Achi news desk-
(Bloomberg) — Crime has risen to the forefront of Brazilians’ minds in recent months, replacing economic issues as their top concern and prompting concern within President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s administration about how to respond.
About 60% of Brazilians now consider crime the biggest problem facing the country, according to a March survey released by AtlasIntel, four times the proportion who said it was the economy. The concerns have helped drive overall approval for the leftist Lula – whose winning 2022 campaign focused mainly on rebuilding the economy and fighting poverty in the wake of the pandemic – to the lowest levels of his term.
Brazil has long suffered alarmingly high rates of violence, and rising security concerns are hardly unique in Latin America. Crime has come to dominate the region’s politics, prompting many leaders to begin imitating the hard-line approach of El Salvador’s President, Nayib Bukele.
What separates Brazil from many of its neighbors is that its overall number of murders has been falling: The country experienced 47,398 murders in 2022, about 10,000 fewer than it had four years earlier, according to the data latest available from the Brazilian Public Forum. Security, research institute.
Read More: Imitating Bukele’s Brutal Crime Prevention in Latin America
Other forms of crime, however, have become more common, experts say, while the end of the pandemic and the better-than-expected performance of Brazil’s economy last year have caused the public to return their focus to other hot-button issues.
“The irony at the moment is that Brazil is actually doing better than it has done in years economically and in terms of political stability,” said Robert Muggah, co-founder of the Igarape Institute, a think tank in Rio de Janeiro. “And yet, that gives people room to preoccupy themselves with other issues, including public safety.”
While Brazil has avoided the kind of homicide explosion that Ecuador has seen, it has not resolved long-standing problems that helped Lula’s right-wing predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro, win the 2018 election on the back of campaign promises to take a hardline approach to the public . safety.
Organized criminal groups still control swaths of major cities such as Rio de Janeiro, and struggle to control drug and smuggling routes from jungle borders to urban ports.
“The pandemic hit and we stopped talking about it,” said Joana Monteiro, professor of public policy at the Getulio Vargas Institute in Rio de Janeiro.
Headline-grabbing incidents related to those problems have helped return the focus to crime, including the torching of public buses by organized criminal groups in Rio last year and the escape of two inmates from a maximum-security prison in northern Brazil in February. The fugitives, who took part in the first prison break of its kind in the country, remain at large.
Read More: Rio Ratchets Improve Crime Surveillance to Keep Streets Safe for G-20
The available data also suggests that the tactics of criminals are changing. While Brazil has seen a big drop in thefts since the pandemic, theft and phishing scams – known locally as “golpes” – have exploded.
Meanwhile, many of the crimes that most affect Brazilian perceptions of public safety are likely underreported. A recent survey showed that almost one in three residents of Sao Paulo, Brazil’s capital city and largest business, have had their mobile phone stolen – incidents so common that many victims never report them to the police.
Anxious Lula
In a nation as divided as Brazil, political trends also have major effects on how citizens perceive the security situation, experts say. Left leaders who typically focus their messages on root causes like inequality – or avoid the topic altogether – often face a backlash on public safety, and polls show that Brazilians routinely considering that Lula’s government is weak on crime.
Bolsonaro and his allies in congress and key governors have seized on the issue, continuing to advocate for more lethal responses to criminals, including by doing more to empower the police.
Privately, Lula has complained to cabinet members that his government is losing the narrative on public safety to critics, according to people familiar with the conversations who requested anonymity to discuss the matter.
“Right or wrong, these messages resonate, especially with far-right supporters who are paranoid that the situation is deteriorating,” Muggah said.
That is true even in Latin American countries that have much lower rates of insecurity. In Chile, the perception that President Gabriel Boric is weak on crime is one of the factors that has pushed his popularity below 30%, while Argentina’s Javier Milei won a hard-fought election last year thanks in part to his law and order platform. .
With municipal elections just months away and no major policy changes in the offing, Monteiro said the debate over crime in Brazil is only bound to get louder ahead of the next presidential race in two years.
“It’s going to be a key topic not only this year but in 2026,” he said.
– With the help of Simone Iglesias, Beatriz Amat and Robert Jameson.
©2024 Bloomberg LP
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