Brothers are called ‘monkeys’ in Mineirão on Black Consciousness Day

The first half ended and the scoreboard was still zero-zero when brothers Carlos Miguel, 25, and Carlos Eduardo Lopes de Almeida, 22, stopped when they were called “monkeys” three times. It was Saturday night (20) and Black Consciousness Day was already over.

They, their girlfriends and two cousins ​​watched Atlético-MG play against Juventude in the stands of Mineirão stadium, in Belo Horizonte, but there was no time to see Galo score two goals and approach the cup of the Brazilian Championship.

Advertiser Carlos Miguel tells that one of the cousins, standing in the hallway, was pushed by a drunken supporter who was trying to climb down to reach the seats below. “Wait a minute, I’ll move away,” she said in Minas Gerais slang, meaning she would walk away.

“You guys better back off even though I’m going to run over you,” he would have replied. Seeing that the brothers were looking at the scene, he snapped: “What are you looking at, you monkeys?”, leaving them both without a reaction. The man then descended the step and was pulled by his own son.

“Are you defending this bunch of monkeys there?”, he declared again, pointing at the two. The son once again caught his attention and warned that he knew the brothers, but he shouted for the third time: “I don’t want to know, no. It’s a bunch of monkeys”, according to the account.

Carlos Eduardo, who is a physical education student, even asked: “What did you say?”, and the fan replied: “I’m just not going to repeat it or you’ll call the police”. Then he disappeared into the crowd.

“Everyone around listened,” says Carlos Miguel, who says he is devastated. “It’s complicated, we prepare for combat, militate, but the time came, I just wanted to go home. It’s such a shock that we lose our reasoning, our sense of place. Nobody is prepared for that.”

He says that the family then received support from security guards, who took them to the police station inside the stadium to file an incident report for racial injury. Officials even looked for the aggressor in the stands at that moment, but they didn’t find him anymore.

The fan lives in the same city as the brothers, Nova Lima, in the metropolitan region of Belo Horizonte, which is why they know each other, but have no relationship. According to Carlos Miguel, he has already been identified by the police and should be called to testify.

When contacted, the Civil Police of Minas Gerais only informed that the occurrence was sent to the 3rd Northwest Police Station to investigate the facts and that “more information will be forwarded in due course”.

The publicist says that everyone is still psychologically processing what happened and that they are at home receiving support from family and friends: “Unfortunately, it’s something that doesn’t leave our minds. Everyone who was there is very shaken, because when he becomes he referred to a bunch of monkeys, he was referring to all of us”.

He also claims that he is getting a lot of messages after he published a report about what happened on his social networks. “Thinking about how many books I’ve read, how many times I’ve prepared for combat, how many times we’ve been through this situation in life, the two of us, my brother and I, we’ve fought since we were born,” he wrote.

“And when a man called us a monkey, all I wanted was my mother’s lap, thinking about protecting my brother, not knowing what to do, crying. The Rooster’s victory no longer made sense, the world no longer made sense and we felt that, despite the victory, we had lost there. Another Black Consciousness Day and the target is still in our chest!”, he completed.

Asked about other episodes of racism he has gone through, Carlos Miguel replies that there were so many that it would not be worth mentioning: “Everyone suffers a little, my parents, my uncles, my friends. The traumas that this leaves us, only we know to speak”.