Sednaya-Carandiru
Gustavo Racy
Focusing on the Sednaya prison complex in Syria and Carandiru in Brazil, the following text reflects on prisons as apparatuses that, as spaces of exception, repeatedly refound the State. While the horrors of Sednaya are being documented months after the complex was opened with the fall of the Assad regime, and Syria undergoes a false transition led by a government with fundamentalist roots, and Brazil approaches the thirty-third anniversary of a massacre that exterminated at least 111 people in Carandiru, the reflection in the text seeks to reveal how state violences are intertwined as stemming from its own legitimacy, and how it seems increasingly difficult to build alternatives when some peoples in the world still need, in order to self-determine, to guarantee the legitimacy of their own State.
Thus, although focusing on Syria and Brazil, the text reveals parallels that can also be observed in the ongoing genocide against Palestine by the Zionist Entity, which will complete two years on October 7th.
While the world watches in astonishment, and people around the world do what they can to bring about some change, the state continues to refound itself, finding ways for its own legitimation through apparatuses like the prison, which is much more than a detention complex, but a machine for producing hunger and subjective dissolution.
Through parallels between Sednaya and Carandiru, the author thus seeks to portray some brief elements about the way geographically distant realities are united by a logic that prevails around the world. A logic we continually witness, unaware of the ethical implications that such witnessing entails.
In September 2025, The Syria Prisons Museum (SPM), a civil society organization, launched its 3D Tour of Sednaya Prison. A virtual museum, the SPM presents ‘meticulous investigations of the systematic crimes and violations in the state prisons of Syria in an effort to contribute to accountability, justice and memory.’ The work of the organization began immediately after the fall of the Assad regime, documenting sites and traces found in cells, interviewing former prisoners, and collecting objects and documents. These sources are meant to be not only an archive, but elements for the conduction of investigative and penal inquiries into the crimes committed by the former regime. It is also, of course, an educational platform that will, hopefully, help families clarify the fate of their forcibly disappeared relatives, as well as elaborating on over 50 years of dictatorship. Previously, the SPM had launched its first project, the ISIS Prison Museum, in October 2024, and will launch Jawab, a sister project, in late 2025/early 2026, dedicated to working specifically with the families of those who disappeared (information retrieved from https://prisons.museum/en/syria/about#our-story).
This project comes at an important moment for Syria, whose “transitional” regime paints itself as a sort of naïve, well-intended state apparatus while promoting massacres against religious minorities in Latakia, Tartus and Sweida, with the excuse of having no control over rogue squadrons stemming from its own ranks. But it surpasses the specificity of the Syrian reality, as it exposes the age-long rationale that is embedded in the very fabric of contemporary society. Upon visiting SPM’s website and roaming the 3D Tour, Westerners and other societies may be appalled by the reality of Sednaya. How not to feel sick with the testimonies of former inmates, or with the very opening of the cells upon the fall of the Assad regime? The constant beatings, the torture, the terrible nicknames given by the inmates to police officers and doctors that abused the random people brought in to, if possible, rot somewhere in the gigantic carceral structure? The writings on the walls, the reports of incessant wailing and screaming, the deplorable state of people who were to be released, the clothes piled up in the corner of the minuscule cells. And yet, though appalled, it is sometimes difficult to feel something that one may think might be appropriate, just towards the reality we are presented with.
Google satellite image of the 27000 sqm complex of Sednaya’s prison. Surprisingly, the map indicates a camping ground close by and a photo studio further down the main road.
Empathy does little here; it might make us feel “more human,” capable of being affected by the suffering of others, but it will either end in this sort of self-aggrandising feeling, or it will make us deal with the fact that little is to be done. Seeing it, witnessing the testimony of those who were there, however, might be enough. This means becoming a type of witness which Giorgio Agamben saw as an ethical principle regarding Auschwitz. Does it change anything? That, perhaps, is a false question. What can “change” mean, when we are deprived of material, practical action regarding a reality that carries on thousands of kilometers away from us? In a language we sometimes do not understand, in a symbolic universe of which we only share a part? And yet, witnessing is, perhaps, enough.
