Biopolitics in Brazil — part 1
An introductory narrative: fictions of the real
The station was empty. No one was waiting for those who were anxiously walking along the tracks. The presence of guards was noticeable and from the way they were organized, they must have known that another train was approaching. Quickly, smoke emerged in the distance, trailing behind even swifter carriages. The image was accompanied by a noise that grew louder and louder. From time to time, the whistle sounded, as if the driver wanted to make sure they knew he was coming. The year could have been one between 1901 and 1994. Regardless of the weather, whether it was continuously raining or extremely hot, this train maintained its schedule and reached its final stop packed with passengers over its 93 years of service. An atmosphere of anxiety pervaded everyone, legible in the marks on their faces. Not at all typical of journeys made for work or pleasure.
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Some of the countless men and women who filled the wagons knew, while others had no idea where they were being taken. Once taken from their families and homes, many of them knew the trip would lead to some form of social separation. However, they had no idea what exactly awaited them in this new life that would begin there, in that station. Would they stay in a dark, stuffy place, locked up in heaps with no room to lie down, like the wagons they occupied? Would they receive no food or water, as they had throughout the journey, or would they be served something to satisfy their hunger and relieve their fatigue? Would they have any contact with those left behind? How could we understand the thoughts and feelings of those individuals as they eagerly waited for their arrival?
When the train stopped for good, the absence of any noise showed the seriousness of the concern that had settled over the new arrivals. Trapped by ignorance and powerless due to the lack of food and water, they awaited the order of the guards who had already surrounded the carriage doors and made them follow “in single file in the direction of the unknown” (ARBEX2. 2013, p.27). No relatives or friends were waiting for them, no news had been sent. The inside and outside were radically delimited and contact between these two poles was broken. Isolation began. Everyone was taken to the sorting area. They were separated by sex, age and physical characteristics. They handed over everything they still had, such as clothes, shoes or any other belongings, causing “embarrassment that brought to tears many women who had never faced the humiliation of being naked in public” (ARBEX.2013, p.28). The men also had their hair shaved in the style of prisoners of war before being sent to their respective pavilions and to the new life they would be subjected to from then on.
The final destination for these trains, nicknamed the “trains of crazy,” was known as Bias Fortes. It was located at the back of the Hospital Colônia complex in Barbacena, Minas Gerais. It brought in the “socially disinherited”, as Daniela Arbex calls them in her book-denouncement entitled Brazilian Holocaust, Genocide: 60,000 dead in Brazil’s largest mental hospital. The story could well be used to describe the arrival of the famous trains full of Jews and other stigmatized members of German society to the Nazi concentration camps in the first half of the 20th century. However, the events that draw our attention curiously refer to the functioning, in Brazil, of a biopolitical structure that, we will soon realize, is more than a simple enclosure of madness.
