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Brazil sets new record for homicides
- dbelchamber 8y agoEesh. If all of this is accurate, it is problematic indeed. I wonder how many of these homicides would cease to occur if drugs were made legal in Brazil (I wonder about this worldwide). I've never understood why it's difficult for people to understand the awful incentive structures that making drugs illegal puts into motion.
- mavdi 8y agoBrazil, like most of South (and now perhaps north too?) America suffers from macho populism. A lot of character politicians with tough messages, empty promises and sadly the population just falls for it every time. These stats, along with others, is the result of years of populism, corruption and neglect.
- ulzeraj 8y agoLet’s ignore the fact that the last president was a woman and that this is the direct result of her party disastrous administration. Blame machismo. It always works.
- forinti 8y agoThe lower house has 513 members and 54 women. The senate has 81 members and 13 women. Only 12% of mayors are women. Dilma was the first and only female president.
- ulzeraj 8y agoI love how you still hold on to the narrative that if we elect women all the problems will go away when in Brazil female politicians like Dilma Housseff and Gleisi Hoffman are pretty much as corrupt as their male counterparts.
- lostlogin 8y agoYour first point is a good one. However I don’t think you can blame one administration with all this mess surely?
- ulzeraj 8y agoNot one but 3 and a half. Her predecessor from the same party ruled for 8 years and she was president for 6 years before being impeached for fiscal embezzlement. So yeah... 12 years in which crime rates skyrocketed.
- forinti 8y agoCrime reduction in 1992 (in the US) is attributed by some to Roe v Wade (1972). It took 20 years. The young people who are dying now (guns deaths hit the young and poor the worst) were born at the end of the 1990s and start of 2000s, which was a period of high unemployment and even famine (300 children died of malnutrition per day in 2001).
- lostlogin 8y agoThere is a competing theory to Roe V Wade, lead poisoning. A HN regular is the Mother Jones article, and it makes a compelling argument. https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/02/lead-exposure-gasoline-crime-increase-children-health/ https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/02/lead-exposur...
- mavdi 8y agohttp://www.unwomen.org/en/digital-library/publications/2017/4/women-in-politics-2017-map http://www.unwomen.org/en/digital-library/publications/2017/... https://www.transparency.org/news/feature/corruption_perceptions_index_2017 https://www.transparency.org/news/feature/corruption_percept...
- tomcam 8y agoGood point. America elected macho populist Barack Obama twice, and macho populist Hillary Clinton took the popular vote.
- cambalache 8y agoThe world is not an Ivy League campus. It is kinda insulting you think this is the cause of crime.
- simonh 8y agoI just want to make sure we're talking about the same thing. 'Making drugs legal' is frequently miss-understood. Treating addiction as a public health problem by decriminalising addicts and personal posession while keeping the trade in drugs firmly illegal, as in Portugal and now Norway, looks like the way to go. The recent changes to the law in Norway are widely reported as 'decriminalising drugs'. That is highly misleading. They have decriminalised drug use and personal possession, but the drugs trade itself is still criminal.
- fancyPantsZero 8y agoDecriminalizing possession doesn't do anything to help the violence associated with the drug trade though, does it? I thought that was one of the main reasons for the "legalize completely" argument.
- simonh 8y agoYes it does, by dramatically reducing rates of addiction and drug use. Take away vast swathes of the market for illegal drugs and the violence associated with it subsides. At least that’s what has happened in Portugal. Now that Norway is following suit, in the years to come we will have another case study to look at.
- smileysteve 8y agoDifferent thing. There aren't black markets for things that aren't illegal. Often, the gang murders we thing of are "turf wars" where one gang is competing with another gang for the same sales territory. So legalizing drug trade likely decreases drug gangs, which likely decreases murders. People might still die from drug use, but that becomes a separate problem.
- simonh 8y agoWe dont know if this is true,because no developed country has decriminalised the drug trade. It seems to me that doing that would increase drug use and the associated public health and social problems. I’m much more in favour of decriminalising use but keeping the trade itself illegal, as in Portugal. That enables attacking the problem from both directions at the same time. Restrict availability through cracking down on dealers, while also removing the market through treatment and rehabilitation.
- GFischer 8y agoHere in Uruguay, marijuana is legal, and homicides are at an all-time high (higher than Argentina and very near to the rates in Brazil, we used to be at less than a quarter). I´m not sure if decriminalizing all drugs would change the equation much (there´s still smuggling, prostitution and other vices to lord over).
- marcosdumay 8y agoUruguay almost surely feels a strong influence from the Brazilian policies.
