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Soriek  9mo ago (text post)   1334 thread views

Transnational Thursdays 25

This is a weekly thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or IR history. I usually start off with coverage of some current events from a mix of countries I follow personally and countries I think the forum lives in or might be interested in. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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Brazil

Brazil has now joined the ranks of Latin American countries using the military to crack down upon organized crime.

Thousands of troops have taken up position in the ports and airports of Rio and São Paulo and along Brazil’s western border as part of efforts to “asphyxiate” organized crime amid an upsurge in bloodshed and violence.

The military intervention – ordered last Friday by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva – will last until next May and is reportedly designed to cut off the drug and gun smuggling routes on which trafficking and mafia groups depend…

This is a major operation and one done in response to extreme public outcry over deteriorating public safety conditions. This is unfortunate, as Brazilian homicide rates had been trending down for much of the previous decade but, like Ecuador, organized gangs seem to have gained a significant amount of ground in a very short window of time.

Late last month, paramilitary gangs known as “milícias” (militias) brought much of west Rio to a standstill, setting fire to dozens of buses and a train in order to stop one of the city’s most wanted mafia bosses being arrested. In early October, three doctors were shot dead outside a five-star beach hotel after assassins seemingly confused one of the group with a crime boss they wanted to kill….

More than 1,000 members of the navy will operate in the container ports of Rio and Itaguaí in Rio state and Santos in São Paulo state from which Brazilian prosecutors say huge quantities of South American cocaine are shipped to Europe each month.

Two thousand army troops, meanwhile, will step up their activities along Brazil’s western borders with Paraguay and Bolivia, across which much of the marijuana, cocaine and weaponry that illegally enters Brazil flows.

They’re also cracking down on the rising issue of, uh, neo-nazis? I guess those confederate enclaves finally got some gumption.

Data on the size of Brazil’s neo-Nazi movement is sparse, but most researchers agree that it has been growing. One researcher tracking neo-Nazi groups, Adriana Dias, an anthropologist at the State University of Campinas, estimated that the number of groups increased from the hundreds in 2019 to more than 1,000 last year.

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