who committed the murders.

Collingsworth’s decision to file suit in the United States made Orcasita’s widow hopeful that justice would prevail. For years, she had felt that justice would be impossible in Colombia due to Drummond’s political clout.

“What we were most excited about was bringing the lawsuit in Alabama,” she said. “There it would not be so easy for them to traffic their influence.”

Collingsworth lost an initial trial in 2007, when a jury found there wasn’t clear evidence tying the company to the crimes. Another of his lawsuits was dismissed for being too similar to the first. But Collingsworth continued to press his case, offering new witnesses with firsthand testimony implicating Drummond.

Then, in March 2015, the case took a surprising turn.

Drummond had returned fire in the legal fight with an unusual accusation. The company charged that Collingsworth — an advocate who recently brought a case before the U.S. Supreme Court — had led a “multifaceted criminal campaign” to extort Drummond into paying a costly settlement. This campaign, Drummond alleged, was in fact a racketeering conspiracy as defined by the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, better known as RICO.

Drummond’s charges represent a scorched-earth legal strategy in which corporations are turning the tables on attorneys and advocates who accuse them of wrongdoing. The technique was popularized by the elite corporate law firm Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, whose clients include a who’s who of America’s most powerful companies. Representing the oil giant Chevron , Gibson Dunn convinced a judge to block one of the largest environmental verdicts ever reached by deploying a novel formula: using the civil provisions of RICO to charge opposing attorneys with racketeering.

Companies that have used RICO against their accusers say they brought the charges on themselves by committing fraud, bribery, and extortion. In Chevron’s case against environmental attorney Steven Donziger, a federal judge agreed; in the case against Collingsworth, a judge ruled that there was enough evidence of malfeasance to allow discovery. Human rights and environmental advocates contend that the true purpose of the cases is to send attorneys and activists a message: Going toe-to-toe with heavyweight corporations can lead to personal ruin.

“Companies with functionally limitless resources can come in and bigfoot like this, and no one can withstand it.”

Legal experts say some plaintiff’s attorneys made themselves vulnerable to RICO claims because they operated at the most aggressive edge of their field, overstepped ethical lines, and by their own admission made mistakes. By shifting the spotlight to these attorneys’ conduct, corporations effectively sidestepped the original allegations against them. Following these victories, other companies adopted similar theories to target advocacy groups directly.

If the goal is to hold attorneys accountable for unethical behavior, RICO is an odd choice. George Washington University law professor and international human rights attorney Ralph Steinhardt noted that RICO is a “very heavy club to swing” when there are more direct penalties, like sanctions, which punish the advocate without invalidating the entire case.

“One wonders why you would bring out the big guns of racketeering to send a message,” he said. “It’s a take-no-prisoners approach that’s intended to distract from whatever good faith allegations there may be.”

Ken White, a former federal prosecutor who specializes in First Amendment law, said responding to alleged misconduct by opposing attorneys with RICO charges is “like going after raccoons knocking over your trash cans with a tactical nuke.”

What’s missing, White says, is a universal mechanism to secure quick dismissals of baseless RICO claims. “Companies with functionally limitless resources can come in and bigfoot like this, and no one can withstand it,” White said.

The RICO Playbook

As scientists issue dire warnings about climate change , advocates have turned to the courts and public campaigning to try to impose consequences on companies they accuse of serious attacks on the environment. Energy and extractive industry giants targeted by these efforts have been particularly eager to turn the tables by deploying this no-holds-barred strategy.

One of the world’s biggest oil companies, accused of dumping billions of gallons of toxic waste in the Amazon rainforest, won the first high-profile victory that relied on this approach. Drummond filed RICO charges in response to allegations that it financed the murder of union leaders who threatened the productivity of its coal mines. A pulp and paper company accused of destroying forests and the energy company behind the Dakota Access pipeline followed soon after, bringing RICO claims against environmental campaigners and anti-pipeline protesters.

In each of these cases, the accused racketeers were environmental and human rights attorneys, Greenpeace and other environmental groups, or Indigenous land and water rights activists.

The RICO Act, originally passed in 1970 to help prosecutors go after the mafia, includes civil provisions that allow private parties to allege a racketeering conspiracy. Most civil RICO claims are filed in business disputes, while others have been brought against political groups from anti-abortion protesters to animal rights activists. These suits require a high bar of evidence: They must prove a pattern of at least two “predicate” crimes such as bribery, fraud, or money laundering; that the perpetrators worked together in a criminal “enterprise”; and that the perpetrators acted with criminal intent.

Nonetheless, RICO claims offer powerful incentives to plaintiffs. If a judge allows the case to go forward, the defendants are subject to extensive discovery in which a well-funded corporate law firm can bury them in paperwork. If the company wins and can establish damages, those damages are automatically tripled.

“When we really think about what these suits are about, it’s fear.”

The success of early cases has helped build a body of law that opens the door for even more aggressive uses of the statute. The most recent corporate RICO cases have sought to define common public advocacy techniques such as negative media campaigns that allegedly contained false claims as predicate offenses for racketeering. The financial and reputational costs of defending these claims can make them devastating to their targets even if they ultimately fail.

“These RICO cases are easier to file than they are to win,” Steinhardt said. “Their intimidating purpose is served by their filing or their pendency.”

Deepa Padmanabha, deputy general counsel for Greenpeace USA, said that even though her team was awarded more than $800,000 in legal fees after successfully defeating RICO claims, the cost of defending the case was even higher.

Padmanabha said that two RICO suits would have cost the organization a total of more than a billion dollars if it had lost. The goal of the charges, she believes, was to caution the environmental movement that even the largest organizations were not safe from ruin.

“When we really think about what these suits are about, it’s fear,” Padmanabha said.

Corporate lawyers seem to be betting that the strategy will have staying power. In October 2020, Gibson Dunn announced a new practice in Judgment and Arbitral Award Enforcement, offering its services to creditors or debtors seeking to litigate existing judgments. The practice’s website highlights “its representation of Chevron Corporation in its successful RICO suit” and boasts that the firm “excels at defending companies and individuals against fraudulent arbitration awards and foreign judgments.”

Evan Mascagni, policy director for the Public Participation Project, an organization that fights against abusive lawsuits, said the RICO strategy threatens to overwhelm the legal system by allowing deep-pocketed companies to deploy endless resources to silence critics and defy judgments against them.

“I think if we accept this as a society, as a country, we’re saying we’re going to give incredibly powerful multinational corporations the ability to hijack our legal system,” Mascagni said.

A Victory for Chevron

The RICO strategy was most famously deployed in 2011 by Chevron in its bitter legal conflict with attorney Steven Donziger.

At the time, Donziger was the lead lawyer pursuing massive damages against the oil company for toxic pollution in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Chevron inherited the lawsuit when it acquired Texaco, which had allegedly left hundreds of open pits of sludge in the rainforests where it operated, causing cancer deaths, miscarriages, and birth defects among the area’s mostly Indigenous residents. As the prospects of a multibillion-dollar judgment grew higher, Chevron enlisted the help of Gibson Dunn.

In February 2011, Gibson Dunn attorneys filed a civil RICO suit in New York accusing Donziger and his colleagues of running a racketeering conspiracy. They charged that Donziger and his team secretly controlled a key independent expert appointed by the Ecuadorian court to assess pollution damages. By the time of Donziger’s trial, they added the accusation that Donziger had bribed an Ecuadorian judge to allow his team to ghostwrite the judgment against Chevron.

Chevron provided hundreds of thousands of dollars in benefits to Alberto Guerra, the witness who claimed he’d facilitated the bribery and served as a liaison between Donziger’s team and the Ecuadorian judge. The benefits included relocating Guerra and his family from Ecuador to the United States, where the company supplied him with a $12,000 monthly salary. Chevron has said that it relocated Guerra to ensure his safety and that the payments were to compensate him for the cost of providing his evidence.

The company’s case was bolstered by Donziger’s own words, obtained through discovery of materials that included outtakes from a documentary film. In one clip, Donziger discussed the size of a possible judgment against Chevron and speculated that his team could “jack this thing up to $30 billion.” In draft testimony in 2013, Donziger conceded that he “did make errors along the way” but challenged the legitimacy of the proceedings against him.

As the RICO case headed for trial, Chevron made a strategic move. Roughly two weeks before the trial date, it dropped its request for damages and sought only to block enforcement of Ecuador’s $9.5 billion judgment. That meant the case would no longer be heard by a jury but decided solely by Judge Lewis Kaplan, a federal district judge in Manhattan who had ruled in the company’s favor in earlier motions.

In March 2014, Kaplan ruled in favor of Chevron, barring U.S. enforcement of the Ecuadorian judgment and holding that private parties are entitled to seek relief from foreign courts’ decisions under civil RICO — a crucial green light for the strategy that Gibson Dunn had developed.

Kaplan concluded that Donziger’s team had not only secretly written the Ecuadorian court’s ruling, but also submitted false evidence and made hidden payments to the court-appointed expert. “The wrongful actions of Donziger and his Ecuadorian legal team would be offensive to the laws of any nation that aspires to the rule of law,” Kaplan wrote in his opinion.

Critics have raised questions about irregularities in the case against Donziger. Guerra later changed key details in his testimony, including the nature of the alleged bribe agreement and the dates of trips in which he claimed to have worked on the case. Computer analysis also showed the judge in question had a running draft of the judgment saved on his hard drive for months, undermining the ghostwriting claim. Still, the case set in motion a stunning downfall for Donziger. The one-time star of the environmental bar ended up serving time in federal prison on contempt charges stemming from his refusal to comply with orders from Kaplan after the RICO decision. Meanwhile, Chevron avoided paying the multibillion-dollar judgment for the toxic sludge that remains in the Ecuadorian Amazon.

In an emailed statement, Gibson Dunn noted that an arbitration panel established through a trade agreement between the United States and Ecuador found that Texaco, Chevron’s predecessor, had complied with a pollution remediation plan approved by the Ecuadorian government, releasing the company from liability. Critics contend that the remediation plan failed to clean up the damage and did not cover claims by private plaintiffs.

In response to questions about Guerra, the firm said Donziger exaggerated the importance of his testimony and pointed to Kaplan’s statement that he would have “reached precisely the same result in this case even without the testimony of Alberto Guerra.” Gibson Dunn added that Kaplan’s RICO ruling, which was unanimously affirmed by a panel of judges on the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, showed that the firm’s advocacy had uncovered serious wrongdoing.

“As for Gibson Dunn’s work successfully exposing fraud by unscrupulous lawyers like Mr. Donziger who seek to rip off vulnerable people in weak legal systems overseas based on lies, this is laudable work vindicating the rule of law,” William Thomson, a partner at Gibson Dunn who was part of its Chevron team, wrote in the statement.

Donziger maintained that his contacts with the Ecuadorian expert were legal and appropriate under Ecuadorian law, and that the ghostwriting charges were fabricated.

“Chevron used a civil racketeering case and false witness testimony from a person who is an admitted liar to try to criminalize me,” Donziger told The Intercept and Type in a written statement. “They wanted to use this bogus RICO case to try to get people to forget about the human devastation Chevron caused in Ecuador.”

Witnesses in Dispute

About a year after Kaplan blocked the Ecuadorian judgment against Chevron, Drummond filed RICO charges against Collingsworth.

Although the company had already prevailed against several of his lawsuits, Collingsworth forged ahead with new legal actions, adding witnesses who offered firsthand testimony alleging that the coal company was complicit in the union leaders’ murders.

One of these witnesses was an imprisoned former paramilitary commander called El Tigre, or the Tiger, who testified that Drummond provided regular payments to his unit. Another key witness was Jaime Blanco, the food contractor who was ultimately convicted of the murders, who said Drummond used his company as a conduit to funnel money to the paramilitaries and directed them to commit the murders.

Collingsworth made payments to El Tigre’s family members and helped arrange financing for Blanco’s legal defense when he agreed to testify. He said the funds he provided to El Tigre’s family were security payments to help the family relocate in order to avoid violent retaliation by the paramilitaries, Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia, which the U.S. State Department designated as a terrorist group in 2001. In response to a court order, Collingsworth disclosed similar payments to relatives of three ex-paramilitary witnesses, but he failed to include the payments to El Tigre and two other ex-paramilitaries, as well as his arrangement with Blanco.

Drummond’s media office did not respond to multiple phone calls and emails requesting comment for this story, and attorneys for Drummond declined to comment.

Colombian authorities have backed up key elements of Collingsworth and El Tigre’s account. In December 2020, the Colombian Attorney General’s Office charged the current and former presidents of Drummond’s Colombian subsidiary with conspiracy in the union leaders’ murders. The 149-page charging document included a summary of a forensic analysis that found evidence of more than $3.7 million in overpayments from the subsidiary to Blanco’s company, bolstering allegations that Drummond had financed the paramilitaries.

Prosecutors also noted that numerous witnesses who did not receive security payments had testified to the same facts. The accounts of El Tigre and other disputed witnesses, they wrote, were “in harmony with and verified by other forms of proof.”

This fall, prosecutors named Drummond’s Colombian subsidiary as a “civilly responsible third party” in the case of the union leaders’ murders.

Though its Colombian subsidiary is now in the crosshairs of prosecutors, Drummond has had more success against Collingsworth in the United States.

In 2015, Drummond filed a civil RICO suit charging that Collingsworth had bribed El Tigre, Blanco, and other witnesses to falsely testify that Drummond was involved in the murders, as part of a racketeering conspiracy to strong-arm the coal producer into paying a hefty settlement. The company pointed to inconsistencies in their testimonies, noting previous statements in which they denied that Drummond had worked with the paramilitaries before they became witnesses for Collingsworth.

The case, which focused on the undisclosed payments to witnesses, was heard by a federal judge who had ruled in Drummond’s favor in earlier litigation with Collingsworth, Judge R. David Proctor of the Northern District of Alabama.

Collingsworth said in court filings that the omissions were an “inadvertent disclosure error” resulting from miscommunication with his co-counsel in Colombia. He said he had failed to include the payments in an initial disclosure and then recycled his answer repeatedly before realizing his error. He also apologized to the judge for making a “terrible mistake” in not revealing his arrangement with Blanco, which he had previously deemed to be outside the scope of required disclosures.

“Sitting here now, boy, I wish I had just disclosed it,” Collingsworth said in a phone interview. “Because it wasn’t hiding the truth or changing the testimony.”

The real question, Collingsworth said, is whether the payments to the witnesses in Colombia were ethical and necessary for their safety. The security arrangements were needed for them to testify truthfully without endangering their families, he said, noting that he reviewed all arrangements in advance with ethics lawyers and turned down witnesses who sought to exchange testimony for cash. He fiercely defends his decision to help relocate the families of former paramilitaries and submitted testimony supporting the need for security payments by expert witnesses including Javier Peña, the former Drug Enforcement Administration agent who led the mission that killed cartel leader Pablo Escobar and inspired the Netflix series “Narcos.”

“It was morally necessary to protect these families from one of the most brutal groups that roamed the earth,” Collingsworth said.

In December 2015, Proctor ruled that Drummond’s RICO case could go forward, finding that Collingsworth’s explanation for the undisclosed payments was “as weak as it is incredible.” He held that there was probable cause to believe that Collingsworth had bribed witnesses and suborned perjury, opening the door to the extensive discovery process that Chevron had effectively used against Donziger.

It was the beginning of years of legal wrangling that Collingsworth said drained the resources of his small human rights firm.

Collingsworth said he has spent some 2,000 hours — what a lawyer usually bills in a year — defending against Drummond’s charges. Even more damaging, he said, has been the impact on his professional reputation, which he says has deprived him of business opportunities and revenue.

“I have had colleagues who are in law firms tell me that they can’t collaborate with me until these charges are completely resolved in my favor, because they don’t want to be accused of associating with someone who bribes witnesses,” Collingsworth said.

Steinhardt, the human rights law professor, said the facts of the case aren’t black and white, but the charges against Collingsworth are disproportionate. “He isn’t a racketeer,” Steinhardt said.

A Chilling Effect

The success of these cases paved the way for increasingly aggressive uses of civil RICO.

Around 2012, Greenpeace and other environmental groups launched a protest campaign against Resolute Forest Products, accusing the forestry company of destroying boreal forests in Canada. Several years later, Greenpeace and others began another campaign targeting Energy Transfer Partners (now part of Energy Transfer LP), the company behind the Dakota Access pipeline. This campaign charged, among other things, that the company was threatening Indigenous communities’ water supply and sacred sites. Greenpeace and its allies rallied their members, drove media coverage, and urged the companies’ business partners to sever ties unless the companies changed course.

The two companies filed RICO charges against Greenpeace and the other groups in 2016 and 2017. Both were represented by the firm Kasowitz Benson Torres, whose founding partner Marc Kasowitz was a longtime personal attorney for Donald Trump and filed a defamation case against one of Trump’s critics. (First Look Institute, the nonprofit that publishes The Intercept, is involved in litigation with Energy Transfer, represented by the Kasowitz firm, over records related to the Dakota Access pipeline.)

Michael Bowe, the former Kasowitz partner who brought the RICO cases, told Bloomberg in August 2017 that he was in contact with other companies considering similar actions and “would be shocked if there are not many more.” He anticipates an increase in these actions, he wrote in response to questions from Type and The Intercept, because “the online nature of activism and speech generally makes it easier and more common to widely disseminate false claims and inflict great harm.”

“The claims against Greenpeace and others are … essentially saying, ‘Your activism is racketeering.’”

The cases against Greenpeace took the RICO strategy well beyond the arguments made by Chevron and Drummond. They argued that common advocacy techniques such as naming-and-shaming campaigns and fundraising amounted to RICO offenses if the campaigns included false allegations. Greenpeace’s campaign against Resolute included an inaccurate claim that Resolute had logged in protected forests, which Greenpeace later retracted, saying it had made a mistake. Resolute accused Greenpeace of intentionally fabricating the claim in order to extort the company, calling the organization a “global fraud” that existed to maximize donations rather than protect the environment.

“The claims against Donziger aren’t claims against environmentalism as it operates,” said Joshua Galperin, an environmental law professor at Pace Law School. “But the claims against Greenpeace and others are much more broad, essentially saying, ‘Your activism is racketeering.’”

Bowe disputed this characterization. “The case is not about activism, it is about lies,” he wrote. “Legitimate activism is truthful.”

Krystal Two Bulls, an organizer who participated in the Standing Rock protests against the Dakota Access pipeline, was added as a defendant in the racketeering suit brought by Energy Transfer in 2018, after a judge found that the initial complaint was too vague to support RICO claims. The company charged that Two Bulls, a media liaison for a group of protesters called Red Warrior Camp, had sought to “provide cover for their illegal activities” by issuing public calls to action on the group’s behalf. They accused Red Warrior Camp of being a “front for eco-terrorists” who engaged in violent attacks on construction sites. News reports state that while members of the camp occupied private land to block pipeline construction, police and security guards carried out much of the violence — using water hoses, rubber bullets, and tear gas against protesters.

Two Bulls, a U.S. Army veteran and a member of the Oglala Lakota and Northern Cheyenne, was shocked when she learned she had been charged with racketeering.

“I remember thinking, what am I supposed to do with this?” she said. “I have no lawyer. I have no money for a lawyer.”

“I started to censor myself.”

Two Bulls was represented pro bono by the nonprofit law firms Center for Constitutional Rights and EarthRights International. She considers herself lucky that colleagues in the environmental movement connected her with these lawyers but recalls a heavy weight on her shoulders while the charges were pending. She felt like her presence was a liability to her fellow activists.

“It made me second guess myself and the spaces I entered,” Two Bulls said. “I started to censor myself in the things I was saying.”

