Brazil - The Country

Imagine a country where the most dangerous criminals are those that are supposed to protect you; a place where you are always the prisoner. Could it be Hell?

Close.

It's Brazil, where the most dangerous people are cops, anyone who ever was a cop, and anyone who ever thought of becoming a cop-not to mention all off-duty cops. In April 1997, 17 cops went on trial for the massacre of 21 residents of a shantytown in Rio. The victims' crime? Living in a neighborhood where some police officers were killed.

In May 1999, a Sao Paulo court overturned the 59-year prison sentence given a former police officer who was videotaped shooting at slum dwellers. The cop was one of eight caught on tape in 1997 beating the crap out of three men with nightsticks at a Sao Paulo roadblock. After the gendarmes allowed the victims to return to their car, the convicted officer decided to take some target practice and killed a 27-year-old mechanic in the back seat.

During the same month, hundreds of Rio slum residents rioted after the police shooting and killing of a 15-year-old boy. It was the third child shot by police in as many days.

Just another day in the office with Brazil's finest.

Rio de Janeiro is a continuing source of petty crimes committed by street kids barely out of pajamas. Shopkeepers pay the cops to pick off the toddler thieves like coyotes on a Wyoming sheep farm. About five children are murdered a day, according to the University of Sao Paulo. Treated like vermin, most street urchins have a short life span. Many work for drug dealers; they sniff glue and gasoline to kill their hunger pangs. There is little sympathy on behalf of Rio's citizenry for these prepubescent dope peddlers, and it's unlikely that the police, who knock them off on a regular basis, will be convicted for what is generally viewed as a socially beneficial act.

Is is estimated that there are 7 million kids living on the streets in Brazil. Hunted by death squads like rats in a sewer, they subsist by begging, stealing and deionizing themselves on petrol-based solvents. Are they a threat? You bet.

Other criminals in Brazil fall under the umbrella of nebulous quasi-terrorists. One street gang, with visions of sugarplums and Abu Nidal, menacingly calls itself the Commando Vermelho (Red Command). This "terrorist" group strikes in a sporadic fashion, but its actions are essentially criminal activities. In fact, the Red Command may be no more than a gang operating under a nom de guerre. And the absence of any identifiable pattern in the crimes suggests most are the work of individuals rather than any organized group.

There's a huge difference in living standards between the developed south of Brazil and the northeast. Consequently, there has been massive migration to Rio's and Sao Paulo's slums. This has caused a sharp increase in urban violence. A group of neo-Nazi nasties called Carecas do Brasil (Skinheads of Brazil) operate with two other extremist clubs out of Sao Paulo and specialize in brutally beating Nordestinos (northeasterners) along with Jews, blacks and gays, not to mention murdering street kids.

The poverty-stricken lower classes have essentially seen zero benefits from the past growth of the economy. About half of all Brazilians are black, and they make, on average, about half of what the whites make. In Brazil, nearly one-fifth of the population is illiterate. The country also has one of the world's most disparate income distributions: 60 percent of the national wealth is possessed by one percent of the population, with maybe 50 percent of the population living in poverty. Since World War II, the purchasing power of Brazil's minimum wage has been cut in half. Because of widespread inefficiency and corruption, only 8 percent of the government's social spending reaches the poorest of the population. In Rio, poor families have become squatters on empty lots and in abandoned and partially completed housing complexes. Brazil's underbelly is also being corroded by the spread of drug abuse and such diseases as AIDS, bubonic plague and cholera-a few good reasons for a lot of crime.