The UN said on Tuesday that the deadly beating of João Alberto Silveira Freitas, a black man, by white security guards at the Carrefour supermarket in Porto Alegre, Brazil, is an example of the country’s “structural racism” and called for an investigation independent and urgent reforms
Porto Alegre, in the south of the country, faces several days of protest after the publication of a video last week in which João Alberto, 40, was beaten in the face and head by a supermarket security guard while another guard held him. Ravina Shamdasani, spokesman for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, told the press in Geneva that the death was “an extreme, but unfortunately very common example, of the violence suffered by blacks in Brazil”.
