A criminal and the woman with whom he was returning from a funk dance in Rio de Janeiro were killed in an ambush with a hundred shots and five cars this Saturday early in the morning, according to a Rio de Janeiro newspaper.
The case is striking because it is spectacular and because the press reports it, but the vast majority of the 41,069 murdered in 2021 were not news then.
They are now because it is the lowest number of violent deaths since 15 years ago, when the Forum Brasileiro da Segurança Pública began collecting the data.
This balance, published by G1, a digital media outlet of the Globo group, does not include deaths in police operations.
The little more than 41,000 deaths represent 7% less than those added the previous year.
That is, more than 3,000 deaths less.
Specialists attribute the reduction to a combination of factors, among which is not the pandemic, but "the professionalization of the drug market", that governments have greater control over criminals, an appeasement of the war between gangs, public security policies and social as those developed in Pernambuco, Espirito Santo or Ceará and a dwindling youth due to demographic change.
The most powerful criminal organization in Brazil, the First Command of the Capital, is exporting to the rest of the territory the model that it implemented in São Paulo more than two decades ago, according to what Bruno Paes Manso, from the University of São Paulo, explains to G1.
The PCC works like a brotherhood of criminals with rigid rules, its own system with which it imposes its justice and also regulates prices.
Its leaders direct 30,000 dues-paying members from prison.
The PCC and the second most powerful gang, the Comando Vermelho, from Rio de Janeiro, and their respective territorial allies waged a brutal war that watered the North and Northeast with blood.
The dispute over the drug routes from the producing countries through the Amazon and to the Atlantic coast left more than 55,000 deaths per year in the 2014-2017 period.
The moment one of the groups becomes strong in a territory, the violence decreases.
Public security is one of the priority issues for Brazilians, who will elect a president in October.
The former judge and candidate Sergio Moro, who has been campaigning for weeks, does not usually miss the opportunity to recall that in his year as Minister of Justice, murders fell by 19%, which experts link to a truce between the PCC and the CV.
And this Monday some Bolsonarists have been quick to highlight the drop in murders despite the fact that weapons licenses have doubled in the three years that Jair Bolsonaro has been in power, a factor that, according to critics, was going to trigger violence.
This annual balance excludes deaths in police operations, which in Brazil in 2020 were more than 6,400 people.
It is one of the countries in the world with the highest rate.
Some States are managing to reduce this police lethality by installing cameras in the officers' uniforms.
Returning to the spectacular ambush of the weekend, the Rio de Janeiro Police are convinced that it is part of the fight between local paramilitary groups, which are entering the drug business, but are dedicated above all to extortion and offering services such as the Internet or illegal transportation.
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