Violence continues in Brazil, but spreads to different regions of the country

Investment Watch
June 15th, 2011

THE road from Maceió, the capital of Alagoas state, to its airport passes luxury-car showrooms and shops selling outsize Jacuzzis. In the central reservation, indigent families live under plastic sheeting. Even by the standards of Brazil’s north-east, Alagoas is scarred by poverty and extreme inequality. With 107 murders per 100,000 people, Maceió is also the most violent state capital in Brazil, just as, with 60 murders per 100,000, Alagoas is the country’s most violent state (see chart). It is a place of sugar and cattle, where the sugarcane cutters settle scores with fists and knives and the well-connected escape punishment by using contract killers instead.

Year-round sunshine, beautiful beaches and coral reefs mean tourism offers Alagoas’s best chance of development. But its status as Brazil’s crime capital puts that at risk. State officials are desperate to point out that Alagoans kill each other, not outsiders, and in slums, not beauty spots. Victims and murderers are often indistinguishable: unemployed, illiterate, drug-addicted young men, says Jardel Aderico, the state secretary for peace, whose job title represents an aspiration.

Brazil’s murder rate barely budged during the past decade, at around 26 per 100,000. But the geography of murder changed, notes Julio Jacobo Waiselfisz of the Instituto Sangari,a think-tank in São Paulo. In 1998 São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro were more violent than average; Alagoas was not. Better policing and economic growth have seen the murder rate fall by nearly two-thirds in São Paulo and two-fifths in Rio over the decade. Criminals squeezed out of long-held strongholds followed the money to areas of new industrial development and tourist destinations. Illegal logging and land grabs, together with new cross-border routes for guns and drugs, stoked crime in the Amazon. And Alagoas, its state government debt-ridden and police force weak, corrupt and often on strike, was at times close to lawless.

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