67-year-old Argentine arrested in Rio de Janeiro for racial abuse in supermarket
José Luis Haile, an Argentine resident in Brazil for two years, was detained in flagrante after insulting a delivery driver in a supermarket in Copacabana.
67-year-old Argentine arrested in Rio de Janeiro for racial abuse in supermarket
A 67-year-old Argentine citizen was detained in flagrante on Monday at a supermarket branch located on Siqueira Campos Street, metres from Copacabana beach in southern Rio de Janeiro. José Luis Haile, who has resided in Brazil for two years, was accused of committing racial abuse against a delivery app worker.
The victim, Samara Rodrigues de Lima, 23 years old, had positioned herself in front of a checkout that was about to open at the establishment to speed up her deliveries. The supermarket employee took around ten minutes to begin serving.
During this waiting period, Haile began complaining loudly about the delay. When Samara intervened to explain that the tardiness was due to the checkout opening process and was not the delivery driver's responsibility, the man demanded that she be silent. Upon her refusal, Haile insulted her with racist expressions on two occasions.
The scene was witnessed by another Argentine who was also shopping at the location. Indignant, this witness alerted a Municipal Guard patrol that was stationed at the corner of the supermarket. The officers arrested Haile on the spot and took him to the 12th Civil Police Station in Copacabana, where he was detained in flagrante for the crime of racial abuse.
One factor distinguishes this case from a previous incident involving Argentine lawyer Agostina Páez, arrested in January of this year in Rio for racist gestures at a bar in Ipanema: Haile is not on holiday in Brazil. According to his statement to police, he has lived in the country for two years and holds regular residence. This condition accelerated his direct transfer to a common prison in the Benfica neighbourhood, rather than the house arrest with electronic monitoring that Páez served in the initial weeks, a situation linked to her tourist status.
The Rio de Janeiro courts rapidly converted the detention into preventative imprisonment. Since January 2023, Brazil has legislatively equated racial abuse with racism, making it imprescriptible, non-bailable at police level and carrying a custodial sentence of between two and five years.
For Haile, the possibilities of obtaining authorisation to leave the country during proceedings are considerably fewer than those that Páez had: by virtue of being a resident rather than a tourist, the procedural grounds for a potential sentence reduction or early release are substantially diminished.
The incident occurs whilst the Páez case still lacks a final sentence. The lawyer from Santiago was filmed in January of this year making monkey-imitation gestures in front of staff at a bar in Ipanema. She remained under precautionary measures and electronic monitoring in Rio for more than 70 days, and was only able to return to Argentina after paying a bond of approximately 20,000 dollars.
The accumulation of cases involving Argentines detained or investigated in Brazil for racial abuse or acts of discrimination has begun to establish itself as a recurring journalistic agenda item. Beyond the individual circumstances of each episode, the phenomenon reflects the distance between Brazilian anti-racist legislation, which since 2023 has made no distinction between racial abuse and racism, and the perception that some Argentine travellers or residents have of their own conduct abroad. In Brazil, this type of act is not a matter of interpersonal dispute: they are serious crimes, subject to public prosecution, imprescriptible and carrying sentences of effective imprisonment.
Source: El Argentino Diario
Source: Google News AR — Crime