Laura Lee Prather, a partner at Haynes Boone who specializes in First Amendment law, said civil RICO claims often lead to extended litigation because they depend heavily on the facts of the case. Defamation charges can be thrown out if the defendant can affirmatively show their statements were true. By contrast, a civil RICO claim usually requires a more complex defense.

“Civil RICO is much more difficult to have a court feel comfortable dismissing at any early stage,” Prather said.

Federal judges in California and North Dakota dismissed the RICO claims in both cases almost a year and a half after they were filed. In the Resolute case, the judge ruled that the company failed to prove that Greenpeace’s fundraising claims had directly caused the alleged harm it suffered. He later ordered the company to pay more than $800,000 of Greenpeace’s legal costs.

Resolute noted that other charges it has brought against Greenpeace, alleging defamation and unfair competition, were allowed to proceed and are still before the courts. “The long-running dispute with activists has been about standing up for our communities to defend our sustainable practices against misrepresentation,” Resolute spokesperson Seth Kursman said in a statement.

In the case of Energy Transfer, the judge ruled that the company failed to prove that the various actors involved in the Standing Rock protests were a coordinated “RICO enterprise.”

“While there is a common purpose among defendants — they all oppose the Dakota Access Pipeline — there is no ongoing organization, no continuing unit, and no ascertainable structure apart from the alleged RICO violations,” U.S. District Judge Billy Roy Wilson wrote in February 2019. “That is far short of what is needed to establish a RICO enterprise.”

Energy Transfer did not respond to email or telephone inquiries. A week after its RICO charges were dismissed, the company filed charges in North Dakota state court, accusing Greenpeace, Two Bulls, and others of trespass, defamation, and civil conspiracy for their role in the Standing Rock protests. The litigation is ongoing.

Protecting the Protest

The RICO attacks on Greenpeace and its allies alarmed civil society organizations, which feared that the cases would deter advocacy groups from speaking out against big corporations. In 2018, a coalition of organizations founded Protect the Protest to combat lawsuits meant to silence free speech, which are known as strategic lawsuits against public participation, or SLAPPs. These lawsuits can include RICO claims but have also proliferated in other ways. Telltale signs of a SLAPP, according to the coalition, are claims that target activities protected by the First Amendment, seek to exploit a power imbalance, and threaten to bankrupt defendants.

“Civil society is not just going to lay down and take this,” said Marco Simons, the general counsel for EarthRights International and a member of the coalition.

Simons believes the coalition’s recent work calling attention to the Greenpeace lawsuits has, for the time being, discouraged companies from attempting more RICO suits that broadly target activism. But Protect the Protest is still seeking more permanent solutions.

The coalition aims to crack down on these suits by promoting anti-SLAPP laws, which provide fast-track procedures for dismissing SLAPPs and shifting their legal costs to the party that filed them. More than half of U.S. states have some version of an anti-SLAPP law.

Ken White, the former prosecutor, said that state anti-SLAPP laws have been highly effective, both in deterring abusive lawsuits and providing a defense mechanism for their targets. But RICO is a federal law.

In September, Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., introduced the SLAPP Protection Act of 2022 , a federal bill that, like the state laws, would provide an expedited process for getting SLAPPs thrown out. Raskin singled out the fossil fuel industry for abusing the “legal system by deploying costly, protracted, and meritless lawsuits to target activists.”

A law providing a uniform standard for dismissing such lawsuits across federal courts would make it “much harder to abuse the system,” White said.

As advocates search for solutions, Drummond is pressing ahead with its RICO case against Collingsworth. The company subpoenaed VICE Media last year for raw audio recordings from a podcast about the union leaders’ murders. On March 7, Proctor, the judge, ruled in Drummond’s favor, ordering VICE to turn over recordings of its interviews with Collingsworth, Blanco, and another witness.

Collingsworth said that he doesn’t fear losing in court, but the looming racketeering charges have taken a toll psychologically.

“There is a question mark over my name.”

“It has caused me emotional turmoil because some people view me differently,” he said. “There is a question mark over my name.”

The coming months are expected to bring new developments in his legal battle with the coal company. Attorneys will take depositions from witnesses in Colombia for Drummond’s RICO suit and a more recent suit brought by Collingsworth. Meanwhile, Colombian prosecutors have resumed work in their case against the current and former presidents of Drummond’s Colombian subsidiary, seeking testimony from a former paramilitary leader in October. The defendants have appealed the decision to charge them with conspiring in Orcasita’s and Locarno’s murders, and the appeal must be decided before the case can go to trial, according to Ivan Otero, Collingsworth’s co-counsel in Colombia.

More than 21 years after her husband’s murder, Elisa Orcasita is still skeptical of Colombian justice but is hoping for a clean trial.

“We pray to God that there’s no more buying of anything, no more influence of anything,” she said. “That’s what we hope for as victims.”

This story was produced with support from the Fund for Constitutional Government and the H.D. Lloyd Fund for Investigative Journalism.

The post The Scorched-Earth Legal Strategy Corporations Are Using to Silence Their Critics appeared first on The Intercept .

F ilipe tem 29 anos. Era o “bebê que todo mundo queria” em um orfanato de Lisboa, em Portugal, onde foi adotado aos 3 anos, e passou a infância tranquila na Inglaterra. Foi na adolescência, ele diz, que começaram os problemas com a família adotiva. Filipe se recusava a seguir os passos dos pais, religiosos. Vivendo entre Belize, Brasil e Estados Unidos, afirma ter sido expulso de casa três vezes, chegando a morar na rua e dormir escondido em garagens em Dallas, no Texas. Estudou até o ensino médio e aprendeu a trabalhar como editor de vídeos.

Entre os períodos de acolhimento e expulsão, Filipe teve empregos em emissoras de TV, sempre com salários modestos. No Brasil, em 2016, conta que ganhava R$ 2 mil ao mês. Já nos EUA, recebia 2 mil dólares por mês, até ser demitido recentemente. Com a mulher e a filha de 8 anos, Filipe hoje vive em Houston, onde trabalha como motorista. “Dá para ver que meus pais não estão nem aí [para mim]. Não vou forçar os meus pais a gostarem de quem eles não gostam. Eu deixo quieto”, lamentou o jovem, com um português ainda um tanto claudicante, misturando palavras do espanhol e inglês.

O relato de Filipe seria uma história comum, não fosse ele parente de quem é. Seu nome completo: Filipe Bezerra Cardoso, neto do poderoso bispo Edir Macedo Bezerra. Fundador da Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus, hoje o avô é um bilionário que ainda comanda no Brasil uma rede de televisão, um banco e um partido político, além de ter sob o seu domínio templos espalhados por mais de 95 países e várias empresas, como corretora, seguradora, locadora de automóveis, serviços de segurança e vigilância, hospital e plano de saúde.

Filipe é filho de Cristiane, a primogênita de Edir Macedo, e do bispo Renato Cardoso, hoje o principal herdeiro do império da Universal e o segundo nome na hierarquia da instituição religiosa. Cardoso e Cristiane são autores de best-sellers, como “Casamento Blindado”, e protagonizam programas religiosos na TV Record. Apresentam na emissora de Macedo o programa “The Love School” [A Escola do Amor, em tradução livre], no qual dão conselhos sobre relacionamentos.

“Eles pregam tanto sobre família, união, esposa, filho, cuidar, orar, estar sempre presente. Mas e o próprio filho, cara? O próprio filho, eles ignoram. Agem assim: ‘Vai embora, você está sendo demitido. Não há nada que a gente possa fazer’”, reclamou Filipe.

O relacionamento do rapaz com os pais adotivos começou “a esfriar”, como afirmou, em razão de ele não desejar ser pastor e seguir os passos dos pais adotivos. Ele queria ter uma vida comum, sair, passear e se relacionar com amigos fora da igreja. “Meus pais sempre tiveram essa ideia. Mamãe já disse isso em reunião: ‘Eu quero que o meu filho seja pastor’. E tinha tudo planejado. Ela disse ter tido um sonho de que, aos 12 anos, eu seria obreiro. Com 17, seria pastor. E ia casar novo com uma filha de pastor. Mas o meu chamado não foi para ser pastor”, defende. “Ser pastor não é para todo o mundo. Eu não quis ser. Porque eu não ia ter a liberdade que tenho hoje”.

Filipe foi uma das crianças adotadas pela família de Macedo e pela cúpula da Universal nos anos 1990 em um esquema que chegou a ser denunciado ao Ministério Público de Portugal por, supostamente, não cumprir os devidos trâmites legais. As denúncias foram arquivadas, mas os dramas familiares vividos por alguns desses filhos persistem.

Ao Intercept , o neto de Edir Macedo contou sua história pela primeira vez, em um relato que mostra como se confundem as relações da família com a Igreja, presente e influente em vários países do mundo. “Acho que não tem nada a ver o fato de eu ter sido adotado. Mudaram o comportamento comigo porque eu não quis realizar os sonhos deles. Quando viram que eu não ia ser o que desejavam, tudo mudou. ‘Então, você faz o seu caminho’. Enquanto eu fazia o que queriam, foram bonzinhos. Quando eu quis ter minha vida, disseram: ‘Pode ir embora’”.

Bebê Cerelac

N o final de 1996, uma fotografia de Filipe chegou às mãos de Cristiane Cardoso. A filha de Edir Macedo não conseguia engravidar. No orfanato em Portugal onde vivia, controlado pelo estado mas gerido em parceria com a Universal, Filipe era considerado por todos como um “bebê Cerelac”. É o mesmo que “bebê Johnson” no Brasil – Cerelac é uma marca de cereal instantâneo produzida pela Nestlé. “Era um bebê que toda a gente queria. Era lindo, de olho azul, loirinho, muito mimoso, muito dengoso”, contou à emissora portuguesa TVI uma jovem chamada Rita, na época uma criança que vivia no orfanato. Cristiane decidiu adotar o menino.

Filipe tinha um irmão, Pedro Alexandre, de 6 anos. A mãe dos meninos, Clara , era vítima de violência doméstica. O marido, usuário de drogas, mantinha-a presa, amarrada com cordas, e a obrigava a se drogar, segundo reportagens veiculadas na TV  portuguesa. Clara enfim conseguiu fugir de casa. Enquanto passava por um tratamento de desintoxicação, deixou os filhos com sua mãe, que os entregou ao abrigo sem seu consentimento.

Três meses depois de conhecer Filipe, a filha de Macedo levou o menino para Londres. Os irmãos foram separados. Pedro acabou adotado pela diretora do lar, Jaqueline Duran, e seu marido, o também bispo da Universal Sidney Marques.

À época, Macedo recomendava a prática da vasectomia, segundo relatos e denúncias de dezenas de ex-pastores no Brasil e Angola, e também uma política de adoção de crianças entre os bispos e pastores. Essas práticas teriam sido disseminadas, de acordo com denúncias da imprensa, para impedir que pastores se fixassem em uma cidade por causa dos filhos e por gerar menos despesas para a igreja com a manutenção dos religiosos.

A outra filha de Edir Macedo, Viviane, casada com o bispo Júlio Freitas, também optou pela adoção no mesmo orfanato em Portugal, e ela e a irmã foram seguidas por outros religiosos da Universal. Viviane adotou os irmãos Vera, de 3 anos, e Luís, de 2. Um outro irmão dos dois, Fábio, então com 9 meses, foi adotado pelo bispo Romualdo Panceiro. Essas três crianças, no entanto, ficaram oficialmente sob a guarda de Maria Alice Andrade Katz, uma americana que vivia em Portugal e era secretária do bispo Edir Macedo, segundo Filipe.

A infância e parte da adolescência Filipe viveu em Londres. Em 2007, foi para Houston, nos Estados Unidos, com o pai e a mãe. Em 2011, veio para o Brasil. Havia passado a morar em São Paulo com o então poderoso bispo Romualdo Panceiro – à época o segundo nome no comando da Universal, e que depois romperia com Edir Macedo –, na catedral João Dias, em Santo Amaro, zona sul paulistana.

Nesse período, Filipe trabalhava como técnico de áudio na rádio São Paulo, de propriedade da Universal. Depois de 11 meses no Brasil, no entanto, relata ter sido expulso de casa pela primeira vez. Seu pai, conta, havia determinado que fosse enviado aos EUA para que se afastasse de suas amizades de fora da igreja.

O então adolescente passou a morar com um pastor em Dallas, no Texas. Não deu certo. “Tinha muita restrição. Quando cheguei lá, ele falou que eu tinha de trabalhar. Achei um emprego em uma loja de roupas famosa. Saí lá da casa porque o pastor sempre ficava em cima. Pelo fato de meu pai ser quem é, mesmo se eu não fizesse nada de errado, sempre estavam em cima de mim. E eu não gosto disso. Já falei para vários pastores que sou um membro qualquer. Esqueçam que eu sou filho do Renato. Sou o Filipe, ser humano. Me tratem como qualquer outro”, ele contou ao Intercept.

Seu pai, relata, orientou o pastor para mandá-lo embora. Filipe conta que passou a morar na rua. Durante sete dias, dormiu escondido nas garagens de residências, costumeiramente abertas nos Estados Unidos. “Eu tinha emprego, só que não tinha dinheiro para alugar um apartamento, nem pagar hotel”, contou. “Se uma pessoa me achasse ali, ela chamava a polícia. Então, eu ficava alerta. Abria o olho, fechava o olho e aí, quando era de manhã, eu ia embora e usava o banheiro do local onde eu trabalhava. Nesse tempo todo, meu pai nunca me ligou para saber como eu estava”. Viveu assim, na rua, até arranjar uma namorada e se alojar na casa dela.

Depois, Filipe acabou fazendo as pazes com a família adotiva. No ano seguinte, foi trabalhar em Belize, na América Central, em uma TV ligada à igreja. No final de 2013, aos 20 anos, conheceu na internet a sua mulher Julianni, que tinha apenas 14 anos na época. Voltou para o Brasil e foi morar com a família dela em Barra Mansa, no interior do Rio, e mais tarde em Campos de Goytacazes, no mesmo estado. Em Campos, conseguiu um emprego na Record local.

‘Quando acordei, meu pai falou: ‘Pega suas coisas e vai embora’’.

Foi convencido a voltar a viver com a família adotiva em São Paulo e passou a morar no Templo de Salomão, a imponente sede da Universal. Mas diz que acabou mandado para a rua novamente por ter saído à noite com amigos sem avisar o pai. “Era muito difícil eu poder sair sem autorização do pai e da mãe. E eu queria ir ao shopping, ao cinema, ir almoçar. E uma noite saí com filhos de outros bispos e pastores. Não deu 20 minutos que havíamos estacionado o carro, e chegou a segurança do Templo de Salomão e recolheu os carros e a gente, e nos levou de volta. Não falaram nada, não teve discussão. Parecia que a gente era prisioneiro foragido”, relatou Filipe.

“Aí, eu fui dormir. Quando acordei, meu pai falou: ‘Pega suas coisas e vai embora’. Podiam ter me dado uma semana para eu me programar e ver para onde ia. Podiam ter me dado duas semanas para arrumar um emprego, mas não. Eu nunca fui de debater, de chorar. Eu falei: ‘Está bom, eu vou, não tem problema’”, afirmou Filipe. “Eles sabem que eu tenho filho, tenho esposa. Mas me mandaram embora”.

Segundo ele, seus pais adotivos também nunca aceitaram o casamento com Julianni e a filha que tiveram. “É a única filha que eu tenho. Eu quero ficar perto dela. Eles diziam que eu ia achar outra [mulher]. Colocavam outras meninas na minha frente para eu namorar. Mas eu nunca quis”.

Julianni revelou ao Intercept ainda que, quando estava grávida, Renato teria sugerido a Filipe para “orar para Deus levar esse bebê”. Ela enviou ao Intercept uma troca de mensagens na qual o marido fez essa revelação, num momento em que ele estava com os pais adotivos em São Paulo, e ela com os seus familiares no interior do Rio de Janeiro.

“Quando eu cheguei aqui meu pai falava cada coisa pra eu mudar a ideia sobre você. Ele até falou pra eu orar pra Deus levar esse bebê. Mas sabendo que meu bebê tá aí dentro, não posso fazer isso. Eu esperei minha vida toda pra ter um nenê. E agora que tenho com uma pessoa que eu amo, jamais vou fazer essa oração. Jamais pediria a Jesus pra matar meu próprio filho”, escreveu Filipe à época.

Como muitos bispos e pastores da Igreja Universal, Filipe fez vasectomia depois de já ter tido a filha Isabelle. “Minha mãe fez eu fazer vasectomia. Ela não queria ter neto, né? Eu falei ‘está bem’, mas hoje me arrependo”. Hoje, há centenas de ações na justiça de ex-pastores contra a Universal por conta da imposição da vasectomia, tanto no Brasil como em países da África, como Angola e Moçambique. O bispo brasileiro da Universal Honorilton Gonçalves chegou a ser condenado em Angola a três anos de prisão por impor a cirurgia a pastores, mas teve a pena suspensa.

O segredo dos deuses

E m 2017, a emissora de TV portuguesa TVI exibiu a série de reportagens “O Segredo dos Deuses”, que apontava uma suposta rede ilegal de adoções mantida pela Igreja Universal. Segundo as denúncias, as filhas de Macedo e outros bispos teriam adotado crianças sem seguir os procedimentos corretos determinados pela justiça.

Mães em dificuldades deixavam seus filhos sob cuidados do abrigo com a intenção de reavê-los quando superassem problemas financeiros e familiares. As mães eram descritas quase sempre como viciadas em drogas, soropositivas e vítimas de violências. Segundo as reportagens, as crianças eram adotadas sem o consentimento dos parentes e até retiradas à força das famílias. A Universal nega as acusações.

O Ministério Público português, ao final das investigações , concluiu que eventuais crimes estavam prescritos e não apontou possíveis responsáveis por atos ilegais. Advogados dos pais biológicos das crianças, autores das denúncias, contestaram a decisão , mas o caso foi arquivado em maio de 2019.

Filipe Cardoso era uma dessas crianças. Na época das reportagens, ele mesmo, já adulto, entrou com uma ação contra a jornalista Alexandra Borges, responsável pela série da TV portuguesa, afirmando que a profissional teria “tentado suborná-lo” para conseguir seu depoimento. Segundo ele, ela teria lhe prometido um emprego. O Ministério Público português arquivou a ação , afirmando não haver comprovação da denúncia.

“Eu fiquei sabendo do caso das adoções porque os advogados da igreja entraram em contato com a gente, querendo representar. Tinha que assinar. Sobre a ação contra a jornalista, eu comentei com os meus pais o que aconteceu e eles que decidiram. Só fiquei sabendo de tudo depois. Se as denúncias sobre as adoções eram verdade ou não, não sei, pois eu tinha 3 anos e não lembro de nada”, explicou Filipe.

Quando a TVI passou a exibir a série de reportagens, Filipe estava no Brasil. E me disse ter sido orientado pelo pai, Renato Cardoso, a retornar imediatamente aos Estados Unidos. A ideia era evitar que fosse encontrado por jornalistas, para não ter de falar sobre as adoções por religiosos da igreja em Portugal.

“Quando meus pais ligam é para saber alguma coisa de mim, que ouviram dizer. É sempre um problema para eles e aí ligam. E eu não estou sabendo de nada”, desabafou o jovem. “Sempre que meus pais acharam que ia dar um problema para eles, deram um jeito rápido de me despedir, de mandar embora”.

