VZCZCXRO2683
RR RUEHRG
DE RUEHBR #0993/01 2032012
ZNR UUUUU ZZH
R 212012Z JUL 08
FM AMEMBASSY BRASILIA
TO RUEHC/SECSTATE WASHDC 2147
INFO RUEHAC/AMEMBASSY ASUNCION 6988
RUEHBU/AMEMBASSY BUENOS AIRES 5715
RUEHLP/AMEMBASSY LA PAZ 6428
RUEHMN/AMEMBASSY MONTEVIDEO 7479
RUEHSG/AMEMBASSY SANTIAGO 0506
RUEHRG/AMCONSUL RECIFE 8296
RUEHRI/AMCONSUL RIO DE JANEIRO 6430
RUEHSO/AMCONSUL SAO PAULO 2469
RUEABND/DEA HQS WASHDC
RUEAIIA/CIA WASHDC
RHEFHLC/HOMELAND SECURITY CENTER WASHINGTON DC
RUEKJCS/SECDEF WASHDC
RHEHNSC/NSC WASHDC
RUEAWJA/DEPT OF JUSTICE WASHDC
RHMCSUU/FBI WASHINGTON DC

UNCLAS SECTION 01 OF 04 BRASILIA 000993 
 
SIPDIS 
 
FOR WHA, WHA/BSC, AND INL 
 
E.O. 12958: N/A 
TAGS: KCRM KJUS PGOV ASEC BR
SUBJECT: BRAZIL: IS THE MILITARY THE SOLUTION TO THE CRIME 
PROBLEM? 
 
¶1. (SBU) Summary:  Public concern in Brazil over steadily 
rising crime and a murder rate more than four times that in 
the United States has re-fueled a two-decade old debate over 
the question of deploying the military to undertake urban 
crime fighting missions.  Enthusiasm for this idea increased 
in the aftermath of the Pan Am games, when the military 
carried out a support role in providing security and helped 
prevent any incidents from marring the games.  Defense 
Minister Jobim, while not voicing outright support for the 
idea, has declined to rule it out.  Various polls have 
consistently shown public support it.  In mid-June, however, 
11 soldiers from an Army unit deployed to a Rio slum as 
security for a social project handed three youths over to 
drug traffickers, who subsequently killed them.  The incident 
has brought the debate over the military's proper internal 
role to the front pages of newspapers throughout the country. 
 Despite a lower court ruling ordering the Army to withdraw 
from the "favela", Minister Jobim continues to argue that the 
Army was deployed legally and should not withdraw.  The 
debate over whether to deploy the military to take on crime 
in urban areas, which is already taking place in an ad-hoc 
fashion, will not be fully resolved until Congress addresses 
the matter legislatively.  Until then, the executive is 
likely to see internal military deployments as a tool too 
tempting and politically useful to forgo during public 
security crises.  End summary. 
 
--------------------------------------------- ---------- 
Society at the Breaking Point, Something Must be Done 
--------------------------------------------- ---------- 
 
¶2. (U) President Lula took office during a record year for 
homicides, with some 51,000 recorded throughout Brazil in 
¶2003.  Since then, the country has seen an eight percent 
reduction in homicides to about 46,600 in 2006, with drops of 
about 5.1 percent in 2004, 1.6 percent in 2005, and 1.9 
percent in 2006.  Nevertheless, the murder rate in Brazil is 
still on the order of 25 per 100,000 people, over four times 
the murder rate in the United States (according to the FBI's 
annual Crime in the United States report, the U.S. rate stood 
at 5.7 per 100,000 in 2006).  Newspapers earlier this year 
trumpeted the headline that total homicides during the last 
30 years are approaching the staggering figure of 1 million 
(in the 27 years from 1979 through the last year of released 
official data, the figure stood at approximately 900,000, 
compared with a little over 500,000 for the U.S. in the same 
time period).  Of these murders, almost half occurred in the 
ten-year period between 1997 and 2006 (compared to 165,000 in 
the United States).  Since 1991, homicide trends in Brazil 
and the U.S. have taken opposite courses: through 2006 the 
U.S. homicide rate had dropped 31 percent, while Brazil's 
rate increased 51 percent. 
 
