In the 20 years I've been covering Brazil, rarely has the drama of a small Latin American country like Ecuador received so much attention in the national press. The topic is examined at the level of information and political analysis.
The violence unleashed in Ecuador both interests and frightens the Lula government, which has been accused by the Bolsonaro opposition of not vigorously addressing the issue of national security, which is weighing on the country to such an extent that the issue has appeared in the polls seems more serious than the economy.
And already in several states of the country, from Rio to Bahia, the criminal groups involved in the drug and arms trade are becoming more visible and dangerous, raising alarm among citizens for whom even taking to the streets can be life-threatening.
In Brazil, the problem of urban violence, in which police militias join forces with drug traffickers and corrupt politicians in search of votes, is becoming more serious every year and has experienced a new upswing during the four years of Bolsonaro's far-right government, which has favored arming the population itself.
The Lula government fears that the fall of Ecuador could end up triggering the criticism that previous governments received for not being tough enough on criminals and for addressing the dramatic problem of Brazil's prisons, which are among the most violent in the world. not tackled courageously.
The Lula government's slogan on the Ecuador case was to handle the matter cautiously “for fear of political contagion” that could be exploited by the opposition. Lula has been having repeated meetings with his foreign policy advisers these days, precisely at the time when he has just appointed former Supreme Court judge Ricardo Lewandowski as justice minister, who has always been known for his concern over prison policy awarded. A policy that has always been criticized by Human Rights Watch for alleged inconsistencies regarding the human rights of Brazilian prisoners. For the organization, police violence outside and inside prisons in Brazil remains a chronic problem, particularly affecting black people and young people in large favelas.
Today, Brazil's prisons, many of which are dominated by criminal organizations, hold 832,295 prisoners, one in four of whom have not yet been tried, and there is no room for 236,000 prisoners. And perhaps worst of all, 43% of those incarcerated are young people.
When Lula won the elections, one of his first promises was to change the far-right's expansive rearmament policy by “turning the country's shooting centers into libraries.” And indeed, the arms trade in the hands of citizens has decreased, but police violence and the strength of criminal organizations are still alive and are increasingly frightening the population of large cities where people are afraid to take to the streets. Fear of being attacked or murdered.
Even the theft of a simple cell phone can result in murder, and there are cities where a state of violence prevails that pollutes coexistence and increases the fear of leaving home. If they weren't tragic, some initiatives to prevent them from being robbed on the streets, in broad daylight and in the most unthinkable places would be funny. Since a large number of victims of street robberies are women, they usually carry their cell phones hidden in their chests so that they can take them. But since this is no longer enough for them to be safe, there are people who have invented a zippered bag to hide them in their most intimate places. And they say it's cheap.
The truth is that, although it may seem surprising, at this moment the government is more concerned not with the economy that is beginning to recover, but rather with the police violence that infects the rest of the criminal organizations that end up embracing each other in turn infect the most right-wing politicians, who are guaranteed millions of votes in the local elections.
Today in Brazil there are cities so dominated by criminal organizations that it is difficult, if not impossible, for a candidate to be elected without the covert and sometimes overt help of police militias. All this has begun to further aggravate the problem of urban violence, which sometimes ends in real guerrilla battles with police insubordination, which the extreme right exploits against the progressive government, accusing it of helplessness and even complicity in this violence through condemnation Bolsonaro's policy was the dream of an armed society in the service of the government.
In his column for the newspaper O Globo, Malu Gaspar has just warned about the risk of infection in Brazil due to the dramatic situation in Ecuador. According to the political analyst, today in Brazil “militias and drug traffickers are so close and mixed that they are called drug militias, which already dominate part of the national territory”. And he concludes that “Ecuador’s alert to Brazil is there.”
And even less so this year, when Brazil goes to the polls again to elect local governments in which these narcomiliates are, in a very special way, experts in infecting and buying candidates and in which the extreme right is particularly entrenched. In addition, it manages to infiltrate politics with candidates from the military and police sectors, who are increasingly represented in the National Congress. Today the three largest influential factions in Parliament are the Bible Call, the Evangelicals, the Farmers and the Military. This is precisely where the Bolsonaro opposition appears most dangerous.
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