Após as denúncias da emissora portuguesa, em 2018, Filipe conheceu seus pais biológicos em Portugal. Pedro, o pai, morreu no dia 24 de outubro deste ano, dois dias antes de Filipe ser demitido da ULFN, a TV da Universal nos Estados Unidos. O pai biológico tinha uma loja em Lisboa, que quebrou na pandemia. Recentemente, fazia entregas. A mãe é empregada doméstica.

“Fui a Portugal e os conheci, e também as minhas irmãs, primas e tios. Eu conheci todos via TVI, basicamente. Meus pais biológicos não tocaram no assunto adoção. Eles tinham uma vida muito difícil. Moravam fora de casa. Eram usuários de drogas”, disse o rapaz. “Eles tinham muito mais preocupação comigo do que meus pais adotivos. Tenho contato com minha mãe biológica. Sempre tive o carinho deles. Da parte dos pais adotivos, já é muito difícil”.

Tragédias e adoção à brasileira

A decisão de adotar crianças no orfanato em Portugal também resultou em tragédias e problemas em outras famílias de religiosos. O menino Fábio, adotado ainda bebê pelo bispo Romualdo Panceiro, teve uma adolescência conturbada e fugiu de casa. Em 2015, foi encontrado morto em um hotel em Nova York. A mãe adotiva viajou para reconhecer o corpo e disse que ele morreu de overdose. A Universal e a família Panceiro negaram. Afirmaram que o jovem morreu em consequência de um ataque cardíaco.

Filipe conheceu Fábio, em um contato rápido, mas intenso, em 2015.

“Em 2015 ele foi visitar o Brasil com o bispo Romualdo, que tomava conta da igreja nos Estados Unidos. Eu não o conhecia antes disso. Só tinha ouvido falar do nome dele. Mas nos conhecemos e nos damos super bem. Eu o levei para jantar, o levei ao cinema. Fomos jogar uma partida de paintball (esporte de combate). Era o cara  mais honesto e mais legal que se pode conhecer”, contou.

Na época, Filipe morava no templo, e Fábio em um apartamento da igreja, em frente à sede no bairro do Brás. “Ele era igual a mim, não queria ser pastor. Todo o dia depois do meu trabalho a gente saía. Eu ia ao apartamento dele, e jogávamos pingue-pongue. Ficávamos horas lá conversando. No dia em que ele foi embora, trocamos número de telefone, nos abraçamos e ele foi para os Estados Unidos”.

Fábio também foi mandado embora de casa. No dia em que morreu, havia enviado uma mensagem ao neto de Edir Macedo. “Fiquei sabendo por um bispo que meu avô não gostou do fato de que Fábio tinha um histórico com drogas e mandou o bispo Romualdo colocá-lo fora de casa. Isso deixou o bispo e sua esposa muito depressivos, porque eles amavam o filho”, contou Filipe. “O que aconteceu? O Fábio não tinha para onde ir, não tinha o que fazer. Infelizmente voltou para a vida de droga. No dia em que morreu me mandou uma mensagem. Fui a última pessoa a falar com ele. Ele enviou um áudio, que infelizmente não tenho mais. Ele falou: ‘Filipe, agradeço sua amizade, quando vier a Los Angeles me avise. Te amo e tal’. No dia seguinte acordei, e minha mãe falou que ele morreu de overdose”, contou.

‘Foi o senhor que mandou a gente adotar. Nós não queríamos, mas o senhor falou que deveríamos adotar’.

Em julho de 2020, o bispo Romualdo Panceiro já havia relatado a mesma história em um vídeo divulgado nas redes sociais ao responder a um ataque de Edir Macedo que chamou a nova igreja aberta pelo ex-aliado, Igreja das Nações do Reino de Deus, de “botequim”. Panceiro disse que Macedo o obrigou a mandar Fábio embora, e que o rapaz morreu no mesmo dia em que implorou perdão ao fundador da Universal, sem ser atendido.

“O senhor lembra o dia em que meu filho morreu? O senhor deu ordem para tirar ele de casa, mesmo ele ligando para o senhor, e eu estava do lado, implorando perdão. O senhor disse: ‘eu não te perdoo’. O senhor lembra? Naquela mesma noite, ele morreu. O senhor nunca ligou pra falar: ‘Romualdo, o senhor me desculpe. Eu errei’”, relatou o ex-aliado de Macedo.

Panceiro culpou Macedo por todos os problemas ocorridos nos casos de adoção em Portugal. “Foi o senhor que mandou a gente adotar. Nós não queríamos, mas o senhor falou que deveríamos adotar. E o senhor sabe que todos os problemas que aconteceram foram por conta da clara direção do senhor. Eu nunca reclamei para ninguém sobre isso. Mas todos os bispos sabem”, afirmou o ex-aliado na gravação.

De acordo com uma denúncia publicada em fevereiro de 2018  no Blog do Pannunzio, do jornalista Fábio Pannunzio, o garoto Fábio havia saído de Portugal para viver com Panceiro – inicialmente nos Estados Unidos –, mas fora registrado, em 28 de maio de 1998, em um cartório em Biritiba-Mirim, na Grande São Paulo, como se fosse filho natural do bispo e de sua mulher, com o nome oficial de Felipe Barbosa Panceiro. Esse artifício é costumeiramente chamado de “adoção à brasileira”.

O próprio Edir Macedo também teria recorrido ao que se convencionou chamar de “adoção à brasileira”, segundo o mesmo Blog do Pannunzio, ao registrar como seu filho natural um bebê que recebeu da mãe biológica, em 1995, enquanto celebrava um culto no templo da Universal no bairro da Abolição, no Rio. Macedo descreveu a entrega desse bebê a ele em sua própria biografia oficial.

O Blog de Pannunzio e a TVI portuguesa exibiram uma certidão de nascimento na qual constava que, em 4 de dezembro de 1995, Edir Macedo teria comparecido ao 11ºo. Cartório de Registro Civil do Rio de Janeiro, no bairro de Pilares, e declarado o nascimento de Moysés Rangel Bezerra, bebê do sexo masculino, como filho dele e de sua mulher, Ester Rangel Bezerra, nascido no dia 14 de novembro de 1985, no Hospital Padre Olivério Kraemer, no Rio de Janeiro.

Outro ex-bispo da Universal, Alfredo Paulo Filho, que foi responsável pela Universal em Portugal entre 2002 e 2009, viveu uma tragédia na pacata aldeia de Paio Pires, no Seixal, nos arredores de Lisboa, em novembro de 2020. O seu filho Lucas Paulo, adotado quando tinha 6 anos no Brasil, matou a mãe, Teresa Paulo, com 20 facadas nas costas, pescoço, tórax e braços. Lucas também havia sido pastor da Universal. Por acaso, ele apareceu nas reportagens da TVI, em 2017, falando sobre as adoções dos jovens Filipe, Luís, Vera e Fábio.

Na ocasião do assassinato, vazou um um áudio de Edir Macedo em uma reunião com bispos afirmando que o diabo “tem o direito de tirar a vida” de “quem vive no adultério e no pecado”. Macedo não citou nomes, mas tudo indicava que ele se referia à tragédia familiar vivida por Alfredo Paulo, um ex-aliado que se transformou em um de seus maiores inimigos. “Hoje, ele está colhendo frutos. Eu não estou condenando ninguém. Ele está se condenando. O que você planta hoje, vai colher amanhã”, afirmou Macedo na reunião.

Filipe só soube ou teve contato com os primos Luís e Vera e com Fábio, adotado por Panceiro, quando morou em São Paulo em 2015. Luís se tornou pastor e hoje vive no México. “Nunca encaixou o meu relacionamento com ele, como foi com o Fábio. O Luís era mais crente, está casado e na igreja”, disse Filipe. Vera voltou para Portugal depois de conhecer sua família biológica e “nem gosta de falar com ninguém da igreja, é muito reservada, não quis mais saber de nada e tem contato zero com os pais adotivos”, segundo Filipe.

A demissão

H oje, Filipe não tem contato com o avô. “Ele nunca me ligou. E eu nunca liguei para ele. Meus pais nunca me deram o contato. Mas meu avô é um cara carinhoso. Foi muito carinhoso comigo quando convivi com ele. Minha avó [Ester Bezerra, esposa de Macedo] também era ultracarinhosa, e eu contava com ela para tudo que eu precisasse. O meu avô, eu o via sempre no escritório dele. A gente sentava lá, conversava, e ele me dava orientação”, recordou.

“Acho que se eu pedisse uma ajuda para o meu avô, ele daria. Mas meus pais não querem”, afirmou. “Meu avô trouxe um presente para mim do Brasil quando eu já vivia no exterior. Ele dizia que eu era o neto preferido dele”.

Ao trabalhar na igreja e na americana ULFN, na Califórnia, em 2020, durante a pandemia de covid-19, Filipe revelou ter tido problemas com bispos e pastores, porque teria denunciado coisas que julgava erradas, como religiosos que traíam as esposas ou que não tinham qualquer preparo para assumir determinadas funções na TV.

“Nunca deram cargo para alguém que tivesse formação. Sempre colocaram bispos e pastores sem preparo para assumir funções. E olhe que na Califórnia, onde fica Hollywood, o que não falta são faculdades com cursos de cinema, vídeo, edição. É a terra da produção. Tem muitos jovens que precisam de oportunidade para começar, mas eles preferem dar funções para pastor ou para imigrantes, porque é mais barato pagá-los”, acusa Filipe. Segundo ele, o presidente da emissora era contra a prática, mas eram os bispos e pastores que mandavam. “Ele conhece a lei, mas a igreja fazia isso para economizar. E tinham os bispos e pastores que acabavam se envolvendo com profissionais mulheres contratadas para trabalhar na TV. Isso sempre aconteceu”, revelou.

Em razão das críticas, segundo ele, acabou acusado por um pastor de vender drogas quando trabalhou na TV. “Eu disse para o bispo: ‘Será que eu seria doido de vender droga aqui dentro?’. Mas ninguém acreditava em mim. Acreditavam mais no pastor”. Filipe, assim, seria mais uma vez removido de posto, desta vez da Califórnia, retornando para o Texas, onde passou a maior parte de sua juventude.

Nos últimos meses,  já em Houston, o neto de Edir Macedo reclamou de cortes feitos em seu salário. Não concordava com descontos de ausência ao trabalho por motivos que considera justificáveis, como, por exemplo, levar ao médico sua mulher, que não fala inglês. “Ele trabalhava igual a um escravo e não recebia pelos dias que ia. Já estava começando a faltar coisas em casa, a acumular contas”, afirmou Julianni.

A esposa enviou mensagens a Cristiane Cardoso reclamando. Disse ter esperado uns 15 dias, mas a mãe de Filipe “não resolveu”. Julianni decidiu reclamar por meio de postagens nas redes sociais. “Resolvi ir para a internet e soltar tudo de uma vez. Falei que não gostavam da minha filha. E falei para as pessoas irem no Instagram e cobrarem o Renato. Ele ligou ameaçando o Filipe. Demorou para pagar o que devia e depois o demitiu”, afirmou a companheira de Filipe. “Eles nunca pararam de humilhar a gente, de fazer maldades”, acusou Julianni.

O Intercept enviou perguntas à Universal sobre os fatos relatados por Filipe Bezerra Cardoso, mas a instituição não mandou respostas até o fechamento desta reportagem.

The post Neto de Edir Macedo afirma que morou na rua, foi expulso de casa e agora se diz abandonado pela família nos EUA appeared first on The Intercept .

S ão 22 quartos com vista para o mar em uma praia privativa. Um ginásio e três piscinas completam a área externa da mansão, localizada em Ilhabela, no litoral norte de São Paulo. Para chegar confortavelmente, há um heliponto. Os quartos superiores têm banheiras e todos são equipados com camas king size e televisão. A mansão espetacular, próxima à praia do Veloso, foi colocada à venda por R$ 25 milhões.

No papel, a propriedade está em nome de Vicente De Noce, empresário e economista, morto em abril do ano passado. A prefeitura de Ilhabela, no entanto, afirma que a mansão pertence ao Apóstolo Valdemiro Santiago, fundador da Igreja Mundial do Poder de Deus, segundo documentos enviados ao Intercept por um empresário que tem relação com a instituição.

Segundo a prefeitura, a mansão em Ilhabela é parte do patrimônio da Igreja Mundial do Poder de Deus. Valdemiro teria ocultado seus bens em nome de terceiros para evitar o pagamento de dívidas, me disse o empresário, cujo nome não será revelado para evitar represálias. Ele é um dos credores da igreja e está sem receber valores pelo aluguel e reforma de um grande templo da Mundial na Grande São Paulo. Segundo ele, a dívida, acumulada desde 2018, chega a R$ 5 milhões.

Foi a própria prefeitura de Ilhabela que apresentou provas que a mansão realmente pertence a Valdemiro. Essa informação está documentada em uma ação de execução fiscal movida, em 2015, para cobrar dívidas de IPTU atrasados do imóvel. Na ação, a prefeitura mostra que, até junho de 2021, os débitos com a administração municipal somavam R$ 2,7 milhões. Somente o IPTU de 2022, não incluído na conta, é de R$ 147 mil.

O imóvel também recebeu multa por danos ambientais, por ampliação irregular. A penalidade foi encaminhada à Igreja Mundial do Poder de Deus, classificada como “infratora”.

Ao executar a dívida , a prefeitura de Ilhabela registrou oficialmente que, de fato, “a atual proprietária do imóvel é a pessoa jurídica da Igreja Mundial do Poder de Deus”.

Em outro trecho do documento, o órgão municipal constatou “se tratar de imóvel de uso recreativo (veraneio) e pessoal do pastor Valdemiro Santiago, cujo patrimônio se confunde com o da própria Igreja Mundial do Poder de Deus”.

A partir disso, o município considerou “legítimo o direcionamento da obrigação tributária a quem efetivamente fique como possuidor do imóvel”. No dia 5 de setembro, a juíza Isabela Carolina Miranda Rodrigues, do Fórum de Ilhabela, pediu o bloqueio de bens da parte executada, pelo prazo de busca de 30 dias.

Um corretor da imobiliária de Ilhabela também confirmou, por áudio, que a mansão pertence a Valdemiro. O empresário que enviou a documentação ao Intercept disse ter estranhado a inclusão da propriedade nas conversas e negociações que teve com representantes da igreja para tentar receber seu aluguel atrasado, já que o imóvel teria um valor muito maior.

Além da mansão, um bispo da Igreja Mundial ofereceu ao credor um barco e um trio elétrico para liquidar as dívidas. O barco de Valdemiro que foi ofertado ao empresário leva o nome de Franciléia, a mulher do apóstolo. É avaliado em R$ 3,5 milhões, valor pelo qual foi colocado à venda no site de comércio eletrônico Mercado Livre.

Já o trio elétrico chamado Bradoque, que pertenceu à banda Chiclete com Banana e brilhou no carnaval da Bahia, foi estimado em R$ 2,5 milhões. O veículo ainda hoje anima eventos religiosos ao estilo da Marcha para Jesus e está em nome da empresa Interteve Serviços Ltda, ligada à Rede Mundial, grupo de comunicação ligado à Igreja Mundial.

A nova empreitada

C om seu inseparável chapelão de vaqueiro, voz rouca e o sotaque caipira inconfundível, o apóstolo Valdemiro Santiago tornou-se um pregador famoso e popular no Brasil a partir dos anos 1990. Em seus cultos, prometia até que pessoas com deficiência poderiam largar suas cadeiras de roda e voltarem a andar.

Cenas desse suposto milagre – não comprovado – foram exibidas exaustivamente durante a madrugada na TV para fiéis insones. Em 2020, Valdemiro pediu ofertas de R$ 1 mil aos fiéis em troca de grãos de feijão ungido que, segundo ele, curariam a covid-19. Ao chorar, enquanto pedia doações em seus cultos, o apóstolo virou meme nas redes sociais e se transformou num dos personagens preferidos de humoristas e imitadores.

O menino pobre nascido em Palma, zona da mata mineira, a 360 km de Belo Horizonte, perdeu a mãe aos 12 anos. Trabalhou na roça, foi pedreiro e morou na rua. Aos 16 anos, foi levado a um templo da Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus. Virou obreiro, pastor, depois um bispo carismático, do tipo que arrastava multidões. Foi um dos campeões na arrecadação de dízimos e ofertas na Universal, até se desligar em 1998 para montar a sua própria igreja. Nascia ali a Mundial do Poder de Deus – e Valdemiro tornou-se a partir daí um inimigo íntimo de Edir Macedo.

Para se vingar, o antigo líder usou sua emissora de televisão , a Record, em 2012, para mostrar que o apóstolo é um homem rico e poderoso, dono, à época, de uma fazenda no Mato Grosso, na região do Pantanal, avaliada em R$ 29 milhões, além de avião próprio e mais de cinco mil cabeças de gado.

As terras de Valdemiro “a perder de vista”, de acordo com a Record, seriam equivalentes naquele momento a 13,4 mil Maracanãs. As fazendas estavam em nome da empresa W.S. Music Ltda, de propriedade de Valdemiro e sua esposa, a bispa Franciléia de Oliveira.

Hoje, no entanto, a Igreja Mundial passa por uma enorme crise financeira .

Só no estado de São Paulo, a Mundial responde a cerca de 740 ações – quase todas por falta de pagamento. Um dos credores, durante reunião para tentar acordo, disse ter ouvido que a instituição estaria com as contas zeradas. Ainda segundo ele, os recursos vindos dos dízimos e ofertas estariam sendo transferidos para uma nova instituição religiosa, a Igreja Mundial Mais que Vencedores. Essa denúncia é feita também por ex-pastores em ações trabalhistas movidas na Justiça.

O apóstolo Valdemiro teria recorrido a esta manobra abrindo um novo CNPJ para evitar que a justiça confisque os valores depositados na conta da Mundial do Poder de Deus, em razão dos inúmeros processos por cobrança de dívidas.

A Igreja Mundial Mais que Vencedores informa ter como sede apenas uma sala – e não um templo – na rua Borges de Figueiredo, na Mooca, zona leste de São Paulo. Tem como presidente o bispo Jorge dos Reis Pinheiro, ex-deputado federal e cunhado de Valdemiro. O endereço eletrônico é o mesmo da Mundial do Poder de Deus. Na internet, não há informações sobre a existência de templos dessa instituição em funcionamento.

O empresário que falou ao Intercept chegou a encaminhar uma denúncia ao Ministério Público de São Paulo contra a igreja, arquivada por falta de provas. O empresário disse que não anexou os documentos à ação propositadamente por receio de torná-los públicos.

‘Pastores estão sem receber salários, mas o Valdemiro esbanja luxo em sua festa de aniversário’.

Em maio, a Justiça de São Paulo autorizou a penhora de 25% dos dízimos e ofertas da igreja para pagar dívidas de aluguéis atrasados. A juíza Ana Claudia Dabus nomeou um administrador judicial para ficar responsável pela arrecadação dos valores angariados nos templos, em dinheiro vivo, até atingir o valor de R$ 117 mil, o montante de uma dívida com proprietário de imóvel, na zona norte de São Paulo.

Na terça-feira, 29, a justiça penhorou também 50% de um apartamento de propriedade de Valdemiro na cidade de Rondonópolis, em Mato Grosso, avaliado em R$ 2 milhões. A penhora foi decidida pela juíza Beatriz Cabezas em processo movido por um outro proprietário de imóvel que cobra dívidas em aluguéis e IPTU da igreja, no total de R$ 360 mil. A juíza também disse, na sentença, haver indícios de que os bens da igreja se misturam com os do apóstolo. A defesa de Valdemiro contestou afirmando não haver “qualquer indício de fraude’ e que as acusações seriam “alegações falaciosas sem nenhuma respaldo na realidade”. Mas a Justiça não aceitou a argumentação.

