Security: Brazil vs. Colombia

I've never seen such a highly guarded city before. Every day there must be thousands if not tens of thousands of heavily armed guards everywhere. In front of government buildings, hotels, transportation centers, large corporate buildings, but also just on random street corners, basically looking bored and scratching their butts. I just want to ask them, "what are you protecting? the curb?"

And these aren't friendly neighborhood police officers with their billy clubs and whistles. Oh no. Many of them have assault rifles and are dressed either in full military fatigues or the more fashion-conscious urban SWAT team uniforms. The assault-weapon-to-person ratio (a widely accepted index of quality of life in Latin America) is higher here than in Rocinha, the favela where I used to live in Rio de Janeiro. I guess that compared to here, all those slums are mere retail storefronts. Colombia, on the other hand, is wholesale.

It's interesting comparing the security condition of Colombia to Brazil.

Going by the numbers, Colombia's situation seems far worse. While Brazil has pockets of urban squallor where government sovereignty enters only faintly or temporarily, Colombia has entire regions controlled by private armies, who extend their influence beyond these regions through bribery, extorsion, kidnappings, and bombings.

Brazil's drug trafficking groups and militias possess high-powered assault weapons, including automatic and semi-automatic machine guns, and here and there a grenade or other infantry explosive. The drug armies of Colombia, on the other hand, possess almost every tool available to modern militaries, including land vehicles, boats, planes, anti-aircraft artillery and rockets, radar systems, anti-personnel mines, and communication systems.

Yet when you compare how people feel about their personal security on a day-to-day basis, I'm sure Colombians would come out far ahead. The difference is that in Colombia the danger is confined largely to "la selva," the jungle, where the heroic military does battle against the evil drug lords (as the commercials here inform us). Even when there are acts of violence in major cities, the chances of being affected by them seem slim to none.

In Brazil, on the other hand, the "drug war" is seen (by the middle and upper classes) as simply one aspect of a larger class and race war occurring everywhere and at all times. Your assailant is just as likely to be a kid on the corner demanding your purse with a homemade shank in his hand as a big, bad drug trafficker. And yet it's all part of the same threat: the amorphous, mysterious combination of drugs, poverty, socialism, and black resentment.