“My girlfriend, my mom and my son were all waiting for me on the other side of the gate,” he told me over Zoom. “We got yelled at by the guards ‘cuz we’re all stood there, taking pictures….”

There was a lot of catching up to do. He’d missed the birth of his son, having been taken into custody a few weeks before, in February.

And his “crime,” which cost him his liberty? He’s a registered medical marijuana patient, serving probation for… a marijuana charge. He initially got in trouble with the law for a possession charge back in August 2019, and went to prison for a short spell in 2020 after getting kicked out of drug court for smoking joints. In order to stay safe while on probation, he obtained a medical marijuana card, as is his constitutional right in Missouri.

Yet after a pee test came up positive for THC, that was enough for his probation officer to send him to prison. In court, they told him it’s a privilege to be on probation and that in the future, they are most likely not going to offer probation to medical marijuana patients.

Breer was one of many drug-war prisoners in the Show-Me State supported by the Canna Convict Project (CCP), which brought in expert witnesses to try and sway his case.

“Probation and Parole and DOC is not recognizing a patient’s ability to medicate while on supervision.”

“Our mission is to assist our non-violent Missouri cannabis inmates—POWs, we call them—with their exit from incarceration, and assisting them with their re-entry needs,” co-founder Christina Frommer told Filter. “They kind of become family. I create a relationship with all of the POWs, with their families. I buy their children presents. We try and give the whole person care.”

CCP is fighting for the rights of the many impacted patients across the state to be allowed to access their medicine. Even though cannabis has widely recognised medical uses, many Missouri law enforcement and probation officers still view it as the devil’s narcotic, an assumption being challenged in the courts.

“The probation and parole issue here in Missouri is that PNP [Probation and Parole] and DOC [Department of Corrections] is not recognizing a patient’s ability to medicate while on supervision,” Frommer said. “Some of the individuals have really cool probation officers or parole officers, and they’ve been allowed to medicate while they’ve been on supervision, no problem. And others have gone as far as receiving sanctions and gotten put back in prison.”

In November 2018, 65 percent of Missouri voters approved an amendment to the constitution, which states that: “the possession of marijuana … shall not subject the possessor to arrest, criminal or civil liability, or sanctions … provided that the possessor produces on demand to the appropriate authority a valid qualifying patient identification card; a valid qualifying patient cultivation identification card; a valid physician certification while making application for an identification card; or a valid primary caregiver identification card.”

Breer had such a card, on account of his mental health condition and bipolar II disorder. It didn’t help.

It isn’t just those already in the justice system who get in trouble, either. In November 2019, 48-year-old Jamie Wilson was pulled over with his grandson by a Highway Patrol trooper while driving through Daviess County. The officer found 8 ounces of weed in his truck, which was within the limits he was allowed as a card-carrying marijuana patient. But Wilson was arrested for possession and child endangerment. The charges were later dropped, but it goes to show the drug-war mentality that persists in the state.

A Legal Battle Brewing

Canna Convict has identified many more cases of Missourians being locked up for their lawful medication, including those convicted on all sorts of non-drug charges. It is now taking the Missouri authorities to court with the help of lawyer Timothy Intessimone (the case is not being filed on behalf of Breer or Wilson, but another one of Intessimone’s clients).

“My involvement with CCP was after I met Christina and seeing the work her, Joani [Harshman]and Chris [Smith] were doing,” Intessimone told Filter. “I was highly impressed with the dedication and devotion to criminal justice reform, so my office really meshed with the groove of the project.”

Intessimone said his work is motivated by a desire to give back to others, especially those from poorer communities disproportionately impacted by criminalization.

“Civil rights is kind of my wheelhouse …  and what the law’s impact is on people that cannot afford attorneys,” he said. “I grew up very, very low-income–roach-infested house, mom working multiple jobs to get her associate’s degree for a better life. The same people that are disproportionately affected … are the same people that may not have a voice to stand up and fight.”

In the United States, marijuana currently lies in a kind of legal purgatory, between a confusing array of state laws, some fully legalized and others less so, and federal law, which remains staunchly prohibitionist. Taking it across state lines remains a federal crime, even if you’re unlikely to run into a DEA checkpoint in the Lincoln Tunnel.

The argument Intessimone will bring before the court is that of states’ rights: If the issue is one of federal law, how are the wishes of Missourians being taken into account?

“It is about whether a state agency can punish someone while the amendment plainly states that they cannot be criminally punished under the state constitution.”

“Without a doubt, every state that has a medical [marijuana] program had to deal with this in one way or another,” he explained. “And it’s like anything else: You go to Nevada, you can go to a brothel, it’s been voted on by the people in Nevada. Why is the federal court getting involved in what the people in Missouri, or Nevada, or Colorado want to do? We’re dealing with a new, multi-billion dollar industry, and we’re at a point where the federal government says, ‘yeah, you can do it, and we’re not going to come in and stop you from doing it.’ But at the same time, they’re saying, ‘well, you can’t do it.’”

“We’re asking the court to decide and clarify whether he [the client] can lawfully use medical marijuana, with a valid Missouri medical card, while on probation,” he continued. “However, that’s not what the case is really about. The case is more about the Missouri Constitution. It is about whether a state agency, acting under state law, under the state constitution, can punish someone while the amendment plainly states that they cannot be criminally punished under the state constitution.”

Marijuana is still classed as a Schedule I controlled substance by the DEA, with “no currently accepted medical use,” even though it’s known to be efficient in treating conditions including multiple sclerosis and for pain relief. The official stance of the Missouri authorities—when it comes to probation—seems to be in line with the feds.

“The terms of probation and parole vary from person to person,” Karen Pojmann, communications director for the Missouri Department of Corrections, told Filter in an email. “These terms don’t always align with the rights and behaviors exercised by people who have not been convicted of a felony. For example, in Missouri it’s legal for adults to own firearms, consume alcohol, or interact with children. However, someone on probation or parole might be prohibited from doing one or all of these things as part of their conditions. Generally speaking, use of cannabis is prohibited, regardless of whether the person has a medical marijuana card.”

This suggests that cannabis is still seen as a vice that those unlucky enough to fall into the state’s clutches must avoid in order to become law-abiding citizens, rather than a medicine (which it is, according to state law).

The next hearing of the case is set for August 23.

Ray Breer, meanwhile, is still on probation. He’s trying to find work and spending more time with his son.

“He sleeps for a bit then he’s up, and he’s crying, but I still love it,” he said. “I’ve had him almost every day. We went to the pool. I’m being a new father and I’m loving it.”

