Brazilians see crime and graft still flourishing
The Financial Times, Jan 05, 2004
Jonathan Wheatley
Brazil's media, always eager for a crime story and seldom short of subject matter, have had a bonanza recently.
A former state governor and 40 of his supporters were arrested last month for allegedly stealing $1m a month in salaries paid to phantom public employees. Highway police at the Paraguayan border were nabbed with piles of cash allegedly extorted from smugglers. A gang of judges and investigators are awaiting trial on suspicion of an array of kickback offences, revealed by the thrillingly named and executed Operation Anaconda.
For Brazilians, these events were remarkable in two ways: first, that they were revealed at all; and second, that the alleged perpetrators are the kind of people - politicians, judges, policemen - who not long ago could safely have assumed they would never be arrested.
"The people in command at the Federal Police and the Justice Ministry have looked at all the corruption going on and said, right, go out and arrest them," says David Fleischer, a political scientist at the University of Braslia.
Some, however, are less optimistic about the authorities' attitude to crime. "This is a coincidence, a number of individual actions occurring at the same time that have nothing to do with public policy," says José Vicente da Silva Filho, a former National Secretary of Public Security. "We need to look beyond the flashbulbs to the real problem of organised crime in our urban centres."
Leaving the high-profile arrests aside, Brazilian crime figures make gloomy reading. The country has more fatal shootings than any other in the world: about 40,000 a year, or 88 per cent of all murders, according to a study by Mr da Silva and others for the Fernand Braudel Institute of World Economics in São Paulo.
Annual homicide rates on the outskirts of Brazil's biggest cities exceed 100 per 100,000 people, among the highest in the world. One in every 20 citizens in São Paulo was a victim of armed robbery during 2002, at a rate of 1,704 reported incidents a day. Mr da Silva says the overall cost of crime to Brazil's economy is $100m (€79m, £55m) a day.
Rising crime is causing rising concern among Brazilians. A survey published last month by the CNT, a transport industry confederation that conducts regular public opinion polls, found that 84.3 per cent of respondents felt violence had become worse over the previous six months, up from 79.1 per cent in October.
One problem is a general sense of impunity. In the state of Rio de Janeiro, for every 100 cases of murder, just two are solved by the uniformed police on patrol, known as the Military Police, and one more by the Civil Police, who carry out investigations. Police intelligence shows that bank robbers and kidnappers regard the threat of arrest as an irrelevance.
Brazil's security apparatus is inadequate. The Federal Police, responsible for Operation Anaconda and several other recent arrests, is understaffed and relies heavily on telephone tapping - a procedure of dubious judicial admissibility.
The military and civil police, which report to the 27 state governments, are underpaid and reluctant to co-operate with each other. Plans to unite the two forces have been diluted under political pressure. A bill in Congress would merely allow individual states to unite their forces should they chose.
Another priority is reform of the judicial system, notoriously slow and full of loopholes. Judicial reform is indeed on the government's agenda. Proposals include setting up an external body to oversee the system, widely regarded as an essential first step.
But the government's plans have been diluted since it was in opposition last year. It has dropped plans to create a Ministry of Security and spending on measures to help co-operation among the various police forces has been curtailed.
Walder de Goes, a political consultant in Brasília, says there is a shortage of "co-ordinated, proactive government action". Rather than setting out its own agenda, he says, the government is taking the line of least resistance, supporting measures that have been in Congress for years and have the greatest chance of becoming law.
Crime has continued to make headlines in recent days with the arrest of a businessmen accused of ordering the murder of a mayor who was investigating corruption.
For the common citizen, however, the sense of insecurity is growing.