In the 20 years that I have been reporting on Brazil, rarely has the drama of a small Latin American country, like Ecuador, received so much attention in the national press. The issue is being highlighted at the level of information and political analysis.
The violence unleashed in Ecuador interests and scares at the same time the Lula Government, which was being accused by the Bolsonaro opposition of not vigorously confronting the issue of national security that afflicts the country to the point that in the polls this issue appears as more serious than the economy.
And already in several states of the country, from Rio to Bahia, the criminal factions involved in the drug and weapons trade are becoming more visible and dangerous, creating alarm among citizens for whom just going out on the street can already mean a danger of life.
In Brazil, the issue of urban violence, where police militias join drug traffickers and corrupt politicians in search of votes, is becoming more serious every year and had a new boost in the four years of Bolsonaro's far-right government. which favored the population to arm themselves.
The Lula Government fears that the case of Ecuador could end up raising the criticism that its previous governments had received for not being severe enough with criminals and for not having courageously addressed the dramatic issue of Brazilian prisons, considered some of the most violent in the world.
The Lula Government's slogan regarding the Ecuador case has been caution in dealing with the matter “for fear of political contamination” that could be exploited by the opposition. Hence, these days Lula has had repeated meetings with his foreign policy advisors precisely at the moment when he has just appointed as Minister of Justice the former Supreme Court judge, Ricardo Lewandowski, who had always been characterized by his concern with prison policy. A policy that has always been criticized by Human Rights Watch for alleged inconsistencies regarding the human rights of Brazilian prisoners. For the agency, police violence outside and inside prisons in Brazil continues to be a chronic problem that mainly affects black people and young people in large favelas.
Today in Brazil's prisons, many of them dominated by criminal organizations, there are 832,295 prisoners, of which one in four has not yet been tried and there would be no room in the prisons for 236,000 prisoners. And perhaps the most serious thing is that 43% of those detainees are young people.
When Lula won the elections, one of his first promises was to change the far-right's expansive policy of arming the population by “turning the country's shooting centers into libraries.” And in fact the arms trade in the hands of citizens has decreased, but police violence and the strength of criminal organizations are still alive and increasingly frightening the population of large cities, where people are afraid to go out into the streets. fear of being assaulted or murdered.
Even the theft of a simple cell phone can end in murder and there are cities where there is a state of violence such that it contaminates coexistence and exacerbates the fear of leaving home. If they were not tragic, some initiatives to avoid being robbed on the street, in broad daylight and in the most unthinkable places, would be funny. Since a good part of the victims of street robberies are women, to take their cell phones they usually carry them hidden in their chest. But since that is no longer enough for them to be safe, there are those who have invented a zippered bag to hide it in their most intimate parts. And they say it's cheap.
The truth is that, although it may seem surprising, at this moment the Government is more concerned than the economy, which is beginning to improve, but rather the police violence that infects the rest of the criminal organizations that end up embracing each other, which in turn infect to the most right-wing politicians who are guaranteed millions of votes in the municipal elections.
Today there are cities in Brazil so dominated by criminal organizations that it is difficult, if not impossible, for a candidate in the elections to be elected without the hidden and sometimes even open help of the police militias. All of this has begun to further exacerbate the issue of urban violence, which sometimes ends in real guerrillas with police truculence, something that the extreme right takes advantage of against the progressive Government, accusing it of being helpless and even complicit in said violence by condemning the bud of Bolsonaro's policy focused on the dream of having an armed society at the service of the Government.
In his newspaper column Or Globe, Malu Gaspar has just warned against the danger of contagion in Brazil from the dramatic state in which Ecuador lives. According to the political analyst, today in Brazil “militias and drug traffickers are so close together and mixed that they have surnames of narcomilicies “that already dominate part of the national territory.” And he concludes that “Ecuador's alert for Brazil is there.”
And even less this year in which Brazil goes to the polls again to elect local governments in which, in a very special way, those narcomilicies They are experts in contaminating and buying candidates and in which the extreme right is especially rooted. In addition, it manages to infiltrate politics with candidates from the military and police world, who are increasingly present in the National Congress. Today the three largest influential parliamentary groups are the Bible Call, the Evangelicals, the Farmers, and the Military. Precisely where the Bolsonaro opposition appears most dangerous.
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