Photograph by Laurie Avocado via Wikimedia Commons/Creative Commons 2.0

The author wishes to thank Seth Ferranti for his help with this piece.

The post Missouri POs Sending People to Prison for Being Medical Marijuana Patients appeared first on Filter.

Bolsonaro has led one of the world’s worst responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, at one point suggesting the whole thing was a hoax, and recently taking part in a protest calling for an end to quarantine and social distancing measures. While the head of the largest nation in South America was out shaking hands and potentially acting as a one-man bioweapon, it’s fallen on local authorities, such as Rio’s Governor Wilson Witzel, to try to contain the situation.

But not everyone who runs a city is elected. The drug gangs that rule the favelas—the slums or shantytowns piled on top of each other over the green hills of Rio—have also stepped in. 

“Lately they’ve been bringing things to the community like grocery bags and cash,” said André*, who runs a small business in Rocinha, the largest favela in Brazil. “It’s like a motivational thing, to help people stay strong in these hard times.”

Such is the gangs’ control over many poorer neighborhoods that Brazil’s former health minister seriously considered sitting down with them to help develop a coronavirus strategy collaboratively.

The scarcity of other help makes any support welcome. “There are a few NGOs I know helping people with food and cleaning products,” said André, “and the government is now helping some people with 600 reals ($113) a month—that’s nothing!”

“They’re seen in a different light, as the only people that locals can count on.”

“A lot of people here [in Rocinha] have tested positive; some have died,” he continued. “Only essential businesses are still running but everything else is shut down. The main street here by the metro is quiet, but there’s still some people not respecting the curfew. Me, I’ve been staying at home, but I’ve still gotta buy food and pay the bills.”

I asked André how he saw the gangs’ intervention. Is it just a cynical way to strengthen their grip on the community? 

“Yeah! It’s good public relations, you’re right!,” he replied. “But I think it’s more because they grew up in the hood. I don’t think it’s just to look good. They’re seen in a different light, as the only people that locals can count on.”

Brazil’s traffickers aren’t alone in filling such a role during the pandemic. El Chapo’s daughter was spotted handing out aid to cash-strapped families in Mexico, and the Mafia has been giving away food parcels in crisis-struck Italy. In Japan, the meth-dealing yakuza have been dispensing face masks at pharmacies and nurseries. Street gangs have also been enforcing quarantine with baseball bats in El Salvador. 

Meanwhile, shadowy militias have imposed curfews in other parts of Rio. But how did Brazil get to this point? The answer takes us back in time to an era the president remembers fondly.

Brazil’s Years of Lead

Brazil in the 1970s was going through its “Years of Lead”—so-called because of all the bullets fired. In 1964 the military seized power in a coup backed by, you guessed it, the CIA, to save the country from “communism” (President João Goulart’s mildly left-leaning reforms). The regime is remembered for suppressing freedom of speech and torturing dissidents. 

In return, left-wing “urban guerillas” launched several high-profile operations, like the kidnapping of the US ambassador by MR-8 (Movement 8 October, after the day Che was captured in Bolivia), dramatized in the movie Four Days in September. 

Bolsonaro looks back on the era with nostalgia.

“It was 20 years of order and progress,” he wrote of the junta. “It’s clear the Left wants to go down in history as the great victim who fought for the current democratic state, completely reversing the role of the military which in 1964, at the request of the press, the Catholic Church, businessmen, farmers and women on the streets, intervened so that our country would not become another satellite of the Soviet Union.”

The generals stepped aside in 1985, just as the cocaine boom was beginning. Before long Rio’s favelas, always poor but not particularly crime-ridden, were in the grip of the militants’ coke-dealing descendants. 

“A Kind of Favela Welfare”

Lying on a hill between Leblon and São Conrado, two of Rio’s richest neighbourhoods along the beaches in the South Zone, Rocinha is the most strategic favela for the drug trade. 

Its previous de facto ruler, Nem of the Amigos dos Amigos (ADA, “Friends of Friends”) gang, set up his own cocaine lab for processing coca paste straight from Bolivia. At his peak, Nem supplied blow to over half the city. ADA ruled Rocinha until 2017, when a power struggle led to the Comando Vermelho (“Red Command”) hoisting its red flag over the hill. 

Rocinha

Last year I spent some months in Rio and visited Rocinha. Among other things, I wanted to meet the man who runs the neighborhood. Weaving through a series of narrow, damp alleyways with my guide, we ominously saw what looked like a seagull flying away from an open sewer clutching a rat, the furry critter struggling to break free. Damn, I thought, even the birds here are hardcore.  

We reached an open area where a group of young men in flip-flops stood clutching high-caliber rifles. They looked very much like rebel fighters in a battle zone. It was the middle of the day, and folks were just passing by carrying groceries, like the guns were part of the scenery.

“All of us have reasons for doing this. It’s not like we woke up one morning and decided we wanted to be drug dealers.”

It had taken us three weeks to work our way up the hierarchy to talk to the big boss after convincing his underlings I wasn’t a narc (“He’s written a book for God’s sake,” my friend cried at one point, “you can look him up!”). Finally, Comando Vermelho’s regional manager agreed to meet me outside a tattoo shop, surrounded by his boys and their “toys.”

“I used to have a regular sales job but I saw a lot of discrimination based on the colour of my skin,” he began. “My boss demoted me and I thought, fuck it, if they’re not gonna respect me I’m going back to the hood to join the gang. I passed my exams so I’m more educated than some of these guys —I can read, write and do math—so they made me manager.”

“My bodyguard”—he pointed to a big, lighter-skinned man with a machine gun, nicknamed “Portuguese Rambo”—“had lots of problems so he ran away from home. All of us have reasons for doing this. It’s not like we woke up one morning and decided we wanted to be drug dealers.”

As one of the more touristy favelas, Rocinha was ostensibly “pacified,” or brought under police control, in the run-up to the 2014 World Cup. But if you were one of a handful of cops manning an outpost surrounded by hundreds of heavily-armed gang members, what would you do?

“We respect each other. We stay out of their business, they stay out of ours,” the boss said. “I’ve had many shootouts with BOPE [special forces] but the ordinary cops will never come here.”

“They wouldn’t dare,” he added, holding up an AR-15. “You see this? We’ve got three hundred of these.”

Red Command was born in the ‘70s, when guerrillas from the MR-8 and other leftist groups found themselves sharing cells with the general population in the Candido Mendes prison on the tropical island of Ilha Grande, Brazil’s Alcatraz. At first, the other residents looked down on the leftists as booksmart intellectuals, but they were quickly impressed by their ability to organize.  