Though the role of witnesses - yes, even those who were not direct witnesses - may be argued to be an ethical imperative of our times, it is not about the meaning or functioning of this role that we will talk briefly about. Rather, we will approach the fact that, to become a witness in the first place, we need only to look around us.
Perhaps few people outside Latin America know of an episode called the “Carandiru Massacre”, which happened in São Paulo on October 2nd, 1992. “Carandiru” was the name of a prison located in the northern region of São Paulo. It had been founded in 1920 as the provincial jail and was inspired by the modern prison system applied in France, which aimed at the regeneration of inmates through work. Between 1920 and the 1940s, the jail worked in exemplary fashion, according to the penal thought of the times. In 1956, the penitentiary went through a transformation, amplifying its capacity from 1200 to 3250 inmates. Demographic growth and the spike in crime rates, evidently a result of Brazilian structural issues, led to overcrowding. By the end of the 1980s, Carandiru had become the largest prison complex in Latin America, with over 8000 inmates. On October 2nd, 1992, 111 - according to official reports, but 250 according to extra-official ones - inmates were brutally assassinated by the Military Police of the State of São Paulo, under the command of colonel Ubiratan Guimarães, who justified the action as the result of an attempt to calm a local rebellion, which had begun as a quarrel between inmates of the 9th Pavilion during a football match. Pedro Franco de Campos, the Secretary of Public Security who authorized police intervention, would leave the state government less than a month later, followed by Michel Temer - whose parents were from Btaaboura, Lebanon and who would later become president of Brazil - who announced that police officers involved in the massacre would be recommended rest and meditation. As for Colonel Guimarães, he was accused of homicide and tried in June 2001, condemned to 632 years in jail for 102 of the 111 deaths. The next year, he was elected state deputy while his defense appealed the sentence. The Special Body of the Justice Tribunal that heard the appeal recognized, by a vote of twenty to two, that the conviction was mistaken: the colonel had been hit and had to be hospitalized during the police action in the prison. The revision acquitted the defendant.
Carandiru Massacre
(source: Canal Ciências Criminais)
A photograph by Niels Andreas shows blood-washed corridors of Carandiru in the aftermath of the massacre.
(Source: Folha de São Paulo)
There are so many parallels possible to be made regarding social and personal trauma, as well as the institutional aftermath of massacres and infringement of human rights. Each massacre, each mass killing, has its own specificities, proportions, and consequences. When thinking about this subject, I believe we should never bend to a comparative perspective, but approach it in terms of how every massacre, mass killing and genocide are related. Such relationships can be drawn in terms of technological apparatuses, discrimination against minorities, and many other phenomena. Quite simply, however, and setting the basis for all of them, is the problem that they share, as stated above, the same rationale, the same principle, which is the right over the state of exception elevated to its fundamental level: the fact that exception begins and ends with the legitimation of killing. It is, itself, the legal power to kill.
For a long time, we have been accustomed to quote Walter Benjamin’s observation according to which the ‘tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “state of exception” in which we live is the rule.’ But we seem to have continuously failed to ‘arrive at a concept of history which corresponds to this fact.’ Is it a matter of will or knowledge? Arguing against Carl Schmitt, Benjamin was precise in addressing the problem of violence and the need for an insurgent violence that suspends the state of exception. After all, every government, every legal power is instituted, precisely, by its legitimacy over exceptionality. It is the law that stipulates when violence is legitimized in order to maintain order. What lies underneath this principle is, precisely, the legal power to kill. Therefore, we seem to arrive at a dead-end. How can we escape the rationale of constituent violence? How can we break up the chains that bind us, and set forth the unending repetition of violence and killing sprees that constitutes, over and over, state power and, with it, the state itself?
