Last week, at a press conference in Jakarta, when talking about the fight against drug trafficking, the president of the Federative Republic of Brazil, Lula da Silva, said the unthinkable: “Every time we talk about fighting drugs, it would possibly be easier for us to fight our addicts internally. The users, the users are responsible for the traffickers who are victims of the users too.” In Portuguese, “users” are drug users. Therefore, what the president of Brazil said was that drug traffickers are victims of consumers. Let’s look at the definition of “victim” in the Houaiss Portuguese Language Dictionary: “1st human being or animal killed in sacrifice to a deity or in the performance of some sacred rite; 2nd person injured, raped, tortured, murdered or executed by another; 3rd e.g. living being, most frequently a person, who dies or is traumatically affected by an accident, disaster, calamity, epidemic, war, etc.; 4th person who is subject to oppression, mistreatment, arbitrariness; 5th person who suffers from his own or another’s vice or feeling; 6th person against whom any crime or misdemeanor is committed.
My question is: which of these meanings was the Brazilian president thinking of when he truly thought that a drug trafficker is a victim? Subsequent questions: will the 4th, given the terrible living conditions that he has not yet been able to eradicate from his country, drive people to despair? Or the 5th, are drug dealers victims of consumer addiction? Perhaps the 6th, in which traffickers suffer harm or loss when drug couriers die from intoxication or are arrested? There are still legal meanings, 7th and 8th, which leads us to consider whether traffickers, when arrested, are victims of the legal or criminal system? However, due to the negative impact of his words on the media, he has already recanted, saying, on social network X, “I made a poorly placed sentence this Thursday and I want to say that my position is very clear against drug traffickers and organized crime”. It was neither a misplaced phrase nor a clear position: it was an unthinkable statement and a dubious position. It was an affront and disrespect to the real victims of the scourge that is drug trafficking. And it is a shame that Brazil, for at least two decades now, has not had a president worthy of the destiny and equal to this great country.
Assistant professor at the Autonomous University of Lisbon and researcher (at CIDEHUS).
Write without applying the new Spelling Agreement
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