“We try to help out. The community here is more comfortable with us than with the cops.”

Comando Vermelho (CV) soon began holding up banks, which members termed “expropriations.” They didn’t end up doing much for the struggle, but robbing for the revolution was a tempting ideal for underprivileged youths, rapidly swelling their ranks. Then as Brazil liberalized in the ‘80s, cocaine emerged as a rapidly growing economic sector, and the favelas were the perfect place to capitalize: As unofficial squat settlements, they’d been long left to their own devices. More money meant more guns to protect it, and the cash-rich CV soon became difficult to distinguish from other criminal organizations. (Later, factions broke off to form ADA and Third Command.)

I grilled Rocinha’s gang members about their loss of class consciousness. They admitted being mostly about making money these days.

“At first people were scared because Comando Vermelho has the most fearsome reputation in the city, but now they accept us,” the leader said. “We try to help out, give free grocery bags to families who can’t afford it. Also medication. It’s a kind of favela welfare. The community here is more comfortable with us than with the cops.”

Yet it should be remembered that narco–rule also keeps neighbourhoods like Rocinha in fear. Gang members have been known to rape, torture and murder young women suspected of being informers or simply for having the wrong boyfriend. There’s even religious persecution: When Third Command’s boss found Christ, his men began violently trashing the shrines of Afro-Brazilian religions, like a kind of Latinx Taliban. 

An Encounter With Rio’s Milicia

One night on the other side of the city, I was making my way home to the working-class neighbourhood where I stayed. I was in a taxi with the windows rolled up, so you couldn’t see who was inside. 

Just as we pulled up to my house, a man, dressed all in black with a baseball cap, stepped out of the shadows, pointing a pistol in my direction and demanding something in Portuguese. We rolled down the windows and I put my hands up, saying, “Es to gringo, no falo Português” (“I’m a gringo, don’t speak Portuguese”). He laughed and let me through. 

It was the second time I’d been held at gunpoint that month. But this man was no ordinary gang member or security guard. He was a member of Rio’s milicia.

“I remember when I was 16 walking home from school, when I saw them about to execute this guy with a gun to his head.”

Like the CV, the militias trace their origins to the dictatorship. In the 1960s, Rio’s military government tasked a police death squad to exterminate suspected criminals. Known as Scuderie Detetive le Cocq, or “the Shield of Detective le Cocq”, the squad was set up to avenge that detective after he was shot dead by crime boss Manoe “Horse Face” Moreira. 

Moreira was operating an illegal lottery known as the “Animal Game.” Le Cocq’s colleagues found him and shot him 52 times. By the 1970s the Scuderie had thousands of members, led by detective Mariel Mariscot, who was himself later gunned down for his own involvement in an illegal lottery racket. One of the original members of the death squad was José Guilherme Godinho, who later became a state representative in Rio de Janeiro, campaigning under the slogan bandido bom é bandido morto—“a good bandit is a dead bandit.” 

In São Paulo around that time, police chief Sérgio Fleury also authorized justiceiros to “clean up” the streets. The vigilantes mainly went after suspected criminals, but also used the same tactics on leftist militants like communist leader Carlos Marighella, who was assassinated in an operation orchestrated by Fleury. Between 1963-75, police death squads murdered nearly 900 people in Rio and São Paulo alone, more than twice the official death toll from political repression. 

That accidentally helped boost organized crime. In 1982 Rio de Janeiro’s first well-meaning, freely-elected governor barred the police from going into the favelas, leaving the CV and their spin-offs in total control.

Vigilante groups remerged in the ‘90s—often consisting of off-duty cops, prison guards and firemen, vowing to clear their neighbourhoods of robbers and traffickers. Their mission soon expanded to include extortion. 

So what’s it like to live in a milicia area?

“The milicia controlled this area since I was a kid,” said Melissa*, who lives in a working-class neighborhood in northern Rio. “The one good thing about living in a milicia area is you’ll never get robbed. The next street along, I don’t know.” 

But that sense of safety comes at a heavy cost.

“I remember when I was 16 walking home from school, just around the corner from here, when I saw them about to execute this guy with a gun to his head,” Melissa continued. “I ran into a building site and the workers slammed the door behind me, and they had to keep giving me water because I wouldn’t stop crying. I don’t know who they killed but he was some kind of big shot, because all my friends were scared to go to school the next day.”

All-Out Drug War

Bolsonaro got elected for a number of reasons, not least because of the perception that every other party was corrupt—a reason André of Rocinha gave for why he reluctantly voted for Bolsonaro. In conservative circles, there’s a distorted view that the dictatorship might have been morally corrupt in the sense of torturing and “disappearing” political opponents, but not corrupt in the “taking massive payoffs” sense. That’s obviously false, but cranky old men think it, so it must be true. Some older Brazilians talk about how it used to be safe to walk the streets at night. 

Bolsonaro clearly sees himself as the junta’s heir. The ethos of the military rulers, who saw themselves as fighting the Cold War, was easily redirected at the drug war. 

“These guys,” Bolsonaro said of the gangs, “are going to die in the streets like cockroaches, and that’s how it should be.”

Last year, heavily-armed police squads made their way through narrow, winding alleys on foot, firing indiscriminately.

Brazil’s drug war more closely resembles a traditional war than in other countries —with territories won and lost, and all sides openly brandishing automatic weapons. Bolsonaro—who claims that if he caught his son(s) partaking, “I would hit him, you can be sure of that”—has imposed the kind of polices you would expect. Together with his ally, ex-marine-turned judge and Rio Governor Wilson Witzel, he unleashed urban warfare.

Comparing the gangs occupying the Marvellous City’s slums to terrorists, Witzel ordered his officers to shoot on sight. The result was a bloodbath. Last year, heavily-armed police squads made their way through narrow, winding alleys on foot, firing indiscriminately.

A tattoo on a member of Brazil’s BOPE (police special forces)

Like any war, there was collateral damage. A young mother died from a stray bullet during a raid, holding her baby boy in her arms. Eight-year-old Ágatha Félix was shot in the back as she sat in a bus with her grandma. And 12-year-old Kauan Peixoto told his friend not to worry when he saw the men in uniform because he wasn’t a “bad guy.” Kauan was shot in the face and back. Last year, the cops killed a record 1,810 people—an average of five a day. As police helicopters, known as caveirão voador, or “flying skulls,” rained bullets from the sky, the children of one favela painted the roof of their school to say, “Don’t Shoot”. 

