Understanding the Complexities of the Drug Trade in Rio's Favelas

Randy points us to this article in The Economist. The article does a great job explaining succinctly why A) there appears to be so much violence in Rio, and B) why it's in the favelas, and not a city-wide event:

"A further reason for Rio’s spectacular violence is that it has three large, competing drug factions, whereas in other big cities (including the largest, São Paulo) one gang is dominant. A recent study from Rio de Janeiro state’s government on the economics of the local drug business suggests that, because of this competition, far from living like characters in an MTV hip-hop video, Rio’s dealers are operating at “close to break-even”.

Using a conservative estimate for total annual drugs sales in the city, of R$316m ($182m), the study reckons that after buying the product from wholesalers, employing a sales force and investing in capital (guns, mainly), Rio’s dealers make combined annual profits of R$27m ($15m). The wage structure within the factions appears to be surprisingly flat, far more so than in the American gang analysed in 2000 by two academics, Steven Levitt and Sudhir Venkatesh. Rio’s dealers seem to be an exception to Brazil’s national picture of unequal income distribution."

It's a quick run-down, and does a good job distributing the blame. While many uninformed non-Brazilians, many racist/classist (no matter how much they deny it) Brazilians, and foreign media reports place the blame solely on the drug gangs (and the favelados more generally), the economist reminds us that there's a long legacy miscues (to put it euphemistically) from other groups as well, including governmental policy-making:

Past mistakes include making accommodations with drug-dealing factions in the hope of keeping them peaceful. Rio’s police force is also part of the problem. Some of the weapons used by drug dealers are sold to them by the police, and officers still execute too many people on the spot rather than bother with prosecuting suspects, making favela-dwellers regard them as no more a source of justice than the drugs gangs.

The article also mentions the existence of militias in the favelas and around them, though it doesn't mention that these militias are often composed of former and current members of the police. Nonetheless, the (brief) article is the first I've seen in the foreign press that really understands the complexities of the violence and drug economy in Brazil. These complexities are why last week's violence was not initially an attack on police forces in Rio (as many headlines and reports tacitly or explictly framed it), and are why the Olympics are not in any grave danger from these types of incidents. And if the media, both in Brazil and abroad, would take better care to understand and report on these complexities, then maybe bringing an end to the violence could be a more realistic possibility than it is when media reports simply frame the city as a place of extreme violence and treats all the urban poor and favelados as criminals. Maybe then, images like the one above will become more uncommon.

The U.S.'s Unstated Role in the Mexican Drug Wars

A lot of people, in the media and elsewhere, have been talking about the effects the exploding violence in Mexico's "drug wars" may have (and already are having) on the U.S., but not a lot of people are talking about the ways U.S. domestic policy decisions have affected the drug wars. The NY Times/MSNBC have a great report up on gun smuggling that's worth watching in its entirety (warning: graphic images), in which they discuss (among other things) the effects of the American gun trade on the Mexican drug wars. Specifically, that 95% of the weapons used in the drug wars in Ciudad Juarez are made in America and illegal in Mexico. Thanks to the Republican Congress's lifting the ban on assault weapons in 2004, "anybody with a driver's license and a clean record" can get these weapons, and they're making their way into Mexico, leading to the escalating violence and body counts.

All of the talk in the U.S. of how the violence "might spill over the border into the U.S." is ignorant in its one-sidedness. The border isn't a one-way road where things and people come from Mexico to the U.S. As this report demonstrates, while we may be worried about how violence might spill over from Mexico, we've conveniently forgotten how our weapons and violence have spread from the U.S. into Mexico. Until we acknowledge this and work to make these guns more difficult to get in the U.S. or elsewhere, things like this will continue to happen, and Mexico may end up suffering even more for our policy decisions.

Brazil's Declining Crime Rates - Signs of Hope?

A few weeks back, the Economist had an article about declining crime rates in Brazil. Murder rates in the country as a whole have declined, and they have taken a very dramatic drop in São Paulo, parts of which used to be among the most violent neighborhoods in the world.

Unlike Boz, I'm not so surprised at the decline of crime in São Paulo. Earlier this year, I commented on the police's change in tactics against drug gangs in Brazil's largest city. Unlike in Rio, where the police still go into favelas with guns blazing and then occupy the favelas for weeks or months, police in São Paulo spend a lot of time gathering intelligence on individual drug lords and their networks, and go in targeting those groups specifically, instead of anybody (including the innocent) that gets in their way. Additionally, after police go into the favelas to root out the drug networks, the state follows in, offering social programs to the innocent civilians living in the favelas. In so doing, the state in São Paulo has simultaneously been able to increase its presence in a non-violent way (compared to the non-stop presence of military police in favelas in Rio) as well as offering better social services to the favelados. That the tactic of concentrating attacks only on drug gangs joined with efforts trying to improve the living conditions within the favelas has led to a decline in violence should come as no surprise. While I think the article overstates the role of gun control somewhat, it certainly hasn't hurt, either. I don't buy the demographics argument so much, simply because São Paulo has 18 million people; just because the population is getting older in the entire city doesn't necessarily mean that it's getting older in the favelas, where levels of violence can be higher.

That said, Boz's caution that we not view these gains as the beginning of a "Paz Brasiliana" is absolutely right. Rio is still suffering from the same, stale police tactics of shooting first and calling everybody "traficantes" later. Additionally, the growing presence of paramilitary militia groups that are sometimes entering into the drug trade in Rio is a bad omen. Finally, while São Paulo's murder rates have dropped significantly, rural violence (generally between rich landowners and indigenous groups or the landless and their champions) has shown no signs of slowing down. It would be great if Rio would at least try to implement some of the changes in its tactics that São Paulo has implemented, but the issue of favelas and the police is also very different from São Paulo, due to (among other things) state and city economies, geographies, and politics. As I said, the dawn of some peaceful period in Brazilian history is still a long ways off. Nonetheless, one cannot help but be at least somewhat happy to see things improving in Brazil, even if it's incrementally.