As Prosperity Rises in Brazil’s Northeast, So Does Drug Violence

Jenilson Dos Santos Conceição, 20, lay face down on the rough concrete,
his body twisted, sandals still on his feet, as the blood from his 14
bullet wounds stained the sloped alleyway.
A small crowd of residents watched dispassionately as a dozen police officers hovered around the young man’s lifeless body.

“He was followed until he was executed right here,” said Bruno Ferreira de Oliveira, a senior investigator. “They wanted to make sure he was dead.”

Mr. Conceição was the third person found murdered in the state of Bahia on that July day. By day’s end, 6 would die violently, and by month’s end 354 had been killed, the police said.

The geography of violence in Brazil has been turned on its head the past few years. In the southeast, home to Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo and many of the country’s most enduring stereotypes of shootouts and kidnappings, the murder rate actually dropped by 47 percent between 1999 and 2009, according to a study by José Maria Nóbrega, a political science professor at the Federal University of Campina Grande.

But here in the northeast, a poor region that benefited most from the wealth-transfer programs that former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva championed during his eight years in office, the murder rate nearly doubled in the same 10-year period, turning this area into the nation’s most violent, Dr. Nóbrega found.

Salvador, the region’s largest city, is one of Brazil’s biggest tourist draws, the gateway to some of the country’s most spectacular beaches. And like Rio, it is preparing to co-host the 2014 World Cup. So the authorities here are taking a page from Rio’s playbook, trying to grapple with the surge in violent crime by establishing permanent police units in violent areas frequented by drug traffickers.

The community police forces being installed here are similar to the “police pacification units” the Rio government has been using — to both great fanfare and controversy — since 2008 to stem drug violence there.

The northeast has long been plagued by crime, but the increase illustrates how Brazil’s economic boom is causing drug-related violence — the main cause for the homicide scourge — to migrate to other parts of the country as traffickers seek new markets, straining local police forces, according to both Dr. Nóbrega and local officials.

The same economic wave that put more money in millions of poor Brazilians’ pockets, especially here in the north, has also stimulated more drug trafficking and the deadly crime associated with it, officials here contended. Drug traffickers, realizing the potential of a stronger market, have focused more heavily on the northeast, resulting in drug wars and addiction-fueled violence, they said.

“If the consumer market is booming, the drug trafficker will come here as well,” said Jaques Wagner, the governor of Bahia. “The social progress in Brazil is visible. But at the same time we still have trouble with drug trafficking and with a lack of respect for human life.”

In the states of Bahia and Alagoas, especially, there has been an explosion of violence in the past decade. The number of murders in Bahia grew by 430 percent, to 4,709, between 1999 and 2008, Dr. Nóbrega said, and last year the state’s murder rate of 34.2 per 100,000 residents was higher than Rio’s, which fell to 29.8. (Bahia officials said that after leveling off in 2010, homicides were down 13 percent through July 2011 compared with the first seven months of 2010.)

Travel agencies say they are concerned about the rise in violent crime in Bahia’s slums — as well as the drug-fueled petty assaults in Pelourinho, Salvador’s colorful historic center.

“Salvador, right now, is not ready for the World Cup by any stretch, and they are starting to realize that,” said Paul Irvine, the director of Dehouche, a travel agency in Rio de Janeiro that organizes trips to both cities.