25/05/2021 Video of Clashes in Brazil Appears to Show Police Infiltrators Among Protesters - The New York Times

Video of Clashes in Brazil Appears to Show

Police Infiltrators Among Protesters
By Robert Mackey, Sergio Peçanha and Taylor Barnes and Nadia Sussman July 24, 2013 5:59 am

Supporters of Brazil’s protest movement and the police in Rio de Janeiro spent much
of Tuesday arguing online over which side was to blame for violence at a demonstration
the night before, at the start of a papal visit.

While neither side was able to produce definitive proof of who instigated the clashes
on Monday near the governor’s palace in Rio, shortly after Pope Francis left the area, an
examination of video recorded by witnesses, protesters and the police did appear to show
undercover officers — called infiltrators by the protesters and intelligence agents by the
authorities — at work.

A central piece of evidence in the arguments presented by both sides was 40 seconds
of video released by Rio’s military police that showed a man near the front line between
the two sides lighting and then hurling a Molotov cocktail, which exploded with a loud
bang near officers in riot gear.

Although the police provided the video to the newspaper O Globo, and issued an
invitation to the public via Twitter to watch what the department described as images of
the protester who started the confrontation by throwing a Molotov cocktail at officers,
within hours the clip was mysteriously removed from YouTube.

Late Tuesday, the police uploaded a different video clip to YouTube that captured a
loud bang at some stage in the clashes outside an Esso station on Rua Pinheiro Machado
near the Guanabara Palace. But that video was recorded from so far behind police lines
that it offered no view of the person who threw the explosive.

Asked to explain the disappearance of video promoted by the department online, a

police spokeswoman, Vanessa Andrade, suggested in an e-mail to The Lede that the clip
had been removed from YouTube by hackers acting in defense of the protesters.

Brazilian bloggers who support the protests advanced a very different argument: that
the masked man caught on video throwing the improvised explosive was an undercover
police officer who had acted as an agent provocateur to give the authorities an excuse to

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break up the demonstration by force. Attempting to prove this theory, one blogger
produced an annotated YouTube clip that mixed the police video with another view of the
same area recorded later on Monday.

According to the theory advanced in the annotated video, the bomb thrower pictured
in the police video, wearing a T-shirt with a bulky design on the front, was identical to a
man caught on video later, retreating behind police lines and pulling off his T-shirt,
alongside a second man also suspected of being an undercover officer.

Other bloggers, including Lucio Amorim — a marketing consultant who captured

stunning Vine video of street protests in Rio last month — pointed out that another video
clip recorded by a witness to Monday’s demonstrations showed the same two men passing
unmolested through a crowd of uniformed officers.

Looking closely at the two videos, there appears to be little doubt that the two men
shown at the end of the annotated clip also appear in the other video (the action from
about the 46-second mark of the first clip seems to exactly match what unfolds about 20
seconds into the second), and the men do seem to be treated by the uniformed officers
much more like colleagues than protesters.

The red wall that appears in the background of this video is the outside of
Fluminense Football Club‘s historic Estadio Presidente Manoel Schwartz ground, where
the pope also made an appearance on Monday night, just before the clashes began. Two
New York Times journalists who were present when the clashes started said that the
Molotov cocktail and the first volleys of tear gas came shortly after the pope left in his
helicopter.

A third video clip, recorded by a witness armed with a better camera, appeared to
offer even better evidence that the two men retreating from the protesters’ side were most
likely undercover officers.

In the third clip, a close view from a reverse angle, the two men were briefly stopped
by a uniformed officer who seemed to take them for protesters before one of them pulled
out some form of identification and said, “It’s the police, dude.”

Ms. Andrade, the police spokeswoman, said the police force in Rio “has never denied
that its intelligence has agents accompanying the demonstrations with the goal of
obtaining information and predicting movements. This information is important for the
decisions of our commanders.” She insisted, however: “These intelligence agents only
work with observation. To imagine that a police officer would throw a Molotov cocktail at
his professional colleagues, putting their lives at risk, is something that surpasses the

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limits of good sense and reveals a sordid conspiracy used to justify the criminal violence
of these vandals.”

