The Rio Carnaval or New Year celebrations would be the ideal
target for Bin Laden who applauded the attacks on innocent
tourists in Bali and Tunisia. Carnaval brings tens of thousands
of foreign tourists, mainly Europeans and Americans, to Brazil.
The streets of cities like Rio, Salvador and Recife are packed
for days and police resources are stretched.

John Fitzpatrick

President-elect Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has finally decided to take up his duties on January 1^st, instead of extending his honeymoon, and will be busy over the next couple of weeks. By mid-December he should have announced his key ministers and will also have had a meeting in Washington with US President George Bush. This will probably be a courtesy meeting and concentrate on trade issues but one wonders whether the Americans will raise the subject of international terrorism and security. Let us hope so because Lula is unlikely to do so.

Domestic security in Brazil means protecting citizens from the ever-present threat of being robbed, attacked, kidnapped and murdered by local thugs and gangsters, rather than international terrorists. Combating crime was a main platform issue for all the candidates in the election campaign but was quickly forgotten. Few citizens expect Lula to make any real difference to the appalling rates of crime in this country.

While there has been a lot of speculation about who will be the next finance or planning minister, and even Central Bank president, not much attention has been paid to the possibility of appointing a minister who would co-ordinate public safety within homeland security office, such as that just set up in the US.

Lula’s ally, Jose Genoíno, who failed to win the governorship of São Paulo, is tipped to be the National Security Secretary. If this happens, it sounds suspiciously like a sinecure to compensate Genoíno for failing to assume power in the country’s most prosperous state rather than a post with concrete demands.

Like the US, policing in Brazil is mainly a matter for the state and city governments. There is a small federal force, similar to the FBI, but with fewer resources. Lula's hands are, therefore, tied domestically but they are not tied in terms of combating international terrorism.

Some readers might be wondering why, if the next government (like this one) cannot cope with homegrown criminals, should it bother with international terrorists who, until now, have left Brazil alone? The answer is that Brazil will not be left alone for much longer and will need international understanding and allies. The size of its territory, its porous borders and multinational population combined with endemic corruption and inefficiency make it a perfect hiding place for international terrorists. There have already been some spill-over effects from the war in Colombia.

Guerrillas have crossed into Brazilian territory and several years ago there was a clash in which around half a dozen Brazilian troops were killed. Much of the drug trafficking, which finances the guerrillas, takes place on Brazilian territory. It is true that the kind of bombings and murders carried out by Moslem terrorists we have seen in other places such as the US, Israel, Tunisia, Karachi, Russia, Bali and, most recently, Mombasa, have not happened here. But that does not mean they will never happen and Brazil should be prepared before it is too late.

Brazil is a perfect soft target for Moslem extremists since it represents everything they hate. First of all, it is one of the largest Christian countries in the world, with the biggest Roman Catholic community. One of the most distasteful aspects of Osama Bin Laden's rhetoric is his hatred for other religions, particularly Christianity and Judaism. For him and his kind, Christians and Jews are “infidels” even though, like Moslems, they are all “people of the Book” i.e. they have the same origins. The fact that Brazil is an easy-going place where people of every race and religion live in harmony, combined with its hedonistic lifestyle, are other negative points in the eyes of fanatics like Bin Laden.

The Rio Carnaval or New Year celebrations would be the ideal target for Bin Laden who applauded the attacks on innocent tourists in Bali and Tunisia. Not only is the Carnaval the precursor to one of the main Christian feasts, Easter, but it also brings tens of thousands of foreign tourists, mainly Europeans and Americans, to Brazil. The streets of cities like Rio, Salvador and Recife are packed for days and police resources are stretched. For people who plotted sophisticated attacks like those on September 11 or against the US ship, the Cole, setting off bombs during the Carnaval would be child's play.

One hopes that the Brazilian authorities have taken all this into consideration and we will see tighter security for the next Carnaval and New Year celebrations in Rio. However, I would not bet on it. Three weeks ago, I went to São Paulo international airport to meet a friend arriving from Europe. The flight was one of four international flights to arrive very early on a Sunday morning at roughly the same time. While I waited at the arrival area I did not see a single policeman or any other uniformed member of a security force. The only people in “uniform” were porters. I saw two people enter the supposedly out-of-bound customs area unchecked.