Religiosos avaliam que a Mundial quebrou em razão de supostos desvios de dinheiro praticados por membros da própria instituição, que teriam lesado Valdemiro – segundo denúncias publicada na imprensa –, contratos milionários com emissoras de TV para a compra de horário e a investimentos equivocados na construção de grandes templos. A Mundial alega que o fechamento das igrejas, em 2020, devido à pandemia do coronavírus, provocou uma queda brusca em sua arrecadação.

Os credores da Mundial dizem que o apóstolo Valdemiro estaria hoje se beneficiando da alegada crise financeira e dos calotes para pedir mais ofertas e doações aos fiéis, a fim de que a sua instituição religiosa não feche e os seguidores não fiquem sem receber a pregação religiosa e o conforto espiritual. Mas os recursos obtidos com dízimos e ofertas estariam sendo transferidos para a Igreja Mundial Mais que Vencedores, que só existe no papel.

O ex-pastor Marcelo Roque, ex-Universal, disse em seu canal no Youtube , no início de novembro, que pastores da Mundial em Canoas, no Rio Grande do Sul, estariam sem receber salários há quatro meses. Roque costuma reproduzir em suas redes sociais relatos e denúncias de pastores, obreiros e fiéis de igrejas como a Universal e a Mundial. Segundo ele, proprietários estão pedindo de volta os imóveis onde estão instalados templos da Mundial devido a aluguéis atrasados e os pastores “passando fome e sendo despejados”.

“O dinheiro entra, mas está faltando para os pastores comerem e pagarem contas básicas. Pastores estão sem receber salários, mas o Valdemiro esbanja luxo em sua festa de aniversário”, afirmou Roque. “Valdemiro, cadê o dinheiro do dízimo? Cadê as ofertas”, perguntou.

O Intercept procurou a direção da Igreja Mundial, mas não conseguiu contato. Funcionários da igreja alegaram não ter alguém disponível para atender e disseram não poder fornecer um e-mail para que perguntas fossem encaminhadas à instituição religiosa. O Intercept também enviou os questionamentos ao deputado estadual Ricardo Arruda, do PL do Paraná, missionário ligado à igreja, que prometeu encaminhar o pedido à direção. Mas não houve retorno.

The post Mansão espetacular atolada em dívidas é de Apóstolo Valdemiro Santiago, diz prefeitura de Ilhabela appeared first on The Intercept .

It was 2002, and Justin Rose was on a losing streak. The 20-year-old South Boston native had washed out of the University of Maine after just one semester, held a string of terrible jobs, and had just gone through a bad breakup with a girlfriend. He was hawking cellphones at the Emerald Square Mall in North Attleboro, Massachusetts, when a Marine walked into his store. Rose went into his standard pitch but lost the sale. The Marine Corps recruiter did not. Three weeks later, Rose shipped out to the Marine Corps Recruit Depot in Parris Island, South Carolina, for basic training.

The war in Afghanistan was about to enter its third year, and the war in Iraq was looming on the horizon. “I’ll see you in a couple years,” Rose told his parents. He’d be on active duty, a rifleman, and probably see service overseas. At least that’s what the recruiter told him. “It turned out, I was actually a communications guy in the Marine Corps Reserves,” Rose recalled. “So I came home 13 weeks later.”

A few years would pass before Rose shipped out for his first deployment, arriving in October 2005 at Camp Lemonnier in the sun-bleached nation of Djibouti in the Horn of Africa. His unit had been cobbled together from Marines based, like him, in Massachusetts. The rest hailed from California and Kansas. One of those Midwestern Marines was Jase Derek Stanton.

As part of the Third Provisional Security Company, Rose and his fellow Marines manned the guard towers and entry control points for the largest American outpost on the African continent. They had only been in-country for about a month when one of the Marine reservists from Kansas got drunk, vomited several times, and passed out on the ground outside his quarters. The next thing that Marine recalled, according to a summary in court documents, was waking up to find his pants pulled down and Stanton on top of him, touching his penis. The Marine shoved Stanton away and returned to his own quarters, but didn’t report the assault. A few weeks later, he would wake up to find Stanton assaulting him again. This time, he reported it. But that didn’t stop Stanton, who was acquitted at court martial. And neither did the Marines.

On New Year’s Eve 2005, Justin Rose headed to Camp Lemonnier’s cantina for celebratory $2.50 beers with his fellow Marines before heading back to his “hooch” around 1:30 a.m. Sometime after daybreak, Rose woke up to find someone stroking his penis. Disoriented for a moment, he lept down from his raised bunk and gave chase as a man dressed in red dashed out of his quarters and into another tent. He found Stanton, dressed in red, feigning sleep in his bed; Rose was certain Stanton was the attacker. So Rose did what he had been trained to do. He went to his team leader, a young corporal, and reported the assault. The first question he heard was: “Are you sure you’re not making this up?”

Stigma and Shame

Serving in the U.S. armed forces is dangerous, especially for women. Despite being a minority, making up only 16.5 percent of the military, nearly 1 in 4 U.S. servicewomen reports being sexually assaulted — a rate far higher than that of men. Years of analysis of the issue, handwringing, and incremental reforms have failed to stem what has been called an “ epidemic .”

But sexual assault of men in the military is also widespread and vastly underreported . Each day, on average, more than 45 men in the armed forces are sexually assaulted, according to the latest Pentagon estimates . For women, it is 53 per day, according to a September 2022 Pentagon report that uses a new euphemism “unwanted sexual contact” as a “proxy measure for sexual assault.” Nearly 40 percent of veterans who report to the Department of Veterans Affairs, or VA, that they have experienced military sexual trauma, or MST — sexual assault or sexual harassment — are men.

Men, civilian or military, are less likely to report sexual assault, to identify experiences they have had as abusive, and to seek formal treatment for such harms. A 2018 study of active-duty, reserve, and National Guard personnel noted an overall lack of awareness of sexual assault of men in the military, an inclination to blame or marginalize male victims, and substantial barriers to reporting sexual assault — including stigma, a lack of confidence in leadership, and feeling “trapped” by the physical confines of deployment. The 2022 Pentagon report found that about 90 percent of men in the military did not report a sexual assault they experienced in 2021; about 71 percent of women failed to report such an attack. “Underreporting of MST,” according to a 2019 study by researchers from the VA’s Rocky Mountain Mental Illness Research, Education, and Clinical Center in Colorado, “may derive from men’s concerns about stigma, shame, rape myths, lack of past empathic response to disclosures of MST, and the perceived implications of reporting MST for one’s masculinity and sexuality.” For these same reasons, they noted, male MST survivors are at “elevated risk for a vast array of adverse health outcomes.” The trauma of sexual assault can, for example, result in depression, anxiety, nightmares , flashbacks, post-traumatic stress disorder, anger management issues, self-blame, and low self-esteem, among other ill effects.

A decade ago, most veterans who submitted compensation claims for sexual assaults during their military service were denied benefits by the VA. In the years since, the VA has granted claims for military sexual trauma at an increasing rate. More than 103,000 veterans, of all genders, are now formally recognized by the VA as having been sexually traumatized during their service.

From 2011 to 2021, the total number of MST claims filed by men skyrocketed more than 119 percent, from 1,352 to 2,969, according to statistics provided to The Intercept by the VA. By the end of June, more than 2,550 male veterans had filed claims in 2022, almost double the number in 2011 and already 85 percent of last year’s total.

Over the last decade, the number of claims granted by the VA has grown from just 27.8 percent of all claims submitted for compensation by men in 2011 to 68.5 percent last year. Despite the precipitous growth, male claims have consistently been rejected at a higher rate than those of women, and the grant rate has lagged an average of 13 percent below that of women. The VA had no answer for the disparity, telling The Intercept via email that “it would be speculative to provide an explanation as to any difference in the grant rate.”

Trust Betrayed

After being assaulted, Justin Rose was made to recount the details again and again, to his squad leader, his platoon sergeant, Jase Stanton’s squad leader, and a chaplain. The trust he placed in his noncommissioned officers to keep his story quiet was quickly betrayed as word spread across the camp. Rose was branded the Marine who had been groped and hadn’t done anything about it. He became the target of jokes and tried laughing along, but inside he was in agony and began questioning himself. Why hadn’t he done anything about it? Why hadn’t he kicked Stanton’s ass? He did the right thing, on paper at least, but it didn’t feel right. “A real Marine would have fought back,” he later wrote . He began to blame himself for his assault and his failure to react as others — and even he — expected. “My inaction that night crippled me, and I had no way to fix it,” he recalled.

Rose returned stateside, remained on active duty, and was promoted to corporal before being called to testify at Stanton’s court martial. But before the trial, he was contacted by Stanton’s military attorney who grilled him about his drinking at the cantina and how close a look he got of his fleeing assaulter. “When you’re in the Marines and an officer calls, you just answer the questions. In hindsight, now that I’ve been a company commander and have been involved with court martial hearings, I realize that was probably improper,” Rose told The Intercept.

“My inaction that night crippled me, and I had no way to fix it.”

The defense dissected his testimony, twisted it around, and used it to attack his credibility. Rose recalled that the defense counsel said his drinking of three beers at the cantina, hours earlier, had clouded his mind; that he had failed to get a clear look at the man who assaulted him; and that his failure to confront Stanton called into doubt whether the assault even occurred. Rose and four fellow Marines who provided evidence against Stanton were instead accused of colluding to ruin his career.

“The main consensus was that we were trying to conspire against Stanton for cultural and social differences,” Rose told The Intercept. “He was a Midwesterner from a religious background, and we were from the Northeast and not accustomed to his kind of Christian fundamentalism.” The military judge ruled in Stanton’s favor and he walked free.

“By the time it was over,” Rose later wrote , “the Marine Corps had failed me three times: It had failed to take my claims seriously; then made my attacker out to be the victim and me the criminal; and finally failed to provide adequate support and resources in the aftermath of my assault — whether through access to sexual-assault counseling or something as simple as believing my story.”

Rose had had enough. He found that he couldn’t wear the same uniform as the man who had assaulted him and the many others who allowed Stanton to get away with it. “The military justice system said that I was a liar for something that I had no reason to lie about. If I was going to lie about anything, it certainly wouldn’t be that I was sexually assaulted and didn’t do anything about it,” he said. “It ended up being the reason that I left the Marine Corps. It shook my confidence in myself. It was a point of self-doubt. It was a point of shame.”

In 2007, the same year he left the Marines, Rose joined the Massachusetts National Guard. He would deploy to Afghanistan in 2011, where he saw combat and suffered a traumatic brain injury while serving as a Security Forces platoon leader for a Provincial Reconstruction Team in Uruzgan Province.

Stanton served in the Marines for several more years before leaving the corps and getting involved in Kansas politics. He worked as the campaign manager for Republican congressional candidate John Rysavy and as a field coordinator for the Republican senatorial campaign of Todd Tiahrt , a 16-year member of the U.S. House of Representatives. In 2010, Rysavy lost his primary, capturing just 2 percent of the Republican vote. In 2014, Tiahrt lost in the Republican primary, failing in a bid to reclaim his House seat from Mike Pompeo , who was later become U.S. Secretary of State.

Politics was not, however, Stanton’s only pursuit.

String of Assaults

Over the next decade, Stanton would be implicated in a string of sexual assaults. In 2007, after he had been acquitted at court martial, Stanton’s reserve unit — based out of Kansas City, Missouri — took part in one of its monthly weekend trainings. One night, according to court records obtained by The Intercept, he and other Marines went out drinking and after the bar closed, headed back to their base to sleep. Stanton attempted, multiple times, to grope two of the men. One of them, after repeatedly telling Stanton to stop, threatened to hurt him and later reported the incident, according to court documents.

In Johnson County, Kansas, in July 2008, Stanton attended a farewell party for a member of the military being deployed to the Middle East. One party-goer drank heavily and passed out, after which Stanton laid him out on a couch, pulled off his pants, and performed oral sex on him, according to the court records obtained by The Intercept. After a friend of the victim contacted the police, Stanton was charged with aggravated sodomy and aggravated sexual battery and resigned from Tiahrt’s campaign.

During the investigation, the Johnson County prosecutor contacted Rose and interviewed him about his assault by Stanton, though Rose was never called to testify. In the end, Stanton was convicted but served no prison time. Instead, he was given probation and required to register as a sex offender — but failed to properly do so.

While Rose and others had information about Stanton’s past that they shared with civilian authorities, the civilian world had no formal record of Stanton’s military legal proceedings. As the deputy attorney of nearby Riley County, Kansas, Bethany Fields prosecutes major crimes like murder, rape, and other forms of sexual assault, but she had no documentation on Stanton. “The military court martial proceeding didn’t follow him into civilian life, so there was no way for local law enforcement to know about it,” she told The Intercept. She also failed to find any records of Stanton’s court martial for the assaults at Camp Lemonnier.

Stanton’s probation meant that he was facing prison time if he was convicted again, but after failing to provide full information when registering as a sex offender, he disappeared from the radar of the criminal justice system until resurfacing a few years later in Fields’s Riley County.

“The military court martial proceeding didn’t follow him into civilian life, so there was no way for local law enforcement to know about it.”

On June 7, 2015, two soldiers, one 19 years old and the other 22, from the Army post at Fort Riley, were drinking at Tubby’s, a sports bar in Manhattan, Kansas, where they met Stanton. At closing time, the men went back to Stanton’s home where he poured shots and fixed them mixed drinks. The teenager passed out and woke to find Stanton “was sitting on top of him and was sodomizing him,” according to court documents. He scrambled to his feet and fled to the bathroom. When he emerged, he saw his friend passed out with his pants and underwear pulled down to his knees. The 19-year-old soldier pulled his friend’s pants up and attempted to contact his superiors and then family members, but couldn’t reach either. He then called the Army’s Sexual Harassment/Assault Response and Prevention hotline and arranged to meet with a SHARP representative at a nearby Starbucks. The teenage soldier was unable to wake his friend and left him at Stanton’s home. Both victims went to the hospital separately and received sexual assault examinations that revealed “a foreign DNA profile that matched Stanton.”

Stanton later texted a friend that he had a “three-way while that moron Boston kid [the 22-year-old] was asleep in the living room.” At trial, Stanton explained that he meant that he, according to summary documents, “messed around” with a friend and the teenage soldier, even though he had initially told a police detective that he had not had sexual intercourse with the teen. Arrested on June 9, 2015, Stanton was charged in Riley County with aggravated criminal sodomy.

A decade after being assaulted by Stanton at Camp Lemonnier, a decade after being doubted by the Marine Corps and accused of lying at court martial, a decade after Stanton had walked free, a detective from Kansas — where testimony about prior acts of sexual misconduct is admissible in court — called Rose to say that he was building a case against Stanton.

At trial, Stanton testified that he and the teenager had engaged in consensual oral and anal sex. The teenager countered that he had been unconscious. “At no point did I knowingly or intentionally hurt anyone,” Stanton maintained.

The 22-year-old victim did not appear at the trial — but Rose did. Then an Army captain with a wife and 2-year-old child, he flew to Kansas to tell his story once more. It was his 34th birthday.

This time, Rose’s testimony along with the victims of the 2005, 2007, 2008, and 2015 assaults was enough to sway the judge, who noted a distinct pattern. “They involved alcohol, they involved partying, usually asleep or perhaps passed out. … Most of them were in the military,” observed Judge Meryl D. Wilson.

“It’s very troubling — this is not the first time you had taken advantage of someone,” said Wilson. “The sad things about these situations is it doesn’t just impact you.” Wilson found Stanton was guilty of one count of aggravated criminal sodomy for his assault of the teenage soldier and sentenced him to 49 years in prison. He was also sentenced to 18 years (to be served concurrently) for failing to properly register as a sex offender in Kansas.

Pentagon Dysfunction

Last July, an investigation by The Intercept found that sexual assault of U.S. military personnel in Africa was far more common and widespread than the Pentagon reported to Congress.

The Pentagon’s Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office compiles annual reports that claim to include all allegations of sexual assault involving U.S. military personnel. Between 2010 and 2020, the Pentagon listed just 73 cases of sexual assault in the U.S. Africa Command, or AFRICOM, area of operations. Yet criminal investigation files, obtained by The Intercept via the Freedom of Information Act, show that military criminal investigators logged at least 158 allegations of sexual offenses in Africa during that same period.

The case files revealed that these charges of sexual misconduct involving U.S. military personnel occurred in at least 22 countries in Africa, including 13 nations that do not appear in the annual Department of Defense reports. Some of the allegations accuse members of the military, while others recount attacks on U.S. personnel by civilians on or near U.S. outposts. For 2006, the year that Justin Rose reported his assault by Jase Stanton, the Defense Department’s official annual report doesn’t even offer a breakdown of such attacks by country.

A March 2020 report by a military advisory committee lamented the “ difficulty in obtaining, uniform, accurate, and complete information on sexual offense cases across the military .” Last November, The American Prospect reported that Pentagon officials were long aware that the military’s system for reporting sexual assaults was dysfunctional, leading to underestimates of the scale of the problem. This may help explain the wide discrepancy between the Pentagon’s annual figures and the AFRICOM files obtained by The Intercept . Earlier this year, in a letter to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, Reps. Katie Porter, D-Calif., and Jackie Speier, D-Calif., took the Pentagon to task for its failures in tracking sexual assault. “Poor data management makes it difficult for DoD leadership to understand the scope of the problem or respond effectively,” they wrote .

The Pentagon notes that survivors of sexual assault are often reluctant to come forward for a variety of reasons, including a desire to move on, maintain privacy, and avoid feelings of shame. Yet troops say that even when they do speak out , they often face a military culture and command structure that doesn’t take their allegations seriously and a military justice system that provides little accountability. Just 225 of 5,640 eligible cases went to court martial and only 50 of those resulted in convictions for nonconsensual sexual offenses, according to 2020 statistics . That conviction rate represents 0.88 percent of the cases.

This year, President Joe Biden signed an executive order making sexual harassment, for the first time, a crime under U.S. military law.

The effects of poor accountability and shame surrounding sexual assault while on active duty can continue far beyond one’s period of military service. “Despite successes in ensuring access to care for men who experienced MST, ongoing stigma related to experiencing sexual trauma in men also may be a barrier to seeking care,” Randal Noller, a VA spokesperson, told The Intercept. “We are looking at every avenue to help address this concern and inform men who experienced MST that VA believes them, that they are not alone, and we are here to help.”

Last year, in the face of increasing congressional pressure, Austin recommended that decisions to prosecute cases of sexual assault be taken out of the chain of command. In December 2021, Congress passed significant military justice reform that did so, which may prevent retaliation and lead more survivors to report sexual offenses. This year, President Joe Biden also signed an executive order making sexual harassment , for the first time, a crime under U.S. military law.

“Changes Will Happen”

Today, Jase Stanton is incarcerated at the El Dorado Correctional Facility in Kansas. Barring parole board intervention or credit for “good time,” his earliest release date is January 1, 2059 — 53 years to the day that he assaulted Justin Rose.

Stanton did not reply to text messages sent via an app that allows communications with inmates or to a letter sent to him by The Intercept.

“In the years since then, I came to realize that it wasn’t the assault that had the most enduring effect on me,” Rose said. “It was people’s refusal to believe that one man would assault another man. It was the mockery from leaders that I had trusted and the implication that, if it had happened, I must have done something to invite it.”

