TrendSurge in armored car sales in Brazil
Brazilians have to live with exceedingly high levels of crime — in the late 1990s, for example, the UN ranked the Jardim Ângela section of São Paulo as the most violent neighborhood in the world — at the same time that government agencies, owing to corruption or incompetence, fail to provide security; São Paulo leads the country — and the world — in making and selling armored cars; tax breaks now allow the middle class to buy protection which once was the reserve of the rich
What are the first words that come to mind when someone mentions “Brazil”? It used to be “soccer” or “samba” or “carnival.” Some would also say “rain forest” or “bossa nova.” For those who love the country and follow the news more closely, the word, sadly, would be “crime” (see, for example, “Growing Crime in Central America Boon to Private Security Companies,” 9 February 2009 HS Daily Wire; and “Brazilians Hijack U.S. Military Satellite Transponders,” 22 April 2009 HS Daily Wire). The reasons are not difficult to understand. When he ran for the presidency of Brazil in 1990 (defeating Lula de Silva, who is the current president) Fernando Collor de Mello aptly described Brazil as “Capitalism without markets, socialism without planning.” It is difficult to think of another country in which the hand of the government bureaucracy is so heavy and regulations so suffocating, at the same time that the very same government fails consistently to provide even minimal level of public services to the vast majority of the citizenry, or ensure that the private sector provides them. These twin tendencies — heavy regulation and indifference to the welfare of the majority of the people — are both exacerbated by pervasive, ever-present corruption which infects all levels of government — from the president (Collor, who was elected in 1990, resigned in 1992 to avoid impeachment) through legislators, governors, and mayors, to the last policeman on the beat.
The writer Michael Lind coined the term “Brazilianization” to describe the resulting situation. He defines the toponym as “a high-tech feudal anarchy, featuring an archipelago of privileged whites in an ocean of white, black and brown poverty.” “Brazilianization”, Lind writes, is characterized by the increasing withdrawal of the mostly-White overclass into its “world of private neighborhoods, private schools, private police, private health care, and even private roads, walled off from the spreading squalor beyond.” The rich and well-connected members of the overclass can flourish in a decadent Brazil with Third World levels of inequality and crime.
Brazilianization leads to ever-rising levels of crime, for two reasons. The vast majority of people are so poor and so devoid of hope, that the wages of crime may appear to many — already alienated and disillusioned — as the only way out of their miserable condition. The second reason is that many in law enforcement — policeman, judges, city clerks — are themselves engaged in crime or, at a minimum, do nothing to stop it because they are on the payroll of
