Death Without Weeping

Chapter 6 is a discussion of many of the interconnected themes in Death Without Weeping: deprivation, exploitation, and the ambience of death. The specific focus of this chapter is the understanding of these negative circumstances as a form of violence. The illustration of this connection is made by way of the connection between the indifference that characterizes residents of the Alto upon death, and the widespread patterns of violent repression they face while alive, but cannot discuss openly.

The beginning of this chapter situates these forces of violent repression in the "feudal" character of the political system, based on sugarcane production. The author argues that the concentration of wealth and power into the hands of relatively few wealthy families works hand-in-hand with the military government of Brazil's past. In the Northeast, the consolidation of this power occurs at the loss of the "peasant-worker" class; their attempts to organize for greater political and economic power are frequently met with violence, torture, and "disappearings."The last of these, she argues, has the greatest significance within the culture of the Alto, a paradoxical observation, given how rarely residents are willing to talk about it. Despite this, most of the residents have a friend or family member who has been "taken," most often on the pretext said individual has committed a crime. The author's argument is that the free hand the authorities are given to go after criminals is used to silence and persecute any and all political dissenters.

However, the author's focus is less an investigation into the persistence of political violence in the Northeast, and more a focus on the anxiety it creates among the population, an anxiety that mingles freely with fictional, even fantastical suspicions. Among these are that street children are being snatched away to have their organs harvested for North American and Japanese buyers and that wealthy citizens of Bom Jesus use the skin and bones of the poor in plastic surgery. This paranoia does not detract from the real threat of trafficking and kidnapping prevalent in the Alto community.

Finally, death and burial represent another form of "violence" against the lower-class communities. For an impoverished community, the cost of organizing a proper funeral can be prohibitive, fostering dependency on local patrons to provide. This, when compared with the very real mistreatment of remains that follows a "pauper's death" in the Alto, contributes to these residents' anxiety that even in death, their own bodies are not under their control.