The lackadaisical approach to security could have implications beyond the horrors of any kind of attack. It could easily lead to a worsening of relations with the US and other countries. There are already many Americans who feel that the Brazilian response to the events of September 11 was weak. There are also suspicions about Lula among some influential, right-wing commentators. One recent article, which appeared in the Washington Times, outraged Brazilians by accusing Lula of being an extremist revolutionary who could be planning to set up an “axis of evil” in Latin America, along with Cuba and Venezuela's erratic president, Hugo Chavez. This article, incidentally, was not written by some inarticulate rabble-rouser but by an academic, Constantine C. Menges, who is a senior fellow with the Hudson Institute and a former member of the US National Security Council.

There has also been a lot of interest in the international media in the so-called Three Frontiers region around the southwestern town of Foz de Iguaçu, where Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina meet. As well as being an area of outstanding natural beauty, which attracts many foreign tourists, this region is a center of smuggling and corruption. Security is extremely lax. I remember some years ago watching two men walk to the middle of the Friendship Bridge, linking Brazil and Paraguay, and topple a large cardboard box into the river far below. For all we know it could have contained a body. The box was swept away and the men returned to the Paraguay side unhampered. I crossed this border three times without showing a passport or being asked for one.

There is a large Arab (and Chinese) community, made up mainly of Lebanese merchants in Foz and the Paraguayan town of Ciudad del Leste. There is nothing new about this, since the Lebanese and Syrians have been coming to Brazil for a century and are present almost everywhere. Most of these immigrants were Christians fleeing the Moslem Ottomans. However, there were some Moslems among them, and during the Lebanese civil war in the 70s and 80s many new immigrants came to Brazil in search of a more peaceful life. For some time now, there have been suspicions by the US and Israel that this region has become a base for Moslem extremists. Attacks on the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires and a Jewish community center, which killed over 100 people, are said to have been planned in this region. In these cases the finger was pointed at Iran.

So far, nothing concrete has emerged from this and Argentina has been blamed for not doing enough to get to the bottom of these particular attacks. Nor, more recently, has there been any evidence that Moslem terrorism has been plotted here. However, just as Indonesia was criticized for not taking claims of terrorist groups operating in its territory seriously so could Brazil if the worst comes to the worst. It must be obvious to this and the next government that any kind of terrorist event in Brazil will lead to accusations by the US and other countries that Brazil is soft on terrorism and has done nothing to curtail extremist activities in the Foz de Iguaçu region.

This may seem unfair to Brazilians but it is a fact. It is up to Lula and his new government to state clearly that it takes terrorism seriously and is doing what it can to prevent it being planned from or happening in Brazilian territory. It could start by making public declarations of condemnation of terrorists’ attacks, show it is willing to co-operate actively in the fight against terrorism and tighten up security at airports and other soft targets. At the time of writing this article the body of a young Brazilian who was killed in the Bali blast is due to arrive back in the country. There were also Brazilian casualties in the attacks on the US. This shows that Brazilians are as much at risk from terrorism as foreigners.

In legal and practical terms, Brazil should be able to tighten security without too much trouble. The high crime rate means that hidden cameras are everywhere, identity checks are required to enter buildings and, by law, everyone has to carry an identity card. The official police forces are backed up by the private security industry, which actually employs more than the official sector.

Rich individuals employ bodyguards and armor-plated vehicles are common. Brazilians are also used to be being bossed around and the kind of influential bodies which protect individual rights in other countries are non existent. Brazilians also have to vote and be members of trade unions or business syndicates, whether they want to or not. This is not meant to be cynical but just to show that the authorities have strong legal powers. What we now need is political will before it is too late.

John Fitzpatrick is a Scottish journalist who first visited Brazil in 1987 and has lived in São Paulo since 1995. He writes on politics and finance and runs his own company, Celtic Comunicações—www.celt.com.br, which specializes in editorial and translation services for Brazilian and foreign clients. You can reach him at jf@celt.com.br

© John Fitzpatrick 2002

You can also read John Fitzpatrick's articles in Infobrazil, at www.infobrazil.com 

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