- sumedh 8y ago> Here in Uruguay, marijuana is legal, and homicides are at an all-time high Are the homicides because of drug related issues? What about other drugs like cocaine and heroin?
- avip 8y agoWhy do you think homocide rates are somehow correlated with legality of drug usage?
- marcosdumay 8y agoBecause 80% of them are directly related to drug dealers. (Or at least that's what the news keeps saying here.)
- avip 8y agoHave you compared that number with countries where drug usage is legal?
- marcosdumay 8y agoYou are working hard to find a problem with it, aren't you? 80% of the crimes being linked to drug use means that most people will only care about the remaining 20%. But, anyway, AFAIK, drug usage is not a crime in Brazil. Dealing is. And for dealing related crimes to go away, one has to legalize the entire production and distribution.
- marcosdumay 8y agoAt this point I'm almost convinced that Brazil keeps the drugs illegal due to the pressure from dealers alone.
- mnm1 8y agoThis is the only real solution. No country has yet tried it. Legalizing weed (Uruguay, some US states) is not even in the same ballpark as what you suggest here (which is my suggestion too in another comment). Until you can go into a pharmacy and buy coke, heroin, and other shit like that over the counter, this problem will never go away. Maybe if murder rates double again and again it'll motivate people to change their government enough to get this done. I don't know how many people must die before governments start to change their stupid drug policies, but clearly, we are nowhere near the amount needed. A fucking waste of millions of lives (if you count incarceration too). Just to be clear, Brazil is in no way unique here.
- anoncoward111 8y agoI recently moved to a "bad neighborhood" and was very surprised to learn that there was only one murder here last year, and it was between friends who had stolen something from each other. There were only around 13,000 murders last year in the US, a number that used to be more like 26,000 during the crack epidemic 30 years ago. US population has increased by 10s of millions since then, but murders continue to drop. Additonally, 90% of murders occur between people who know each other in some form, be it neighbors or classmates. Being robbed at gunpoint on the street or in your apartment and then shot to death is quite rare, especially if you arent in places like Memphis, Detroit, Chicago, NOLA, Cleveland, St Louis. The USA certainly isn't perfect but I was thrilled to get a good price on a great apartment in what everyone else calls "the hood". I will take my chances that I won't be the unlucky 1 out of 11,000 people who is shot here every year.
- kolbe 8y agoYou simply did not live in a bad neighborhood by American standards. The worst neighborhoods in Chicago have murder rates far worse than Brazil as a country. For example Brazil has an intentional homicide rate around 30, whereas Chicago has 26 neighborhoods higher, with the most dangerous one, Engelwood, topping out at 172. To put that in context, the world's most dangerous city is Caracas at 120. http://www.chicagonow.com/getting-real/2017/07/chicagos-safest-and-most-dangerous-neighborhoods-by-murder-rate/ http://www.chicagonow.com/getting-real/2017/07/chicagos-safe...
- reaperducer 8y agoComparing a Chicago neighborhood to a South American city seems a little disingenuous. It might be more appropriate to compare the most violent neighborhood in Chicago to the most violent neighborhood in a similarly-sized Venezuelan city. Just as you would compare the safest neighborhoods in both cities.
- kolbe 8y ago"to put that into context" -me I was giving context of what that number means. Not claiming Chicago is more violent than Caracas.
- 0x4f3759df 8y agoAnother crazy stat: 132 politicians in Mexico murdered since September.
- mavdi 8y agoWhile still shocking, life in Brazil isn't the kinda Aleppo like bloodshed this article portrays. Majority of victims are young male gang members sucked into the drug turf wars.
- lbrito 8y agoMore or less. But Brazil is, for example, the world's largest armored (bulletproof) car market. I could name a large amount of social and cultural effects of this low-intensity war we have going on.
- joe_the_user 8y agoThe majority of deaths in the war in Syria have also been combatants with only being minority civilians, a substantial minority certainly but I suspect there's a reasonable minority of "civilians" killed in Brazilian drug wars. This 63K killed/year figure seems to exceed some years of the Syrian civil war. Brazil is a larger country but the drug war is concentrated in a minority of the country. The one thing you're not getting is bombed out apartment buildings and mass population displacements. Edit: I mean, "not Aleppo like" is true for some interpretation of the phrase but one certainly shouldn't view this a "no reason to worry if you haven't consciously entered the drug trade" or something. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Syrian_Civil_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Syrian_Civil...
