For years, voices have emerged in the public security debate in Brazil that, in trying to explain crime, end up justifying it. After the mega-operations of Penha and Alemão, some re-emerged with the old thesis that drug trafficking is an inevitable consequence of poverty or a form of survival economy in the favelas. This vision, although humanist in appearance, is the synthesis of denialism in the debate on public security and harms the lives of the poor population who suffer from the tyranny of organized crime.
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The idea that poverty breeds violence is a myth that has been repeated for decades. If poverty were an automatic gun trigger, India, whose per capita income is half that of Brazil, would be a much more violent country than ours. The data, however, shows the opposite. While India has a homicide rate of 3 per 100,000 inhabitants, Brazil’s is 21 per 100,000 inhabitants. This shows that reducing the criminal to a “structural victim of the system” is an economic determinism that ignores the millions of honest people who, living in the same conditions, choose the path to decent work.
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Many still insist on seeing the drug trafficker as an outdated caricature of the poor young black man from the favelas who sells drugs to the “playboys” of the elite. This character no longer exists. Although he remains, for the most part, black, poor and from the favela, today he carries weapons of war like rifles and is part of criminal organizations whose central activity is no longer the sale of drugs. It is now territorial control aimed at economic exploitation and the imposition of terror on the favelas themselves.
Entire neighborhoods in Rio de Janeiro and Brazil suffer from the tyranny of organized crime and live in the midst of a bloody struggle for territory and power. Young people are co-opted by factions, girls are sexually exploited by criminals, people are tortured and killed if they do not respect the laws established by crime. From inside the barricade there reigns a state of exception with its own court, in which the accuser and the judge are the criminals themselves, terrorizing precisely the poorest.
We must courageously confront the speeches that attempt to naturalize this absurdity also in the economic field. The argument that the criminal economy drives the favelas and, without it, there would be collapse is the institutionalization of the unacceptable. Accepting the premise that blood money finances the local economy amounts to legitimizing modern slavery imposed by the factions. Crime does not “move” the community; he parasitizes it and takes hostage most of the good people who live there.
Data from the Data Favela Institute shows that Brazilian communities have a total income of 300 billion reais, more than 22 states of the Federation and countries like Bolivia or Paraguay. This economy is diverted and extorted by organized crime through the application of fees on the use of basic services, such as Internet, gas, commerce, transport, irregular sales of houses and even the manufacture of ice. The good citizen of the favela who owns a bakery and refuses to pay this fee dies.
The State is not the enemy of the favela. Those who close schools, prevent ambulances, impose gas taxes, control the Internet and impose death sentences are not the police, they are the factions. The public safety debate no longer takes into account romantic views on crime while thousands of people live under armed tyranny.
*Rodrigo Pimentel, veteran BOPE captain, is co-author of the book “Elite da tropa”, which spawned the film “Tropa de Elite”