¶3. (U) Despite the drop in the absolute number of homicides 
during the first three years of the Lula administration, the 
number of homicides in most areas of the country remained 
flat or increased.  That is because most of the drop is 
attributable to a reduction in homicides in Sao Paulo, which 
alone is responsible for 70 percent of the drop in the 
homicide rate for Brazil since 2003.  Its homicide rate has 
fallen 54 percent during that time, from 5,591 total murders 
in 2003 to 2,546 in 2006, placing its homicide rate of 31 per 
100,000 people lowest among Brazil's 13 cities of more than 
one million inhabitants.  Major-city murder capital Recife 
(90.5), Belo Horizonte (56.6) Rio de Janeiro (44.8), Curitiba 
(44.7) and even Brasilia's metropolitan area (33.3) rank 
higher (according to the FBI the three U.S. cities with the 
highest homicide rates are Detroit (47), Baltimore (43), and 
New Orleans (37)).  (Note: Violent crime statistics are 
collected by state governments, which have unreliable systems 
for data collection and in many instances do not keep track 
of some forms of violent crime or do not report these to the 
central government. As a result, they are often difficult or 
impossible to find, and where they exist, they are less 
 
BRASILIA 00000993  002 OF 004 
 
 
reliable than U.S. statistics.  End note.) 
 
-------------------------------------- 
Time for the Military to Step In? 
-------------------------------------- 
 
¶4. (U) As a result of these flat or increasing rates of 
homicides in most parts of the country, not to mention the 
constant barrage of TV and newspaper headlines blaring news 
of often shocking and brutal criminal acts, fears of violent 
crime remains consistently top the list of concerns for most 
Brazilians. In addition, many Brazilians believe that the 
Military Police (regular uniformed police of each state with 
a "military" rank structure) is corrupt and lacks the 
firepower to take on organized crime networks and 
drug-trafficking gangs.  This is reflected in polling that 
shows widespread and steady support for an increased role by 
Brazil's armed forces in providing public security. 
According to a 2005 survey the daily newspaper O Globo, 90 
percent of the public favored a military role; in a 2007 
survey reported weekly newsmagazine Veja, support remained 
strong and steady at 88 percent, a preference that is helped 
by high public confidence in the military, which hovers 
around then 70 percent mark.  Even a poll of service members 
that appeared in the same edition of Veja showed that some 63 
percent either supported or are at least open to the idea of 
deploying the military internally, depending on the 
situation.  Media outlets often fuel debate by questioning 
the presence of 190,000 soldiers posted to bases in urban 
areas, when there are no evident national defense missions to 
perform in those areas. 
 
¶5. (U) Since Minister Nelson Jobim took over the Defense 
portfolio, he and various commanders have openly contemplated 
the idea of involving the military in urban crime fighting 
missions, lauding the military's preparedness to taking on 
that role.  Colonel Claudio Barro Magno Filho, commander of 
the Brazilian troops in the UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti 
(MINUSTAH) was quoted in the daily newspaper Estado de Sao 
Paulo in 2007 noting that the peacekeeping mission was 
serving as a laboratory to put into practice the planning 
that had been done for similar operations that might be put 
in place within Brazil.  He noted that under the right 
conditions--political support and integration of all law 
enforcement entities on the ground--the Brazilian military 
could succeed in carrying out anti-crime operations similar 
to those it was undertaking under MINUSTAH.  During an April 
9 hearing before the Chamber of Deputies, Jobim suggested 
that such a role for the military could be considered, but 
only after an improved legal framework allowing such 
deployments was passed in Congress. 
 
¶6. (U) The idea of using the military in this way is far from 
new.  At the end of the military regime more than two decades 
ago the military suffered an identity crisis as its influence 
waned and elected democratic civilian governments 
consolidated their power, but the topic remained hotly 
debated within the Brazilian military and civilian society. 
Since then the military has been enlisted to act internally 
several dozen times, usually in limited short-term missions 
such as protecting heads of state attending the Rio Earth 
Summit in 1992 and the Mercosul Summit in Rio in 2006, and 
occasionally, as in Operation Rio in 1994, to combat 
organized crime and drug traffickers. 
 
¶7. (U) The Lula government has approved military deployments 
for internal security purposes several times since it came to 
power in 2003.  That year, at the request of the Rio de 
Janeiro state government, it approved the use of the military 
to augment police patrols.  In 2006, under a judicial 
warrant, the military was allowed to occupy eight favelas to 
retrieve weapons stolen from the military compound.  Most 
recently, the Army helped support security preparations for 
the Pan American games in 2007 at the request of Rio State 
 
BRASILIA 00000993  003 OF 004 
 
 
Governor Sergio Cabral (a strong Lula ally).  Prior to the 
Pan Am games, Justice Minister Tarso Genro affirmed that the 
military could act in public security without violating the 
constitution in their role as guarantors of law and order, 
and as long as its mission was well defined, limited in 
duration, and agreed to by the governor of the state in which 
they would be present. 
 
¶8. (U) In fact, in part because of the numerous occasions for 
which it had been called to deploy internally, in 2004 the 
Army converted the 11th Brigade of the Southeast Military 
Command based out of Campinas, Sao Paulo into a light 
infantry brigade with a formal "guarantee of law and order" 
or "GLO" mission.  Now known informally as the "Brigada GLO," 
it specializes in urban conflict, use of non-lethal 
munitions, and anti-riot actions, and is trained to undertake 
operations against narcotraffickers and organized crime. 
 