According to a report by Brazilian news site UOL, all the fatal police operations that took place in Rio between January and June last year seemed to exclusively target areas run by drug traffickers—not the militias. It’s not hard to imagine why that would be. Unlike the boys in Rocinha, militiamen tend to be more middle-aged, middle-class and of a lighter complexion. They don’t even pretend to stick it to the Man; they are the Man.

The Bolsonaro Administration’s Tangled Ties

Marielle Franco was an AOC-like figure: a popular, young, black councilwoman from the favelas who spoke out against police brutality. On the night of March 14, 2018, she was assassinated when a hitman drove up to her car and opened fire. 

A poster of Marielle Franco in Lisbon, Portugal

The trail led to a milicia group called the Crime Bureau and the largest arms haul in Brazilian history: 117 assault rifles stashed in a safehouse to the north of Rio. 

Two suspects were arrested, both ex-cops, which, their impressive arsenal aside, isn’t too surprising—Franco didn’t have many supporters in law enforcement. But then a few interesting facts begin to emerge. Like how one of them lived in the same apartment complex as Bolsonaro: They were literally neighbours. The suspect’s daughter was also dating Bolsonaro’s youngest son. 

When another ex-cop—and Bolsonaro family driver for a decade—was sought for questioning over suspicious transactions in Bolsonaro’s wife’s account, he hid in Rio das Pedras, a favela controlled by the Crime Bureau. 

Although there’s no evidence to indicate that Bolsonaro greenlit the hit, whoever did seems to move in the same circles.  

What’s more, Bolsonaro’s oldest son Flávio, himself a politician in Rio’s assembly, kept on his office payroll the wife and mother of the Crime Bureau’s boss, on whom he once bestowed a prestigious award while the boss was being investigated for murder. You couldn’t make it up. Flávio was also the only lawmaker who voted against giving a medal, posthumously, to Marielle Franco. 

That same death squad leader with ties to the ruling family was gunned down by police in February. Dead men tell no tales, as they say. Although there’s no evidence to indicate that Bolsonaro greenlit the hit on Franco, whoever did seems to move in the same circles.  

Witzel has slowed down police operations during the pandemic, publicly clashing with Bolsonaro, who wants to go back to business-as-usual. While Bolsonaro holds rallies in defiance of his own health officials, whom he has fired, the CV, in contrast, has cancelled its weekly baile funk street parties—a huge source of income through sales of cocaine, ecstasy and marijuana. 

A cocaine baggie in Rocinha

Although the gangs that control parts of Rio and other Brazilian cities are stepping in where the government has failed—either providing basic supplies, or, in the case of the milicias, “public safety”—all three sides have created a war zone, leaving local residents trapped in the middle. 

Until a government is elected that actually addresses the social conditions behind the violence—including the legacy of dictatorship—gang handouts are the best many residents of Rocinha can get.  

* Names have been changed to protect sources’ identities.

Top photo shows a view over Rio from Rocinha. All photographs by Niko Vorobyov.

The post Inside the Gangs Handing Out Pandemic Supplies in Rio’s Favelas appeared first on Filter.

Born and raised in Culiacán, when she was a little girl Angela wanted to be a vet. “I became a model by accident, after I took part in a beauty pageant where I was discovered by a woman in an agency,” she said. “It was easy money and I also worked as a hostess⁠—it’s very normal at these type of agencies to provide girls working as hostesses.”

In countries like Mexico, Colombia and Honduras, participation in pageants is frequently tied to involvement with gang members. In the macho world of the narcos, having a beauty queen at your side is a status symbol, and cartels often bankroll beauty contests to facilitate this.

“We all knew she was gonna win because she was with this big fish.”

“There was this one guy I met… He’d never tell you what he does but by the car he drives, you can tell he’s in the business,” Angela said. “All the men around here like to have mistresses, and all the women know but they try to ignore it so they can have a sweet life. But this guy I was dating had too many and that made me uncomfortable.”

The allure of narco-bling, sports cars and all-expenses trips to Cancún is obvious. But then there’s the other, sinister side. 

The Jardines Del Humaya outside Culiacán, known as a “narco-cemetery”

“I was at this one beauty contest where all the models were congregated in this hotel,” Angela remembered. “I met a girl there who was involved with a trafficker, and he’d sent her a big flower bouquet the size of a wall! We all knew she was gonna win because she was with this big fish.”

That young woman, 20-year-old María Susana Flores Gámez, duly won Miss Sinaloa 2012. Just a few months later, she was gunned down when the car she was riding in was ambushed by soldiers. Her boyfriend, Iván “‘El Cholo” Gastelum Cruz⁠—a close associate of none other than Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, erstwhile leader of the once all-powerful Sinaloa cartel⁠—survived. 

“I sensed something wasn’t right and walked away.”

After that, Angela usually kept her distance. “Once my friends told me, ‘There’s this party, do you want to come?’” she recalled. “Then we got there and you could tell it’s a narco house because of all the opulent decorations, and there was a few well-dressed men from Colombia and Venezuela. I sensed something wasn’t right and walked away.”

She probably made the right call. Mexico suffers sickening rates of violence against women, much of it directly or indirectly connected with the narco business. Nine women are murdered each day, according to the latest data from the UN. Of more than 50,000 murders of women since 1985, over a third took place since 2010—the height of the country’s brutal drug wars. The general killing surged in the mid-2000s, partly from turf wars between cartels and partly because the government started taking out bosses, upsetting the usual pecking order and sparking the “freelancer effect.” 

When a war broke out between El Chapo and the rival Zetas cartel, they kidnapped his ex-girlfriend, Zulema Hernández. Her body was later found in a car trunk with the letter “Z” carved into her breasts and buttocks. She had been murdered merely to send a warped message to Chapo.

Of course, not all women in the narco world are victims or bystanders. A few, like Sandra Ávila Beltrán, known as the “Queen of the Pacific,” rise above the sexist culture to reach the highest echelons of the cartel hierarchy⁠—in her case, becoming the crucial link between the Sinaloans and their Colombian suppliers. 

Others, such as Melissa Calderón, aka “La China,” become ruthless enforcers. Calderón was a savage operator even by Mexican cartel standards—once slaughtering an entire family so she could take their truck, then killing one of her own men after he protested. 

“That’s what happens when you say no to a narco; they’re used to getting whatever they want.”

But those are exceptions to the rule. For the most part, the narco world is heavily misogynistic. 