Rose, now a major in the Army Reserve, still grapples with feelings that, somehow, he remains at fault. “There is guilt on my behalf. I didn’t present a convincing enough case,” he said of his testimony at Stanton’s 2006 court martial. “And these two soldiers down at Fort Riley paid for it. What he did to them was substantially worse than what he did to me, and that’s a shitty feeling — that I didn’t do anything to help them.”

But Bethany Fields, the Riley County prosecutor, credits Rose’s willingness to testify in 2015 as having a major influence on Stanton’s conviction and lengthy prison sentence. “The case got delayed a couple times, so we had to call and tell the earlier victims that the dates had changed, but Justin stuck with me. That was huge,” she said. “In this case, the issue was consent. We had DNA, so there was no question that the act happened. The issue was whether or not the victim consented. Because we had Justin and others come in and say, ‘This happened to me and I didn’t consent,’ ‘I saw him do this and that person didn’t consent’; because we had all these other people who said they had been sleeping or drinking or passed out and didn’t consent, it made for a much stronger case.”

Fields believes that testifying about these traumas will help to hasten change. “The more the word gets out about this type of assault, the more that people are willing to talk about this, the more people speak out,” she said, “the more changes will happen and the less victims we will have in the future.”

Rose said that he’s seen a shift in military culture since his assault at Camp Lemonnier — and that it’s been driven by survivors.

“There was a perception, as a male sexual assault victim, that you wanted it. And if you didn’t, you could have fought back harder. And that creates a culture of silence,” he said. “Today, you see a lot more people being open about their stories. People are willing to come forward. They’re not ashamed of what has happened to them. And because of that, things are changing.”

The post In U.S. Military, Sexual Assault Against Men Is Vastly Underreported appeared first on The Intercept .

G rowing up, Khorry Ramey didn’t speak to her father about the day he would be put to death. “It was too uncomfortable for me,” she said. Her dad, Kevin Johnson, was sent to Missouri’s death row in 2007, when she was only 4 years old. As a child, she went to visit him at the Potosi Correctional Center, just over an hour from St. Louis. They played Scrabble and took Polaroid photos together, which could be purchased for a dollar apiece.

When it came to Johnson’s crime, there was not much to say that Ramey didn’t already know. Everyone in the neighborhood knew that he’d killed a police officer when he was 19. It wasn’t easy, but “it wasn’t a secret,” she said. Most importantly, it did not change who Johnson was to her. As Ramey got older, they talked about the ordinary things parents discuss with their kids: school, family, and his hopes for her future.

But on New Year’s Day 2022, when Ramey was 18, Johnson called her sounding different. “He was kind of like throwing hints at me,” she said, suggesting that he might not be around for much longer. The conversation unnerved her. It seemed clear that he was trying to prepare her for an execution date.

Later that night, Ramey found out she was pregnant. She worried about disappointing her dad; with his encouragement, Ramey had graduated early from high school and was studying to become a nurse. Under her red graduation gown, she’d worn a T-shirt printed with a photo of her dad, along with her maternal grandmother and mother, who was murdered in front of Ramey just months before Johnson was convicted. “I did it for y’all,” the T-shirt read.

In late August, Ramey got a phone call from her aunt. She told Ramey that her father had received an execution date and warned her that it would be all over the news. Shortly afterward, Johnson called. “They came and got me and told me to pack all my stuff,” he told her. His execution had been set for November 29.

Ramey gave birth just two weeks later. On Facebook, she posted baby pictures of herself, her dad, and her son, whom she named Kaius. In October, she brought him to see Johnson, who was able to hold his grandson for the first time. “That was a very special moment,” Ramey said.

Ramey spoke to The Intercept over the phone in early November while doing a shift at the nursing home where she works. She had not discussed her father’s looming execution date with her employer, let alone taking time off to deal with it. This was one of several logistical questions she was still figuring out. Another was even more daunting. At 19, she was too young to attend the execution under Missouri law. She did not know where she would be as the state took Johnson’s life. It felt important to be at the prison. Even if her dad couldn’t see her, Ramey said, “he would at least know that I’m there with him in his final moments and he wasn’t alone.”

But as Johnson’s execution date got closer, Ramey decided that wasn’t enough. On November 21, the American Civil Liberties Union filed an emergency motion asking the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Missouri to intervene and allow her to attend the execution. “My father has been the only parent for almost all of my life,” she wrote in a declaration to the court. “He is the most important person in my life. If my father were dying in the hospital, I would sit by his bed holding his hand and praying for him until his death, both as a source of support for him, and as a support for me as a necessary part of my grieving process.”

With Johnson’s execution days away, a number of legal challenges are still pending before the courts. The most pressing is whether Johnson’s conviction was unconstitutionally tainted by pervasive racism, as a special prosecutor appointed to review the case has determined; the prosecutor is now seeking to vacate Johnson’s death sentence.

In the 17 years since Johnson was sentenced to die, St. Louis County has become infamous for structural racism, most visible in its policing and prosecution practices. Johnson’s case is emblematic of these dynamics and how the death penalty has been deployed to reinforce the status quo. To Johnson’s attorney Shawn Nolan, the special prosecutor’s findings mean Johnson’s execution must not move forward. “Civilized countries don’t execute people based on the color of their skin,” Nolan said, “but that is what the state of Missouri is about to do.”

The Crime

Nineteen-year-old Kevin Johnson was at his great-grandmother’s house on July 5, 2005, when two police officers showed up, snooping around his white Ford Explorer. Johnson was on probation in connection with a domestic dispute involving his former girlfriend, the mother of his young daughter, Khorry. He had violated the terms of his probation, and the cops were looking to arrest him and perhaps tow his ride. Johnson didn’t want that to happen, and he had an idea. He gave his car keys to his little brother Joseph Long, whom everyone called Bam Bam.

Johnson and his siblings had been raised in difficult circumstances in Meacham Park, a predominantly Black neighborhood in wealthy, mostly white Kirkwood, Missouri, one of the many suburbs that sprawl west of St. Louis. Johnson’s mother was addicted to crack, and his dad was incarcerated for most of Johnson’s young life. Johnson and his siblings had been abused and neglected, at times left for days to fend for themselves. Johnson was particularly protective of 12-year-old Bam Bam, who’d been exposed to cocaine in utero and was born with a congenital heart defect that required major surgery not long after his birth.

Johnson asked Bam Bam to take the car keys next door, where his grandmother Pat Ward lived, to make it look like she owned the Explorer. Bam Bam got up and ran next door. As Johnson watched from the window, what he saw set off a chain reaction that he would forever regret. Ward came out of the house, keys in hand, Johnson later recalled, asking the cops to come quick: Bam Bam had passed out.

Johnson couldn’t see Bam Bam, but after the cops arrived at Ward’s front door, he saw one of them step over something as he made his way inside. Sirens wailed as an ambulance approached along with a third cop, Kirkwood Police Sgt. William McEntee. Johnson’s impulse was to race next door to help, but his family told him to stay put or risk arrest. When Johnson’s mother, Jada Tatum, arrived, McEntee pushed her back, Johnson recalled, nearly knocking her off the porch. “It looked to me … like they was fighting, and I started to get mad,” Johnson later testified. “Then eventually my mom just stopped, she went into the yard and started crying.”

Nearly 20 minutes after the ambulance arrived, Johnson saw the first responders leaving with Bam Bam on a stretcher. His shirt was off, and his feet were dangling over the side.

Not long afterward, Ward returned with the news that Bam Bam was gone. An autopsy later revealed that he’d died of heart failure. Johnson was too shocked to react at first, he said. Then he became distraught, kicking the hinges off his bedroom door. If he hadn’t asked Bam Bam to take the keys, maybe this wouldn’t have happened, he thought. Why had the cops reacted so casually when Ward asked for their help? If Bam Bam had been taken to the hospital sooner, maybe he would be alive.

Johnson went outside trying to clear his head. He removed a pistol from the back of his car and put it in his pocket; if the cops came back to tow the car, he later explained, the gun could put him in even bigger trouble. As Johnson wandered around on foot, people asked him if it was true that Bam Bam had died; news spread quickly through tight-knit Meacham Park. He told his cousin that he thought the cops were responsible.

Around 7:30 p.m. McEntee was back in Meacham Park, responding to a call about someone setting off fireworks. He pulled his cruiser next to three boys, one of whom was carrying a spent firecracker. As he talked to them through the driver’s side window, Johnson walked past on the passenger’s side. He caught McEntee’s eye, and the cop smiled at him. Johnson raised his gun. “You killed my brother,” witnesses recalled him saying as he fired into the car, striking McEntee multiple times. One of the bullets tore through McEntee’s cheek and lodged in his jaw.

Although seriously wounded, McEntee was able to put the car into drive, lurching up the street before hitting a tree. Neighbors were screaming. Johnson ran into his mother, who asked him what he’d done. The cops killed Bam Bam, he told her. No, she replied, Bam Bam just died. She started crying; what about his daughter, Khorry, she pleaded. Johnson remembers taking off running to see Khorry. Cutting through a path between two houses, he found himself back by McEntee’s crashed car. The bloodied officer was kneeling on the pavement. Onlookers scattered as Johnson walked up behind McEntee and shot him in the head.

McEntee was pronounced dead shortly afterward. Johnson fled in his Explorer, passing a stream of cop cars on their way to the scene. Only then did he understand what he had done, he later testified. When he turned himself in three days later, Johnson had one request: that police first let him see his toddler, Khorry. They refused.

The Trials

McEntee’s murder was front page news in St. Louis. Kirkwood had not seen a law enforcement officer killed in over 100 years, police told the press. The 43-year-old father of three had been with the Kirkwood police since the 1980s. Outside the police department, people left flowers and balloons on the lawn.

St. Louis Prosecuting Attorney Robert McCulloch said he was considering seeking the death penalty against Johnson. During his 17 years in office, McCulloch had gained a reputation for winning death sentences — and having a personal stake in punishing cop killers. He was just 12 years old when his own father was killed in the line of duty; Paul McCulloch was “one of the best known officers on the St. Louis police force,” according to a 1964 news article that lauded him as a famed canine handler whose dog had a knack for sniffing out drugs. A Black man named Eddie Glenn was convicted and sentenced to death for McCulloch’s murder. But after the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated the death penalty in 1972, the sentence was reduced to life.

While the headlines trumpeted a possible death sentence against Johnson, many in Meacham Park felt that the full story surrounding McEntee’s death was not being reported. Family members told a Black columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that Johnson had been distraught by Bam Bam’s death in part because police had been more focused on arresting him than helping his brother. After the columnist wrote about Bam Bam’s funeral preparations, readers wrote in to say that the writer had “slandered a fallen officer” and “excused a killer.”

“They didn’t try to help him because they was looking for me.”

Johnson was tried twice, beginning in March 2007. The courtroom was packed with family members on both sides, along with a slew of police officers. In his opening statement to the jury, McCulloch acknowledged Bam Bam’s death as the precursor to McEntee’s murder. But he rejected the claim that police had failed to act quickly to help the child — or that McEntee had mistreated Tatum, Bam Bam’s mother. An EMT testified that they were attempting lifesaving measures when Tatum approached, so he asked McEntee to sit with her on the porch.

Most importantly, McCulloch rejected the notion that Johnson had acted impulsively, without premeditation. He argued that Johnson had taken the gun from his car with the explicit intent to kill a police officer and dismissed Johnson’s claim that he had been en route to see his daughter when he came upon McEntee the second time. Johnson had returned to the scene after hearing that McEntee was still alive, McCulloch said, then ruthlessly finished the job. “Each one of those shots, in and of itself, is deliberation,” he told the jury.

The testimony was graphic. McEntee’s colleagues described the horror in vivid detail; one Kirkwood police officer struggled to speak as he described kneeling down to roll McEntee over, only to see pieces of his head fall onto his lap. A cousin of Johnson’s said he vomited after witnessing McEntee get shot, prompting Johnson to call him a “pussy.”

Although most of the witnesses who knew Johnson said on cross-examination that they had never had problems with him before, McCulloch cast Johnson as a menace who would kill again if given the chance. Not only had he killed McEntee in cold blood, McCulloch said, but Johnson had also tried to murder witnesses who might testify against him.

The evidence for this claim was thin. One witness, 19-year-old Anthony Davis, who knew Johnson from the neighborhood, had agreed to testify against Johnson only after being arrested at the courthouse, where investigators for McCulloch’s office claimed that Davis was intimidating witnesses. No witnesses had complained of intimidation, yet Davis was thrown in jail and his bond was set at $100,000. On the stand at trial, Davis admitted that he was testifying in order to resolve his own legal troubles; his version of events clashed with what others said. In addition to claiming that he had seen Johnson’s family members menacing witnesses, Davis testified that Johnson had told him on the day of the murder that he was going to kill the first cop he saw. A jailhouse informant with a long rap sheet also testified at length about an elaborate plot he’d discussed with Johnson to have key witnesses killed.

It was true that several witnesses seemed reluctant to testify against Johnson. Some had given statements to police, only to back off upon taking the stand. But while McCulloch told the jury that Johnson had threatened them, it was also plausible that witnesses had felt intimidated by police. One woman who was visiting family in Meacham Park on the night of the murder testified that contrary to what she told police, she had not seen Johnson shoot McEntee. “I felt scared. I felt they was intimidating me, pressuring me,” she said.

On March 31, Johnson took the stand. He recounted how he had seen police outside the house, how McEntee had manhandled his mother, and how shocked he was to hear that his brother was dead. He remembered telling his friends that the police had not done anything to help Bam Bam. “They didn’t try to help him because they was looking for me,” he said. When he saw McEntee smile at him from inside his police car, “I flipped out, and I pulled out my gun, and I started shooting,” he said. He could not explain what he was thinking. “I was just in a trance.”

McCulloch mocked Johnson’s “trance nonsense” in his closing statement. But the defense said he was merely trying to find words to describe his tragic mistake. “What he’s talking about is acting without thinking,” defense attorney Robert Steele said.

Jurors found this position persuasive. When it came time to decide Johnson’s fate, a majority believed that he was not guilty of first-degree murder. Deliberations were contentious, according to jurors who later gave statements to Johnson’s appellate attorneys. One Black juror described a pair of white jurors who “kept loudly repeating that they couldn’t vote for 2nd degree because Kevin would get out and hunt them down.” One of them “kept yelling things about ‘your neighborhoods’ and ‘you people’” when talking to Black jurors, he said.

Another Black juror said that she had been called to speak to the trial judge after a white woman on the jury accused her of “intimidating” behavior. For all the talk of intimidation, the juror said, it was the heavy police presence that made her the most uneasy. “We were aware from the beginning of the trial that cops were going to be heavily packing the courtroom. I even had my neighbor drive me because someone warned me that cops would run my plates if I parked in the garage.”

Johnson’s retrial took place later that year. Whereas the previous jury had been evenly split between Black and white jurors, this time the jury was made up of nine white and three Black jurors.

There were other changes. McCulloch eliminated the jailhouse informant with the story about plotting to kill witnesses and added a video reenactment of the crime. He also bolstered testimony about the officers’ efforts to save Bam Bam and emphasized that McEntee had not mistreated Johnson’s mother. “Was he very deferential to her?” McCulloch asked one of the cops who responded to the scene. “Yes, he just tried to get her to go out of the house, and he was kind of holding on to her, trying to hold her up,” the cop said. “She was very upset about her son.”

McCulloch’s final witness at the retrial was St. Louis County Medical Examiner Mary Case, who described the damage each bullet had inflicted on McEntee. Using a model skeleton, she demonstrated where the bullets had entered his body, noting that McEntee might have survived some of the most severe injuries, but there was no way to survive being shot in the head.

On November 8, 2007, the jury convicted Johnson of first-degree murder.

“They want you to think that because he had this horrible childhood that he shouldn’t be punished appropriately.”

The sentencing phase began immediately. McCulloch called McEntee’s three siblings, who testified about the hole his death had left in their family. His sister Cathy testified that after she gave birth to a daughter with a heart problem, McEntee had helped with the baby’s tube feedings. “He was very supportive — and very supportive when I lost her,” she said.

In contrast, defense attorneys cast Johnson as an unwanted child who had never known a stable home. His grandmother described how 2-year-old Johnson used to come to her house looking for food because his mother was too incapacitated from drug abuse to properly care for him. Records from the Division of Family Services described how caseworkers found Johnson and an older brother living amid cockroaches; Johnson has since described chasing the insects for food. During his years in and out of institutions and group homes, he did not receive the therapy he needed to overcome the trauma of his early life. A psychiatrist who evaluated Johnson said he had attempted suicide when he was 14.

McCulloch accused the defense of weaponizing Johnson’s upbringing to deny justice to McEntee’s family and the people of Meacham Park. “They want you to think that because he had this horrible childhood that he shouldn’t be punished appropriately, that he does not deserve it,” he said. The real problem, McCulloch insisted, was that Johnson did not take advantage of the opportunities he’d been given.

Before jurors voted to sentence her client to death, defense attorney Kelly Kraft suggested that there was more to the case than they had seen. A defense witness had testified about being pulled over by McEntee multiple times while living in Meacham Park. Although he seemed reluctant to go into detail, he described how McEntee had screamed at him after ordering him out of his car. Kraft said she thought “long and hard” about whether to call this witness. “I don’t like speaking ill of the dead,” she said. But “there may be a side of Sergeant McEntee that his family didn’t see. That’s all I’m going to say about that.”

Meacham Park

Johnson had been on death row for seven years when McCulloch’s name exploded onto the national stage in the wake of a different killing in St. Louis County. In 2014, a white police officer named Darren Wilson shot and killed an unarmed Black teenager named Michael Brown. The shooting in Ferguson sparked mass protests and added the call “Hands up, don’t shoot” to the lexicon of the nascent Black Lives Matter movement.

McCulloch’s handling of Wilson’s prosecution would help turn the case into an emblem of institutionalized racism and impunity for violent cops. When McCulloch announced that a grand jury had declined to indict Wilson, he added fuel to the fire by blaming the media for the protests and declaring that the grand jurors, who were mostly white, “gave up their lives” to see the inquiry to its end.

The Ferguson protests exposed long-simmering tensions over law enforcement’s treatment of Black residents in St. Louis County. While the Department of Justice ultimately declined to file federal charges against Wilson, it found that Ferguson police “routinely” violated Black residents’ constitutional rights, using their powers to unlawfully detain and arrest residents in a scheme that prioritized revenue through fines and fees over the duty to ensure public safety. The department was not diverse, failed to engage with the community, ignored complaints of police misconduct, and engaged in practices that fostered “distrust and resentment.”

“Before there was a Ferguson, there was a Meacham Park.”

Such police abuses — and the grievances they engendered — were not isolated to Ferguson. To longtime residents of St. Louis County like Michelle Smith, co-director of Missourians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, Johnson’s case can only be fully understood in the context of the community’s relationship to police. “Before there was a Ferguson,” Smith said, “there was a Meacham Park.”

Then surrounded by fields and forests, Meacham Park was established in 1892 as an unincorporated Black enclave roughly 14 miles southwest of St. Louis. The dirt streets were named after prominent people and places in Black history. Although it lacked running water and sewers, by the early 20th century, Meacham Park was thriving .

But as suburban developments proliferated, weak state law governing the establishment of new municipalities left Meacham Park vulnerable, sparking a protracted tug of war over annexation by wealthy, white Kirkwood. Colin Gordon, a history professor at the University of Iowa who has written about race and inequality in St. Louis County, described how municipal boundary-making was used as a tool of segregation. “You fragment local citizenship in such a way that some people get surveilled by the state and some people get served by the state,” Gordon said.

