Brazil’s new leaders vow to kill criminals
Governor of Rio de Janeiro: ‘We’ll dig graves’ for crime groups
RIO DE JANEIRO — Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s next president, won over millions of voters by vowing to make it easier for police to kill criminals and crush the nation’s violent gangs, often flashing a gun sign with his hands.
A “good criminal is a dead criminal,” Bolsonaro said on the campaign trail.
The type of draconian approach Bolsonaro promised has already been employed for months in Rio de Janeiro, his home state, where the military has overseen security operations since February. It has led to a surge in killings by authorities — and a debate over whether the tactic is working.
Between March and September, the police and the army killed at least 922 people in the state of Rio de Janeiro, a 45 percent increase from the same period last year. Nearly 1 in every 4 people killed here since March has died at the hands of the state.
Opinion polls suggest a broad majority of people in Rio de Janeiro support the military intervention.
“The reduction of violence is strategic to Brazil,” said Samira Bueno, executive director of the Brazilian Forum for Public Security, which studies violence trends. But so far, she added, “it has been discussed through myths and formulations that aren’t fact or evidence based.”
Brazilians broadly agree that drastic measures need to be taken to curb the extraordinary wave of violent crime in the country, which led to the deaths of a record 63,880 people last year.
In Rio de Janeiro state alone, more than 5,197 people have been killed this year, according to U.N. figures. The staggering level of violence weighed heavily on voters over the weekend.
Along with Bolsonaro, other politicians who had vowed to hunt down suspected criminals were rewarded at polls, setting the stage for a period of intensified bloodletting.
Bolsonaro, who won by a decisive margin, said in August that police officers who gun down armed criminals with “10 or 30 shots need to be decorated, not prosecuted.”
Wilson Witzel, a former federal judge who was elected governor of Rio de Janeiro in an upset victory clinched by running as a Bolsonaro ally, put organized crime groups on warning during a speech days before the vote.
“There will be no shortage of places to send criminals,” he said. “We’ll dig graves, and as to prisons, if necessary we’ll put them on ships.”
This week, he said he favors extending the military intervention, which is set to end in January, for an additional 10 months. And he proposed using snipers, some aboard helicopters, to gun down anyone spotted carrying a weapon in low-income urban communities known as favelas.
João Doria, a former mayor who was elected governor of São Paulo on Sunday, vowed to raise money so that the “best lawyers” could defend police officers sued for killing suspected criminals.
Gen. Walter Souza Braga Netto, the army commander who was appointed to lead the military intervention in Rio de Janeiro, said the vast majority of people killed by police are “irrational thugs.”
Asked to explain the surge in police killings since the intervention began, Braga Netto explained that his men had trained police in marksmanship and helped them procure and maintain equipment, leading to better accuracy.
“There was a lot of shooting, and basically no one hit anyone,” he said, referring to police operations before the intervention began. “We trained the police and they learned how to hit the target.”
Experts warn that encouraging police to become even more lethal is unlikely to address the root causes of violence.
“You’re implementing the death penalty in the police’s dayto-day activities,” said Bueno.
Much of the violence in Rio de Janeiro is driven by criminal organizations known as militias, made up of active-duty and retired police officers and military personnel acting on their own. They have become increasingly powerful in communities neglected by the state by extorting protection money from residents, operating unlicensed public transportation businesses and muscling into the drug trade.