- lostlogin 8y agoThanks for that. I was sceptical and went for a dig. In most conflicts the civilian to combatant death ratio is high, with numbers like 9:1 cited. This is probably over estimated but having a civilian toll lower than combatant is unusual. As far as I can tell Syria has a toll of about 3.5 combatants to each civilian. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualty_ratio https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualty_ratio
- joe_the_user 8y agoIndeed, as your link essentially states, civilian to combatant casualty rates are complex. As your link notes, high ratios like 9:1 have only been documented in a few campaigns. After WWI, "total warfare" targeting the entire population and productive capacity of the enemy in a mechanized fashion seemed like the logical direction in which war would go. The reality has been somewhat different, with guerrilla warfare and other asymmetrical approaches making political dimensions important also, where on the one hand avoiding unneeded deaths is often a useful political strategy and on the other hand, if the enemy is essentially hardened guerrillas with rocket launchers hiding in caves and supported from outside, that enemy may not be sensitive to the mass destruction of the population and productive capacity of the area. Both these situation make "total war" a less effective strategy (witness the different casualty ratios of the first and second Chechen wars).
- rvr_ 8y agoBrazilian here. Our criminality numbers are _probably_ higher than the official numbers. The country is huge and diverse, but even the most pacific states and cities are in a bad shape if compared to almost any other country. More than 70% of the deaths are related to gang conflicts. Drugs are not the only problem. We also have a lot of cargo/truck stealing, street-level robbery, an enormous black market of stolen mobile phones, etc. We have some affluent startup hubs, there are innovation in e-commerce, payments, banking, HR and many more, but our tech elite is complete out-of-sync with our major problem: violence. Maybe a fresh HN discussion can put some light on the issue.
- MrEfficiency 8y agoWhats this like for civilians that are not involved? I hear about the crime in my country, but it seems unreal to me because in my area you'd never know there were dozens of murders last weekend. Does this affect your life?
- goshx 8y agoYou never know when you are going to be targeted, so you live in this constant fear. Ask anyone who lives in Brazil what they do if they see two guys in a motorcycle coming their way. I've been robbed at gun point; I've woken up with someone inside my bedroom stealing my laptop; I've been followed home; The bus from the public transport system I used to take was stopped by criminals and set on fire; and so on. It used to affect only the life of those living in the metropolitan areas, but now it is spreading. The main reason why I moved to the US was because I was living in such a state that I was always tense. When I was robbed at gun point I almost got shot because the guy thought I was too calm and suspected I was a cop. Living in the US I realized how much that was affecting my daily life and how life without worrying feels like. That's how it affects your life.
- bennicholes 8y agoWhere did you live in Brazil? As an American I visit the interior of São Paulo and Belo Horizonte often and have never experienced anything like this, nor does it seem my Brazilian friends live in constant anxiety.
- woliveirajr 8y agoAmong all the violence in Brazil, homicides happen mainly in drug-related problems: fights over territory are the majority, "punishments" for unpaid debts come second, and robbery (not exactly kill to steal afterwards, more like "I will kill you just to be sure you won't come after me, nor will identify me"). Guns are out of control in criminal hands, while population in general don't even have one at home. So, given that the cost of ammo is low (in black market), killing is used to gain territory or to send messages to drug users with debt or to general population.
- ulzeraj 8y agoFun fact: Brazil has very strict gun control laws.
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- yesforwhat 8y agoSo does England. One has the ability to enforce them, the other doesn't. The point you are implying, that gun laws do nothing, is ridiculous.
- ulzeraj 8y agoYeap. Comparing a nation 35 times the side of the other which has cultural and economic differences is totally a valid point. There is also the fact that during a referendum about gun control the vast majority voted in favor of keeping their guns but the social democratic government chose to just ignore the results.
- sebleon 8y agoa) It is a fun fact, and b) I think their point was gun laws do nothing without enforcement
- ulzeraj 8y agoIf drug prohibition enforcement does not work why would people believe gun enforcement does?
- dragonwriter 8y agoBecause drugs and guns aren't similar products.
- kikoreis 8y agoYes. Are you claiming some form of correlation?
- 8y ago
- megaman22 8y agoLatin American countries are a shitshow. Cynically I cannot but wonder what might be if they got their shit 6ogeth4t
- sctb 8y agoWe don't have any need here for a comment like this. Please say something meaningful instead, or nothing. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- megaman22 8y agoIt's really not hateful to say that people are terrible for expressing those beliefs
- ransom1538 8y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_laws_in_Brazil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_laws_in_Brazil "Thus, disarmament is effectively happening in Brazil,[12] as are massive gun confiscations,[13] notwithstanding its refusal by Brazilian people (at the referendum of 2005). Some argue that this will increase gun homicides. Other research shows that there is a decrease in firearm deaths correlating with disarmament.[14][15] However, 2012 marked the highest rate of gun deaths in 35 years for Brazil, 8 years after a ban on carrying handguns in public went in to effect,[16] and 2016 saw the worst ever death toll from homicide in Brazil, with 61,619 dead.[17] Only to rise again in 2017 to 63,880 a 3.7 per cent rise from 2016. [18] " Doesn't seem like the gun laws are working out.
