International Journal on Criminology Volume 7, Number 2, Spring 2020 | Page 58

The Security Foundations of Jair Bolsonaro’s Electoral Breakthrough
There is also the subject of financing. 80 percent of the 81 billion BRL (just
under 20 billion euros) spent annually on the Civil and Military Police, whose
powers are limited to state borders, are provided by the federated states alone. The
federal state in no way guarantees these budgets (unlike the budgets for health and
education), and they often end up being the poor relation of local budgets. Faced
with real problems concerning functioning, armament, recruitment, and salaries,
many local police forces sink into negligence at best and racketeering, corruption,
and deference (or even complicity) with regard to criminal groups at worst.
Corruption and Decline of State Authority
However, the general image and authority of the state are also at stake, in
a broader sense. Even before the “Mensalão” and “Lava Jato” scandals revealed
industrial-scale political corruption, leading to the incarceration
of former president “Lula” Da Silva and the dismissal of his heir apparent, Dilma
Rousseff, Brazilians had an image of their country that was tarnished, to say the
least. Politics was already widely perceived as a business, but the level of embezzlement
of funds from public and private companies, the sense of impunity among
the political class, and the depth of state mismanagement were completely unanticipated.
Virtually all political staff were involved in scandals far beyond any
partisan bickering, and many incumbent politicians remain under investigation
today.
Political correctness, a phenomenon stemming from North American academia,
is also behind Brazilians’ lack of esteem for their country. This guilty conscience,
cultivated by a certain intellectual class, has consequences that extend
even to certain choices regarding the management of public security and criminal
and prison policy. Excuses for criminal behavior linked to belonging to a minority
or a certain class, or the idea that a bandit can display a “social conscience,” for
example, deeply disgust the man in the street.
The Gangs in Power
Despite judges who are often considered too lax and a police force whose
effectiveness is sometimes questioned, Brazilian prisons are highly overcrowded.
Since 1969 and the creation of the Comando Vermelho (CV) in
a carioca jail, which brought together political prisoners and common-law inmates
in an ideological struggle against the military regime, Brazilian criminals have developed
a marked taste for gangs originating in the prison world. The Primeiro
Comando da Capital (PCC) (First Commando of the Capital) of São Paulo, the
country’s biggest gang, was thus founded in 1993 in Taubaté prison and has now
become an international organization that is attempting to stifle its main competitor
(the Comando Vermelho) by controlling the Amazon’s drug supply routes. The
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