A10 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 19 , 2022
The World
COLOMBIA
Former FARC captive
to r un for president
Íngrid Betancourt, a politician
who was held captive by
Colombia’s largest guerrilla group
for more than six years,
announced Tuesday that she will
compete in the presidential
election this year.
The la st time Betancourt ran
for president, in 2002, she was
kidnapped by the Revolutionary
Armed Forces of Colombia, or
FARC, and held hostage in the
jungle. She became one of the
highest-profile captives during
the country’s 52-year conflict
with the FARC.
Despite the horrors she
endured — a t times being
chained by the neck —
Betancourt supported Colombia’s
2016 peace deal with the FARC.
On Tuesday, she launched a
second bid for the presidency,
billing herself as a centrist
focused on tackling corruption
and unemployment in a country
where historic protests over
inequality erupted last year.
Betancourt is entering a
crowded field at a r elatively late
stage ahead of the May election.
Leftist senator Gustavo Petro is
leading in the polls. Betancourt
will first have to win the centrist
coalition’s primary in March.
— Samantha Schmidt
and Diana DuránNORWAYFar-right killer g ives
Nazi salute at hearingAnders Behring Breivik, the
man responsible for one of
Norway’s most heinous crimes in
recent memory, gave a Nazi salute
as he entered court Tuesday to
argue for early release from his
21-year prison sentence.
In July 2011, Breivik killed 77
people by setting off a bomb in
Oslo and opening fire at a y outh
summer camp. He was given the
maximum prison sentence
permitted under Norwegian law.
At the time, the judge ordered
“preventive detention,” reserved
for criminals seen as a danger to
society beyond the length of their
sentence. That makes it unlikelythat Breivik will ever be released,
though he became eligible for
parole after having served a
decade in prison.
On Tuesday, Breivik carriedsigns into the hearing that read
“Stop your genocide against our
white nations” and “Nazi-Civil-
War.”
Since Breivik’s incarceration,he has argued before Norwegian
and European courts that his
isolation in a three-room cell
violated his rights. His case
against Norwegian authorities
was shot down by a top European
human rights tribunal. But his
post-incarceration hearings have
also been opportunities for him
to trumpet his far-right leanings.
— Amy ChengINDONESIAParliament approves
capital’s relocationParliament on Tuesday
approved a b ill to relocate
Indonesia’s capital from Jakarta
to a site deep within the jungle of
Kalimantan on Borneo island, the
most significant advancement of
an idea the country’s leaders have
been toying with for years.
The new state capital law,
which provides a legal framework
for President Joko Widodo’s
megaproject, stipulates how
development of the capital will be
funded. The initial relocation will
start between 2022 and 2024, with
roads and ports prioritized, theFinance Ministry said.
Plans to move the government
away from Jakarta, a megacity of
10 million people that suffers
from chronic congestion, floods
and air pollution, have been
offered by multiple presidents,
but none has made it this far.
Jakarta will remain the capital
until a presidential decree is
issued to formalize the change.
— ReutersHong Kong to kill 2,
hamsters over virus fears: Hong
Kong has asked pet shops and
owners to hand over close to
2,000 hamsters for culling, after
11 of the small rodents tested
positive for the coronavirus in a
pet store. The territory has also
suspended the import of small
animals. Authorities announced
the decision after health experts
found two groups of hamsters,
which originated in the
Netherlands and arrived in Hong
Kong on Dec. 22 and Jan. 7, t o be
“high risk” for carrying the virus.
Officials said hamsters turned
over by o wners will be killed to
“cut the transmission chain.”
— From news servicesDIGESTMARTIN MEJIA/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Workers in Peru clean up oil on Cavero beach in the port city of
Callao on Tuesday after high waves attributed to the volcanic eruption
in Tonga rocked a s hip loading oil into a refinery on Sunday.BY TERRENCE MCCOYrio de janeiro — When tour
guide Pedro Andres arrived at the
site historians call the most im-
portant physical evidence of the
arrival of enslaved Africans to the
Americas, the scene he found was
familiar. The Valongo Wharf was
empty.
Addressing a family of Para-
guayan tourists, Andres de-
scribed its historical significance.