“Another time I was at my mother’s village. There was some dancing and I saw this guy with 20 armed men,” Angela told me. “One of them comes up to me and asks me to dance, and I politely said no. He muttered something to his boss who came up and sat next to me, saying, ‘Why don’t you wanna dance with me?’ I said, ‘My skirt is too short.’ I was getting uncomfortable so we got up to leave, but we were followed.”

“So when we got home we locked all the doors, and that’s when they started shooting in the air outside. That’s what happens when you say no to a narco; they’re used to getting whatever they want. They’ll go to the villages and take whatever girl then bring her to the boss.” 

Atrocities Against Refugees

Mexico’s drug wars have seen atrocities perpetrated on an incomprehensible scale. In 2010 the bodies of 72 immigrants from Brazil, Ecuador and Central America, including a pregnant woman, were unearthed in a mass grave near the town of San Fernando in the state of Tamaulipas⁠, in Zetas territory. Their only “crime” was seeking to head north to the US. 

While powerful cartels like the Zetas don’t usually smuggle people across the border themselves, they collect taxes from those who do, as well as from the immigrants themselves. Failure to pay up is believed to have prompted the massacre. 

Then in 2011, the authorities found more bodies at a ranch in San Fernando (again), killed by the Zetas (again). This time, buses carrying 193 men, women and children were run off the road. Several of the passengers were lined up in front of a bus and the driver was forced at gunpoint to run them over. Women were raped before being murdered, children thrown into acid baths, men forced to club each other to death for the Zetas’ entertainment. 

As many as 80 percent of women and girls trying to reach the United States are raped.

Hellish acts like these highlight another aspect of the drug war’s violence against women: Immigrant and refugee women, particularly those from Central America, are especially vulnerable. As many as 80 percent of women and girls trying to reach the United States are raped—so many that according to Amnesty International and law enforcement, some decide for this reason to get contraceptive injections before setting out.

The trauma and devastation are visible north of the border. “In San Diego you’d see crimes against undocumented persons as they swept in the country, on the front line,” Norm Stamper, a former captain in the San Diego police force who now advocates for drug policy reform, told me. “You’d see children’s underpants with blood on them, rocks the size of grapefruits with blood on them. In other words, evidence of rape, robbery and murder. It’s not uncommon to harvest dozens of bodies in those hills in a given year.”

The immigrants—or let’s call them what they are, refugees—are fleeing violence of warzone proportions in their home countries of Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala. In 2014 a truce between the two biggest maras (gangs) in El Salvador, Barrio 18 and Mara Salvatrucha, fell apart. Whole neighbourhoods were cleared out for urban warfare. That same year, 67,339 unaccompanied children came over the US-Mexico border. Even in the pre-Trump era, politicians responded with the usual rhetoric about securing the border⁠—a callous reaction that would have sent children back to the slaughter.  

Since then, the expansion of drug cartels in Honduras and Guatemala, bolstered by their ties to the wealthy, land-owning elite, has thrown more fuel on the fire. The Central American maras also work for the cartels as guns-for-hire, helping protect cocaine shipments.

An Entire System Targeting Women

But violence against women isn’t limited to the narcos. The cartels have only been able to amass so much power in Mexico by getting police, politicians and other players on their payroll. The original core of the Zetas comprised former members of the Mexican special forces. Police and federal forces frequently terrorize peaceful civilians while supposedly doing their jobs. Murder, cover-ups and kidnappings are all routine, while torture is fairly standard procedure for investigating crimes. 

“The problem in Mexico is there’s only one way to investigate: torture,” Mercedes Murillo, the head of a Sinaloan human rights NGO, told me. “On paper, we have very good laws in Mexico—one law is if you confess by torture, they have to let you out. But they don’t do that. They don’t even need a crime, they can say whatever they want. It’s all the police, all over Mexico.”

Mercedes Murillo

Murillo, a veteran campaigner who runs the Sinaloa Civic Front, is in her 80s but has the appearance, drive and energy of a much younger woman. As we sat in her office in Culiacán, a picture of a young girl on the wall caught my eye.

“That’s a girl, we helped her: Yecenia Graciano,” she said. “She was tortured. The judge knew. They raped her. The took her clothes off, and sent people in to torture the girl. There was no investigation. She’s a nice girl. We got her out of jail, but she was there for many months. And there are people like her every day.”

In a grim pattern seen in wars of every kind, both narcos and soldiers use rape and gender violence as a tool.

Police brutality has always been a problem in Mexico, as in many countries. But the war on cartels has given a new excuse for the worst possible abuse of power.  

In a grim pattern seen in wars of every kind across the world, both narcos and soldiers use rape and gender violence as a tool, similar to gruesome execution videos, to goad and humiliate the enemy, and keep local people cowering in fear. Like soldiers, gang members feel a sense of brotherhood and camaraderie, and in some cases wartime rape might be a twisted form of bonding. And being a cartel hitman or a corrupt cop offers such impunity that those people with prior inclinations to sexual violence and sadism feel free to act on them.

There’s a common thread tying these many forms of violence and brutality together. A gram of coke is expensive, and it’s expensive because it’s illegal—allowing a small group of opportunistic, ruthless people to make vast sums of money and obtain unfettered power (in turn allowing them to diversify into other areas, like extortion of refugees). All this abuse and death is ultimately the consequence of prohibition.

Angela walked out on her narco boyfriend and stayed out. Many others weren’t so lucky. The death toll in Mexico keeps climbing.

*Name has been changed to protect source.

Miguel Angel Vega contributed to the reporting in this article.

Top photo shows a mural in northern Mexico. All photos by Niko Vorobyov.

The post Women in Mexico’s Narco World Face Misogyny and Murder appeared first on Filter.

He pulled it off thanks to a 2014 scandal at the New Bilibid prison in Muntinlupa, just outside Manila, where drug lords were revealed to be living in luxury. As well as murdering thousands of his own people, the scandal helped Duterte to crack down on political opponents like Senator Leila de Lima, who was accused of ties to the New Bilibid gangs.

Rodrigo Duterte in 2016. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Amid a national prison population counted at 188,000 in 2018 (a rate still vastly lower than the United States), New Bilibid is the biggest correctional facility in the world, housing over 26,000 people.

I got access through my fixer, Sherbien “Bien” Dacalanio. I found a fixer to be essential when you’re reporting on the Philippines drug war; finding sources can be tricky when anyone who tells the truth instantly becomes a magnet for cops, insurgents, drug dealers and vigilantes.

