Governor Geraldo Alckmin asked the state security secretariat to publish its latest crime statistics a few days early, so as to shield his new state security secretary from the negative fallout. According to the figures, 1,157 people in the city of São Paulo were murdered between January and October this year, more than in all of 2011.
In October alone, there were 149 murders in São Paulo city, more than double the 78 registered in the same period a year earlier. In Greater São Paulo, there were 289 homicides in October, up over two thirds (65.3%) on the same period of 2011. In the State overall, homicides rose 38% to reach 505 in October, up from 366 in October 2011. In the first 10 months of this year, there was a 29.1% rise in the number of homicides in the city and an 11.6% rise in the State as a whole.
The figures were released on the same day as Governor Alckmin announced a change at the top of the state security office, with the resignation of Antônio Ferreira Pinto, who had been in office since 2009. Pinto was well regarded, and crime statistics continued to fall on his watch (until this year). However he managed to make enemies within the civil police (PC) thanks to his moves to assert more control over the corps. As a former military police officer for 11 years, Pinto was always viewed with some suspicion by the PC, which complained that he was inflexible. Pinto was also outspoken, ticking off the press for “glamourising” Primero Commando da Capital (PCC), Brazil’s biggest and most notorious criminal gang (rooted in São Paulo).
His replacement, Fernando Grella Viera, is a former state prosecutor general known for a more low-key approach. The former state governor José Serra has described him as a “diplomat”. He was brought in by Alckmin to take a more conciliatory approach to the PM and the PC, which have a long history of rivalry and still barely communicate. Alckmin is determined to get the two forces working together. Grella Viera is expected to make changes at the top of both police forces. The PC’s delegate general, Marcos Carneiro Lima, indicated on 22 November that he would resign as a matter of course to allow Grella Viera to form his own team, adding that he felt it time to move on.
Alckmin is very keen to get São Paulo out of the spotlight. Although the latest crime wave has made international headlines – and is being spun as a repeat of the grisly and vicious war that took place in the city in 2006 between the PCC and the PM, in which almost 400 people died – the reality is more nuanced.
The conservative weekly Veja this week published a useful comparative study of crime stats in São Paulo and it concluded that current perceptions are some way away from the actual reality on the ground. As Alckmin has repeated over and over this past month, São Paulo remains one of the safest states in Brazil, with a below national-average homicide rate.
In 1999, according to Veja, one person was killed every hour in São Paulo, on average. By the end of last year, that average had fallen to one every 8.5 hours. Even with the latest spike, the average is still one homicide every five hours, still much better than it was in 1999. The homicide rate (intentional) in São Paulo in 1999 was an exceptionally high 52.58 per 100,000 residents. It was 8.95 in 2011, a huge improvement (and there was similar improvement on other crime stats). To date in 2012 it has averaged 11.2, although in the month of October alone it was 15.7, nearly double the 2011 average. The average homicide rate in Brazil overall was 22.3 in 2011.
Several local crime experts deny that the latest wave of violence is a textbook repeat of the 2006 war between the then all-powerful PCC and the PM. In fact, some argue that the violence in fact may evidence a weakening and splintering of the PCC in the face of stronger action against it by the federal and state security forces, led by the PM.
Police sources told Veja that state intelligence sources earlier this year got wind of plans by the PCC to induct a new younger generation of leaders by means of a string of criminal operations to “legitimise” the new leaders. Acting on this intelligence, the PM’s shock troops, known as the Rondas Ostensivas Tobias de Aguiar (Rota), acted “strategically” against these new leaders, with a string of arrests and crackdowns which led to several large seizures of guns and arms. With its drug business under financial pressure, the PCC leadership is said to have told its underlings not to retaliate, for fear of making the situation worse. They refused to listen.
The same experts suggest that the traditional PCC leadership (most of it in prison) no longer reigns supreme. The PCC’s best-known leader, Marco Willians Camacho (‘Marcola’), has been in jail for six years and although some reports would have it that he is directing the latest violence from his cell, others argue that he is no longer relevant, “Today Marcolo is a kind of Queen of England of crime”, one commentator quipped, adding that two other factions are fighting it out for leadership of the gang.
One outcome of this alleged infighting is a lack of discipline out on the streets; with renegade cells refusing to obey orders from the top to lay off on the attacks against the PM. Alckmin himself argues that he has the main criminal gangs like the PCC, Comando Vermelho, Terceiro Comando and PM-run militias on the run. That’s also a little simplistic: organised crime – and police corruption — remains a major problem in São Paulo and elsewhere. Although it may not feel like it at the moment in São Paulo, increasingly the Brazilian federal and state security authorities are acting more coherently against it, however.
- Alckmin slaps down Carvalho
Governor Alckmin dismissed as “unhappy” comments made by the federal secretary of the presidency, Gilberto Carvalho, comparing the violence in São Paulo to the situation in Palestine. Carvalho suggested that more people were dying in the violence in São Paulo than in the Palestine conflict. “Yesterday people were alarmed about the deaths in Palestine and the statistics show that in Greater São Paulo you have more people lost, murdered, than in one of the attacks there. People should be aware of this,” he stated after a ceremony at the presidential palace (Planalto) in Brasília on Tuesday.
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