At the height of the transatlantic
slave trade, nearly 1 million en-
slaved Africans arrived on its cob-
blestones, more than landed any-
where else, and twice as many as
were trafficked to all of the United
States. UNESCO has called the
wharf, discovered in 2011 during
an urban renovation project, a
“unique and exceptional” place
that “carries enormous historical
as well as spiritual importance to
African Americans.”
But Andres, who brings tour-
ists to the wharf of his own voli-
tion and not because it’s recom-
mended by his tour agency, saw
little indication of that remark-
able history. There are no memo-
rials. Only a single sign above a
large puddle far removed from
the street. The wharf has been
unearthed but is still ignored.
Even people who live nearby,
whose ancestry leads back to this
point, don’t know of its existence.
“Sad,” said Andres, 26. “Sad
that slavery ever happened, but
also sad that its history is being
neglected.”
How that history is honored at
the site, and who gets to make
those decisions, are questions at
the core of another struggle over
race and memory in the country
that brought the most enslaved
Africans into the Americas. The
dispute, which pits federal pros-
ecutors and historians against
the right-wing presidency of Jair
Bolsonaro, echoes a racial reck-
oning in Brazil that in recent
years has taken on some of the
country’s darkest moments and
most enduring contradictions.
Brazil historically has de-
murred on questions of race, pre-
ferring instead to understand it-
self through the lens of class. Its
intellectual elite have long de-
scribed the country as a “racial
democracy” forged by intermar-
riage and unencumbered by the
racism plaguing other countries.
But it also imported nearly 5 mil-
lion enslaved Africans — an esti-
mated 40 percent of the transat-
lantic slave trade — and in 1888
was the last country in the West-
ern Hemisphere to abolish slav-
ery.
Historians, federal prosecutors
and advocates for racial justice
say the Valongo Wharf presents a
unique opportunity for Brazil to
fully address that original sin and
the racial inequality it imparted.
But they say that the government
under Bolsonaro has failed to
meet the historic moment, per-
haps intentionally, and that Bra-
zil is once more choosing to ig-
nore the injustices of its past.
“The least that Brazil can do is
recognize this crime against hu-
manity,” said Brazilian anthropol-
ogist Milton Guran, who worked
on the UNESCO World Heritage
application for the site. “The Va-
longo Wharf is a way to recognize
that Brazil was the country that
most received enslaved peoples
and, therefore, is the country that
has the greatest debt to Africa and
the descendants here, who repre-
sent the largest Black population
outside of Africa.”
But instead, federal prosecu-
tors alleged in a lawsuit filed in
September, the government has
failed to honor commitments
made during the administration
of President Michel Temer in
2017, when UNESCO recognized
the wharf.
A tourism welcome center has
not been built. Almost all of the
African artifacts that have been
recovered — rings, amulets, reli-
gious items — remain locked
away out of sight. The site itself
has at times been littered with
trash or flooded. The drainage
system has repeatedly malfunc-
tioned; a city worker was electro-
cuted in 2020 while trying to
drain the site. The United States
and a Chinese state utility compa-
ny have each donated $500,000,but the money has yielded few
improvements. There is still no
concrete management plan for
the site.
“All of this depends on the
federal government,” federal
prosecutor Sergio Gardenghi
Suiama told The Washington
Post. “But the federal government
today hasn’t met its commitment
to work with the local communi-
ty, let alone advance an anti-racist
agenda to honor its African heri-
tage.”
Bolsonaro’s office deferred
comment to the National Insti-
tute of Historic and Artistic Heri-
tage, the federal agency chargedwith overseeing the site. The in-
stitute declined a request for an
interview last week and did not
respond to written questions.
The biggest point of contention
has been the dissolution of the
site’s civic management commit-
tee. It was assembled to give
the local community, specifically
A fro-Brazilians, a chance to ad-
vise and oversee government offi-
cials working on the site. But the
group was disbanded in 2019
when Bolsonaro dissolved many
such committees to help “de-
bureaucratize” the Brazilian gov-
ernment.
