Brazilians demand crackdown on crime
RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil – The annual Carnival festivities get under way this weekend, but many Brazilians are in no mood to party.
Thousands have taken to the streets to demand tougher action against crime after the horrific death Feb. 7 of a 6-year-old boy, Joao Helio Fernandes Vieites, who was caught in his seat belt and dragged beside his mother’s car for 4 miles through Rio de Janeiro’s streets during a botched carjacking.
His death has become a symbol for Brazil’s out-of-control crime problem in a city in which bloodshed is a daily occurrence.
“The sad thing is this death was just another one,” said butcher Marcone Duarte, who joined hundreds of mourners Wednesday in downtown Rio de Janeiro during a memorial service.
On Wednesday, Guaracy Paes Falcao, 42, vice president of the Salgueiro samba band, was fatally shot before dawn while leaving the group’s headquarters.
The violence has fueled desperation among many Cariocas – as Rio residents are called – that their world-famous city is in serious trouble.
Residents had been recovering from a wave of violence that had upped the city’s casualty rate. Experts blame cocaine trafficking and the growing firepower of the city’s powerful drug gangs for much of the violence.
Brazil has the world’s highest rate of firearms deaths and one of the highest homicide rates. Criminal gangs are in virtual control of large parts of the country.
Rio state, which includes the city of Rio de Janeiro and outlying areas, is the country’s deadliest, with a homicide rate in 2005 of about 62 for every 100,000 residents. The murder rate in the United States was 5.6 per 100,000 people that year.
Five men, ages 16 to 23, have been arrested in connection with Joao’s killing. The police allege that a witness who drove up beside the speeding car said he’d heard one of the suspects call the boy his Judas doll, a puppet that’s ritualistically beaten and incinerated during Easter ceremonies.
About a thousand people, including Joao’s family, filled Rio’s Candelaria cathedral Wednesday to remember the boy and voice their outrage. Many demanded that legislators increase the maximum sentence for juvenile offenders and lower the age at which people can be prosecuted.
On the church’s steps, 19-year-old Livia Serpa held a sign that read “Peace.”
Serpa said that despite the tragedy, celebrating Carnival was an act of survival this year.
“We can’t let the violence stop us from living our lives,” she said. “We have to celebrate and show the world we aren’t defeated yet.”