---------------------- 
A Bump in the Road 
---------------------- 
 
¶9. (U) On June 16th, 2008, three youths between the ages of 
17 and 24 years old from the "Morro da Providencia", a favela 
in Rio de Janeiro, were killed by drug traffickers after 
being abducted by Army soldiers deployed to the favela, who 
"sold" them to rival drug dealers.  Eleven officers from the 
Western Military Command were involved, and three of them 
have already confessed their participation in the crime.  The 
Brazilian Army had been occupying the "Morro da Providencia" 
for six months to provide security for workers of the 
Programa Cimento Social (Social Cement Program), an 
initiative of current federal deputy and Rio mayoral 
candidate Marcelo Crivella.  The State Secretary of Public 
Security, Jose Beltrame, as well as the Brazilian Bar 
Association have strongly criticized the presence of the 
Brazilian Army in the favela, claiming they have no expertise 
in public security.  A lower court judged ruled that the Army 
had to exit the favela, a decision the federal government is 
appealing.  Both Jobim and Army Chief of Staff General Enzo 
Peri have defended the legality of the Army's presence and 
its mission, which was to provide security so that a social 
development project could be completed in an economically 
distressed area dominated by drug traffickers.  (Note: 
Without military protection, the social project has been 
suspended.) 
 
¶10. (SBU)  Though the federal military,s presence in Rio in 
the lead-up to the 2007 Pan Am Games was publicly heralded as 
a success, many Consulate contacts (including state public 
security officials) have expressed their view that the 
deployment did not have any lasting positive effect on the 
security situation.  Rather, they say, the military 
deployment in advance of the Games was a calculated political 
move on the part of the new Governor to counter Rio,s 
negative reputation as a dangerous city.  The military, along 
with state police forces, conducted several high-profile 
"raids" in favelas to send drug traffickers the message that 
the Pan Am Games needed to take place without incident.  Rio 
was uncharacteristically calm during the Games, but returned 
to "normal" shortly after the international delegations and 
tourists departed. 
 
¶11. (SBU) A significant consequence of the military,s 
presence in Rio,s favelas is that corrupt members of the 
military have become part of the problem.  Corrupt soldiers 
terrorize residents and demand protection money.  Some 
Consulate NGO contacts report that the security situation in 
the favelas has actually deteriorated since the military's 
deployment because now there are several competing elements 
jockeying for power-- drug traffickers, corrupt local police 
(militias), and corrupt soldiers.  In many cases, residents 
are pressured and threatened by all of these groups. 
 
 
BRASILIA 00000993  004 OF 004 
 
 
----------------------- 
A Risky Proposition 
----------------------- 
 
¶12. (U) Even before the incidents in Rio, some defense 
experts had sounded a note of caution towards the idea of 
deploying the military in this way, noting that training for 
war and to provide public security were incompatible and that 
the legacy of two decades of military repression still 
lingered in people's minds  In a meeting with poloff 
Joanisval Brito, a Senate legislative advisor and that body's 
leading expert on national defense issues, stated that it 
would be unwise to employ the military for anything other 
than temporary and limited missions, such as emergency 
response or providing security for international events-- 
which are already allowable under current law.  Open-ended 
public security missions are fraught with risks, he noted, 
because they have the potential of corrupting the 
military--eroding confidence in it--and require wholesale 
changes in training, doctrine, and in Brazilian laws.  The 
only way the Congress could see itself pressured into 
allowing such actions would be for Brazil to suffer a 
continuous series of high-profile incidents of such shocking 
nature that the Congress would have no choice but to act to 
provide broad authority for these types of missions. 
 
---------- 
Comment 
---------- 
 
¶13. (SBU) For the moment, the pendulum has swung against 
deploying the military for these kinds of domestic missions. 
Once the next wave of high-profile criminal acts takes place, 
however, it will probably swing back again.  There is no 
constitutional question as to whether the military may deploy 
for internal security purposes, as that is already allowed by 
the constitution.  The issue Brazilians are grappling with is 
how broadly these internal missions may be defined. Settling 
this question is essential to formalize a legal regime 
allowing for the systematic use of the military in a range of 
public security roles, in place of the current haphazard and 
ad hoc use of the military whenever public pressure to do 
something about crime builds to the boiling point. It is not 
clear that Brazil's congress is prepared to act on the matter 
at this point.  Until then, the pendulum will keep swinging 
with the headlines of the day.  We doubt that any Brazilian 
government will permanently rule out deploying the military 
for internal security purposes so long as it remains a 
temptingly simple, popular, and politically useful tool for 
addressing public security crises.  End comment. 
 
SOBEL