Haddad seals an electoral deal with Maluf, for more TV time in the mayoral campaign, 2012.
(Source: G1)
Socialists have, for a long time, realized the crux of this problem: the state, this everlasting fiction, is to be abolished. The fact, however, that people around the world see their struggle tightly connected to the real need, first of all, of having their own state grounded on the basis of contemporary democracies shows how difficult our task is. In Syria, people struggle for a new state, one which is able to protect them from the Zionist project close-by, and that allows them to live under democratic rule, granting them decent jobs and economic opportunities, as well as freedom of speech, assembly and religion. In Brazil, one of the largest democracies of the Western hemisphere, we have just condemned a former president who engaged in hate speech and committed genocidal acts that resulted in the loss of, at least, 400 thousand of the 700 thousand dead from the COVID pandemic. He was not, however, arrested for being genocidal, but because of an attempted coup d’État, which would have only reinstated a different legitimacy over the state of exception. Celebrations abound regarding the strength of Brazilian democratic institutions. Bolsonaro, however, was a direct heir of Michel Temer’s machinations when the latter assumed the presidency after Dilma Rousseff’s legally justified, but unjust impeachment. Bolsonaro was also part of Fernando Haddad’s platform when the latter was Lula’s bet for São Paulo’s mayorship in 2012. At the time, Bolsonaro was a member of the Progressive Party, whose head figure, Paulo Maluf, sealed a deal of support for the Workers’ Party. I wonder how much these not so secret and not so silent complicities are part and parcel of the robustness of our democracy.
Differences apart, witnessing Sednaya and Carandiru seems to be the key to understanding the rationale of the state of exception, which is the very foundation of the state. Incessantly defended and reinstated by the democratic rule, episodes like these are portrayed as a misguiding, as an error of calculus, as if they are a human mistake in an otherwise fully functioning machine, thanks to a system of counterweights that avoid the excesses of personal power. Nothing could be more wrong than this idea: democracy, unfortunately, continuously reinstates the prison system as a means to uphold itself through this fiction called “state”. If, in Syria, this was done by an obviously dictatorial regime, it was nonetheless done, through its official discourse, in the name of real democracy, whereas in Brazil, it is continuously promoted despite democracy, while men in positions of power continuously thread their path towards reform or regression.
Whteher through the memory of Carandiru, now long demolished and turned into a public park, or through Sednaya’s still existing writings on walls, and remains of burnt files. Whether through photographs and videos, personal testimonies, the overall materiality of prisons holds the key to our understanding and, hopefully, great refusal of state apparatuses that must be fought. Witnessing the testimonies is but a start on the long path towards liberation from the constraints of state apparatuses, and a role we must assume; in fact, an ethical role we must not avoid assuming once we are faced with it. It may serve, furthermore, to strengthen global connections, informing one another and creating relationships aimed at a common goal. It is about time we struggle for the acknowledgement of liberal democracies’ hypocrisy when it comes to legitimizing themselves. Sednaya will justify HTS, legitimizing the new state, Carandiru legitimizes the reforms of Brazilian democracy. Both Sednaya and Carandiru, however, will keep on existing. The only guarantee both liberal democracies and dictatorships have granted us is the state of exception. I am pretty sure this is not exclusive to Brazil and Syria.
Sednaya Prison, Amin Sensar for Al Anadol
Gustavo Racy is a professor at the Anthropology Department of the Federal University of Paraná (Brazil). He is a researcher of the Centre for the Analysis of International Conjuncture at PUC-SP, and a post-doc researcher at the Federal University of São Paulo. As one of the founders of sobinfluencia edições, he edited and translated “Walter Benjamin está Morto,” a collection of short texts by Walter Benjamin. He also shares the direction of Al Jaliah, in which he published, in Portuguese, “Sinais Desonrosos”, “Tragédia não é a Palavra Certa” and, in English “Palestine is the World,” available in the first edition of the digital magazine.
