Case History: Alex Pamplona

Human rights defender Alex Pamplona is in hiding. Pamplona, his wife, and his daughters have received at least five threats over the past three weeks – some from persons identifying themselves as “police officers” - forcing the Brazilian human rights defender to leave his home indefinitely.

Since February 2015, Pamplona has also been active in a Parliamentary Group on Youth, facilitating discussions on the massacres of young black men by the police and on secondary education reform in Brazil.

Pamplona is also involved in monitoring the recommendations made by the Commissão Parlementar de Inquérito – CPI (Parliamentary Committee of Inquiry) regarding the actions of militias in the state of Pará and the need for an investigation into alleged human rights abuses. The CPI recently identified a complex network of militias (involving police officers and former police officers) who were responsible for the massacre of 10 persons in the outskirts of Belém in November 2014. The investigations into the massacre are currently being finalised, and a number of military policemen have been placed in preventive detention. Following the massacre, TIME magazine reported growing concerns over police violence in Brazil:

The killing of ten people in a northern Brazilian city last week by a militia allegedly linked to the country’s military police has raised fears of a growing problem with police violence in a country where new figures reveal 2,212 people died in confrontations with law enforcement officers last year.

In the face of mounting police and militia violence, Brazilian human rights defenders who document and report on these abuses are both increasingly vital and at risk. In its latest annual report, Front Line Defenders reported that 12 human rights defenders were killed in the first ten month of 2014.

In January 2008, 17-year-old Andreu Luís de Carvalho Silva, was brutally tortured and murdered by Brazilian guards in the juvenile detention system. His mother, Deize Carvalho, a resident of Cantagalo community in the South Zone of Rio de Janeiro, has been prominent in the struggle for justice since her son's murder. Through it's violent tactics, the Brazilian policing system is creating it's own opposition.

As a result of his activism in both local youth groups and national human rights monitoring initiatives, Pamplona and his family have received number threats over the past month. In early March, the human rights defender and his family left their home in the city of Belém (Pará) in an attempt to quell the threats on their lives.

Shortly after evacuating their home, on 18 March 2015, they learned that a man also called “Alex”, similar in appearance to Alex Pamplona, had been murdered in their neighbourhood, Terra Firme. The following day, on 19 March 2015, Pamplona's spouse reported that when she and her daughter briefly returned home to pick up some personal belongings, unknown persons in a red car in front of their house appeared to be watching them. That same afternoon, a man in a black car passed in front of the house and asked Pamplona's daughter about her father's location.

When his wife went to the school of their daughters to inform the school that they would not be attending, one day after having left their residence due to the threats, she was informed that an unknown person had come to pick up her daughters at school.

On 23 March 2015, Pamplona filed a complaint to the police in the state of Pará regarding this series of intimidations.

Less than a week later, on 29 March 2015, human rights organisations in Bélem reported receiving information that persons identifying themselves as “police officers” were searching for Pamplona and threatening that ''he should be very careful''.