International Journal on Criminology Volume 7, Number 2, Spring 2020 | Page 56

The Security Foundations of Jair Bolsonaro’s Electoral Breakthrough
experience on a daily basis. This is one of the biggest paradoxes in the country. As
Brazil has become increasingly wealthy, internationally successful, and regionally
influential, and as inequality has begun to diminish significantly, the country has
experienced an explosion of violence. Excluding homicides, crimes and offences
have fallen drastically throughout Brazil over the past ten years, but, ultimately, we
are unaware of how many cases are not reported to the police, those that are the
subject of a more or less private justice, or the extent to which these statistics are
rigged to appear acceptable.
The statistics for murder alone are stark and staggering: from fewer than
20,000 deaths per year in the early 1980s, they reached the record level of 62,500
deaths in 2017. In spite of real disparities between regions, which have fluctuated
over time (currently over-represented in the north and in medium-sized cities),
the annual cost of violence in Brazil is between 2.3 and 2.5 percent of annual
GNP.
The Extreme Case of the State of Rio de Janeiro
The state of Rio de Janeiro is particularly representative of the build-up of
incompetence and embezzlement that led to its bankruptcy in 2017, then
to its budgetary takeover by the authorities of Brasília. Its capital, the “Marvelous
City” of Rio de Janeiro, is experiencing an anarchic urban development and
a criminal sociology linked to the favelas. The latter have long been dominated by
organized crime: barons of the “jogo do bicho” (an illegal gambling game) from
the 1940s, and currently drug and arms traffickers. The most notorious traffickers
belong to the famous Comando Vermelho (Red Command), which was said to
control up to 60 percent of the most violent areas in the mid-2000s. Many police
officers, underpaid or rarely paid both before and after the state’s bankruptcy, simply
became racketeers in the neighborhoods they patrolled, ensuring their “protection”
while the gangs continued their customary “taxation” of working-class
neighborhoods.
On February 16, 2018, President Michel Temer responded to carioca and
national public opinion by declaring a state of emergency after the Carnaval festivities,
which had given rise to unacceptable excesses. General Braga Netto, previously
the security coordinator of the 2016 Olympic and Paralympic Games,
stripped the state governor of Rio de Janeiro of all public security powers, assuming
sole management of law enforcement in a very broad sense: command of general
police operations, if necessary under the supervision or direct intervention of
the armed forces; direction of the Civil Police; and coordination with the Federal
Police. This presidential intervention, unprecedented in Brazil, seemed inevitable.
Yet it was, as is too often the case, merely a reaction to a dramatic situation that
could have been avoided.
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