BY OLIVER STUENKEL | NOVEMBER 2, 2016
Promoting gun control measures in international fora could put pressure on domestic actors to catch up.
Last week, Fórum Brasileiro de Segurança Pública, a well-respected NGO based in São Paulo, published a series of grim statistics. In 2015, a staggering 58,383 people were assassinated in Brazil. The number of murders in Brazil increased over 250 percent in the last three decades, jumping from 13,910 in 1980 to above 50,000 in 2012. This means that one person is killed in the country every nine minutes, or 160 per day.
These figures are particularly noteworthy because Brazil has no territorial disputes or civil, religious or ethnic wars. Some say that the rate could be even higher, arguing that up to 15 percent of murders go unreported, particularly in Brazil’s rural areas. Sadly, exorbitant crime is nothing new. Between 2004 and 2007, almost 200,000 people died of homicide in Brazil, exceeding the number of people killed in the largest armed conflicts in the world during the same period.
Unfortunately, there is little hope for systematic progress on the domestic level, as the problem is intimately related to a complex array of issues ranging from inequality and police impunity to an archaic justice system and drug policy – which are controlled by different levels of government. To make matters worse, Brazil is seeing the rise of the so-called “bullet caucus,” which consists of more than 20 legislators with strong name-recognition and bright political futures who seek to facilitate gun ownership and fight against progressive laws, for example those which prevent teenagers from being tried and sentenced as adults, or those which allow some convicts to avoid long prison sentences.
This is where Brazil’s diplomats come in. It is often overlooked that Brazilian foreign policy could be a key ingredient in addressing the country’s murder epidemic. Indeed, given that foreign policy is less constrained by interest groups that create obstacles to meaningful progress, it may just be one of the most promising approaches to dealing with the problem.
How?
Continue read here (free access).
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