Opinion: Teenage deaths still haunt Brazil

A study released recently in Brazil shows the tragic extent of violence in the country, despite the great social and economic advances it has achieved in the last two decades.

The report states that violence will lead to the death of more than 33,000 12- to 18-year-olds between 2006 and 2013. It also says that for every 1,000 teenagers, 2.03 die every year as a result of violence. Young Brazilian men are 12 times more likely to die than women, and a young black teenager is almost three times more likely to die violently than a white one. In 2006, when the data was collected, homicides were the cause of 46% of the deaths of young Brazilians.

Take the story of Hélio José da Silva Ezequiel, a black Brazilian. He was murdered in April 2007 when he was 25 years old, coming back from the hospital where he visited his seventh child, a girl, who had just been born. The police said Ezequiel was probably taken for a drug dealer by a rival gang which was trying to seize the neighbourhood. His sister Edna Ezequiel had, 43 days before Hélio’s death, seen her 13-year-old daughter Alana killed by a stray bullet in the same area.

Would curtailing the drug market have any significant effect on violence? Is it a matter of political will? What efforts are being made to confront poverty and its links to violence?

All these issues can be understood by considering the gap between state and nation in Brazil. Despite the country’s recent social and economic advances – especially after the fall of the military regime and the establishment of a democratic one – many Brazilians entered the 21st century without the basic benefits a state should provide.

Young black people are dying in higher numbers not only because they are poorer than white people or don’t have the same opportunities as them, but also because there is little policing in their communities, education and healthcare are poor and they don’t even have their rights as citizens guaranteed by the justice system.

Public institutions are way behind the private ones in quality. Public healthcare is, in general, catastrophic. To provide medical, hospital and ambulance services to the country’s 180 million people, as the constitution requires, the federal healthcare system spends about $20bn per year. This is almost the same amount that the private sector spends to provide the same services to the 40 million people capable of paying the bills.

There is no universal access to justice or even to the knowledge necessary to use the legal system. In 2008, for example, 70m cases passed through the Brazilian justice system but only 25m came to trial. Justice in Brazil is hard to access, slow and very expensive, even for the rich.

In education, there has been a major improvement in the number of children going to school in the last few years. However, between 14 and 18 years old, the percentage of young people in education drops radically, to less than 50% by school leaving age. Public schools are so bad that they can’t keep their students.

Every year, there are 45,000 violent deaths in Brazil, 80% of which involve firearms. The police are violent (in the state of Rio de Janeiro alone, they kill more than 1,000 people per year, more than 65% of whom show clear signs of execution); seen as widely corrupt (from 2003 to 2007, 854 military police officers were arrested due to links with organised crime); and poorly organised. Since the responsibility for public security in Brazil lies with each state, the federal government avoids being part of a complex issue that entails more political costs than benefits.

All over the country, public security institutions are fighting hard to prove they are not a general failure. This is all despite the fact that taxes in Brazil take 36% of income – as much as in New Zealand (36.5%), Germany (38%), or the United Kingdom (39%), more than in Australia (30.5%) and Switzerland (30.1%), and close to the OECD 2005 average of 36.2%.

In a country where infrastructure, industrialisation and economic development have been in the hands of an elite that has always controlled the state, consumers have always been preferred to citizens. Former president Fernando Henrique Cardoso and current president Luis Inácio Lula da Silva have both started major changes, giving great importance to issues such as public education and healthcare, poverty and economic stability. But the challenges are such that it will take more than two presidents to complete this work.

Arthur Ituassu is professor at the Pontifícia Universidade Católica in Rio de Janeiro.