Paper short abstract:

By investigating the so-called Rafael Braga’s case, I excavate how the truth-making of the trial sustains racist fantasies, thus solidifying otherwise unreal proofs to invariably condemn black impoverished people in Brazil.

Paper long abstract:

What can turn disinfectant and sanitary water into Molotov cocktails that, yet unserviceable, were enough to send a person to prison for five years? Was it an equivalent fiction as that which later would imprison this same individual for eleven years for supposedly being found carrying a few grams of drugs? I investigate the legal papers of the so-called Rafael Braga’s case to excavate how the trial truth-making sustains racist fantasies, thus solidifying otherwise unreal proofs to invariably condemn black impoverished people in Brazil. Condemned for carrying ‘incendiary artefacts’ during a massive demonstration, Braga, then a homeless person, had never taken part in any protest and had in his hands no more than cleaning materials. Released on parole, he was condemned again, this time for ‘drug trafficking’ after being framed with a minimal amount of drugs in the favela where he had gone back to live. Zooming into Braga’s successive trials, I show how ‘crimes’ forged by police officers through violence, counterfeit materials and false testimonies were certified by the at once sterilised and sensationalist judicial prose of the prosecutor and the judge, the trial’s protagonists whose mimetic accusatory writing relegates defence and defendant to figurant roles, preventing their version to emerge or in any case to have any effect. Police violence translates into the law, while the accused, calcified as a prisoner, has his voice discredited and only heard as an irrational offence to the law itself.