POLITICS-BRAZIL: Wave of Kidnaps Triggers Public Alarm

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Jan 24 2002 (IPS) - A wave of kidnappings in Brazil, concentrated in the south-central state of Sao Paulo, has put public safety back on the top of the political agenda, reflecting the public’s fear of the “Colombianization” of Brazilian society.

The sense of insecurity was aggravated by the recent assassination of the mayor of Santo André, a suburb of Sao Paulo. Celso Daniel, a prominent leader of the left-leaning Workers Party (PT) had been kidnapped Friday night in Sao Paulo and was found executed with gunshot blasts to the face early Sunday.

But the multiplication of kidnappings had already been fuelling the fears expressed by the residents of the Sao Paulo metropolitan region, Brazil’s leading industrial centre, and by inhabitants of nearby cities like Campinas.

In Sao Paulo state there were 307 kidnap cases reported in 2001, more than four times the previous year’s total, according to the preliminary figures of the state government’s Public Safety Secretariat.

ILANUD, a United Nations institute specialising in Latin American crime research and prevention, recorded 63 cases of kidnapping in Sao Paulo in 2000, and 180 in the first nine months of 2001.

Across Brazil, ILANUD calculates there were 522 kidnappings in 2001, twice the figure for the previous year.

“The increase in Sao Paulo followed that of the rest of the country, with the exception of Rio de Janeiro. There were states where the rate of increase was much higher even than Sao Paulo’s,” ILANUD researcher Tulio Khan told IPS.

The cases with greatest impact news-wise occurred in Sao Paulo, including the kidnapping of Patricia Abravanel, daughter of media giant Silvio Santos, who owns Brazil’s second largest television network, and the kidnapping of Washington Olivetto, the award winning advertising executive who has yet to be found 40 days later.

Then came the kidnapping and assassination of mayor Daniel.

The proliferation of this type of crime has awakened fears that Brazil is on its way towards a situation like Colombia’s, though the realities of the two countries have little in common.

Colombia, a nation of 42 million people, sees thousands of kidnapping each year, most of which are politically motivated, perpetrated by insurgent groups, paramilitaries or drug traffickers, though the practice also serves as a source of revenues.

In Brazil, home to 170 million people, nearly all kidnappings have extortive aims, which is why the targets tend to be business executives or individuals who are otherwise known to be wealthy.

In an ironic twist, the dramatic increase in the crime last year is widely attributed to the decline of what are known as “lightning-kidnaps”, which last minutes or just a few hours, and are perpetrated in order to obtain quick cash, explained Kahn.

Generally, the victim is forced to withdraw money from his or her account, using a bank’s automatic cash machine.

This crime is “technically categorised as robbery” and is therefore not really considered a kidnapping, because the victim is not held in captivity and relatively small sums of money are involved, said the expert.

The expansion of the lightning-kidnaps prompted the banks and the authorities to adopt new measures last year, such as shutting down automatic cash machines after 10 pm and setting daily withdrawal limits for each account holder.

The explosion in the number of true kidnappings, as defined by the police, coincided with the implementation of obstacles to prevent lightning-kidnaps, supporting the theory that there was a shift from one crime to the other, said Kahn.

The exception to the kidnapping trends in Brazil is Rio de Janeiro, which saw its peak in 1992 with 124 kidnappings. But the city was able to reduce the total to just five in 200, and two in the first half of 2001.

Kahn said this decline could be explained by the effectiveness of the anti-kidnap unit of the police force and the new “dial-a- crime” telephone hotline, which allows individuals to report information on crimes anonymously. Another factor contributing to the decline, paradoxically, is the presence of drug trafficking rings, he said.

“The greater the organization of the crime, the less violence there is,” because the drug traffickers know that if they attract police repression, their profits will decline, the researcher explained.

The case of mayor Daniel served to highlight the crime epidemic, though his was not typical. His kidnappers did not demand a ransom, and they tortured him before executing him, according to the autopsy. This strengthens the hypothesis that it was a political assassination carried out by members of the extreme right, remnants of the last military dictatorship.

The nearly one million inhabitants of Campinas, a university city and high-tech industrial centre located 100 km from Sao Paulo, are living in terror because of the sharp rise in local crime in recent years.

In an incident a week before Daniel’s kidnapping and murder, a band of criminals gunned down a woman outside her home in Campinas after holding her hostage for several days.

It was apparently a brutal retaliation against her middle-class family, who were unable to produce the 40,000-dollar ransom.

With the national and international repercussions of the assassination of Daniel, the problem of violent crime has become a top issue in the campaigns for October elections, in which Brazilians will choose a new president, governors, parliamentary deputies and senators.

The governor of Sao Paulo state, Geraldo Alckmin, and PT leader Luis Inacio Lula da Silva, presented President Fernando Henrique Cardoso with a list of proposals for fighting crime, such as creating a national commission, implementing criminal sentences of life imprisonment, and placing embargos on the properties of kidnap victims.

Violence is among the top concerns of the electorate, according to polls, but the Public Safety Plan that Cardoso announced a year ago has yet to be implemented, and the budget for the sector was reduced by 28 percent.