In the late 1950s, Kirkwood made its first land grab, annexing a valuable commercial strip of Meacham Park, for which the community got nothing in return. In 1956, Interstate 44 sliced through the community, paving over homes and leaving a wedge of the neighborhood stranded. Meanwhile, Kirkwood officials were wringing their hands: They didn’t want responsibility for providing services to Meacham Park, but they also didn’t want the area’s perceived problems coming into Kirkwood. As city leaders put it in a proposed action plan in 1966, “Mosquitoes, bred in the failing septic tanks in Meacham Park, or potential criminals, raised in an atmosphere devoid of police protection, are not respecters of municipal boundary lines.”

In 1991 the residents of Meacham Park finally agreed to an annexation plan. The promise was that commercial development along a discrete swath of its western edge would provide jobs for residents and bring in revenue needed for Kirkwood to extend services across the area. The promise was hollow: The development’s footprint ballooned, swallowing 100 homes and displacing residents for what in the end was a wall of big-box stores that only further isolated Meacham Park from the rest of Kirkwood.

The “racial, spatial, political climate of that place made it ripe for people to lose in different ways.”

In every practical sense, the first “service” to fully encompass Meacham Park was policing — or, more accurately, over-policing, which manifested itself in many of the same ways that would later be identified in Ferguson. “To be the subject of neglect and harassment simultaneously definitely set up a lot of harm in that community,” Smith said.

This dynamic was entrenched long before Johnson shot McEntee in July 2005. Court filings in Johnson’s case include affidavits from relatives and community members who described relentless police surveillance in Meacham Park. Patrol cars were omnipresent, and neighbors were hassled for minor infractions or questioned for seemingly no reason at all. In his affidavit, Dameion Pullum, a childhood friend of Johnson’s, said the cops once maced a group of kids for hanging out in a church parking lot after a high school football game and harassed Johnson’s grandmother’s husband for waxing his car in the driveway.

Several of the affidavits specifically named McEntee as contributing to the harassment. Pullum said McEntee was known as “Tackleberry” because “he was big, and he would tackle and beat people up.” Romona Miller, who was a science teacher at Kirkwood High School in 2005, told the Riverfront Times that students shared stories about “Mac” — including that he had escalated one encounter to the point that another officer had to intervene. “I had never heard the kids talk specifically about a person, so that was concerning to me,” Miller told the weekly. She said she contacted the Kirkwood police with her concerns but never heard back. “I often wonder, if that had been taken more seriously, we could have avoided a lot of this.” (A KPD spokesperson told the St. Louis Beacon that the chief had no recollection of Miller’s complaint. “He’s not saying it didn’t happen,” the spokesperson said . “We get a lot of complaints.”)

Smith stressed that reports of McEntee’s misconduct were not meant to “condone killing. We wish that McEntee was still here.” Still, she was blunt about the role he and other cops played in Meacham Park. “The reality of the situation is he was a terrorist in that community.”

Andrea Boyles, a sociology and Africana studies professor at Tulane University, interviewed Meacham Park residents about their experiences with police for her doctoral dissertation. That work later became the book “ Race, Place, and Suburban Policing .”

There had been a “long-standing racial contention between Meacham Park and Kirkwood,” Boyles said, and “ultimately, there were a number of things that transpired … ranging from full loss of land and people losing their homes or being bought out, feeling like they had been manipulated” in the annexation process. Their distrust of the police was perhaps just the most visible manifestation of the disenchantment. “What they reported to me wasn’t just isolated to or told about the police, it was about the entire process, which included the city council,” she said, “and them already feeling like, in many respects, that they had been … indifferently characterized as baggage or weight or throwaways that needed to be saved by the neighboring rich white people.”

Residents told her that in the wake of violent incidents like McEntee’s killing, they felt that the whole community was being indicted, as if at fault for what happened. The “racial, spatial, political climate of that place made it ripe for people to lose in different ways,” Boyles said. “And the results of that, unfortunately, and without justifying or condoning, would be the loss of many lives. And the fact that we are now possibly facing another.”

A Cloud Over the Case

In the wake of Ferguson, voters ousted McCulloch, who had spent nearly 30 years in office, and elected a reform candidate. Former public defender and Ferguson City Council Member Wesley Bell became St. Louis County’s first Black elected prosecutor . In 2019, Bell launched a Conviction and Incident Review Unit, tasked with reviewing officer-involved shootings, allegations of police misconduct, and claims of wrongful prosecution or conviction — a deliberate departure from the status quo under McCulloch. “We know the same-old, same-old approach that we see incarcerating people based on their socio-economic stature, their zip code, their status, their race, their gender — that doesn’t work,” Bell told The Intercept at the time.

While wrongful convictions are a persistent problem within the criminal legal system, until last year , Missouri prosecutors lacked a meaningful way to revisit a conviction they believed was wrongly obtained. In 2021, state legislators passed a law intended to fix the problem; by statute, prosecutors may, “at any time,” file a motion to vacate a conviction in the court where the defendant was originally tried. The trial court is required to hold a hearing to determine if “constitutional error at the original trial … undermines the confidence in the judgment.”

In December 2021, Johnson’s lawyers asked prosecutors to review his conviction, which they argued was unconstitutionally tainted by racial bias. There was an immediate issue, however: Steele, one of Johnson’s defense attorneys at trial, now works for Bell, creating a conflict of interest. In July, Bell’s office wrote to the Missouri Supreme Court, explaining that the office was reviewing Johnson’s case and looking for a special prosecutor to head up the inquiry. Prosecutors asked the court to refrain from setting an execution date. The court disregarded the request, setting Johnson’s execution for November.

“Unconstitutional racial discrimination infected this prosecution.”

Nonetheless, in October, the St. Louis County Circuit Court appointed Kansas City attorney Edward Keenan as special prosecutor. Keenan reviewed more than 31,000 pages of documents related to the case, and in mid-November, he filed a motion with the trial court seeking to vacate Johnson’s conviction. “Unconstitutional racial discrimination infected this prosecution,” he wrote, “and this error requires the judgment to be set aside.” The murder of McEntee was “horrific,” and his family deserved justice. “Unfortunately,” McCulloch “did not pursue that justice according to law,” Keenan wrote. “The law requires this court to … order a new trial that adheres to constitutional standards.”

Among the evidence laid out in Kennan’s motion was a memo he found within the prosecution’s files that showed McCulloch’s team had schemed to eliminate Black jurors from Johnson’s second trial. And he pointed to a speech McCulloch gave to the Oregon District Attorneys Association as evidence of racial animus. A week after he lost his primary race to Bell, McCulloch spoke at the association’s summer conference, where he aired his grievances about the unrest in Ferguson and showed a seemingly random photo of a group of young Black people standing together, telling the audience, “This is what we’re dealing with.” A number of prosecutors were stunned by the presentation. “I found Mr. McCulloch’s remarks to be offensive and unprofessional,” Multnomah County District Attorney Rod Underhill told Willamette Week . “The implication was that these kids were thugs,” Deschutes County District Attorney John Hummel said of the photo. “I was bothered by the implicit nature of his words.”

Perhaps most revealing is McCulloch’s history of charging decisions — an area where prosecutors have complete discretion. McCulloch prosecuted five police officer killings during his tenure. Four of them involved Black defendants; in each, McCulloch sought the death penalty. The fifth case involved a white defendant named Trenton Forster. In that case, McCulloch sought life. Forster’s conduct was far more aggravated than that of the other defendants, Keenan found. Among other things, Forster had bragged on social media about wanting to kill cops, suggesting that his attack was premeditated. Nonetheless, McCulloch took the extraordinary step of giving Forster’s public defender nearly a year to provide mitigating evidence that might convince McCulloch not to seek a death sentence. McCulloch did not offer this opportunity to any of the Black defendants.

Over the course of his career, McCulloch was far more likely to seek the death penalty in cases where the victim was white, according to a recent study by Frank Baumgartner, a political science professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Baumgartner analyzed 408 death penalty-eligible murder cases from St. Louis County between 1991 and 2018 at the behest of Johnson’s legal team. He found that even after controlling for various circumstances, McCulloch’s office was 3.5 times more likely to seek death when the victim was white.

While two-thirds of victims in all eligible cases were Black, 62 percent of the cases ending in a death sentence involved white victims. Baumgartner’s analysis suggested that McCulloch set the bar higher when considering cases involving Black victims, seeking death more frequently when there were multiple victims. The same was not true where white victims were concerned, Baumgartner wrote: “A single white victim suffices.”

McCulloch did not respond to emails from The Intercept requesting comment. In a recent interview with the Riverfront Times, McCulloch defended his record and denied allegations of racially motivated prosecutions. “There’s no question that you can’t do the job that I did for as long as I did it and not have some people think that you’re a terrible person,” he said. “You just can’t do it.”

“This court should consider the special prosecutor’s motion to vacate for what it is: the state’s confession of error.”

Despite Missouri’s requirement that the trial court hold a hearing on the evidence, St. Louis County Presiding Judge Mary Elizabeth Ott denied Keenan’s motion the day after he filed it. In a subsequent order , Ott acknowledged that while capital punishment “is different from all other punishments” and “requires particular care in its application,” there was nonetheless “insufficient time” to conduct a thorough hearing before Johnson’s scheduled execution, which she said she had no power to stay.

Both Keenan and Johnson’s attorneys appealed the ruling to the Missouri Supreme Court, asking it to halt the execution so that the lower court could hold a hearing on the evidence. “This court should consider the special prosecutor’s motion to vacate for what it is: the state’s confession of error,” which has not been contested, Johnson’s lawyers wrote . “The state admits long-standing and pervasive racial bias in St. Louis County’s handling of this case and other death-eligible prosecutions, including the office’s decisions of which offense to charge, which penalty to seek, and which jurors to strike.”

“Unless this court stays the execution,” Keenan wrote in his appeal, “the result in this case will forever have this cloud over it.”

The Missouri Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on November 28, the day before Johnson is set to die.

Witnessing Death

Two days before Thanksgiving, Rep. Cori Bush, who represents St. Louis, sent a letter alongside her Kansas City colleague Rep. Emanuel Cleaver. They urged Missouri Gov. Mike Parson to grant Johnson clemency. “Johnson’s cruel execution will not solve any of the systemic problems facing Missourians and people all across America, including the scourge of gun violence,” they wrote. “It will simply destroy yet another family and community while using the concepts of fairness and justice as a cynical pretext.”

The letter drew from Johnson’s clemency petition, which emphasized his youth at the time of the crime. In 2005, the same year that Johnson killed McEntee, the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed death sentences for people who committed capital crimes before the age of 18. The ruling in Roper v. Simmons was based on scientific research revealing the extent to which the human brain develops throughout a person’s teenage years. It is now well-established that the parts of the brain guiding impulse control continue to form well into early adulthood, and that factors like poverty, abuse, and neglect profoundly impact such development. Earlier this year, the American Psychological Association concluded that the prohibitions established by Roper should also apply to people between the ages of 18 and 20 — the age Johnson was in 2005.

Although Parson has not made an official announcement regarding clemency, he told reporters on November 23 that he did not intend to intervene.

Today, Johnson’s record behind bars is a testament to the way young people mature beyond their crimes. At Potosi, he is considered a “model inmate,” according to his clemency petition, which included dozens of letters from incarcerated men who described him as a mentor and role model. Among Johnson’s most vocal supporters are a group of educators who have maintained since his trial that Johnson was a good kid who committed a tragic act of violence on one of the worst days of his life. Pam Stanfield, his elementary school principal, who has grown especially close to Johnson over the years, described him as a devoted father whose relationship with Ramey “far exceeds what many fathers are able to do while living outside prison walls.”

In a phone call, Stanfield emphasized that Johnson had expressed deep remorse for killing McEntee. “He would give anything if he could go back and do something differently,” she said. “And yet he’s so much more than that.”

On the morning after Thanksgiving, Johnson’s attorneys organized a press conference to discuss Ramey’s fight to witness her father’s execution. Ramey had planned to give a statement but struggled to speak. She asked Smith, of Missourians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, to read the rest of what she’d written. “I have suffered so much loss in my life,” the statement read, recalling how Ramey had seen her mother killed when she was 4 years old. It was excruciating to think that she would not be there to see her sole surviving parent in his final moments. “If the state of Missouri thinks that my father’s actions at age 19 make him mature enough to be executed, then it makes no sense that under Missouri law an adult who is 19 is not mature enough to be present at that person’s execution.”

A federal judge rejected Ramey’s legal challenge later that evening. He found that Missouri had a valid interest in preventing teenagers from “witnessing death.” He cited a landmark Supreme Court case reining in life sentences for youth, which was rooted in the same scientific research that led to Roper in 2005. Young people “may be more inclined to act out in ways that are disruptive,” he wrote, threatening the “solemnity and decorum” of the execution.

“We are heartbroken for Khorry,” said Nolan, Johnson’s attorney. “Every aspect of this case is a tragedy, but we promise Khorry that we are not done fighting for her father.”

The post A Special Prosecutor Found Kevin Johnson’s Case Was Tainted by Racism. Missouri Is About to Kill Him Anyway. appeared first on The Intercept .

N enhum outro estado da Amazônia Legal teve uma explosão de clubes de tiro como Rondônia. O estado, que tem 1,8 milhão de habitantes e faz fronteira com a Bolívia, ganhou 33 estabelecimentos do tipo só entre 2019 e 2021. Hoje, já são 53 clubes. Ao mesmo tempo, Rondônia concentrou o maior número de assassinatos no campo em 2021, segundo dados da Comissão Pastoral da Terra, a CPT, ligada à Igreja Católica. Dos 35 homicídios no país, 11 aconteceram ali.

Não por acaso, Rondônia é, também, um dos estados em que os bolsonaristas mais têm se sentido à vontade para seus atos golpistas e terroristas de contestação à eleição. Na segunda-feira, o estado tinha oito pontos de obstrução de rodovias – numericamente, só perdia para o Mato Grosso, que estava com onze estradas fechadas. Militantes de esquerda e apoiadores do presidente eleito, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, relatam terem sido agredidos em bloqueios . A situação causa preocupação no estado vizinho, o Acre, que está sem ligação terrestre com o resto do país.

Rondônia é governada por Marcos Rocha, do União Brasil, um coronel da Polícia Militar que venceu as eleições de 2018 sem experiência política anterior e, agora, foi reeleito no segundo turno contra o também bolsonarista senador Marcos Rogério, do PL. Seu secretário de Segurança Pública, o coronel da PM José Hélio Cysneiros Pachá, foi um dos réus pelo Massacre de Corumbiara, ação policial que resultou na morte de 12 pessoas em agosto de 1995.

A violência contra camponeses, indígenas e outros povos tradicionais também se destaca no número de prisões e de agressões. Das 100 detenções registradas pela CPT, 76 foram em Rondônia, assim como 32 das 75 agressões e três dos 13 casos de tortura no país. Quando divulgou seu relatório, a CPT apontou o “emparelhamento protetor do estado brasileiro ao setor ruralista” como um dos fatores do aumento dessa violência e colocou as “agromilícias”, a “pistolagem sob encomenda” e a participação de agentes públicos como responsáveis pelos crimes.

Um dos casos mais emblemáticos dessa promiscuidade ocorreu em 2019, quando oito policiais militares foram presos sob a acusação de atuarem como “capangas” ou “guaxebas”, como dizem os rondonienses, de Chaules Volban Pozzebon. Ele era apontado pelo MPF como um dos maiores desmatadores e vendedores de madeira ilegal da Amazônia, com a propriedade de mais de 100 madeireiras.

Segundo as investigações, os PMs eram usados para a cobrança de “pedágio”, para o despejo forçado de trabalhadores e para ações de pistolagem na região de Cujubim. Um dos presos já era ligado pela CPT a outros casos de violência contra camponeses. Pozzebon foi condenado em 2021 a 99 anos de prisão por organização criminosa e extorsão.

Dos 11 assassinados ocorridos no estado, oito foram mortos nos acampamentos Tiago Santos e Ademar Ferreira, ligados à Liga dos Camponeses Pobres, a LCP. A liga é considerada um dos movimentos mais radicais de luta pela terra da atualidade – e Rondônia é o epicentro de suas atividades. Em um documento lançado em setembro, em que chamava Lula de “pelegão” e Bolsonaro de “celerado”, o movimento pregava contra a participação no processo eleitoral. Com o título “Abaixo a farsa eleitoral e o incremento da guerra contra os camponeses e o povo. Avançar a Revolução Agrária!”, o manifesto defendia a ação direta como instrumento de luta pelo acesso à terra.

A LCP é usada como justificativa para quem defende armas de fogo e clubes de tiro no campo. Em 2021, o presidente do movimento Proarmas Marcos Pollon – hoje eleito deputado federal pelo PL – deu palestras a produtores rurais defendendo a abertura de casas de tiro dentro de fazendas. “A legislação diz que na legítima defesa e no desforço [defesa] imediato da propriedade, eu posso usar todos os meios disponíveis para conter a ameaça” ele disse, segundo reportagem da Agência Pública. “Então você fala: ‘Eu estou indo treinar, o meu stand fica na fazenda’”. Pollon mencionou nominalmente a LCP em suas palestras.

Em Rondônia, Bolsonaro e o governador Rocha transformaram a LCP em alvo. Em maio do ano passado, quando participava da inauguração da Ponte do Abunã, que liga a capital do estado ao Acre, o presidente fez uma ameaça direta ao grupo. “LCP, se prepare! Não vai ficar de graça o que vocês estão fazendo. Não tem espaço aqui para grupo terrorista. Nós temos meios de fazê-los entrar no eixo e respeitar a lei”, bradou.

Não era a primeira citação direta. Dias antes, na abertura da Expozebu, em Uberaba, Minas Gerais, Bolsonaro qualificou as ações da liga como “terror no campo”. Adversário de Rocha nas eleições, Marcos Rogério também esteve afinado contra a liga. Ele apresentou em junho de 2021 um projeto de lei para enquadrar a ocupação de terras por movimentos sociais como terrorismo e chegou a afirmar que a proposta tinha como alvo a LCP.

Para o procurador Raphael Bevilaqua, do Ministério Público Federal em Rondônia, a classificação da atividade do movimento social como terrorismo é uma “acusação fantasiosa” e serviu para justificar o envio da Força Nacional de Segurança Pública ao estado. Ele defende que o envio foi ilegal, porque não apontava um objetivo específico e não vinha acompanhado de um plano de ação. A FNSP participou de operações ao lado da PM em que foram apontadas diversas violações aos direitos humanos.

Integrantes da liga também são investigados sob a acusação de terem participação na morte de pelo menos dois policiais militares. Além disso, entre presos e mortos em ações policiais, havia pessoas que chegaram a cumprir pena por crimes violentos. Isso não permite, no entanto, para o procurador da República, que o movimento seja apontado como terrorista. Segundo relatos de testemunhas, dos seis assassinados no acampamento Tiago dos Santos, pelo menos cinco foram atingidos por disparos feitos a partir de helicópteros.

Na ocasião, o governo de Rondônia confirmou a presença de atiradores nas aeronaves. Os moradores da área foram alvo de um despejo no ano passado, mesmo com a decisão do Supremo Tribunal Federal que proibia este tipo de ação durante a pandemia de covid-19.

Decidida pela justiça , a remoção foi prontamente cumprida pela polícia. Militantes de direitos humanos receberam denúncias de agressões e interrogatórios informais durante a ação policial. Segundo os moradores, muitas casas foram destruídas, assim como roças. Eles citaram também a contaminação de poços com combustível. A própria Secretaria de Segurança Pública de Rondônia confirmou ter recebido denúncias na época, que foram encaminhadas para as Polícias Civil e Militar.

