The mere use of certain colors on shirts or caps, the type of haircut or dyeing, greetings between people or poses in photographs serve as motives for murders, writes delegate Jesus Pablo Barbosa

Narcoterrorism. A strong word, which scares. Just hearing it brings such apprehension, but, in truth, this abomination is nothing new and has been promoting fear here in our Bahia for some time.

Initially, it is appropriate to present Narcoterrorism as the practices of individuals or criminal factions, which exploit the trafficking of illicit drugs and whose direct purpose is to cause widespread social terror, by exposing people, public peace or security to danger, or even causing damage to property, whether public or private, through intimidation, coercion and various constraints, with the use, as a rule, of strong military power.

This is what has been happening, unfortunately, in our State in recent years.

We have a “nonsense” in which the mere use of certain colors on shirts or caps, the type of haircut or dyeing, greetings between people or poses in photographs serve as a motive for murders. It seems banal, but it is part of a tactic of domination through terror.

Bloody executions, depredation of property, such as burning of properties and vehicles, blocking of public roads, attacks against institutions, executions with sadistic refinements, such as dismemberment and beheading, exile and summary expropriation of individuals and entire families from their homes and their community, These are actions promoted by these criminals, who have subjugated the population of Bahia, which finds itself cornered, in the absence of effective responses. The state therefore appears incapable of combating this crime.

They often order the activities of entire localities to cease, imposing curfews, demanding the closure of schools, businesses and health units. Those who oppose will subject themselves to barbarism as a reprimand.

With such violence, narco-terrorists seek to control their territories of activity, to consolidate their hegemony in the illicit drug trade, whether wholesale, supplying this poison to other traffickers, or retail, directly meeting the demand of drug users.

Narcoterrorism operates in Bahia with the systematic use of large-caliber firearms, fires and even explosives in its means of execution, all of this, often, duly filmed and released on social media, precisely to foment terror and nourish the absolute fear among our people. The intention of narco-terrorists is to dissuade the state from repressing drug trafficking, to give greater freedom of action to criminal factions, to exercise territorial control in an unrestricted manner, to circumvent and inhibit police action and to obstruct criminal justice. , making law enforcement difficult, whether through systematic threats or the direct use of this terrifying violence that we have seen.

Certainly, narco-terrorists act only in the face of the weakness of a state that is hesitant in its actions and weak in its responses. A clear example of this is the inability to effectively segregate individuals who exercise leadership of criminal factions, even though they are imprisoned in the penitentiary system.

Our society thus finds itself besieged by a parallel state, which, now, has not only flirted with politics, but has started to directly infiltrate its power games. Traffickers began to directly dictate who should vote for: obviously those who do not face them. It is the end of democracy.

Therefore, it is extremely important that our society knows how to empower the state’s repressive apparatus, because, in the face of drug terrorism and these many attempts by drug trafficking to influence government policies, we can devolve even further and lead to something even worse, which would be the constitution of a narcostate. But that’s another topic…

Jesus Pablo Barbosa is delegate