Human Insecurity in Brazil – Focusing on Armed Violence

Ilona Szabó de Carvalho & Raphael M.C. Corrêa, Coordinator and Researcher of the Human Security Program of Viva Rio, Brazil

The following text is an extract of the paper “Brazilian Perspectives on Human Security”.

In 2002, 38,088 people in Brazil were killed by fire arms – the highest recorded rates of any country in the world, including countries at war. Clearly, then, urban violence is one of the most pressing development, security, and health issues facing the country today, even though as a phenomenon, it is a quite recent starting in the eighties and acquiring alarming proportions during the nineties.

The urban aspect of armed violence and its high mortality and morbidity rates were highlighted in its specificity by a public health perspective of social violence. Without neglecting structural aspects of violence, created by different modes of oppression inducted by specific economic, cultural and political systems, social sciences experts acknowledge that the armed violence related to socially recognized outlaw actions turned to be an urgent issue of the political agenda. The population’s well being and basic rights are continuously threatened by a crescent conflict involving each time more firearms events. The mortality rate increased from 2% in 1930 to 15% in the 90’s, appearing as the second general death cause in Brazil, being cardiovascular diseases the first in the rank.

Official health data shows that the risk of gun related deaths in Brazil is 2.6 times higher than in the rest of the world, and the great majority of these deaths (90%) are homicides. Further, gun violence rates have tripled in the past twenty years, from 7.2 per 100,000 residents in 1982 to 21.2 per 100,000 residents in 2002.

Although public insecurity has been a growing concern in Brazil since the ‘80s, civil society groups have focused specifically on guns and gun violence for just over a decade, from around the mid-nineties. Activists used public health data from the outset, and also adopted public health terminology: guns came to be seen as a “vector” of the “epidemic” of violence, making it more lethal and prolific.
The public health approach also allowed policy-makers, activists and researchers to begin to characterize the impact of the gun violence and unpack the different ways that different segments of the population are affected by the problem. As elsewhere in the world, the vast majority of deaths and injuries affect men, and especially young, poorer men.

In Brazil the risk of being killed by firearms for young men between 20 and 29 years of age is five times higher than for the rest of the population, and two times higher than for the rest of the male population. The risk of death for these young men is 38 times higher than that of the female population and 20 times higher when compared to the female population in the same age group. The data makes it very evident that gun violence is a serious problem that will have an important demographic impact in the future if allowed to continue unchecked. There is no bacteria, virus or motor vehicle that kills more adolescent males in Brazil than guns. Among adolescents between 15 and 19 years of age that died in 2002, 39.1% were killed by guns.
In nine state capitals in Brazil, guns were responsible for over half of the externally caused deaths in this age group: Vitória (70%), Recife (63%), Rio de Janeiro (58%), Salvador (58%), Belo Horizonte (58%), Maceió (54%), Cuiabá (53%), Florianópolis (53%), and João Pessoa (51%).

Although the number of women killed by firearms is low compared to men, guns are used in 42.4% of homicides against women. And despite the fact that guns are more regularly used for and by men, women, too, suffer the losses and consequences they bring – they are widowed, orphaned, left without siblings or children. Fear, insecurity, anger, and financial difficulties are all part of the legacy left by the deaths and/or incapacitating injuries caused by guns. Further, even when a gun it is not fired, it can be used to threaten and intimidate women, particularly in situations of domestic violence. A rapid analysis of women who denounced domestic abuse at eight of the nine Delegacias da Mulher in the Rio de Janeiro found that, among women who responded that their abuser had a gun at home: 75.6% said the accused threatened them; 73% said that the presence of a gun stopped them from verbally or physically responding to violence; and 68% said that they wanted to break off their relation with the accused but did not do so because they feared retaliation with the gun. In order to fully understand the specific impact of gun violence on women, it is important to complement health data with additional qualitative studies and other approaches to information-gathering.

The lack of perspective for personal, professional and social status – the impossibility of having dreams and making them come true – generates a feeling of impotence and low self-esteem, mainly among young men, who may resort to armed violence to express these frustrations. If it were possible to measure the value of a life, certainly in Brazil it would be inversely related to the firearms-related death rates. Life expectancy among youth falls in tandem with lowered life expectations. The availability and misuse of firearms, as an alternative to impotence, are part of the reasons behind this extremely worrying situation.

One of the main firearms events in contemporary Brazil is led by young, poor and black men fighting as criminal groups against competitors on drug trafficking business or with the state police force. Rio de Janeiro is a notorious example of these new social conflicts spaces. As an empirical phenomenon armed urban conflicts can be described as violent armed struggles between different groups in specific spaces of the urban tissue. The territorial scope of these conflicts distinguishes them from routine police patrol that happened to enter in conflict with antagonists, even when firearms are used. The territorial character of the struggle presents its own distinguishable features such as a) expected conflict; b) strategic behaviour of the parts involved, c) occupation and dominance logic, d) use of terror.

It is well known that the emergence of conspicuous armed conflicts in metropolitan region of Rio de Janeiro and other big urban centers in Brazil at the eighties coincided with the organization of an informal criminal economic activity in Latin America and overseas that constituted maybe the first true form of economic integration in the continent: the production, processing, and international distribution of cocaine. This economic activity concentrated at areas where public services were absent during authoritarian period and, even after that, it delayed to establish inclusive policies to lower classes sectors of population. The common perception of city inhabitants was that the only way state marked its presence within squatter population at favela areas were with its repressive forces.

From the traditional National State perspective, the armed violence appears in political theory as theories of revolution, guerrilla and civil war. However, in the urban armed conflicts in main Brazilian cities the law is being broken by armed groups, but different from guerrilla, that affront government and seek to overthrow the state and proclaim itself legislator on behalf of justice, the agents of these new urban armed conflicts affront power on behalf of drug trafficking businesses, of a symbolic affirmation and “social delinquent insertion”. The conflict processes are disentailed of the social transformation and acquire a conservative character. Civil war in international politics differs from popular violence such as protests and riots. A civil war for international organizations like the World Bank “occurs when an identifiable rebel organization challenges the government militarily and the resulting violence results in more than 1,000 combat-related deaths, with at least 5 percent on each side”. The design of newest forms of war has some distinguishable features as mapped by COAV Research such as elements of a command structure and power over territory, local population or resources.

It is clear that the new conflict situation that emerges in the world, and which Brazil low intensity territorial armed conflicts is part of, claim for a human perspective approach. The military solution seem outdated since no enemies of national security are present but a subtle dialectics where usually the perpetrator of criminal violence can be, at the same time, a victim and symptom of a structural violence situation. How to maintain social order by building social binds and not destroying them, when new forms of organized violence blurs the limits between war, crime and human rights violations? The Human Security perspective proclaims being a path to build new alternatives for these new challenges.