But even with Bien, getting inside was a pain in the butt (talking to hitmen in Manila slums, on the other hand, was no problem). After weeks of negotiations, we were finally allowed onto the minimum-security part of the compound, where they keep prisoners deemed too old to escape, their hellraising days long behind them.

After walking through the castle-like main reception, past a guard wearing the tightest shirt I’ve ever seen, and undergoing all the usual checks for phones or escape tools, we crossed a parking lot, passing a group of prisoners on work leave, and entered the low-sec, which felt like a retirement home with barbed wire.

We were met by JP, a man in his 50s who’s doing time for a fatal frat house fight in the ‘90s. He’s now a maths teacher and a head of the Lamb of God Foundation, which helps look after other prisoners.

“It used to be different a long time ago, we used to have privileges,” he recalled. “Before, visitors could enter cells and dormitories, even children.”

I was bracing myself for something like Escape from New York, but New Bilibid felt like pretty much any other prison I’d been to. Videos and documentaries from a couple years back, however, show a totally different place. New Bilibid looked more like a small, walled-in town, with little shops, kiosks, taxis, tennis courts and even its own TV channel, BTV3. The one- or two-story barracks where prisoners live, sprawled out across the massive perimeter, were divided into little “neighborhoods” ruled by gang bosses who slept in palaces. And it was here that the Filipino drug war began.

There were 12 of these prison gangs, the leaders of which held weekly meetings to keep the peace.

“Prison gangs are widespread throughout the country, and officially the policy is to eliminate them,” Inspector Eusebio Del Rosario Jr, the prison’s chief public information officer, told me in his office. “Before, we didn’t really have a budget so we let the inmates police themselves for the betterment of the facility. Each gang has their own inmate code which allows them to discipline their own. But now, we don’t let that happen.”

There were 12 of these gangs, the leaders of which held weekly meetings to keep the peace. In 2014, a well-publicized raid on the prison uncovered the lavish lifestyles the drug lords were living behind bars—enjoying jacuzzis, bars, strippers, sex dolls and widescreen TVs—while keeping their operations running on the outside. The leader of the Commandos gang, Jaybee Sebastian, even kept a framed picture of him and then-Justice Secretary Leila de Lima hung on his wall.

It’s no secret that in the Philippines drugs and corruption were rife. My fixer, Bien, once wound up in another jail after an exposé went wrong. The case has now been dismissed, but he spent two weeks locked up on drug charges and another four years on probation, getting to know Manila’s less law-abiding residents, as well as getting a taste of the privileges available to more moneyed prisoners.

“I called my best friend: ‘Alma, can you please hurry up and bring some pizza for lunch!’” he laughed of his brief spell of incarceration. “Every day I was like, ‘can you bring me pasta, can you bring me pizza’, so I bribed all the killers and pushers and lived like a king. I had my own nice space to sleep while everyone else was crammed 30 to a cell.”

“One prisoner tried to escape, and when the guards found out they got everyone in a line and beat them.”

While in jail, Bien witnessed drugs being smuggled in—and police brutality.

“They were all packed around smoking shabu [meth] and marijuana, and it was right next to the police station! It’s crazy!” he told me. “One prisoner tried to escape while he was high by punching a hole through the ceiling, and when the guards found out they got everyone in a line and beat them.”

“Another time they arrested a Muslim and they were beating him inside the office, and everyone was just so high listening to all those screams and flying chairs.”

There was a sense that anything went behind bars. There was even a rumor there was a meth lab on the grounds of the New Bilibid jail (it’s not inconceivable; San Pedro prison in Bolivia had an onsite cocaine factory). But was the Philippines really on the verge of turning into a narco-state, one of those corrupt countries where the president is basically a drug baron?

“I’ve been here for 19 years, and they say there’s a drug lab here but it’s impossible!” declared Inspector Rosario. “No-one will take that risk. Not even before 2016.”

The Origins of a Genocide

It’s no surprise that just like Americans, Filipinos think of their country in before and after terms following a 2016 presidential election.

It began locally. Since the 1990s, hundreds of bodies had been piling up in the city of Davao, on the southern island of Mindanao, as a vigilante group known as the Davao Death Squad carried out its mission to exterminate social outcasts: street kids, drug dealers, petty criminals—or those merely accused of such things. At the time the city’s mayor was one Rodrigo Duterte, also known as “The Punisher.”

Duterte latched onto the New Bilibid scandal, proclaiming it a sign the Philippines was turning into a drug-infested warren of despair.

“Come to Davao City, Philippines, and do drugs in my city,” he once said. “I will execute you in public.”

By 2012 an investigation by the country’s Commission on Human Rights, which included Senator Leila de Lima, found that Duterte, at the very least, turned a blind eye to the killings. Later, a hitman revealed he might have taken a more active role (that is, if you count emptying two Uzi clips into someone as “active”). Not that it seemed to bother voters: In 2016, Duterte was elected president of a country of 100 million people.

In his campaign, Duterte latched onto the New Bilibid scandal, proclaiming it a sign the Philippines was turning into a drug-infested warren of despair.

Statistically, crime in the Philippines was going down. But public perception—as with the supposed meth factory behind New Bilibid’s walls—was at odds with reality. Of course, problems with drugs and crime did exist, but whether they posed an existential threat is a very different question.

A plain-clothes narcotics officer in a Manila slum

“The drug problem is a grave, severe problem and I believe every country needs to address it, but I believe Duterte created his own demand for his brand of politics,” said Senator Antonio “Sunny” Trillanes, the loudest voice in the Philippines’ opposition, when we met at his Senate office. “He’s tried to magnify this as the biggest, in fact the only, problem in this country, and to his credit, it’s been very, very effective.”

Shortly after Duterte’s victory, a battalion of the Special Action Force, the paramilitary corps of the Philippine National Police, swept into New Bilibid and took up residency. Uncompromising and supposedly incorruptible, they meant to publicly show that the drug lords’ cushy life was over.

“We interact with the normal guards every day. They have their rules and we have ours. But they don’t hurt us like the Special Action Force,” JP complained. “They go in, cover their faces and ransack our rooms.”

It didn’t end there. Invoking Hitler is normally considered a faux pas for politicians, but someone didn’t get the memo.

“Hitler massacred 3 million [sic] Jews,” Duterte said at a September 2016 press conference. “There are 3 million drug addicts. I’d be happy to slaughter them.”

“They took my husband and told me not to follow, and that’s when I heard gunshots.”