The police in Rio are of course far from alone in sending undercover officers to
infiltrate protest movements. The New York Police Department has done so for years, as
my colleague Jim Dwyer reported eight years ago.

Although the video evidence strongly suggests that those two men in Rio de Janeiro
were undercover officers, there appears to be no proof that either of them was the bomb
thrower. A close look at still frames of the original police video next to frames from the
two other clips seems to show that while the man who hurled the Molotov cocktail was
wearing a black T-shirt with a white design on the front, the man who retreated through
the crowd of officers later wore a black T-shirt with a red design.

Although the other man suspected of being an undercover officer is bare-chested in

these three clips, he appears to have been wearing a black T-shirt with a white pattern on
its side, rather than the front, in more video of the clashes posted on Facebook by
supporters of the protest movement.

That Facebook video, recorded as the police chased and ultimately captured one
protester, seems to show the same undercover officer taking part in the arrest before
pulling off his T-shirt and using it to cover his face as witnesses started to take his picture.

The blogger Lucio Amorim later shared a photograph on Facebook that appeared to
show the same man pulling off his T-shirt just after the arrest.

Part of that same scene, the arrest of the protester after he ran from the officers and
was knocked down with a shot from a stun gun, was also captured in video recorded by
another witness from a bridge above the road.

A blogger named Felipe Buarque released perhaps the most useful overview of the
clashes, a 12-minute video that captured everything from the first loud bang outside the
Esso station to the dramatic arrest of the protester near the bridge. Protesters eagerly
pointed to Mr. Buarque’s video, calling it evidence that the man who was detained by the
police was not the bomb thrower.

The man in that video, whose arrest was also recorded by TV Globo, was identified by
the police as Bruno Ferreira. Ms. Andrade, the police spokeswoman, told The Lede that
Mr. Ferreira was “accused of having thrown the Molotov cocktail that left two officers with
burns on their bodies.” Mr. Ferreira, however, was not wearing a black T-shirt with a

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white design on it, but a green jacket with a zipper. He was “released by the justice system
on Tuesday night for lack of material evidence,” Ms. Andrade said.

Another video of his arrest shot from the street showed even more clearly that he was
not wearing a black T-shirt and offered a glimpse of the man in civilian clothes quickly
pulling off his shirt.

An image of Mr. Ferreira standing on the metal barricade between protesters and the
police, apparently taken before the clashes, was shared online by his supporters as
evidence that he was not wearing a black T-shirt at any stage.

Perhaps sensitive to how badly their reputation can be damaged by video evidence of
what takes place at protests, the police took aggressive steps Monday night to limit the
number of cameras at future demonstrations by bashing the head of at least one world-
renowned news photographer, and arresting two members of the activist media collective
known as Mídia Ninja.

As our colleagues Simon Romero and William Neuman reported last month, Ninja, “a
Portuguese acronym for Independent Journalism and Action Narratives, has been
circulating through the streets with smartphones, cameras and a generator held in a
supermarket cart — a makeshift, roving production studio.”

On Monday night, the Brazil-based journalist Dom Phillips reported, the police
detained Filipe Peçanha, a Ninja cameraman who goes by the nickname Carioca, as he
was streaming live video of the protest.

Inevitably, video of his arrest was also captured from another angle on another
camera. (In both clips, a man standing next to the citizen journalist, wearing a light blue
shirt and talking on a phone, looked to be one of those identified by protesters as potential
infiltrators.)

In a statement to The Lede, the police spokeswoman Ms. Andrade said, “The goal of
detaining people on Monday night was to identify who had incited the disorder.” The
police Twitter feed seemed to confirm that the authorities make no difference between
activists documenting protests and vandals inspiring disorder: “Two protesters who
transmitted the protests live were arrested for inciting violence.”

Another Twitter update warned: “Whoever posts multimedia material on the Internet
that encourages violence and vandalism is criminal.”

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Video of Mr. Peçanha’s subsequent release showed protesters adapting soccer chants
in celebration.

In an odd twist, hours after police officers at the demonstration battered the Agence
France-Presse photographer Yasuyoshi Chiba on the head, the Rio de Janeiro police
Twitter feed offered one of his photographs as proof that it was the officers who were the
real victims of Monday’s violence.

© 2017 The New York Times Company

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