From the success of super-minister Sérgio Moro to the failure of 'hugs, not bullets': two different signs in the first year of populist presidents in Brazil and Mexico

• AMLO promised to end the steady annual rise in homicides seen under his two predecessors, but over the course of 2019 he has accentuated it.

• Improved figures in Brazil are overshadowed by an increase in accidental deaths in police operations and the issue increase in the number of provisional inmates in prisons.

• In the first months of 2020 in both Mexico and Brazil homicides have increased, but the Covid-19 confinement could affect the annual statistics.

▲ The Mexican president at the launch of the National Guard in June 2019 [Gov. of Mexico].

report SRA 2020 / Túlio Dias de Assis and Marcelina Kropiwnicka[PDF version].

One of Latin America's best-known conflicts is its high level of violence, often as a consequence of the strong presence of organised crime. Within this regional paradigm, not all presidents deal with the problem of crime in the same way. While some opt for a more passive policy, others prefer to bet on an iron fist, despite the risks that this may entail. 2019 was the first year in office of Andrés Manuel López Obrador and Jair Bolsonaro, populist leaders of opposing ideologies, who came to power barely a month apart. In Brazil homicides went down, in Mexico they went up.

Mexico

There were a total of 35,588 victims of intentional homicide in Mexico in 2019. This means that, as 2019 drew to a close, a record high in homicides nationwide was left behind. In doing so, President López Obrador, known by the abbreviation AMLO, failed to deliver on his election promise to reduce violence. Although he maintained his approval rating at 72% at the end of 2019, his approval has been damaged in the aftermath by his management of the coronavirus health crisis.

Three previous governments had favoured military combat against drug cartels, but López Obrador established a divergent security strategy upon his arrival, focusing more on the self-described approach of "abrazos, no balazos" (hugs, not bullets). This approach led to the release of Ovidio Guzmán, son of Joaquín 'El Chapo' Guzmán, which the government argued was motivated by a desire to prevent an escalation of cartel violence. In addition, AMLO created the National Guard, a new security force that has been deploying tens of thousands of troops, formerly from the army and federal police, to tackle organised crime in areas core topic across the country. While the new strategy aims to strengthen security and tackle violence in the cities, it has so far failed to curb the barbarity. The president has even reneged on another promise and announced that for the time being the army will remain on the streets sharing the role of citizen security.

The issue of intentional homicides in 2019 was 34,582, up 2.5% from 33,743 the previous year; femicides reached 1,006, up 10.3% from 912 in 2018, according to the National Public Security System (SNSP). Although in previous years, during presidents Enrique Peña Nieto's term in office, there were larger increases - previous increases were 15.7% (from 2017 to 2018), 26.5% (from 2016 to 2017) and 25.1% (from 2015 to 2016) - the 2019 homicides represent the highest overall figure recorded in the last two decades. The figures from the mandate of Felipe Calderón (PAN), the first to take the army to the streets to fight drugs, were surpassed in the mandate of Peña Nieto (PRI) and now there has been an increase again in the first year of López Obrador (Morena). All three criticised the security management of their predecessors and all three failed in their purpose (AMLO at least for the moment).

On average, 2,881 murders were committed per month in 2019; the highest issue recorded was 2,993 murders in June and the lowest issue was 2,731 in April. The state with the most homicides was Guanajuato, followed by the state of Mexico and leave California. In terms of homicide rate per 100,000 inhabitants, Colima ranked first with 98.3, followed by leave California (80.6) and Chihuahua (68.7).

Much of the violence that has occurred across the country is directly related to gang formations and drug traffickers, and the struggle for dominance of local markets. It is therefore not surprising that Colima, home to the strategic port of Manzanillo, a focus of illicit activities, is the state at the top of the blacklist. In addition, there is partnership between criminal groups on both sides of the US-Mexico border for the mutual supply of drugs and weapons. Seventy per cent of homicides are committed with firearms, many of which have been smuggled across the border. The status not only undermines security in Mexico but also in the US. 

Donald Trump has urged Mexico to "wage war" against the cartels. In November he announced that he would officially label them as terrorist organisations. "The United States is ready, willing and able to engage and do the work quickly and effectively," Trump tweeted at the time. However, he ended up postponing the proclamation at the request of the Mexican president.

In the first quarter of 2020, homicides continued their upward trend, with 269 homicides more than in the same quarter of the previous year. While the social distancing measures taken during the Covid-19 crisis may change the trend in the second semester, the reduced investment in security to direct the public expense towards the health and economic sectors may push up the issue murder rate.