The presidential decree, Bol-sonaro tweeted at the time, was to
“reduce the power of politically
equipped entities that use beauti-
ful names to impose their will,
ignore the law and purposefully
slow Brazil’s development.”
But the elimination of the
wharf’s committee left Black
community members feeling ex-
cluded and without a voice in the
site’s management.
“This isn’t neglect,” said Luiz
Eduardo Negrogun, who sat on
the committee. “This is a coordi-
nated, clear and explicitly racist
action to deconstruct and undo
our attempts to rescue the site.”
He added, “I’m not sad. I have ahate that runs deep.”
In legal filings, the federal heri-
tage institute that oversees the
wharf defended its management
and said improvements were on
the way. The agency said it was
under no international obligation
to work with a civic management
committee. The local community
can still participate in the site’s
management, it said, by attend-
ing public meetings and follow-
ing the agency’s online news
page.
“There is no plan by the Brazil-
ian Government to impede the
participation of the interested
community,” the institute said in
court documents. “The absence of
the management committee does
not imply that there is an absence
of management.”
But what has been absent, ad-
vocates say, is a full telling of the
story. It begins in the 1700s, when
Rio’s original slave market was in
the city center. The daily specta-
cle of trading people and separat-
ing families had begun to discom-
fort the urban elite. They de-
manded not the end of the mar-
ket, just that it be moved out of
sight.
So it was relocated to the Va-
longo Wharf, where hundreds of
thousands were sold. Mass
graves, filled with people killed by
disease or malnourishment from
the journey across the Atlantic,
are spread out around the wharf.
After Brazil banned its slave
trade in 1831, the Valongo Wharf
was remade into a port to greet
the Brazilian emperor’s future
wife, an Italian princess. Then it
was built over again in 1904 and
made into a municipal plaza. For
more than a century, the wharf’s
slave history lay hidden under
two layers of infrastructure, bur-
ied and largely forgotten until it
was brought to light once more in
2011 during the urban renewal
project.
“An archaeological treasure,”
the newspaper O Globo said at the
time.
Monica Lima, a historian at the
Federal University of Rio de Ja-
neiro, said the misery embedded
here is so extreme that the wharf
should be categorized among hu-
manity’s most notorious sites and
commemorated with the same
international recognition.
“It’s for the pain and suffering
that happened there,” she said.
“The Valongo Wharf is similar
t o the concentration camp
Auschwitz-Birkenau or Robben
Island in South Africa or other
places that have been recognized
for a history of pain and suffer-
ing.”
But on a cloudy recent after-
noon at the wharf, f ew were con-
templating that history. Children
rode bikes through the nearby
city plaza. A father worked on his
daughter’s bicycle, fixing a bro-
ken spoke. He lived in the neigh-
borhood above the site, Morro da
Providência, the oldest favela in
Brazil, populated by the descen-
dants of enslaved Africans. But he
said he’d never heard the truth
about this place.
“I knew there was something
old here,” said Luiz Cláudio
Coutinho, 34. “But I didn’t know
what it was exactly.”
Down below, at the base of the
steps, looking out at the stone
remains was Larissa Rodrigues
Mouzinho Lugarini, 28. She came
here as a history student a decade
ago, when the port was rediscov-
ered. But she has rarely been back
since. She shook her head, frus-
trated to see how little the site has
been improved.
“It’s been 10 years,” she said.
“But it’s still the same.”
[email protected]More enslaved Africans came
t o the Americas through this
p ort than anywhere else
Brazil’s Valongo Wharf, cited by UNESCO for its historical significance, sits
forgotten and neglected. Prosecutors blame Jair Bolsonaro’s government.TERRENCE MCCOY/THE WASHINGTON POSTSILVIA IZQUIERDO/ASSOCIATED PRESSERALDO PERES/ASSOCIATED PRESS
TOP: Two tourists visit Rio’s Valongo Wharf,
considered the most important physical trace
of the arrival of enslaved Africans to the
Americas. LEFT: Broken pavers at the site,
which was unearthed in 2011 during an urban
renovation project. ABOVE: Jair Bolsonaro,
whose right-wing government dissolved a civic
oversight panel f or t he site as part of an effort
to “de-bureaucratize” the Brazilian state.