Half a million Brazilians murdered between 1998 and 2008
Brazil is the sixth most murderous country in a list of 100 nations around the world, according to a new study sponsored by the government and released Thursday.
Brazil, which will host the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games trails only El Salvador, Colombia, Venezuela, Guatemala and the Virgin Islands for the number of homicides proportional to its population, said the report carried out by the Sangari Institute.
More than half a million Brazilians were murdered between 1998 and 2008, the year of the last census.
Most of the victims were young people aged 15 to 24, and two-thirds were of African descent and one-third of white European descent.
The proportion of slain youths went from 30 per 100,000 residents in 1998 to 52.9 in 2008, the study said, calling the preponderance of young murder victims an “epidemic.”
Brazil's justice minister, Jose Eduardo Cardozo, said his country's high murder rate, which was just ahead of Russia's, could be cut by stepping up campaigns to reduce the large number of firearms in circulation.
“The numbers show that when guns are given up, the murder index drops,” he said.
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That's awful high, but you can reduce by giving the youth better and more opportunities, so that they can improve their lives them self.
“The numbers show that when guns are given up, the murder index drops,”
Of course, but this political nonsense talk, I remember well when Brazilians voted somewhere in 2003 or 2004 against taking the guns away. Message was clear: Do not touch my gun(s), Do not try to take away from me, I have the right to protect myself, but you the government must solve the crime problems by doing your job.
Perhaps death penalty will reduce crime?
*note, Brazil has an indirect death penalty, by having over populated jails where criminals get frustrated for power or whatever other reason, and kill each other. Is that efficient or just damn evil?
When your car is taken from underneath you with its contents (sometimes the occupants, if there is ransome potential) - usually at gun-point, the common culture is to abandon the car intact rather than to burn it out as they do in England. This means the car (and the occupants) survive intact but at a serious cost.
Gang-on-gang and police-on-gang is the most reported, but common criminality is all-pervading - unsurprising when political killings, high-level institutionalised corruption and woeful legal process remain part of modern Brasil.
Brasil is nowhere near a firt-world country in its social and governmental structures, but the flip-side of being second/third world has some very good features - it is not all bad.
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