O Judiciário também é criticado pela ação, porque a reintegração de posse foi dada à empresa de um fazendeiro reconhecido como grileiro. O pedido foi feito pela Leme Empreendimentos, de Antônio Martins dos Santos, conhecido como Galo Velho, e seu irmão, o advogado Sebastião Martins dos Santos. Eles são alvo, desde 2020, da operação Amicus Regem do Ministério Público Federal que investiga grilagem de terras com particiação de agentes públicos, inclusive membros do judiciário. A quadrilha teria faturado pelo menos R$ 330 milhões com crimes agrários entre 2011 e 2015. Por causa dessa investigação, o registro da fazenda alvo da reintegração de posse está bloqueado.

‘Eu estou com medo, eu tenho quase certeza de que a coisa vai piorar.’

Uma nova operação foi deflagrada na semana passada, a Lamassu. Com o apoio da Polícia Federal e do Ministério Público Federal, o Grupo de Atuação Especial de Combate ao Crime Organizado do Ministério Público Federal desbaratou uma quadrilha com a participação de agentes públicos que servia de milícia privada para a proteção das atividades de grileiros. Segundo o promotor Anderson Batista, “há comprovação de que agentes públicos chegaram a fazer uso de veículos da polícia e armamento do estado para ameaçar pessoas e garantir ilegalmente posse de terra em regiões localizadas na Ponta do Abunã”. Com base nas investigações, foram cumpridos 32 mandados de prisão, cinco de busca e apreensão e um de afastamento de função pública.

Os militantes apontam ainda ações do Judiciário que dificultam o direito de defesa do movimento. Em novembro, a advogada Lenir Correia Coelho, defensora da Liga dos Camponeses Pobres, foi alvo de busca e apreensão em sua casa e local de trabalho. Segundo o advogado Felipe Nicolau, presidente da Associação Brasileira de Advogados do Povo, da qual ela faz parte, os policiais apreenderam o celular e o computador de trabalho da advogada, além de dinheiro em espécie, materiais de estudo, contratos de honorários e notas promissórias de clientes, muitas sem qualquer relação com a liga.

Para embasar sua decisão, o juiz Fábio Batista da Silva, da vara de São Francisco do Guaporé, afirmou que a advogada era, na verdade, uma das líderes do movimento, o qual acusa de ser uma “organização criminosa destinada à invasão de terras, e ainda lavagem de dinheiro, esbulho possessório e comércio ilegal de armas de fogo”. A inviolabilidade do advogado “por seus atos e manifestações no exercício da profissão” é prevista no artigo 133 da Constituição Federal.

“Eu estou com medo, que eu tenho quase certeza de que a coisa vai piorar”, disse à Agência Pública Marino D’Icahary, vice-presidente da Associação Brasileira dos Advogados do Povo que também representa integrantes da Liga dos Camponeses Pobres. “Esse enfrentamento vai ficar mais aberto e generalizado e escancarado com esse povo super treinado, milícias, entendeu?”.

The post Rondônia concentra o maior número de clubes de tiro criados sob Bolsonaro na Amazônia – e também o de mortes no campo appeared first on The Intercept .

O n a rainy Saturday morning in May, Hayanuddin Afghan, a former member of a CIA-backed militia that was once his country’s most brutal and effective anti-Taliban force, welcomed me to his new home in a hilly neighborhood of Pittsburgh.

He invited me in through the kitchen, where his wife, who was pregnant with their fourth child, was baking traditional Afghan bread with flour from Aldi’s. The trip downtown to buy groceries was among the greatest challenges of Hayanuddin’s new life in Pittsburgh. It involved hauling heavy bags back home on foot and in multiple city buses, whose schedules were unknowable since he didn’t speak English and had not downloaded the relevant app.

“It is difficult to descend from a very strong position to a very weak position,” Hayanuddin told me. In Afghanistan, “we had value. It was our country, and we were making sense for that country. But now, even our generals and commanders, everyone is in the same position.”

In Afghanistan, it was impossible to talk at any length to members of the secretive commando forces known as the Zero Units. They hunted the Taliban in night raids and were widely accused of killing civilians , including children . But last September, Hayanuddin and his Zero Unit comrades were the beneficiaries of the most successful aspect of the Biden administration’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan: the CIA’s rescue of its allied militias . Their arrival in the U.S. over the last year has cracked open one of the war’s blackest boxes.

My conversations with Hayanuddin and several other militia members yielded new details about the command structure, operations, and final days of shadowy units that were nominally overseen by the Afghan intelligence service but were in fact built, trained, and in many cases fully controlled by the CIA. Their fighters hold clues to many of the war’s mysteries, including how U.S. intelligence engineered and oversaw years of deadly night raids that contributed to the Taliban’s ultimate victory, and how a secret deal between longtime enemies may have hastened the lightning collapse of the Afghan security forces last August.

Celebrated as heroes by their American handlers and some Afghans who oppose the Taliban, militiamen like Hayanuddin were feared and detested by many rural Afghans, who bore the brunt of their harrowing raids. While hundreds of Zero Unit members and their closest relatives made it to the U.S., they left behind extended families who have suffered abuse, imprisonment, and death threats under the new government.

The CIA did not respond to detailed questions about its role in overseeing, evacuating, and resettling Zero Unit members and whether the agency would do more to help militiamen and their families left behind in Afghanistan. “The United States made a commitment to the people who worked for us that we would create a concrete pathway to U.S. citizenship for those who gave so much to assist us over the years,” an agency spokesperson told me in an email. “It will take time, but we never forget [our] partners and are committed to helping those who assisted us. We are continuing to work closely with the State Department and other US government agencies on this effort.”

“With regard to allegations of human rights abuses,” the email continued, “the U.S. takes these claims very seriously, and we take extraordinary measures, beyond the minimum legal requirements to reduce civilian casualties in armed conflict and strengthen accountability for the actions of partners. A false narrative [exists] about these forces that has persisted over the years due to a systematic propaganda campaign by the Taliban.”

Hayanuddin said that he and his comrades took care to avoid harming bystanders during their raids, even using loudspeakers to warn women to stay inside or shelter in basements before the fighting began. “For me, it was like a holy war,” he said. “I was there to target bad guys.” But he also described lingering feelings of rage, guilt, and remorse, and connected his struggle in Pittsburgh to his past. At one point, he wondered aloud if he was being punished.

“Sometimes I can’t control my anger and my anxiety,” he told me. “My heart is so sad, like someone is squeezing it very hard. I don’t know why. Maybe because of what happened back home or what is happening here.”

Reversal of Fortune

I met Hayanuddin last spring, at an Afghan New Year’s celebration in a park in Pittsburgh, where we had both recently settled as refugees. I had worked for the New York Times in Kabul for five years and made many trips to the front lines to report on the Afghan security forces, including in the days before the Taliban captured the Afghan capital last August. I was evacuated with other Times staffers to Houston, where I lived in a hotel for several months before getting a job as a visual journalist at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review and moving north.

At first, Hayanuddin didn’t want to talk to me. But after several attempts, he grew more comfortable, in part because he thought he was talking about an episode of the war that was closed, and in part because we were both exiles from the same place, trying to start new lives in Pittsburgh while still longing for home.

Hayanuddin had served six years with a unit known as 03, fighting the Taliban across Afghanistan’s southern deserts from his base in a compound previously occupied by the one-eyed former Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar. U.S. special operators had commandeered the property when they arrived in Kandahar in 2001 and turned it into a redoubt for American and Afghan intelligence forces. With hundreds of other Zero Unit fighters, Hayanuddin crossed shifting front lines in the final days of the war to get to Kabul’s CIA-controlled Eagle Base . From there, he was airlifted to the Hamid Karzai International Airport, where he briefly worked security before being handed $8,000 in cash — half a year’s salary — and flown with his wife and three young children to Fort Dix.

At 37, with a seventh-grade education, Hayanuddin, along with his comrades, is facing a reversal of fortune that is humiliating, infuriating, and utterly intractable. After almost two decades as an American proxy — from guarding U.S. bases to killing Afghans in partnership with the world’s most powerful intelligence agency — he has landed, as a poor and vulnerable refugee, in a three-bedroom apartment with flowered curtains he had to harangue the resettlement agency to install in keeping with Pashtun culture, which dictates that a woman must be shielded from the eyes of passing strangers.

The Zero Units, also known as Counterterrorism Pursuit Teams, were born soon after the first U.S. military and intelligence operatives arrived in Afghanistan in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. Formed in 2002, they operated entirely under U.S. control until 2012, Gen. Yasin Zia, Afghanistan’s former chief of Army staff, told me in August from London, where he leads an anti-Taliban resistance force. “The government of Afghanistan had no interference in these units,” said Zia, who spent many years in senior roles in the U.S.-backed Afghan government, including as deputy director of the Afghan intelligence service, the National Directorate of Security, which nominally oversaw the units in recent years.

The first of what would become the Zero Units operated in eastern Afghanistan, in a mountainous area along the Pakistani border where the Taliban and other militants often sought refuge between attacks on U.S., NATO, and Afghan government forces. That militia, known as the Khost Protection Force, or KPF, covered the southeastern region of the country. Later, the CIA created and trained at least three more units: 01, which operated in Kabul, Logar, and Wardak provinces in central Afghanistan; 02, based in Jalalabad, which fought in the east; and Hayanuddin’s unit, 03, based in Kandahar and fighting across the south.

In 2010, under pressure from then-Afghan President Hamid Karzai, U.S. officials agreed to transfer oversight of the Zero Units to NDS “physically, but not technically,” Zia said. “We had the names and ranks of members of Zero Units,” he told me. “But their salary was paid by Americans, their targets were given by Americans, and until the end the Americans were with these units.”

“Their salary was paid by Americans, their targets were given by Americans, and until the end the Americans were with these units.”

As the Obama administration transitioned from combat operations to a counterterrorism and advisory mission in Afghanistan after 2011, the U.S. handed control of several Zero Units over to the Karzai government, Zia said. But the CIA retained control of other key units, including the Kabul-based 01; the KPF; and Hayanuddin’s 03.

The units targeted the Taliban, the Haqqani Network, and Al Qaeda, but they were not accountable to the Afghan government — not even to the president. In 2019, Afghanistan’s then-national security adviser, Hamdullah Mohib, responded to allegations of extrajudicial killings by 01 — including massacres of children in madrassas — by noting that the unit operated “in partnership with the CIA.”

Hayanuddin had a front-row seat to the shambolic American withdrawal from Afghanistan, and now he can describe what he saw and heard in the war’s final months. The Zero Units were built to work in tandem with U.S. air support, but in August 2020, a year before the government of Afghan President Ashraf Ghani collapsed, U.S. forces began to radically scale back their air support for his unit, Hayanuddin said.

“Our American advisers left our bases for Kabul, and the choppers that would wait in our base on the edge of Kandahar City left with them,” he recalled. “Our commanders would only report to Americans about our operations, and the Americans would just say, ‘Go ahead.’ We were not working as closely as we used to.”

When the Americans took away their planes, the Afghans’ missions grew much more treacherous. “The American surveillance aircraft would tell us how many people were inside a building and how many of them were armed, and what weapons they have,” Hayanuddin said. “But those details were not there anymore.”

With U.S. air support gone and the fledgling Afghan Air Force unable to provide comparable intelligence , more Zero Unit members got hurt. The planes that had once ferried them to field hospitals in minutes were gone too. In February 2020, when U.S. drones and other aircraft circled over their operations, one of Hayanuddin’s comrades, Akmal, was blown up by a roadside bomb. The Americans airlifted him to a military hospital and he survived, Hayanuddin said, though he lost both his legs. But eight months later, another unit member, Shahidullah, was shot twice in the abdomen. This time, there was no airlift, and Hayanuddin’s unit was stuck in enemy territory. Shahidullah died on the spot.

After President Joe Biden took office in January 2021, the CIA gave the NDS a year’s budget for the Zero Units and said the agency would no longer support them, Zia told The Intercept from London. But the final Zero Units were not transferred to Afghan control, he said, until after Biden announced the full U.S. withdrawal in April 2021 and the last American forces and intelligence operatives began to leave.

“Like Committing Suicide”

The Zero Units were designed to capture and kill in targeted raids, not to fight on battlefields. They were widely known as among the most effective elite units in the Afghan security forces, and last summer, as the U.S. military pulled out and the Taliban advanced, many in the Ghani government and the Afghan military looked to them for salvation.

“I am not sure if our commanders got some money in bribes from provincial officials or the government in Kabul,” Hayanuddin said. “But they started turning a blind eye to our standards and sending us to several missions a day and making us suffer heavy casualties.”

Sometimes seven or eight unit members were killed each month, he said, an unprecedented rate for the elite unit. “Once, I remember that all our unit members started crying and protesting because of being overused. Our commanders never listened to that. They would still force us to go to operations all over the south.”

As casualties rose and the war intensified, the morale of Zero Unit members cratered, an Afghan doctor who fought for 02 told me. Like Hayanuddin, the doctor was evacuated last summer; he asked me not to use his name for fear of repercussions now that he and his family are in the United States.

When his commander would ask militia members to go on operations, the doctor told me, some would faint. They would say that “going to an operation is like committing suicide,” he recalled, “as there is no air support and not enough weapons and equipment.”

Rumors that U.S.-Taliban peace talks in Qatar had yielded an agreement to essentially give Afghanistan to the Taliban didn’t help. “The Taliban would send tribal elders to different security forces and tell them that it was decided in Doha that the province where they are stationed should be handed over to the Taliban, so better you don’t fight and avoid the casualties,” the doctor said. “The security forces would accept that and give up fighting.”

The Afghan security forces couldn’t keep up with the losses. In May 2021 alone, more than 400 pro-government forces were killed . Afghans were no longer willing to join the security forces because the job had become too dangerous.

“We had very smart people in our unit,” Hayanuddin said. “I remember that on a single day, one of our guys, without proper equipment, cleared nearly 30 roadside bombs” in Maiwand District, a Taliban stronghold west of Kandahar. Fighters with 03 repeatedly forced the Taliban out of Kandahar’s Arghandab District in the spring of 2021, he said, but when the regular Afghan army and police took over, the Taliban surged back.

Both Hayanuddin and the doctor from 02 suspect that the Afghan security forces largely surrendered the south not because they were defeated on the battlefield but as part of a political deal. They were not alone in thinking this. In the summer of 2021, the Taliban took control of dozens of Afghan police outposts in the districts surrounding Kandahar.

“It was a political deal which led to a wave of collapse of hundreds of outposts first in the south of the country.”

“The leadership of the Afghan security forces asked ground forces in many provinces across the country to stop fighting. We have seen videos on social media that soldiers were crying when they were told to leave their outposts and drop their weapons,” Mirza Mohammad Yarmand, a former Afghan deputy interior minister and military analyst, told me. “This means that it was a political deal which led to a wave of collapse of hundreds of outposts first in the south of the country.”

Soldiers who insisted on fighting found their supply lines cut and didn’t get the support they needed, Yarmand said, adding that when Afghan forces in the northern province of Takhar wanted to stand their ground, they were given a choice: surrender to the Taliban or drive to the mountains of Panjshir, where the last forces resisting the Taliban were holed up.

Near Kandahar, Hayanuddin’s unit ran into police officers trying to flee. “They said their outpost was captured by the Taliban,” he recalled. “We took them with us, and there was no Taliban in their outpost. When we asked why, they said their tribal elder told them to leave the outpost to the Taliban. This is only one example, but it happened many times.”

In June 2021, 03 was deployed from one front line to another as district after district fell to the insurgents. By the end of that month, nearly half of Afghanistan’s districts were under Taliban control.

As the fighting intensified, other Afghan security forces pinned their hopes on the Zero Units. On August 4, 2021, I was with the Afghan National Police Counter Resistance Unit outside Sarposa Prison, one of the main front lines in Kandahar. The fighting picked up on one edge of the city just as the police machine gun stopped working. I asked Shafiqullah Kaliwal, a unit commander, what they were going to do.

“The 03 will come,” he told me, “and they will push back the Taliban to their original outposts.”

The next day, Kaliwal told me that 03 had indeed come to their rescue and forced the Taliban to retreat. But when the Zero Unit moved on, the Taliban quickly recaptured the territory.

Zia confirmed that the pressure on Zero Units was unsustainable. In the last four months of the war in Kandahar, Zia said, “the casualties of Zero Units were very high. It was not comparable to the past 20 years of war. The reason for that was that they were not used professionally.”

A Secret Deal

One of the many mysteries of the war’s final days was how the Zero Units managed to make their way through Taliban-held territory to Kabul, where they were evacuated to the United States and other countries. An apparent agreement between the Taliban and the U.S. helps explain their unlikely escape.

On August 11, 2021, one of the main government lines of defense in Kandahar City collapsed to the Taliban . Hayanuddin was on leave at the time, but the next day, he said, his comrades in 03 and other security forces drove to Kandahar Air Field, which by then was in Taliban territory. There, they spent two days waiting to be flown to Kabul.

On August 14, the Taliban captured Jalalabad City, the provincial capital of Nangarhar Province, where Hayanuddin was spending his leave with his family. Terrified, he and his younger brother, who had also served in 03, stayed up all night, trying to contact Hayanuddin’s commander for orders. When they finally reached the commander, he told them to get to Kabul. The next morning, they climbed into a taxi and set off on an anxious two-hour journey through territory now controlled by their enemies. If anyone identified them, they thought, they would be killed.

But the trip was far easier than they’d expected as, one after another, the Taliban fighters manning checkpoints let them pass. “We didn’t know what was happening,” Hayanuddin told me. “They were our enemy. We were intensively fighting just a day before the collapse, but now we were staying in their territory or driving through it. We thought we were taking a big risk, but now as I think about it, it seems the Taliban didn’t want to attack us as part of their deal with the U.S.”

It wasn’t just a few guys in taxis who managed to cross Taliban checkpoints with ease. On August 15, the day Kabul fell to the Taliban, the doctor from 02 told me that he drove from Jalalabad to Kabul with his fellow unit members in a convoy of hundreds of military vehicles packed with weapons and equipment. The doctor thought they would have to fight their way through the checkpoints, but each time, the Taliban soldiers called their commanders and waved him and the other Afghan militiamen through.

The Taliban allowed Zero Unit members to safely cross their front lines in the final days of the war because they had agreed with the U.S. government to do so.

The Taliban allowed Zero Unit members to safely cross their front lines in the final days of the war because they had agreed with the U.S. government to do so, according to the doctor from 02 and two former Afghan intelligence officials, who asked not to be named because they feared repercussions from the Taliban for speaking to a journalist. The U.S. evacuation plan depended on Zero Unit members working security at the Kabul airport, and the Americans had told those fighters to get passports shortly before the republic collapsed, Zia, the former senior security official, said.

The CIA declined to comment. The Taliban did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Hayanuddin and his brother made it safely to Eagle Base, the Kabul headquarters of the CIA and 01, where they spent three nights. One by one, the Zero Units boarded Chinook helicopters and left the base for the Kabul airport: first 01, then 02, and then Hayanuddin’s unit, 03.

Hayanuddin spent five nights in the airport, providing security for the evacuation of thousands of desperate Afghans . In those days and later, Zero Unit members were accused of firing over the heads of crowds and beating Afghan civilians who were trying to leave. Hayanuddin denied mistreating people at the airport, but my own encounter with a Zero Unit fighter on August 19 suggests there is truth to the charges. As I made my way through crowds in front of the airport terminal, trying to reach my American colleague and the U.S. Marines, a member of the Zero Units stopped me. I explained who I was and where I was going, but the fighter ordered me to sit down. If I didn’t, he said, he would shoot me with dozens of bullets, and no one would question him.

