Even Army Is Unsafe as Brazil Gangs Seek Firepower

Reuters ^ | 05/30/04 | Andrei Khalip

[Pikamax]

Even Army Is Unsafe as Brazil Gangs Seek Firepower Sun May 30, 2004 09:51 AM ET

By Andrei Khalip RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil (Reuters) - Military units in Rio de Janeiro are stepping up security at their bases -- not to repel foreign forces but to face a different enemy.

The threat comes from Rio's notoriously violent drug gangs who have raided military armories and stolen weapons. They are bolstering their arsenals for turf wars with other criminal groups and battles with security forces.

"There is a fear of gang raids on guards, checkpoints and even armories. We're training all the time to stop intrusions and the number of guards and posts has been doubled recently," said a sergeant at an army base on Rio's outskirts who did not want to be identified by name.

But the military is just one source of arms for criminal elements in Brazil, which is struggling to contain the violence amid a flood of black-market weapons imported from neighboring countries and diverted from legal domestic manufacturers.

Anti-gun groups say there are 20 million unregistered guns in Brazil, while police have records of 5 million guns.

In early May, heavily armed men raided an Air Force armory, stealing a van with assault rifles and taking guards hostage. A few days later, an armed group invaded the grounds of a paratroop unit but an alarm raised by guards scared them away.

"The bandits are challenging armed forces more and more by raiding armories and using heavy caliber weapons. That demoralizes troops and police," said political scientist Antonio Rangel Bandeira, head of the disarmament program at Viva Rio, a nongovernmental human rights group.

The federal government decided this month to send in army units to seize weapons from bandits in Rio's slums as a way of helping outgunned police.

Police have discovered slum arsenals complete with land mines, grenades, bazookas and even anti-tank rockets. A jailed drug lord was recorded negotiating the purchase of a U.S.-made surface-to-air Stinger missile.

Convoys of stolen vehicles used by gangs to transport drugs and arms at times have the same firepower as a motorized infantry squad, experts said.

GUNRUNNERS USE LEAKY BORDERS

Brazil's porous borders allow criminals to bring in weapons from neighboring countries. "It's like Swiss cheese with holes all around," Bandeira said.

One of the weapons coveted by criminals is the U.S.-made AR-15 assault rifle which sells for $4,000 on the black market. These and bigger U.S.-made weapons are smuggled across the Amazon jungle border from the tiny country of Suriname.

The land border in the rugged region is nearly impossible to control. Moreover, officials say there are more than 4,000 unregistered small aircraft flying over the Amazon, complicating their job further.

In the South, tourists and traders can buy guns fairly easily in the black market paradise of Paraguay or in Uruguay. They return to Brazil, which has stricter gun laws, via border towns or in convoys of buses that do not stop for checks.

Also in the South, Argentine army-issues firearms and grenades are often illegally sold to Brazil.

As a port city, Brazil's crime capital of Rio, in the Southeast, is a major transit point for drugs and guns.

"Guns from Europe and the United States come here often in exchange for drugs, shuttled on the same ships," said Professor Ignacio Cano, a violence expert with the Rio state university.

Small fishing boats in Rio's Guanabara Bay at night exchange contraband cargoes with giant transport ships anchored far from the shore as they await unloading in the port.

"On their way to the Mare slum for unloading they pass a Navy base where soldiers are playing basketball or just doing nothing at all," Bandeira said. "Really, the military could do more to prevent it instead of raiding slums later."

BRAZIL-MADE WEAPONS LEAD KILLING STATISTICS

In any case, imported weapons account for just over 25 percent of all the arms confiscated by police, meaning that the biggest problem is Brazil's own weaponry, principally locally made pistols and revolvers, most used in robberies.

"The fact is that we are making the arms that are killing us," Cano said, noting that Brazil is one of the world's leading small arms makers.

Firearms kill about 40,000 people a year in Brazil, more than some wars elsewhere. With about 3 percent of the world population, Brazil accounts for 11 percent of murders by firearms according to United Nations data.

Made mainly by private Forjas Taurus firm, whose products are hugely popular in the United States, pistols and revolvers are often "rerouted" while being transported to buyers.

Fake exporting firms also prosper by leaving the arms in the country to be sold to bandits. Paraguay, again, is a big worry as arms legally delivered there are re-imported to Brazil by gunrunners.

Finally, many arms bought legally end up in the hands of the criminals after being stolen or resold.

"The guns that changed ownership with very rare exceptions are used by criminals," said police superintendent Jose Milton Rodrigues, adding that there were few records of such changes.

[cyborg]

lord have mercy

[eastforker]

I understand where Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay borders meet there is a high influx of muslim population disguised as Europeans, living there with false passports and visas. With the heat we are puting on the middle east the rat terrorist have scurried to another corner of this earth, no doubt planning their next move. The terrorism network is global and will suffocate and destroy us if we do not stop it. Remember, their goal is to conquer the world and bring it under islamic rule.

[groo]

Actually, we have an "Arabian Community" composed by legal imigrants (almost all, i guess).
The good news is that here we never heard about terrorism, but the bad is that we have a big problem with organized crime.
I think our "Arabian Community" is something like your "Chinatown"