It wasn’t just talk. On the night of August 14, 2017, masked gunmen dressed in black entered a ramshackle building in the slum of Old Balara in Quezon City, east of Manila. Their original target, an alleged drug dealer who lived on the second floor, fled over the rooftops, so they went downstairs and found Ignacio Yutero with three friends.

“They took my husband and told me not to follow, and that’s when I heard gunshots,” his widow, Jenny Yutero, told me.

They executed Ignacio, two other men and one woman.

Jenny broke down. “I didn’t want to leave my room, I was so scared what might happen,” she said of the aftermath. “I don’t know why he was killed. He was using, not selling. Later, when the police talked to me, they said, ‘You know he used drugs, why didn’t you stop him?’ And I just stared at them, I didn’t know what to say. The people here are scared, they won’t come out at night. In this area 15 people were killed, and some outsiders were brought to be killed as well.”

Jenny Yutero’s neighborhood of Old Balara

Most of the victims in the Filipino drug war have been, like Ignacio Yutero, poor and living on the margins of society. People who aren’t visible to, or missed by, the 66 percent of Filipinos who still support the president. But drug users, dealers, kingpins, street kids—Duterte said he wanted to make “fish food” out of them all.

Of course, the police deny the systematic extermination of the poor.

“Who uses shabu? It’s the poor man’s cocaine,” police spokesman Dionardo Carlos told me. “But if you look at the drug syndicates and their clients, how can they say it’s a war against the poor when it’s at all levels? They’re all breaking the law. If you’re using shabu, we don’t distinguish between rich and poor; we will come to your house.”

Police spokesman Dionardo Carlos

But it isn’t just the police and their proxy vigilantes who do the killing. Gangland assassins, too, have joined the fray. When you consider how drug dealing is overseen by powerful figures, for whom outlaw cops sometimes carry out hits, this makes sense. It recalls how crackdowns in Mexico would leave certain cartels curiously untouched—and illustrates how Duterte’s drug war could just be an excuse to crush private competition, as Senator Antonio Trillanes told me.

“You can look at it as a war of competition to monopolize the drug business.”

“I believe his war on drugs is a sham,” Trillanes explained. “His son was involved in importing 6.4 billion pesos’ worth of shabu, but when Duterte’s confronted with this he doesn’t lift a finger. So you can look at it as a war of competition where [the Duterte clan] are trying to monopolize the drug business.”

While it’s hard to prove the president’s son is a drug lord, police corruption and extrajudicial killings, especially at the lower levels, are not in doubt. Some may claim that Duterte is not personally responsible if an officer breaks the law, but his presidency has normalized cold-blooded murder. A month after his election victory, Duterte told would-be vigilantes, “Feel free to call us, the police, or do it yourself if you have the gun—you have my support.”

A vigilante in Manila

“Duterte’s not as fucking crazy as he seems,” Bien explained. “Remember he’s a prosecutor, and sometimes when you’re a prosecutor you have to make a scene to get a reaction, and he’s good at that. So now every single word that he says, it’s taken literally in the media, but he just stirs the water. All the drug dealers and some police, they’re the ones killing each other. And he knows in the end all those killings will be pointed to him because he’s the one stirring the water.”

In another sign that Duterte’s actions are more calculated than they seem, he has used the drug war to remove political opposition. In 2017, former Justice Secretary Leila de Lima was arrested for allegedly taking bribes from the New Bilibid gangs. Inside the Gangster’s Code, a 2013 documentary in which Commandos boss Jaybee Sebastian showed off his snaps with Leila de Lima (and his music—as well as a crime lord, Jaybee is a Lord of the Sax), was a big hit at the Filipino Congress.

The whole affair around de Lima is murky—her arrest was condemned by organizations from the European Union to Amnesty International—but what’s certain is that Duterte’s had a beef with her ever since her probe of the Davao Death Squad, and now he’s taken his chance.

Leila de Lima

“She’s doing well,” Trillanes told me. “I visit her in detention every now and then. So far she seems to be in high spirits, but to be blunt, as long as Duterte is president I don’t see her getting out of there anytime soon.”

Senator Trillanes is a former naval officer who’s served some time himself, having led a mutiny in 2003 over corruption in the presidency, and was re-arrested by Duterte’s government in September 2018 over the same affair. But he didn’t stand to retain his seat in this year’s midterm elections, which cemented Duterte’s grip on power. With de Lima conveniently locked away, the Philippines lurches closer to being a one-party state.

“If you’re against me, I’ll do everything in my power to silence you; that’s the message he’s trying to send.”

“Then after the war on drugs, comes the war on media,” said Bien.

Duterte has a particular vendetta against the online outlet Rappler, a site headquartered in greater Manila and known for its scathing critiques of the drug war. In 2018 the government revoked Rappler’s licence and arrested its chief editor, Maria Ressa, on libel charges.

That move sums up another “bad side” of Duterte, according to Bien. “If you’re against me, I’ll do everything in my power to silence you; that’s the message he’s trying to send.”

Meanwhile, there is no sign of an end to the killings. Since Duterte came to power, officially at least 6,600 people have died in anti-drug operations, but 23,000 deaths are classified by police as “homicides under investigation,” including thousands of killings by unidentified gunmen—and even this higher figure relies on police figures for recorded deaths. Nor should we forget the indirect casualties—the 68,000 Filipinos living with HIV, whose numbers have been rapidly swelled by current policies, and the thousands of bereaved families. The genocide is now being investigated by the UN.

Suspects being led into a Manila police station

Bien was in Manila during the early days of the drug war, when more bodies were appearing every night. I asked him how it felt, to hear about or see somebody get killed almost every day.

“During the first week of extrajudicial killings, I met a woman whose husband got killed, and she told us how she saw a masked man standing in front of her, and he shot her husband straight in the head,” he related. “After the interview I fell asleep, and I just woke up shouting when I saw the man pointing the gun at me [in my dream].” 

“After that it was calmer, but it still never sat right with me. Maybe they take drugs for work, or they have family problems, but everyone has the right to live. You cannot kill the problem. It’s crazy.”

A murder scene in Manila

Sherbien Dacalanio contributed to the reporting of this article.

The top photograph shows the entrance to New Bilibid prison. All photographs, except where stated, by Niko Vorobyov.

The post Inside the Philippines Prison That Sparked Duterte’s Murderous Drug War appeared first on Filter.

In 2014, as the Ukraine crisis erupted, “little green men” started popping up across the Crimea—a Black Sea peninsula the size of Maryland dangling off the south of Ukraine. A “referendum” was held in which 95.5 percent of the population apparently backed joining the territory up with Russia. In the political surprise of the century, Vladimir Putin later admitted that the mysterious strangers in green uniform were Russian troops.