Brazil

In contrast to Mexico, Brazil has achieved a series of more positive results, following a trend to leave already experienced in the last year of Michel Temer's presidency. This is mainly due to the measures taken by the until recently appointed Minister of Justice and Public Security Sérgio Moro, the former federal judge in charge of Operation Car Wash. Bolsonaro's choice of Moro as minister was not random, since Moro is considered by a large part of the population as a hero in the fight against corruption, due to the various trials he led against members of Odebrecht and the political class , including the one that led to the imprisonment of former president Lula da Silva. Having promised in his campaign a tough hand against crime and corruption, Bolsonaro decided to merge the ministries of Justice and Public Security and offer Moro its leadership.

issue The decision was a wise one, and one of those that best sustained the Brazilian president's popularity in his first year in office. test of this was the significant drop in violent crime, including a 19% drop in the number of homicides issue . This is one of the most worrying indicators in Brazil, as it is the country with the highest issue gross annual homicide rate in the world. In 2018 homicides were 51,558, while in 2019 they fell to 41,635, a decrease of 19.2%. Excluding larcenies from these figures, the decrease was from 49,120 to 29,750.

In addition, cargo thefts were down by 35% and drug seizures increased by 81%. In Rio de Janeiro, one of the most problematic states in terms of security, larceny (robbery followed by death) was reduced by 34% and seizures of illegal weapons increased by 32%.

One of the measures that contributed most to this decline was the integration of the different institutions of state security forces at all levels: federal, state and municipal. This has allowed for a higher level of coordination, especially significant in the area of intelligence services, where information now flows more easily between institutions. Furthermore, in this same area, it is worth highlighting the investments made in Big Data and intelligence systems. The main focus has been on facial recognition and video surveillance systems.

Another important policy has been the transfer of gang leaders to more isolated prisons, thus preventing their possible communication and coordination with gang members on the outside.

Finally, mention should be made of the so-called "anti-crime package": a series of laws and reforms to the penal code that increase the power of the security forces to act, as well as establishing harsher penalties for violent crime, organised crime and corruption. The project C finally adopted by the Brazilian Parliament is a far cry from Moro's original proposal , but it has contributed, albeit to a lesser extent, to the drop in crime.

On the other hand, these positive figures were accompanied by a worrying increase in accidental deaths in police operations, with several cases of children killed by stray bullets in shoot-outs between drug gangs and security forces going viral. In addition, the issue number of provisional prisoners in Brazilian jails increased by 4.3% compared to the previous year. All this has encouraged criticism from most of the civil service examination and various national and international human rights NGOs.

In the first two months of 2020, 548 more deaths were recorded than in the same period of the previous year. This spike occurred in 20 of Brazil's 27 federal states, suggesting that this is a general trend rather than a sporadic episode. However, due to the mandatory quarantine library porter in several states and municipalities, homicides fell again, making any extrapolation for this year as a whole difficult. Another factor to take into account for 2020 is the recent resignation of Minister Moro; without him, the likelihood that the reforms initiated in the first year will continue is greatly reduced.

Regional security in the Americas has been the focus of concern over the past year in Venezuela. We also review Russia and Spain's arms sales to the region, Latin America's presence in peacekeeping missions, drugs in Peru and Bolivia, and homicides in Mexico and Brazil.

▲ Igor Sechin, director Rosneft executive, and Nicolás Maduro, in August 2019 [Miraflores Palace].

report SRA 2020 / summary executive[PDF version].

Throughout 2019, Latin America had several hotspots of tension - violent street protests against economic measures in Quito, Santiago de Chile and Bogotá, and against political decisions in La Paz and Santa Cruz, for example - but as these conflicts subsided (in some cases, only temporarily), the constant problem of Venezuela as the epicentre of insecurity in the region re-emerged.

With Central American migration to the United States reduced to a minimum by the Trump administration's restrictive measures, it has been Venezuelan migrants who have continued to fill the roadsides of South America, moving from one country to another, and now number more than five million refugees. The difficulties that this population increase entails for the host countries led several of them to increase their pressure on the government of Nicolás Maduro, approving in the OAS the activation of the Inter-American Reciprocal Treaty of attendance (TIAR). But that did not push Maduro out of power, nor did the assumption in January 2019 by Juan Guaidó of the position as president-in-charge of Venezuela (recognised by more than fifty countries), the failed coup a few months later or the alleged invasion of Operation Gideon in May 2020.

