Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva on Wednesday said he is sending the country’s armed forces to boost security at some of its most important airports, ports and international borders as part of a renewed effort to tackle organized crime in Latin America’s largest nation.
The decision comes days after members of a criminal gang set fire to dozens of buses in Rio de Janeiro, apparently in retaliation for the police slaying their leader’s nephew.
“We have reached a very serious situation,” Lula said at a news conference in Brasilia after signing the decree. “So we have made the decision to have the federal government participate actively, with all its potential, to help state governments, and Brazil itself, to get rid of organized crime.”
Photo: AFP
Brazil will mobilize 3,600 members of the army, navy and air force to increase patrols and monitor the international airports in Rio and Sao Paulo, as well as two maritime ports in Rio and Sao Paulo’s Santos port, the busiest in Latin America — and a major export hub for cocaine.
The deployment is part of a broader government plan that includes increasing the number of federal police forces in Rio, improving cooperation between law enforcement entities and boosting investment in state-of-the-art technology for intelligence gathering.
State and federal authorities have said in recent weeks they want to “suffocate” militias by going after their financial resources.
Rio’s public security problems go back decades, and any federal crackdown on organized crime needs to be supported by a far-reaching plan, the fruits of which might only be seen years from now, said Rafael Alcadipani, a public security analyst and professor at the Getulio Vargas Foundation, a university in Sao Paulo.
“The federal government is being rushed into this due to previous lack of action,” Alcadipani said. “The government is trying, but the chance of this not working is huge ... This is an emergency plan, something being done last minute as though it were a problem that arose just now, but it isn’t.”
Brazilian Minister of Justice Flavio Dino said the measures announced on Wednesday are part of a plan being developed since Lula took office on Jan. 1, and the result of months of consultations with police forces, local officials and public security experts.
The latest wave of unrest in Rio began Oct. 5, when assassins killed three doctors in a beachside bar, mistaking one of them for a member of a militia.
The city’s powerful militias emerged in the 1990s and were originally made up mainly of former police officers, firefighters and military men who wanted to combat lawlessness in their neighborhoods. They charged residents for protection and other services, but more recently moved into drug trafficking themselves.
There has since been increased pressure for the state and federal governments in Brazil to come up with a plan and demonstrate they have a handle on public security in the postcard city.
On Oct. 9, days after the doctors were killed, Rio state government deployed hundreds of police officers to three of the city’s sprawling, low-income neighborhoods.
On Monday last week, Rio’s police killed Matheus da Silva Rezende, known as Faustao, nephew of a militia’s leader and a member himself. In a clear show of defiance, criminals went about setting fire to at least 35 buses.
PARLIAMENT CHAOS: Police forcibly removed Brazilian Deputy Glauber Braga after he called the legislation part of a ‘coup offensive’ and occupied the speaker’s chair Brazil’s lower house of Congress early yesterday approved a bill that could slash former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro’s prison sentence for plotting a coup, after efforts by a lawmaker to disrupt the proceedings sparked chaos in parliament. Bolsonaro has been serving a 27-year term since last month after his conviction for a scheme to stop Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva from taking office after the 2022 election. Lawmakers had been discussing a bill that would significantly reduce sentences for several crimes, including attempting a coup d’etat — opening up the prospect that Bolsonaro, 70, could have his sentence cut to
China yesterday held a low-key memorial ceremony for the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) not attending, despite a diplomatic crisis between Beijing and Tokyo over Taiwan. Beijing has raged at Tokyo since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi last month said that a hypothetical Chinese attack on Taiwan could trigger a military response from Japan. China and Japan have long sparred over their painful history. China consistently reminds its people of the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, in which it says Japanese troops killed 300,000 people in what was then its capital. A post-World War II Allied tribunal put the death toll
‘UNWAVERING ALLIANCE’: The US Department of State said that China’s actions during military drills with Russia were not conducive to regional peace and stability The US on Tuesday criticized China over alleged radar deployments against Japanese military aircraft during a training exercise last week, while Tokyo and Seoul yesterday scrambled jets after Chinese and Russian military aircraft conducted joint patrols near the two countries. The incidents came after Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi triggered a dispute with Beijing last month with her remarks on how Tokyo might react to a hypothetical Chinese attack on Taiwan. “China’s actions are not conducive to regional peace and stability,” a US Department of State spokesperson said late on Tuesday, referring to the radar incident. “The US-Japan alliance is stronger and more
FALLEN: The nine soldiers who were killed while carrying out combat and engineering tasks in Russia were given the title of Hero of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea North Korean leader Kim Jong-un attended a welcoming ceremony for an army engineering unit that had returned home after carrying out duties in Russia, North Korean state media KCNA reported on Saturday. In a speech carried by KCNA, Kim praised officers and soldiers of the 528th Regiment of Engineers of the Korean People’s Army (KPA) for “heroic” conduct and “mass heroism” in fulfilling orders issued by the ruling Workers’ Party of Korea during a 120-day overseas deployment. Video footage released by North Korea showed uniformed soldiers disembarking from an aircraft, Kim hugging a soldier seated in a wheelchair, and soldiers and officials
RSS