beyondbrics

These first two weeks of February are normally those during which the mood in Brazil picks up ahead of carnival.

But in the booming state of Bahia, in northeastern Brazil, the situation is anything but festive as gangsters have gone on the rampage in the capital Salvador amid a strike by police.

Here’s Bloomberg’s account:

About 1,000 soldiers sent by the federal government yesterday continued to surround the Bahia state assembly in Salvador, which hundreds of officers and their families have occupied for a week to demand higher wages. The homicide rate in the city of 2.7m, Brazil’s third-largest, has more than doubled to leave 100 dead since Jan. 31, when a third of Bahia’s 30,000 police walked off the job, according to the state government.

TV images of masked bandits holding up buses at gunpoint and troops firing tear gas at protesters caused a 10 per cent fall in hotel reservations in Bahia, said Pedro Galvao, head of the state’s travel agents association.

The strike has exposed Bahia’s law-and-order problem for what it is – a blight on the state’s development. As the economies of the poorer northeastern states have boomed, so have they become more violent.

Home to one of Brazil’s biggest carnival celebrations outside Rio de Janeiro, Salvador’s homicide rate in 2010 was 55.5 per 100,000 inhabitants compared to 6.5 per 100,000 in New York and 18.4 in Mexico. Clearly, even before the strike, something was wrong in Bahia.

As for the strike, there seems to be no easy solution. The police support a constitutional amendment that would establish a national minimum wage for all uniformed forces.

While one sympathises with the poorly paid officers, who are expected risk their lives confronting armed bandits, the problem is that any minimum national salary would only create more rigidity in Brazil’s already inflexible public spending system.

The federal budget is already committed by the constitution to minimum spending on various items and has little elbow room. Brazil’s poorer states, meanwhile, are also over-burdened with stifling public salary and pension bills.

The strike also comes at a time when the federal government is trying to limit budget increases so that it can reduce Brazil’s cripplingly high interest rates – a laudable exercise.

If the violence tells us anything, it is that even in the new Brazil, the old demons are sometimes still lurking not too far below the surface.

Related reading:
Drug gangs strike back in Rio’s ‘pacified’ slums, FT
Rio governor looks to turn the page on crime, beyondbrics
Security forces win control of Rio’s favelas, FT
Brazil security: there’s more work to do, beyondbrics