- briandear 8y agoVenenzuela fully “disarmed” in 2013. And the murder rate went up significantly. Mexico is also “disarmed” and their murder rate is sky high. There is no correlation to gun disarming and crime rate reduction. The problems aren’t caused by guns, but by disfunctional governments.
- frockington 8y agoEven in America your point stands. Chicago and LA have strict gun laws and out of control crime
- Retric 8y agoBrazil's population is growing, so it's really the rate of violence especially for 15-35 year olds that's important. However, all current and past statistics are questionable making assessment difficult.
- morsma 8y agoLowering crime rates has never really been the goal of gun confiscation.
- dudus 8y agoI don't want to dismiss your point, when it comes to gun control I don't really have a strong opinion, I see both sides. But I wouldn't simply put these numbers in direct correlation with gun control. There are other factors that are much more important than gun control changes such as the political crisis, economical crisis and rise in gang violence filled by drug dollars.
- forinti 8y agoTraffic deaths are nearly at the same level (nearly 50k per year) even though statistics only count those who died on the spot. I fear the road more than guns, because most shootings occur in certain regions (mainly poor neighbourhoods) which I can avoid.
- pmichaud 8y agoI'm a little surprised that other places with military conflicts (eg. middle east) or paramilitary conflicts (eg. Mexico) aren't higher? Maybe those are counted differently?
- dddddaviddddd 8y agoWithin the broad range of violent deaths, the core element of intentional homicide is the complete liability of the direct perpetrator, which thus excludes killings directly related to war or conflicts, self-inflicted death (suicide), killings due to legal interventions or justifiable killings (such as self-defence), and those deaths caused when the perpetrator was reckless or negligent but did not intend to take a human life (non-intentional homicide). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...
- jessaustin 8y agoSomething that never seems to come up in discussions of violence rates in the Americas is our history of colonial domination. The fraction of people who survived the onslaught of Old-World diseases were not equipped to effectively resist the influx of predatory Europeans. That was and is a very violent process. It's not over.
- sumedh 8y ago> Something that never seems to come up in discussions of violence rates in the Americas is our history of colonial domination. because its not relevant to the topic being discussed.
- jessaustin 8y agoYou don't think that Brazil today is affected by the Brazil of 200, 400, 500 years ago? You don't think that colonial attitudes persist? You don't think that it would be a different nation had not so many natives been killed or enslaved? You don't think that violence is a self-perpetuating cycle? How the hell does that work?
- sumedh 8y agoIts very easy to blame others, its very difficult to accept failure. Are going to blame colonialism for all the presidential corruption scandals as well?
- jessaustin 8y agoBlame? What is that? Are you making a moral argument? I'm talking about cause and effect, and I mentioned one cause that exists in Brazil but not in e.g. France.
- sumedh 8y agoBlame - feel or declare that (someone or something) is responsible for a fault or wrong, which is exactly what you are doing. So colonialism is the cause for the recent presidential corruption scandals?
- pmarreck 8y agoIs Brazil basically a failed state?
- MTemer 8y agoMaybe by design, depending on what you mean. I think organized crime and state corruption (often hard to separate the two) thrives under all that chaos. Brazil is HUGE and I see many people asking to bring control back to each of the states. How that would help I'm not sure but it's like the government is isolated in their own safe island and they are in most cases untouchable, or just get a slap in the wrist. I'm surprised how in the poorest and uneducated areas you can get lynched or beheaded if someones yells "thief" or "rapist" (even if you're innocent) but there isn't any acts of organized violence against the government.
- swfsql 8y agono, it's a successful state (people are those who failed).
- pmarreck 8y agoI'm not trying to call Brazil's surely beautiful people out, I'm referring to this concept: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Failed_state https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Failed_state
- swfsql 8y agoI used another concept.. imagine people as slaves and state agents (mostly politicians) as slave-owners. Does poor slaves implies slave-owners' failure? Nope. And this is reality in Brazil. Politicians are wealthy, they are paid well, they create monopolies for corporations (and get benefits from it whereas consumers pay the cost) and they may even be corrupt. Some may get caught, sure, but are replaced by others. But nonetheless, the slaves keep hoping for the "right slave owner". Thus politicians, politics and the state are extremely successful. In this perspective, a failing state would be one whose politicians are getting less wealthy, lose intervention power and so on. Strong individuals, weak politics is a failed state. But in this situation people are wealthy (contrary to the concept shown on wikipedia). Another (somehow related) type of failed state are those whose population emigrates massively, therefore slave-owners have less slaves. Or when a secession occurs, where power get less centralized.
