Favela War - 2016
Twenty-nine violent deaths were recorded per 100,000 residents in 2012 - the lowest total on record - but then jumped to 38 per 100,000 residents in 2016, when Rio hosted the Summer Olympics, according to government figures. By September 2017, the number had increased even further, to 40 violent deaths per 100,000 residents. At least 134 police officers were killed in Rio, while police killed more than 1,000 people, the highest tally in nearly 10 years, according to government figures.
Saying drug gangs had “virtually taken over” the city, the Presdient said “I am taking these extreme measures because circumstances demand it”. The decree affects the entire state of Rio, including Rio de Janeiro's metropolitan area of 12 million people. He said organized crime “threatens the tranquility of our nation. For that reason, we have just called for a federal intervention in the public security for Rio de Janeiro. ... We will not accept a passive response to the death of innocent people. What is intolerable is that we are burying fathers and mothers and workers and police and young people and children”.
The order was quickly criticised by opposition figures, however, who derided it as a cynical move by the widely unpopular and scandal-plagued Temer, whose approval rating hovers around five percent, to look presidential in an election year. Brazil's security crisis will likely be a deciding factor in October's general elections, with law-and-order candidates gaining in popularity.
According to the Forum Brasileiro de Segurança Pública, a public safety research group, 4,572 people were murdered in the state of Rio de Janeiro in 2016, an increase of almost 20% over the year before. In February 2017 alone, the state registered 502 murders, which was 24.3% higher than February 2016. Brazil’s national homicide rate is ninth in the Americas, according to a 2016 World Health Organization report, with 32.4 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants. That’s worse than Haiti (26.6), Mexico (22) and Ecuador (13.8) but better than homicide-beset Honduras (103.9), Venezuela (57.6), Colombia (43.9) and Guatemala (39.9).
But in this country of 200 million, the sheer numbers were staggering. More people were murdered in Brazil in the five-year period from 2011 to 2015 (279,567 victims) than those killed in the war in Syria (256,124 victims by one count). Also notable is the profile of the people dying: in 2015, 54% of Brazilian homicide victims were young people between the ages of 15 and 24, and 73% were black or brown. Between 2009 and 2015, law enforcement killed 17,688 people. Figures from the Forum Brasileiro indicate that in 2014, 584 people died as a result of “resisting a police intervention”. In 2015, 645 out of a total 58,467 violent deaths were at the hands of police. And in 2016, 920 people were killed by the same forces that, in theory, were supposed to protect them.
Brazil had been trying unsuccessfully to quell crime with militarised law enforcement for decades, but governments remain immune to criticism from the local population and international human rights organisations. Warlike invasions carried out by the military police – do not provide any positive or sustainable results. Instead, the raids create widespread fear, injure or kill innocent bystanders, and kill people: both suspects and police officers.
The crisis of fatal violence against Afro-descendents in Brazil that saw one Black youth killed every 23 minutes in what some had called an “undeclared civil war,” according to a Brazilian Senate committee report announced, is leading experts to raise alarm over a “genocide” suffered by young Black people in the South American country. The June 2016 report, carried out over the past year by a Senate commission on youth murder in consultation with victims of violence and their families, counsellors, researchers, lawyers, police, and other representatives, finds that over 23,000 Black youths were killed in the country every year, BBC Brazil reported. That’s more than three quarters of the total 50,000 annual youth murders. According to the commission, some participants in the study referred to the crisis as the de facto “extermination of poor and Black youth.”
Jose Mariano Beltrame, the state security secretary of Rio de Janeiro, submitted his resignation on 10 October 2016. In recent months he had decried a lack of resources and political commitment by the state government on security issues. The former police officer who was lauded in recent years because of reduced violence and inroads against criminal gangs in Rio, resigned as violence and crime rebound in the Brazilian city and erase many of the gains made during the near-decade he was in the job.
|
NEWSLETTER
|
| Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list |
|
|
|
