| SPECIAL
REPORTS: |
|
|
|
BRAZIL-COLOMBIA:
Inequality as Much a Cause of Violence as
Drugs
Mario
Osava*
RIO DE JANEIRO, May 21 (IPS) - The rise in
violent crime in the cities of Brazil and
Colombia in the past few decades is often
squarely blamed on organised crime and
drug trafficking. But would the bloodbath
come to an end if the drug trade suddenly
disappeared?
The answer is no, unless inequality,
poverty and social exclusion are fought
with the same intensity as the energy put
into law enforcement, say analysts.
For the past eight months, the city of Rio
de Janeiro has been witnessing bloody
clashes between the police and armed
''commandos'' that dominate the drug trade
and govern many of the favelas or
shantytowns, as a kind of ''parallel
authority,'' which some analysts compare
to the situation in Colombia.
According to newspaper reports, 100
''crooks'' were killed in the first two
weeks after the state of Rio de Janeiro's
new Secretary of Public Security, Anthony
Garotinho, assumed his post on Apr. 28
with the mission of restoring law and
order in the Rio de Janeiro metropolitan
region.
The military police reported that 52
agents were killed in firefights or
ambushes between January and May 11. But
Garotinho said that more than 300
delinquents were killed in that same
period.
''Rio de Janeiro is bathed in blood due to
the drug trade,'' said a local resident
interviewed by a TV station a few days
ago. A TV campaign also accuses drug users
of ''financing the violence.''
But drug trafficking has become sort of a
''scapegoat'', and blaming it for the
violence is an overly simplistic reduction
of the problem that ignores the inequality
and social exclusion suffered by a large
part of the population of Brazil,
Professor Gilberta Acselrad at the Rio de
Janeiro State University (UERJ) told IPS.
''Violence has not always been associated
with drugs,'' she noted, pointing out that
drug use in the past did not invariably
generate high levels of violence, nor does
it lead to such violence today in all
drug-producing and consuming countries.
Acselrad said one problem is that today's
society encourages the use of alcohol and
legal drugs like depressants, while
criminalising others.
Furthermore, competition rules, and that
logic is based on ''the exclusion of 'the
other','' which often drives those
marginalised by society to desperation and
the use of violence, she said.
One element that drives young impoverished
Brazilians into crime, ''even more than
poverty, is inequality and the awareness
of inequity that is generated especially
in cities,'' due to the impossibility of
ever being able to afford the consumer
products and lifestyles that they see,
Priscila Celedón, a researcher with the
Colombian non-governmental organisation
(NGO) Communication for Development,
commented to IPS.
In Colombia, the world's leading producer
and exporter of cocaine, violence has long
permeated society, beginning with the
civil wars between the two main parties,
the Liberals and Conservatives, which
claimed hundreds of thousands of lives up
to 1962, starting in the 19th century.
Today the violent confrontations in that
country are between the security forces,
leftist guerrillas and right-wing
paramilitaries that are fighting for
control of the territory, as well as
organised criminal bands and youth gangs
in poor neighbourhoods, said Alonso
Salazar, the author of several books on
social violence.
However, ''urban conflicts are played out
through the armed political violence,''
said Salazar, who is involved in the
Region Corporation, an NGO in the
northwestern Colombian city of Medellin.
The situations in Brazil and Colombia are
not really comparable, and the difference
between the realities of the two countries
is even reflected by the statistics.
In 1995, there were 23 homicides per
100,000 people in Brazil, compared to 61.6
per 100,000 in Colombia, according to a
global report released by the World Health
Organisation (WHO) last October.
Police reports show that last year there
were 4,933 and 2,661 homicides,
respectively, in Medellin and Cali in
western Colombia, cities that are known
all over the world for their cocaine
cartels.
In those two cities there are also six and
three times more security agents,
respectively, than in Rio de Janeiro, in
proportion to the population.
But voices predicting the ''Colombianisation''
of Rio de Janeiro have grown louder since
September, when a narcotrafficking gang
known as the Red Commando (Comando
Vermelho) used terrorist methods to
intimidate the local population.
More than 100 buses were set alight in the
streets of Rio de Janeiro, bombs were set
off in hotels, and luxury buildings and
schools and shops in wealthy districts
were forced to close their doors due to
threats of armed attacks.
Two other offensives by armed groups shook
this Brazilian city in September and
February, making it clear that the reach
of organised crime was no longer limited
to the outlying slum areas of Rio de
Janeiro, because the attacks also targeted
middle-class neighbourhoods, and hurt the
influx of foreign tourists.
The wave of violence was aimed at ''terrorising
the city, in order to strengthen the
negotiating power of imprisoned druglords''
keen on recuperating privileges that they
have lost since last year, Alba Zaluar, an
anthropologist at the UERJ who has been
researching violence for the past 20
years, remarked to IPS.
Prison authorities have confiscated the
druglords' cell-phones, began to control
and limit the visits they received, and
transferred the heads of the drug gangs to
other penitentiaries, in an attempt to
eliminate the control that they exercise
over the Rio de Janeiro drug trafficking
''commandos'' from behind bars.
The recent stepped-up violence waged by
the world of organised crime in Rio de
Janeiro is a reaction to the more
effective law enforcement measures drug
traffickers and gangs are now facing, said
former secretary of public security Josias
Quintal, a military police colonel who is
now a member of the legislature.
But an exclusively repression-based or
police approach to the problem only tends
to spawn more violence, said Luke Dowdney,
an anthropologist with the NGO Viva Rio
and the coordinator of a study based on
hundreds of interviews, which gave rise to
the book ''Children of Trafficking''.
An estimated 5,000 to 6,000 youngsters
under the age of 18 are active in the
''commandos'', drawn by the chance of
earning incomes that would otherwise be
inconceivable to them, said Dowdney.
But 3,937 juvenile members of the
commandos were killed in clashes with the
police or other criminal factions between
late 1987 and 2001.
Dowdney fears that simply cracking down on
the drug trade without offering
''economic, social and also cultural
alternatives'' to young slumdwellers could
fuel the wave of armed robberies, muggings
and other violent actions that target
middle-class sectors in the city.
The youngsters also lose their current
source of income, which is vital to their
families and for the economy of the
favelas, he pointed out.
That is what occurred in Medellin after
the collapse of the cocaine cartel led by
notorious kingpin Pablo Escobar, who was
killed in 1990: the gangs diversified
their activities, and went into bank
robberies and other elaborate armed
robberies, vehicle theft and kidnappings.
But in Rio de Janeiro, the number of
murders was reduced from 78 to 45 per
100,000 inhabitants between 1994 and 2002,
although armed robberies doubled in
number, to a total of 70,908 last year.
* Yadira Ferrer (Colombia) contributed to
this report
Email
this page to a Friend
|
|
|
|
