Jair Bolsonaro, the president of Brazil, will not defeat crime in Brazil by tolerating militias

 

The economists highlighted Brazil’s plagues: economic stagnation, corruption, and sickening violence. In brief, terrorists, not the civilian government, rule much of the communities of Latin America, not just Brazil.

 

The number of murders in Rio de Janeiro state reached 40 per 100,000 in 2017, 14 times the rate in New York State. The government felt compelled to send in the army, temporarily, to quell the mayhem. Organized criminals, who are difficult to prosecute because residents are terrified to testify against them, control much of the city. Mr. Bolsonaro is well aware of this. He was a seven-term federal congressman for the state of Rio de Janeiro and has deep personal ties to the city. Yet his prescription for fighting crime in Rio and places like it is clueless. 

 

Instead of bolstering the institutions of law and order so that they can restore calm and prosecute gang bosses, Mr. Bolsonaro thinks the way to tackle violence is with more violence. He has allowed more Brazilians to own and carry guns, encouraging them to confront criminals themselves. He also wants to make it harder to punish police officers that kill suspects. Under one proposal, a judge could suspend a cop’s sentence for homicide if he acted out of “excusable fear, surprise or intense emotion”. Yet how many cops do not experience “intense emotion” just before shooting someone? Unsurprisingly, the number of shootings by police has soared. In the first four months of this year, officers in Rio state shot dead nearly five people a day. That is more than all the police in the United States typically kill, while policing a population 19 times larger.

 

Bolsonaro supports mafia-like organizations, paramilitary groups to control a quarter of Rio’s metropolitan area and one-sixth of its population, some 2 million people. Instead of suppressing gangs, they have in some cases held auctions where gangs bid for the rights to distribute their wares.

 

Bolsonaro encourages the police to shoot people and run extortion rackets with impunity.

 

I agree with the economist that if the government provided decent services, taxed them fairly and cracked own on the corruption which prevents social services from effectively operating, the lawlessness would decrease markedly.

 

Sadly, the experience in Brazil is rampant throughout Latin America. This has contributed to the record number of people seeking asylum to America. In the past, America mistakenly sent troops into Latin America countries to provide a semblance of order. In hindsight, our military intervention just led the way to dictatorship rule in Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti, Dominican Republic, etc. I know the answer is not to just let hundreds of thousands of people immigrate to America. We will be doing a disservice to our own population, particularly our lower income residents. On the other hand, my heart is broken about the miserable life that many of them lead in their homeland.