- holografix 8y agoAnother Brazilian here. I’ve lived in Australia for 15 years, Brisbane for 5 and Sydney for 10. I reckon both cities are some of the cleanest safest cities in the world. I grew up in Rio, left when I was 20. Still to this day I’ve got the street reflexe. My partner, who’s Swedish, finds it mostly amusing, sometimes rude. For example: I won’t sit with my back to a door or a hallway, corridor etc. I don’t tolerate people walking behind me closer than 5-10 meters, I’ll literally turn around and pretend to tie my shoe laces or look at a shop window. And I think most of all, I can tell immediately if someone is sussing me out, looking for a vulnerability, something of value I’m wearing, etc. I see the eyes, I hear the body language. All of this from someone who grew up in a middle-upper class neighbourhood in Rio (Ipanema). I’m wearing an Apple Watch and I’ve got an iPhone 8 Plus in my pocket atm. I often leave the house with a $2000 dollar Sony a7iii câmera just because I “might see something I want to photograph”. My friends in Rio simply wouldn’t comprehend...
- jeanlucas 8y agoOne more Brazilian here to confirm the stereotypes. I always think photographers are like heroes for the audacity to go out with good cameras in hand all the time.
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- jlarocco 8y agoIs that website cutting off the right side of the article text for anybody else? I tried resizing the window, zooming in and out, and disabling my ad blocker, but the page steadfastly refuses to show the right side of the text. I'm using Chromium and Linux.
- swfsql 8y agoI'm another brazilian here. The crime rate is not as bad as of Venezuela, and >50% of all (ALL) brazilians desires to leave the country. The problem is simple. 1- It's quite impossible to leave poverty due to state regulations. 2- People are killed by robbers/murderers, or jailed by officers if they try to prepare/defend for themselves. So both economics and justice are completely distorted towards inhumanity. There's nowhere to go. That's a sad reality, and it's not a coincidence that Brazil has the strongest world-wide desire for libertarian philosophy, by students/youngsters. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=%2Fm%2F0cpvcd https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=%2Fm%2F0cpvcd https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=%2Fm%2F052h3 https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=%2Fm%2F052h3 https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=%2Fm%2F01hfv2 https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=%2Fm%2F01hfv2
- burntrelish1273 8y agoHoly moly! The irony is private gun ownership is illegal but all/most of the criminals have them. Two people on a motorcycle is an implicit threat of robbery, kidnapping, murder, etc. Also, it's sad that ASP videos coming from Brazil involving off-duty police is it's own meme. Maybe it's not gun ownership or not, but the quantity of firearms in private hands, massive income inequality and essentially a failed state... conditions, ability, motive and opportunity.
- johnalamos 8y agoMulticulturalism is an opportunity
- superherointj 8y agoBrazillian here. Living in country of Rio. I avoid going to Rio (capital) as much as possible. Tomorrow I'm visiting family there and the tension increases a bit because of uncertainty. I have watched robberies live, car stealing. Two of my neighbords were shot by a rifle in Rio when crossing "linha vermelha". My wife has been kidnaped once. This year her brother had his car shot 3 times. (He does Uber) My brother was almost hit by a lost bullet recently in Rio downtown, missed by 50cm. I could probably go on listing this sort of things endlessly. People from Rio are used to this and consider it the way life is. It is not like they like or accept violence but don't have the means of doing much about it. Brazil is a puppet state. Not sovereign. The state is dysfunctional. The violence problem can be tracked to state policies. But the state has no will to solve any of it. Just mask it and keep going (nowhere good for civilians). It is an actual goal of state to things to not work. That is the goal, and standard policy. Like the last 5 times tried to contact police for reporting ongoing (live) stealings all failed. Most times couldn't even report. There is a queue of calls that take a long time. And when they answer, they just tell you to mind your business. Now I even don't bother reporting anything. They won't do a thing. They don't care. In fact, they are just FOLLOWING ORDERS. People are too powerless to influence the state in any meaningful way. At the end of the day the law/state is at the side of criminals. I wish Brazil would change ownership so policy could be changed.
- Proven 8y agoA progressive state (of course like the EU and other similar places, run entirely by crooks)
- jessaustin 8y agoTFA would feel a bit more complete if it included the phrase "per capita".