Crimea’s history—and tensions reignited this week with the Russian capture of three Ukrainian naval vessels—is complicated. For all the international outrage, the 2014 change in power was relatively bloodless. But for one group of people, it was life-or-death.

Russia, Ukraine (green) and Crimea (black)

Once Crimea went under Russian control, the territory’s “registered drug addicts” found themselves cut off from their methadone supplies, which they’d previously got courtesy of Kiev. They were in for a nasty surprise when the new leadership banned their medication, in line with the rest of Russia.

“They gave it a few days, but then the feds and the Cossacks got together and came down on the dealing spots. They broke arms, legs, everything.”

Rather than risk withdrawal, many went back to using heroin, subject to dodgy doses and harsh enforcement. Within a year, over a hundred of them had died.

“At first they were humane, they gave it a few days,” Sasha tells Filter. “But then the feds and the Cossacks got together and came down on the dealing spots. They broke arms, legs, everything; it’s all on YouTube. Of course the heroin was still there—just the price went up two, three times.”

“Actually, the price of everything went up,” he continues. “We grow grapes over here but it’s cheaper to buy grapes in Moscow! And then all these Chinese [bath] salts started flooding in, and that shit kills people. But hey, at least Crimea’s ours, right?”

(Sasha isn’t being ironic. He actually supports leaving Ukraine, as do most ethnic Russians in Crimea. I told you it was complicated!)

Hardliners and Heroin

If you had to choose among all the countries of the world to be a regular drug user, Russia would be near the bottom of the list. The Philippines under President Rodrigo Duterte might be worse, but short of actually gunning down people in the street, Russia is about as bad as it gets. The country also has one of the highest populations of injecting drug users in the world.

How did these two situations come about?

Priests and their fellow cultural conservatives now have an inordinate influence over public health and society.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, Russian crime rates went up, wages and life expectancy plunged, and society itself seemed on the brink of collapse. In this context, heroin started being smuggled in huge quantities through the “Northern Route”—a reincarnation of the old Silk Road by which dope makes its way from Afghanistan via parts of the old Soviet empire (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan), greasing corrupt officials’ palms along the way.

Since the wild old days of the 1990s there’s been a revival of conservative nationalism in Russia. Vladimir Putin, a God-fearing Orthodox Christian, has embraced the Church as a symbol of Russian nationhood, as it was in tsarist times. Priests and their fellow cultural conservatives now wield inordinate influence over public health and society.

Their positions on sex, drugs and rock n’ roll have echoes of the Catholic stance on contraception (one that has worked out so well for Africa). Finding common ground with Russia’s Soviet-era understanding of addiction—known as “narcology”—they promote abstinence, and abstinence only, from all illegal substances.

Current Russian drug laws are predictably draconian, and the Kremlin has overtaken its arch-nemesis, the White House, to become the champion of international efforts for a “drug-free world.”

But the Just Say Nyet message rings hollow if you’re already sat behind a dive bar heating up a metal spoon.

Brave, Threatened Efforts to Meet Drug Use With Compassion

The Andrey Rylkov Foundation (ARF) is one of Russia’s very few counterpoints to that message, working to keep people alive whether or not they use drugs. But it has repeatedly paid the price for being out of step with the Russian state, and its existence is now under threat.

Its website was shut down for an article that merely discussed methadone. The authorities considered it “drug propaganda.”

ARF is the only organization doing on-the-ground harm reduction work—handing out condoms, sterile syringes and naloxone, and dispensing support and advice—in the whole of Moscow. (Similar groups exist in St Petersburg and Kazan). It’s vital work, especially when you consider that Russia is at the heart of the world’s fastest-growing HIV epidemic.

But these efforts are seldom appreciated. The organization found that out the hard way back in 2012, when its website was shut down by the government for an article that merely discussed methadone. The authorities considered it “drug propaganda.”

Even for those who prefer abstinence-based rehab, that’s not always an option. “There are few good programs in Russia, and where there are, they cost crazy money,” Anya Sarang, ARF’s president and co-founder, tells Filter. “But we think there should be options: rehabilitation, psychiatric help, some people don’t like methadone. That’s our concept. Everything has to be accessible.”

ARF also gives legal advice to people facing Russia’s unforgiving justice system, where anything over two grams of hash (cannabis) can land you 15 years’ hard time. The organization also creates an important community for ostracized people, with get-togethers and movie nights featuring some notable sing-alongs to Frozen.

But now ARF finds itself in the authorities’ crosshairs once again.

The ARF van outside its headquarters in Moscow. Credit: Ivan Reedm

This time, the offending article was a piece of safety advice the organization published in Hats and Bayan, a newsletter which they hand out to their clients.

As Sasha told us, “bath salts,” or synthetic cathinones, have become popular in Russia in recent years. They were once legal, leading many people to assume they were safe, but as with any drug, risks apply.

ARF simply recommended in its pamphlet that readers who use bath salts start with a small dose, drink plenty of water, and take vitamin C to counteract some of the more disagreeable effects. They did not recommend that anyone try bath salts.

“The government wants to strangle us with fines and we’ll have to stop everything.”

Nevertheless, on October 26 a Moscow court hit them with a 800,000 ruble ($12,500) fine for publishing drug propaganda.

Fines large enough to cripple small organizations are the state’s latest tactic against groups that don’t toe the party line. Novoe Vremya, a liberal opposition magazine, was also fined in October. However, thanks to the generosity of its large readership, the publication managed to raise the money in four days.

The Andrey Rylkov Foundation’s situation is trickier. They’re a small NGO working with some of the most alienated and disenfranchised people in Russian society: drug users, former prisoners, sex workers and LGBTQ folks. They don’t get any government grants, for obvious reasons, and funding from abroad has only just been enough to keep them afloat. Their only hope is for their fundraiser to get the money together by the end of the year.

“It’s hard to say what will happen in the future,” says Anya Sarang. “We really want to carry on, but of course the government wants to strangle us with fines and we’ll have to stop everything.”

That means no more sterile syringes, no more naloxone, no more heart-to-hearts or sing-alongs to Frozen. In a country that’s already one of the worst places on earth to be a drug user, this is one grim prospect.

The main image shows volunteers and clients at the Andrey Rylkov Foundation. Credit: Ivan Reedm

The post Russia’s Harm Reductionists Are Once Again Under Attack appeared first on Filter.