In May of 2021,
Brazilian police carried out the deadliest raid
in Rio de Janeiro’s history.
Two hundred officers
entered the city’s Jacarezinho favela community,
along with four military-style armored vehicles
and two helicopter-mounted snipers.
A television crew filmed the whole scene as it unfolded.
The raid left 28 people dead, including one police officer.
Authorities claimed the operation was to arrest 21 people
accused of drug trafficking for one of Brazil’s most notorious gangs,
the Red Command.
But only three arrests were actually made.
Since he was elected in 2018, Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro
sought to play the strongman by getting tough on drugs
and lax on guns.
It hasn’t worked.
Brazil has exploded as a center of the global cocaine trade,
and in 2020 averaged one murder every eight minutes.
So how did Brazil get here?
And what happens when you just throw more guns at the problem?
In this episode, we’re looking at how Bolsonaro’s Brazil
is losing its war on drugs.
[THE WAR ON DRUGS SHOW]
[BRAZIL’S DEADLY DRUG WARS]
Brazil is now the world's second biggest cocaine market after the US
and has overtaken it to become
the leading consumer of crack cocaine.
Meanwhile, the lucrative drug trafficking routes from the Amazon
have enabled Brazil to become a major player
in the transatlantic coke trade.
Up to 80 percent of Europe’s cocaine is thought to flow through
the Brazilian port of Santos near São Paulo.
And dominating Rio’s drug and gun trafficking
are the Comando Vermelho, or Red Command,
who run many of the city’s favela communities
with a combination of drug money and brutal violence.
The Red Command emerged in the 70s in the prison of Ilha Grande,
and there we see the mix of people from the guerrilla groups
and groups that were connected with the left,
in particular with the common criminals.
These conversations that they had in the days in the prison
made the criminals in particular to be more organized.
While Brazil’s war on drugs has been raging for decades,
it's been significantly ramped up since 2018,
when Jair Bolsonaro began his presidential election campaign.
Copying Rodrigo Duterte’s playbook in the Philippines,
Bolsonaro grabbed headlines by promising to intensify the drug war
and allow police officers to shoot
anyone they suspected of being a criminal.
Brazil is not at war.
It’s [Bolsonaro] who wants to start a war against us.
Bolsonaro rode the populist way to victory
and immediately began putting his right-wing militaristic stamp
on Brazil's drug and gun laws.
In order to guarantee the citizens this legitimate right of defense,
I, as president, will use this weapon.
Back in 2014,
Bolsonaro genuinely suggested that taking drugs turns you gay,
which didn’t bode well for a man with a pen in his hand
and the power to change laws.
Stating he hoped that
criminals would “die in the street like cockroaches,”
he raised the minimum penalty for drug trafficking to eight years
and moved Brazil away from proven harm reduction policies,
instead focusing on coercive abstinence
and forcing people into Christian-run rehabs.
Today it’s rare to find someone who isn’t involved.
There is always someone here selling some ammunition,
accessories, or a rifle, and on it goes.
I understood that these laws caused more harm than the drugs themselves.
So I was already retired,
and I started to write about drug legalization
and about the necessity of putting an end to this policy.
It is also urgent to end ideologies that defend thugs
and criminalize the police.
In something of a libertarian irony,
just as Bolsonaro was getting tough on drugs,
he started to relax gun laws.
He got out his favorite pen and signed a decree
making it easier for Brazilians to keep weapons at home,
loosening restrictions on ammunition,
and declaring that every Brazilian citizen should own a rifle.
This was despite the fact that
Brazil has one of the highest homicide rates in the world,
three times the global average.
2017 was Brazil’s deadliest year on record.
There were nearly 64,000 murders— the most in the world.
He’s going to take Brazil into an urban war.
Instead of killing the Red Command...
we’re going to go after the policeman
who obeyed one of Bolsonaro’s orders.
So has anything actually improved in the last few years?
Not really.
In the first half of 2020,
police officers in Brazil killed 6 percent more people
than the year before.
Murders also increased by 7.1 percent over the same period.
Meanwhile, cocaine seizures surged to record levels in 2021,
and COVID-19 lockdowns
are thought to have actually increased the power of Brazil’s gangs
as they stepped in to provide services the state is failing to.
And as so often with drug prohibition across the world,
these policies are disproportionately targeting
the most marginalized members of Brazilian society.
Black Brazilians make up 56 percent of the population
but account for 67 percent of the prison population
and 79 percent of those killed by police.
Nearly all the victims of the Jacarezinho raid were Black.
You see that historically the mindset of the Brazilian police
is to persecute specific people,
the marginalized people in society.
The way that police arrives in a favela in Recife, São Paulo,
Rio de Janeiro, and so on
are totally different when compared to other parts of the city
from the middle classes and the richest neighborhoods.
What’s an average 24-hour shift for you now?
How many homicides are you being called to see now?
Four or five just today, since 8:00 in the morning.
But the problem with the war on drugs
is that it’s actually bigger than the political divide.
Brazil has a long and bloody history of police violence,
and the war on drugs has allowed
a massive increase in these brutally heavy-handed tactics,
particularly as the government attempted to pacify threats
in the run-up to the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games.
The World Cup ended—and just look.
They only make promises in the favela.
The residents get stuck in the middle.
So the traffickers fought the police and the police left,
and then the traffickers fought each other
for control of this favela.
It just got worse, two gangs with the police in the middle.
The so-called policy of pacification is a contradiction.
You can’t have pacification through war.
The first thing we need for a real pacification of society
is to put an end to the war on drugs,
to put an end to this military approach
of the criminal justice system.
There’s little doubt that Bolsonaro’s new wave of drug war brutality
is much scarier than anything Brazil has seen in recent history,
particularly his alleged association with Rio’s terrifying militias,
paramilitary groups of serving and retired cops
who claim to protect favelas from drug trafficking
but tend to be just as violent as drug gangs.
Meanwhile, the Red Command are only growing more violent
as they fight for control of the cocaine trade
and clash with rivals like the Third Command
and the Primeiro Comando da Capital, known as the PCC, in São Paolo.
So what are the chances of these crackdowns actually working?
On the evidence so far, pretty slim.
It is one of the biggest trades in the world,
and I assure you it’s going to be very difficult
for the state or the police to end trafficking.
They may be able to stop it in one place,
but then in another place it will be complicated
and probably impossible to control.
The Jacarezinho raid may have also been unlawful
due to a Supreme Court ruling to cease operations during COVID-19.
And yet police continued to enter the favelas
and kill civilians throughout 2021.
As of January 2022,
hundreds of heavily armed police are occupying Jacarezinho.
As Brazil prepares for a general election
in October of 2022,
there may still be hope that the approach to drugs
could shift away from the policies that have failed for decades.
But if Bolsonaro and his favorite pen stay on for another term,
the favelas will likely be the scene of drug war battlegrounds
for years to come.
We’d like to congratulate drugs for the winning the war on drugs.