Booming Brazil struggles to get a grip on crime

By Stuart Grudgings

RIO DE JANEIRO (Reuters) - Stretched out on a beach framed by the sparkling Atlantic Ocean and a violence-plagued slum in the background, Pedro Mena Barreto speaks of crime with a sense of hopelessness that is common in Brazil.

He remembers when he could leave his windows open at night and hear the birds in the forest behind his apartment in Rio de Janeiro's beach district of Leme. Now he is kept awake by gunfire between gangs fighting for control of the drug trade.

"You need to have drastic measures, but justice here is soft and slow," said Barreto, a 76-year-old doctor who was sunbathing on the beach near Copacabana, not far from where gang battles have terrified residents in recent days.

"I don't see anything that's going to solve this."

Despite President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva's achievements in nurturing a strong economy and social programs that are lifting millions out of poverty, crime remains a stubborn problem on which his government has made little impact.

After Brazil's economic policies received an international seal of approval with investment grade status last week, former union leader Lula said he wanted foreigners to put more money into factories to create more jobs.

But analysts say crime is effectively a tax on such investment in many parts of a country that has one of the world's highest murder rates and where there are more private security guards than police.

The Institute of Applied Economic Research, a government think tank, says that criminal violence cost Brazil the equivalent of 5.1 percent of its GDP in 2004, including lost income and private security measures such as the armored cars popular in big cities.

The same study estimated that 24 million crimes were committed in 2003, but only 28 percent of them were reported to police, who are poorly equipped and often accused of corruption.

"A lot of people are afraid of reporting crimes because they don't have confidence in the police -- you don't know if the police are going to accuse you," said Christiane, a teacher who said she has witnessed two gun murders in her north Rio neighborhood and who didn't want to give her surname.

SAO PAULO AHEAD

A short-lived national campaign against guns helped push the rate down for two years after 51,043 people were murdered in 2003, but the numbers are on the rise again despite the healthy economy, according to sociologist Julio Jacobo who tracks violence in Brazil for the Latin American Technological Information Network.

Lax enforcement of sentencing means that murderers sentenced to 18 years often walk free after about three, said Ib Teixeira, a researcher and writer on crime.

"Killing a person in Brazil has the same value as killing an insect," he said.

In the latest example of what critics see as a culture of impunity, a man convicted for ordering the murder of U.S. Catholic nun Dorothy Stang in the Amazon in 2005 was acquitted on Tuesday in a decision condemned by rights activists and by Lula himself.