One of the flags of the administration of former president Jair Bolsonaro, who governed Brazil between 2019 and 2022, was the flexibility of the possession and use of weapons. There were numerous warnings about the harmful consequences that this regulatory relaxation could have. The effects are already beginning to see the light: the Army, which in the Bolsonaro years was in charge of granting permits to buy a weapon, granted more than 5,000 licenses to people who had been convicted of crimes as serious as homicide or drug trafficking. The information is contained in an exhaustive secret report from the Union Court of Accounts, revealed exclusively by the newspaper State this Monday.
In the four years of the Bolsonaro administration, Brazilian legislation was modified in such a way that the gun market and shooting clubs experienced a golden moment. If in 2018 there were 1.3 million weapons, when the far-right leader left the presidency there were already more than double that, 2.9 million, according to a count by the Igarapé and Sou da Paz institutes. The number of people with the so-called CAC license (which includes hunters, shooters or collectors) increased by 262%.
A total of 5,235 people serving a sentence had no problem purchasing a firearm or renewing their registration so they could continue to have a gun at home. The Army also authorized weapons for 2,690 people with arrest warrants and who were fugitives from Justice.
When Brazil approved the Disarmament Statute in 2003, it was established that only people who were not convicted or immersed in criminal proceedings could access weapons. Although Bolsonaro made many points of the regulations more flexible, that requirement remained. For the Court of Accounts, the problem for so many criminals to sneak in is that Brazil does not have a unified criminal record registry.
That is, it was enough to register in a municipality in another State and request the criminal record from that new address to appear completely clean, because the state authorities do not cross-check the information. According to the report, the most common crimes among people who obtained the weapons were homicide, drug trafficking, bodily injury, driving under the influence, robbery and threats.
The fact that thousands of weapons ended up in the hands of criminals represents just the tip of the iceberg. The audit of the court of accounts detected many other irregularities: 94 deceased people are listed as buyers of 16,669 bullets, and 21,442 firearms appear on official lists even though they belong to Brazilians who have already died. Now it is not clear where the pistols, shotguns, among other weapons, that they left behind went.
The indications are high that organized crime took advantage of these holes to make a killing. More than 22,000 Brazilians registered as possessing a firearm also appear on the Government's lists of low-income people who receive social assistance. For the auditors, it does not add up that so many poor people suddenly had money to buy revolvers or rifles, and they believe that they are front men.
The problems were aggravated by the lack of means to supervise. During the Bolsonaro years, the Army's budget to control the population's access to weapons fell by 40%, while the number of weapons in the hands of individuals multiplied exponentially.
According to specialists, in recent years, for the leaders of organized crime, it was more profitable to buy a weapon in a store than to obtain it through traditional illegal circuits, avoiding, for example, costly smuggling from Bolivia or Paraguay. There is already enough evidence that this was the case.
Last year, police arrested several members of the Primeiro Comando da Capital (the PCC, Brazil's most powerful drug trafficking faction) with legally purchased weapons. If a drug trafficker, for example, managed to register as a professional shooter (which, given what we saw, was not very difficult) he automatically had permission to buy up to 30 weapons (including 15 rifles) and 6,000 bullets, like any citizen. Even better was getting a collector's registration, which did not set quantity limits.
Putting a stop to this arms rampage was one of the priorities of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in his first months in office. The new administration forced all CAC license holders to re-register their weapons, limited gun purchases to three per person, suspended permits to open shooting clubs and required proof of why the gun is needed, among other restrictions.
Furthermore, last July, control of permits passed from the Army to the Federal Police. To reinforce oversight, the corporation promised to open a specialized police station in each state of the country and hire 2,000 agents.
Follow all the information from El PAÍS América in Facebook and xor in our weekly newsletter.
#Bolsonaro #Government #granted #weapons #licenses #convicted #homicide #drug #trafficking