The next few posts will highlight some of the interesting Brazil-related research that crossed our desks in the last quarter of 2020. This post focuses on five recent works on crime and corruption.
Juan Albarracín and Nicholas Barnes begin their review essay on criminal organizations in the Latin American Research Review with shocking statistics. Latin America houses 8 percent of the global population but accounts for a third of global violent deaths; it is home to 17 of the 20 most violent countries and 43 of the 50 most violent cities. These data help to explain the rapidly expanding scholarly interest in crime in the region. The essay does a fantastic job of weaving together observations from a variety of country projects, including two books specifically on Brazil (a translation of Karina Biondi’s ethnography of prison life and the PCC, and Graham Denyer Willis’ reflection on the regulation of life and death in Brazilian cities, also focused on the PCC) as well as two drawing on the Brazilian case as part of a broader comparative project (Desmond Arias’ work on local-level criminal organizations and Benjamin Lessing’s work on confrontation between drug cartels and governments). The article superbly achieves one of the aims of the LARR’s review essays, helping to tease out the conceptual and theoretical state of the literature, while pointing to unresolved debates. Key takeaways include the incredible variation in forms of criminal violence in the region; the extent to which state-society relations are remade by criminal groups; the huge proportion of the region’s population who are directly impacted by criminal groups’ symbiotic but often antagonistic relations with the state; and the manner by which criminal groups “shift back and forth across the political/criminal divide.” Lots to chew on, both in the review and within the books whose themes it so beautifully summarizes.
Marcelo Bergman has a heartbreaking piece in Harvard’s ReVista about the impact Covid-19 is having in Latin America’s prison systems. Bergman tells the complex tale of how the consequences of mass incarceration in the region are heightened by the pandemic, and underlines again how impossible it is to isolate prisons from the broader social fabric. With specific reference to Brazil, his article points out that although it is not the worst performer in terms of prisoner infections per capita, even the underreported virus figures suggest that approximately twenty thousand Brazilian prisoners had contracted the virus by September, placing Brazil’s prisons at the top of regional rankings in absolute terms. The pandemic will have disturbing consequences in a prison system that held more than 770 thousand people in 2019, with family ties extending the impact of Covid among prisoners to perhaps as many as five million citizens nationwide.
“Killing in the Slums,” (APSR 2020), offers a rational choice model to explain why the community policing interventions in Rio de Janeiro’s Unidad Pacifying Police Unit (UPP) program had distinct results in the various localities it served. The key contribution of this article is to demonstrate that different criminal organizations have distinct attitudes toward rival criminal groups, toward the state, and toward the community. The authors show that these differing attitudes across Rio’s vary diverse slums conditioned the success of the UPP in the distinct populations it was designed to serve.
Violência Política e Eleitoral no Brasil is a graphical report from human rights groups Terra de Direitos and Justiça Global, demonstrating the large number of cases of violence against politicians and political candidates in Brazil between 2016 and 2020, including 68 murders and 57 murder attempts. Distressingly, these numbers appear to have increased sharply in 2020.
Politicians’ immunity from prosecution is a controversial subject: does it protect politicians from abusive lawsuits, or simply shield them from meaningful accountability? In a study of 90 democracies, Reddy, Schularick and Skreta (2020) create an index of legal provisions for politician immunity and come to the conclusion that stronger immunity is associated with greater corruption. Sadly, the Latin American region has the strongest immunity protections, and Brazil scores high on the index.
Image: Rovena Rosa, Agência Brasil.
