Each week, we’ll post information about the Amnesty International cases we’ll be writing letters for at Pittsburgh’s 2014 Write-a-thon and Human Rights Festival on December 8.

Jorge Lázaro Nunes dos Santos

FATHER SEEKING JUSTICE FOR HIS SONS

Two of Jorge Lázaro Nunes dos Santos’ seven children were shot to death. He has been struggling for justice ever since.

Ricardo Mattos dos Santos, a talented circus acrobat, was gunned down in January 2008 while playing soccer with his friends in the Bahia state of Brazil. Ricardo died begging for his life and insisting that he was not who the attackers were looking for. In March 2011, the public prosecutor charged three military police officers with his execution. Six years after Ricardo’s death, the case still has not gone to trial and no one has been brought to justice.

Five years later, his 19-year-old brother Enio was abducted from his home and killed. Almost nothing is known about the context of his death. In 2011, his father had applied for his inclusion in Brazil’s National Program for Children and Adolescents Threatened with Death (PPCAM). The program refused to include him, arguing that he was not at-risk.

Ricardo and Enio were young black men. Every year, thousands of young black Brazilians die in gun related homicides. Hundreds are killed by military police, death squads or militias with links to the police. In a climate of pervasive racism, impunity is the norm. Some commentators refer to this phenomenon as the “extermination” of black youth in Brazil. Now is the time to stand up and affirm that Ricardo and Enio’s lives matter.