At last, it was Hayanuddin’s turn to call his family to join him on a flight to the U.S., via Abu Dhabi and Germany. Like many Afghans, Hayanuddin was married to two women. He had moved one of his wives, who he asked me not to name, to Nangarhar with their three kids several months before the collapse, and one of his brothers managed to escort them to Kabul to meet Hayanuddin at the airport. But Hayanuddin’s other wife was still in his home province of Kunar with their four children when the republic fell.

“My first wife, who was in Kunar, couldn’t make it to Kabul,” he told me, “because there was no one to accompany her.”

Hayanuddin also left his parents and siblings behind, including the brother who had served alongside him in 03. The Americans refused to evacuate him, Hayanuddin said, because he had left the unit a year before the Taliban took control.

Thankful, but Angry

In Pittsburgh, Hayanuddin and several other Zero Unit members found work at a halal grocery. One of them was Khan Wali Momand, a former school principal who started working for 02 in Jalalabad as a security guard in 2017. Momand now lives with his wife and children in Section 8 housing in Duquesne, a Pittsburgh suburb. When I met him, he was unloading boxes; he has since gotten a different job at another local grocery store, which he prefers because it doesn’t involve as much heavy lifting.

Momand started working with 02 through his brother, Inayatullah, who he says served 16 years with the unit but left just days before the government collapsed because his wife was ill. Like Hayanuddin’s brother, Inayatullah was left behind when the Taliban took over, and he and Momand’s other relatives immediately became targets for retribution. Inayatullah went into hiding, and when I spoke to Momand this spring, he was consumed by grief and worry. “Every time I receive a call from home,” Momand told me, “I think it will be bad news.”

This spring, members of the Taliban kidnapped two of Momand’s teenage nephews and held them for five days in an attempt to force the family to hand over Inayatullah. The nephews were released after tribal elders in the area promised to help the Taliban find Inayatullah. He has applied for a Special Immigrant Visa to come to the United States, Momand said, but has not heard back.

“We were so loyal to Americans that we wouldn’t leave their bags behind in the battlefield, but now they are leaving behind my brother, who helped them for 16 years,” Momand told me. “It happened many times during missions with 02 that an American adviser or soldier would get shot, and we would risk our life to take them out of the battlefield. Look at our level of loyalty and their level of loyalty.”

Momand is deeply conflicted over his role in the war. When he began working with the Americans five years ago, he drew the enmity of the Taliban and many acquaintances. In his conservative village, he had a hard time defending his decision and explaining how helping the Americans would benefit his country. Now he wonders whether he made the right choice — whether it was worth it, given the price he and his family have paid. He’s an outsider in Duquesne and may never be able to go back to Afghanistan. Did he join 02 for the wrong reasons, he wonders, or was he used? Did he betray his country, his people, after all?

Momand said he is grateful to Biden. “He hasn’t left us to the Taliban. If I had been left behind in Afghanistan, my whole family and I would have been killed by now,” he said. “But there is no one in the U.S. to rescue me from the tough situation here.”

As our conversation drew to a close, Momand’s anger flared. He had told his story many times, he said, to workers from resettlement agencies and other relief organizations. “Everyone comes here and asks about my problems and the problems of my family, but I don’t see any outcome of telling these stories,” he said. “Do you enjoy hearing my painful life story?”

Only in the Darkness

At Hayanuddin’s house that rainy May morning, an oilcloth was spread over the living room carpet, and we sat around it while his wife and 9-year-old daughter, Simina, brought out loaves of hot fresh bread, eggs, warm yogurt, and a giant thermos of sweet, milky black tea.

As we ate, Hayanuddin kept an eye on his phone. At 9 a.m., an alarm sounded, and Simina brought him a pair of white athletic socks, a jacket, and an umbrella. Back in Afghanistan, his American advisers had stressed the need for punctuality, often arriving 15 minutes early for meetings with their Afghan counterparts. He feared that if he were late to work, he’d get fired. And he needed this job.

He took home about $1,600 a month after taxes, he told me. The resettlement agency was covering the first three months of rent on his apartment in Pittsburgh; after that, he’d have to spend $1,500 a month, nearly his entire paycheck, on rent and utilities. He was getting food stamps, but the family budget was tight.

His house was about five miles from the halal grocery, an easy 15-minute drive. But the bus ride, including a transfer downtown, could take more than an hour. On this day, he would work for nine hours, arriving home between 9 and 10 p.m. The family, including the children, would eat a late dinner together. After that, they’d call Afghanistan, so Hayanuddin and his wife could talk to their parents, and the parents could speak to their grandchildren.

It was his father, Hayanuddin says, who had convinced him to go to the U.S. last year. “If the Taliban come and they behead you in front of us or shoot you in the head in front of us, that would be a very big trauma for us for our whole life,” his father told him last August. “So if you want to spare us that pain, you should leave.”

He sometimes regrets it. “We didn’t voluntarily come here, and it is not easy here,” he told me. “That’s the everyday struggle. And then you have a family that is staring at you and hoping that you will fix everything.”

At 9:20 a.m., Hayanuddin pulled on a black jacket and headed out to the bus stop, a wooden pole with a metal sign at the edge of a busy road. He hunched his shoulders against the rain and took a drag on his Marlboro Red. The resettlement agency gave him transit cards, but when they ran out, he’d have to spend his own money on bus fare.

Back in Afghanistan, he drove heavy military vehicles over mountainous terrain wearing night vision goggles. But in Pittsburgh, he couldn’t get a driver’s license. The test was offered in Urdu and Arabic, but not Persian or Pashto, Afghanistan’s two main languages, and at the time, translators were not allowed. (Several months later, after the local Afghan community complained, the DMV added a test in Persian.)

“If I would stand in a bus stop in Afghanistan, I would just wave to a taxi and they would stop and take me to where I wanted to go,” he said. “There is no country as good as Afghanistan around the world, if only it were safe enough to live in.”

After 15 minutes, the bus arrived. Hayanuddin, thoroughly soaked, donned a surgical mask, climbed the steps, and settled into an empty seat. As the bus heaved along the twisting roads, heading downtown, he surveyed the other passengers.

“Only poor people like me are using the bus,” he noted.

Back at his apartment, he’d shown me a stack of military ID cards and commendations from the Americans he’d worked with, each signed by a different soldier or officer, praising his service and making promises they couldn’t keep.

“Your exemplary actions demonstrate your overall commitment to not only safeguard your Village, your District, and Province from those who inflict harm upon the innocent, but also to ensure a better future for all current and future Afghan citizens,” read one certificate, signed by “Master Sergeant Scott” and “Commander Josh” of Special Forces unit ODA 3115.

“His expertise, unfaltering dedication to duty and work ethic have far exceeded my expectations and he is an inspiration for all who work with him,” said another, marked QSF — for Qandahar Strike Force — National Security Unit 03 and dated March 2021. “Over the past 6 years, He has demonstrated his total loyalty to his unit. His service to the country is a shining example for all his fellows’ unit around him and he demonstrates an unfailing commitment to a free and prosperous Afghanistan.” It was signed by “Mac,” a U.S. adviser.

“Mr. Ayanudin will be a great asset to the SRF-03,” read a commendation from 2015, “and will make a significant contribution to a free and prosperous Afghanistan.”

What to make, now, of those papers, those words?

More than an hour after leaving his house, Hayanuddin disembarked on a desolate street corner and walked a block to the halal grocery, a sprawling brick warehouse complex with murals paraphrasing Martin Luther King Jr.: “Only in the darkness can you see the stars.”

Inside, he traded his jacket for a white apron and reappeared behind the meat counter, where he used a mechanized blade to slice chicken breasts.

The post The Evacuation of the CIA’s Afghan Proxies Has Opened One of the War’s Blackest Boxes appeared first on The Intercept .

O Intercept lança nesta quinta-feira, dia 17, o minidocumentário “Brasil em Transe”, um registro independente sobre o eleitorado brasileiro durante a disputa presidencial que botou em xeque o sistema democrático do país. Ao longo dos três meses, seis repórteres percorreram ruas de cidades no estado de São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro e no Distrito Federal para saber o que pensam (e o que ignoram) dezenas de eleitores de Lula e Jair Bolsonaro.

Encontramos pessoas de diferentes classes sociais, gêneros e raças em lugares que vão desde um depósito de paletes no interior de São Paulo, até um comício de campanha de Bolsonaro no Rio. Apesar das mais divergentes visões e histórias que ouvimos, em comum, todos traziam um sentimento à tona: o medo.

Mas o que provoca medo entre lulistas e bolsonaristas é tão radicalmente diverso quanto a percepção que eles têm sobre a realidade.

Entre os apoiadores do petista, o medo é de ser agredido na rua por simplesmente usar um lenço vermelho e manifestar sua liberdade política, resguardada pela Constituição. Entre os eleitores de Jair, o medo é baseado na paranoia de que Lula vai transformar o Brasil em uma ditadura comunista e perseguir cristãos.

Ao longo desses meses, conversamos com cidadãos que relativizaram a incompetente gestão do governo Bolsonaro da pandemia de covid-19, que culminou em quase 700 mil mortes no país. E gente que, assim como o presidente, nega momentos cruéis da história recente, como a ditadura militar – que assolou o Brasil entre 1964 e 1985 – e temas que sangram na nossa sociedade, como o racismo.

O documentário retrata também a tensão que dominou os eleitores durante a apuração final das eleições, em 30 de outubro, e o choro que brotou com o resultado das urnas. Choro que, para alguns, foi de frustração, mas para a maioria, de libertação.

The post ‘Brasil em transe': Intercept lança documentário sobre o embate entre Lula e Bolsonaro contado por seus eleitores appeared first on The Intercept .

P ouco mais de 140 quilômetros separam a aldeia Gorotire dos quatro clubes de tiro abertos nos últimos cinco anos na cidade de Redenção, no Pará. A comunidade integra o território de Cumaru do Norte – a 14ª cidade com maior taxa média de mortes violentas intencionais do país, segundo o Anuário Brasileiro de Segurança Pública .

À beira do rio Fresco, um dos afluentes do Xingu, fica uma das principais entradas para a Terra Indígena dos Kayapó, afetada pela presença de garimpeiros há décadas. Segundo o Boletim do Ouro , elaborado pela Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, entre janeiro de 2021 e junho de 2022, quase metade da área total de mineração em terras indígenas estava no território Kayapó. E, de acordo com o MapBiomas, lá também ficam as maiores áreas de garimpo em TIs no Brasil – são 7.602 hectares de área minerada.

Logo ao norte da reserva, dois clubes de tiro em São Félix do Xingu e Ourilândia do Norte fecham o cerco aos Kayapó. Tucumã, que fica entre essas duas cidades, também inaugurou uma casa de tiro em 2021. Os três municípios registraram ao menos 52 conflitos entre 2020 e 2021, segundo dados da Comissão Pastoral da Terra, a CPT.

“É muito significativo que tenham aberto um clube em São Félix, em 2019, por exemplo, porque as invasões em terras indígenas cresceram muito nessas regiões. E ainda estão abrindo uma estrada que vai ligar São Félix a Novo Progresso, cortando a Terra do Meio. Isso é o fim do mundo”, criticou a antropóloga Luísa Molina, consultora do Instituto Socioambiental.

Em maio, uma operação da Polícia Federal em conjunto com Ministério Público Federal, Funai, Ibama e Força Nacional destruiu três garimpos e maquinários ilegais na parte da TI que ficam nas delimitações de São Félix do Xingu. Mas nos últimos quatro anos, Jair Bolsonaro – que fez de tudo para tentar legalizar o garimpo em terras indígenas – desmontou os mecanismos de fiscalização. A apreensão de maquinários, por exemplo, caiu 81% . E tem outro problema: fiscalizar garimpos ilegais se tornou bem mais perigoso para os próprios policiais.

“Trabalho com segurança pública desde 2012. Você vê em qualquer lugar do Brasil gente atirando contra a Polícia Federal. E isso era algo que não acontecia! Você vê garimpeiro batendo com facão no rosto de fiscal, botando fogo em helicóptero. E esses policiais veem que os bandidos são empoderados pelo presidente”, disse Bruno Langeani, gerente de projetos do Instituto Sou da Paz. “Vi uma matéria outro dia mostrando um garimpeiro com armas num helicóptero, e você consegue ver um fuzil novíssimo da Taurus. Então, você vê que eles passam a comprar isso com mais facilidade”.

As demais divisas da TI Kayapó fazem fronteiras com outras reservas, todas cercadas por clubes de tiro. E não são as únicas. Em todo o Pará, no Mato Grosso e no Maranhão, as terras indígenas estão rodeadas por esses estabelecimentos.

A boiada no Matopiba

N a madrugada de 3 de setembro, Janildo Oliveira Guajajara foi morto com tiros nas costas em Amarante do Maranhão. O município fica a menos de 100 quilômetros de Imperatriz, onde ficam três clubes de tiro – dois deles foram abertos durante o governo Bolsonaro. Na mesma noite, Israel Carlos Miranda Guajajara morreu atropelado na mesma cidade, próximo à região norte da terra índigena Arariboia. Os dois casos são investigados como homicídios dolosos , com suspeita de conflitos com madeireiros ilegais na TI.

Ainda que não haja tantos de clubes de tiro quanto em outros estados, o número desses estabelecimentos dobrou no Maranhão sob a gestão Bolsonaro – passando de sete para 14. Sob condição de anonimato, um morador relatou a presença mais forte desse tipo de comércio. “Imperatriz está cheia de lojas de arma. No meu bairro tem muitas. Isso começou nos últimos dois anos. É um mercado que se abriu, afrouxando as leis e deixando tudo muito confuso e de fácil acesso”, contou.

Imperatriz é uma das maiores produtoras de soja do estado e abriga o Sindicato dos Ruralistas. Também é um lugar onde Bolsonaro se sente bem confortável. Só entre julho e setembro, o presidente da República fez duas motociatas na cidade.

‘Você não precisa mais abrir uma empresa, basta ir lá e tirar um registro de caçador.’

A região faz parte do Matopiba – acrônimo de Maranhão, Tocantins, Piauí e Bahia –, considerado a última fronteira agrícola do país . Em 2008, uma porção de fazendeiros começou a ocupar territórios no Cerrado, impulsionando o agronegócio na região. Só em 2015, o governo delimitou oficialmente as áreas do Matopiba – e começou a criar programas para facilitar as empresas do agro, com projetos de infraestrutura para escoamento da produção e regulação de terras.

Mas o agro empurra os conflitos para outros municípios da área. “Essa regularização das terras pressiona os pequenos produtores, que produzem farinha, mandioca e que estão perdendo terras”, me contou o morador. “Em Arariboia, quem está atacando os indígenas são pessoas pobres, que vivem da caça e madeira ilegal. É uma questão fundiária em uma região agrícola. Todo mundo é filho de camponeses aqui. Você tem cidades inchadas, com muita gente pobre, jovens sem emprego, sem condições de se integrar à vida do consumo. Então vão surgindo conflitos”.

Em 2021, segundo dados da CPT, o estado foi o segundo com mais conflitos de terra: foram 72 registros, atingindo 14.377 famílias. No mesmo ano, o Maranhão registrou nove assassinatos por questões fundiárias. O estado só ficou atrás apenas do Pará, com 96 áreas de conflito.

Armando agromilícias

N o começo da noite de 24 de maio de 2017, viaturas se aproximaram de um acampamento improvisado de trabalhadores rurais sem-terra na fazenda Santa Lúcia, de 5 mil hectares, em Pau d’Arco, no sul do Pará. O grupo de 25 pessoas havia chegado há pouco no local e, assim que escutaram a aproximação, todos saíram em disparada mata adentro. A chuva, que até então caía fina, virou tempestade. Sentiram-se seguros – a polícia não entraria naquele lamaçal. Foi um erro. Nem tiveram tempo de perceber o cerco dos agentes quando começaram os disparos.

De primeira, a polícia matou cinco trabalhadores no tiroteio. Encontraram com vida a líder do acampamento, Jane de Oliveira, junto ao marido, Antônio Pereira Milhomem, e o cunhado, Ronaldo Pereira de Souza. Os policiais comemoraram o encontro com Jane – ela era uma das responsáveis por outras ocupações realizadas naquele ano na mesma fazenda e por um protesto que havia fechado a BR-155, contra uma ação de despejo de trabalhadores do MST.

Jane foi torturada e assassinada pelos policiais. Na sequência, eles mataram os outros dois parentes e mais dois posseiros. A chacina de Pau d’Arco contabilizou 10 corpos, numa ação orquestrada e protagonizada por 29 homens da Polícia Civil e Militar. Segundo a investigação , dois seguranças particulares armados também participaram da ação.

No fim de janeiro do ano passado, Fernando Araújo dos Santos, sobrevivente da chacina e uma das principais testemunhas do caso, morreu com um tiro na nuca, em casa. Semanas antes, Santos havia relatado ao site Repórter Brasil ameaças feitas por policiais, que nunca foram ouvidos nas investigações. Segundo o inquérito, não houve relação entre o assassinato e o massacre. Quanto aos envolvidos nas 10 mortes na fazenda Santa Lúcia, dois policiais civis e 14 militares foram indiciados pelos crimes, mas seguem em liberdade – e em atividade – enquanto esperam pelo julgamento. A investigação final concluiu que não houve mandantes.

Os reflexos de Pau D’Arco ainda ressoam no sul e sudeste do estado, a região mais violenta do Pará. É comum que latifundiários contratam pistoleiros para tomar conta das fazendas e coagir os posseiros a abandonar a luta. E, muitas vezes, policiais militares fazem parte desses bandos. “As empresas de segurança atuam com eles. Em Pau d’Arco elas participaram ativamente na busca pelas pessoas na área”, me disse José Vargas Júnior, advogado que defendeu as vítimas do massacre. “Antes dessa onda armamentista, essas empresas nem sempre tinham o direito de fazer vigilância armada, como no caso da fazenda Santa Lúcia”.

É justamente nessas regiões que pipocam clubes de tiro. Só entre as BR-158 e 155, no Pará, existem 15 deles. No sul do estado, o número é bem maior: são 35 – quase 70% do total de estabelecimentos do estado. “Essa flexibilização na regulamentação foi um grande facilitador. Antes tinham que dar um aspecto de legalidade, com empresas, havia mais restrições, as armas tinham um menor potencial ofensivo”, disse Vargas.

Agora, ele explica, as agromilícias se formam no mesmo modus operandi, mas com dois facilitadores: os CACs e os clubes de tiro. “Você não precisa mais abrir uma empresa, basta ir lá e tirar um registro de caçador”.

A lei mudou mesmo o cenário no campo. Em 2019, Bolsonaro aprovou uma lei de posse de arma estendida no campo . Ou seja, desde então, os fazendeiros podem andar armados por toda sua propriedade – e não apenas na sede, como era antes. “Essas propriedades na Amazônia são do tamanho da região metropolitana de São Paulo. Então essa pessoa pode andar por milhares de quilômetros armada. Ela agora pode botar um fuzil legal dentro da sua propriedade”, observou Langeani.

As cidades que permeiam a BR-155 abrigam os maiores rebanhos de gado do país. Xinguara, por exemplo, é conhecida como a capital da pecuária. Mais uma vez, os clubes de tiro acompanham o rastro do agronegócio, numa região cheia de terras indígenas assaltadas por grileiros, garimpeiros e madeireiros.

The post Clubes de tiro cercam indígenas e facilitam agromilícias na Amazônia appeared first on The Intercept .