BRAZIL: Civil Disarmament Campaign Could Be Wildly Successful

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Aug 20 2004 (IPS) - Brazil’s national civil disarmament campaign will triple or quadruple the government’s goal of collecting and destroying 80,000 firearms in civilian hands this year.

But it could increase that quantity tenfold if civil society were given greater participation, said Antonio Rangel, coordinator of the Viva Rio arms reduction project in Rio de Janeiro, who based his argument on the fact that 57,000 weapons have already been handed over by civilians in the first month of the campaign.

At this pace, the year-end target could be reached within the next two weeks, which makes Justice Minister Marcio Thomaz Bastos’s prediction that the goal of 80,000 guns may be doubled look overly conservative, Rangel told IPS.

The process “is going well, but it could be going much better” if the number of collection points where civilians can hand in their guns in exchange for a payment equivalent to between 33 and 99 dollars is increased, said Rangel.

What is needed, he said, is a “broad national network” of collection points, along with the planned efforts to raise public awareness, as established by the national civil disarmament campaign launched on Jul. 15 on the initiative of Viva Rio and the I Am of Peace Institute, in coordination with the Justice Ministry.

The campaign has run into a “bottleneck”, said the activist: the slow pace at which the federal police – the Justice Ministry body in charge of coordinating the collection of firearms – is opening new reception points.

The voluntary weapons collection effort, concentrated in the hands of the federal police, is leading to congestion in police stations, where long lines of people wait to hand in their pistols, shotguns and rifles.

Viva Rio, the I Am of Peace Institute and other groups have started opening their own collection points. But Rangel said there are still too few.

He suggests that state police forces, churches, city governments, clubs and other social organisations also take part in the weapons reduction drive, to enable people to hand in their guns at a spot near their homes.

It is not logical to expect people to travel long distances from their homes to turn over their firearms, especially in the case of poor people who may not even be able to afford the cost of transportation, he argued.

Experiences in other countries and even in the southern Brazilian state of Paraná, which began its own arms reduction campaign early this year, show that success depends on a wide network of collection points, with broad participation by civil society, he added.

In Paraná, where more than 20,000 guns have been collected so far, the “champions” in terms of number of firearms taken in were the radio stations, which also provided publicity on the campaign, in an intense competition between themselves, he said.

With broad mobilisation and participation by civil society and state and municipal governments, Brazil could beat the “world record” set by Australia, which collected 644,000 guns in one year in its own civil disarmament campaign, said Rangel.

Australia’s 1996 campaign offered an attractive financial incentive, because the guns were paid for at market price.

But in Brazil, the people handing in firearms are paid between 100 and 300 reals (33 to 99 dollars), depending on the size and calibre of the weapon, which sometimes amounts to less than one-tenth of the market price.

The international civil disarmament movement estimates that around half a million people worldwide are killed by small or light arms every year. Brazil is one of the hardest-hit countries, with more than 40,000 homicides involving firearms a year.

Demonstrations and calls for an arms reduction campaign in Brazil intensified in the past 10 years. The public pressure helped bring about parliamentary approval in late 2003 of a law making it illegal for civilians to carry guns, and the scheduling of an October 2005 referendum allowing voters to decide whether Brazil should adopt a ban on sales of firearms.

Another factor curbing the reach of the current campaign is the requirement of a bank account to deposit the indemnification paid for the weapons turned in, said Rangel, who pointed out that the poor do not have bank accounts.

The solution could be money orders, an alternative that has already been used in Paraná, although the suggestion has run into bureaucratic resistance.

In addition, many people are afraid to go to a police station, which makes participation by non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and other “neutral” civil society bodies even more important.

Viva Rio, which is receiving an average of 50 firearms a day, immediately renders them useless by smashing them with a club, in the presence of the person bringing the weapon in, to help gain the public’s trust.

The idea behind the campaign is to offer a kind of “amnesty and anonymity” without investigating the origin of the weapon, eliminating “any hurdle that could stand in the way of turning the guns in,” explained Rangel.

The aim is to withdraw from circulation the greatest possible number of weapons, to prevent future deaths, not to clarify crimes of the past, he underlined.

The positive results have already begun to be seen in terms of a reduction in the homicide rate. Several states and cities have already registered drops between 14 and 26 percent in the number of firearm deaths, said Rangel.

In a survey carried out in early August, only 3.7 percent of respondents admitted that they owned guns, and of these, only 19.2 percent said they were willing to voluntarily hand them over.

To increase that willingness, in the next few weeks the government and NGOs will launch a broad publicity effort to raise awareness about the campaign, and will hold a “caravan for disarmament”, to encourage local authorities and society in general to participate, announced Denis Mizne, coordinator of the I Am of Peace Institute.