While Maduro may appear stabilised, the geopolitical backdrop has been shifting. The year 2019 saw Rosneft gain a foothold in Venezuela as an arm of the Kremlin, once China had stepped back as a credit provider. The risk of not recovering everything it had borrowed meant that Russia acted through Rosneft, benefiting from trading up to 80 per cent of the country's oil. However, US sanctions finally forced the departure of the Russian energy company, so that in early 2020 Maduro had no other major extra-hemispheric partner to turn to than Iran. The Islamic republic, itself subject to a second sanctions regime, thus returned to the close relationship it had maintained with Venezuela in the first period of international punishment, cultivated by the Chávez-Ahmadinejad tandem.

This Iranian presence is closely watched by the United States (coinciding with a deployment of the Southern Command in the Caribbean), which is always alert to any boost that Hezbollah - an Iranian proxy - might receive in the region. In fact, 2019 marked an important leap in the disposition of Latin American countries against this organisation, with several of them classifying it as a terrorist organisation for the first time. Argentina, Paraguay, Colombia and Honduras approved such a declaration, following the 25th anniversary in July of the AMIA bombing attributed to Hezbollah. Brazil and Guatemala pledged to do so shortly. Several of these countries have drawn up lists of terrorist organisations, which allows them to pool their strategies.

The destabilisation of the region by status in Venezuela has a clear manifestation in the reception and promotion of Colombian guerrillas in that country. issue In August, former FARC leader Iván Márquez and some other former leaders announced, presumably from Venezuelan territory, their return to arms. Both this dissident core of the FARC and the ELN had begun to consolidate at the end of the year as Colombian-Venezuelan groups, with operations not only in the Venezuelan border area, but also in the interior of the country. Both groups together have some 1,700 troops in Venezuela, of which almost 600 are Venezuelan recruits, thus constituting another shock force at Maduro's service.

Russia's exit from Venezuela comes at a time when Moscow is apparently less active in Latin America. This is certainly the case in the field of arms sales. Russia, which had become a major exporter of military equipment to the region, has seen its sales decline in recent years. While during the golden decade of the commodity boom several countries spent part of their significant revenues on arms purchases (which also coincided with the spread of the Bolivarian tide, better linked to Moscow), the collapse in commodity prices and some governmental changes have meant that in the 2015-2019 period Latin America is the destination of only 0.8 per cent of Russia's total arms exports. The United States has regained its position as the largest seller to the rest of the continent.

Spain occupies a prominent position in the arms market, as the seventh largest exporter in the world. However, it lags behind in the preferences of Latin American countries, to which it sells less defence materiel than it would be entitled to in terms of the overall volume of trade it maintains with them. Nevertheless, the level of sales increased in 2019, after a year of particularly low figures. In the last five years, Spain has sold 3.6% of its global arms exports to Latin America; in that period, its main customers were Mexico, Ecuador, Brazil, Peru and Colombia.

Better military equipment might suggest greater participation in UN peacekeeping missions, perhaps as a way of keeping an army active in a context of a lack of regional deployments. However, of the total of 82,480 troops in the fourteen UN peacekeeping missions at the beginning of 2020, 2,473 came from Latin American countries, which represents only 3 per cent of the total contingent. Moreover, almost half of staff was contributed by one country, Uruguay (45.5% of regional troops). Another small country, El Salvador (12%), is the next most committed to missions, while large countries are under-represented, notably Mexico.

In terms of public safety, 2019 brought the good news of a reduction in homicides in Brazil, which fell by 19.2% compared to the previous year, in contrast to what happened in Mexico, where they rose by 2.5%. If in his first year as president, Jair Bolsonaro scored an important achievement, thanks to the management of the super security minister Sérgio Moro (a success tarnished by the increase in accidental deaths in police operations), in his first year Andrés Manuel López Obrador failed to fulfil one of his main electoral promises and was unable to break the upward trend in homicides that has invariably occurred annually throughout the terms of office of his two predecessors.

In terms of the fight against drug trafficking, 2019 saw two particularly positive developments. On the one hand, coca crops were eradicated for the first time in the VRAEM, Peru's largest production area. Given its difficult accessibility and the presence of Shining Path strongholds, the area had previously been excluded from the operations of subject. On the other hand, the change of presidency in Bolivia meant, according to the US, a greater commitment by the new authorities to combat illicit coca cultivation and interdict drug shipments coming from Peru. In recent years Bolivia has become the major cocaine distributor in the southern half of South America, connecting Peruvian and Bolivian production with the markets of Argentina and especially Brazil, and with its export ports to Europe.

Venezuelans leaving the country to look for a livelihood in a place of refuge [UNHCR UNHCR].

[download the complete PDF]

report SRA 2020 / presentation

The Covid-19 pandemic has radically altered security assumptions around the world. The emergence of the coronavirus moved from China to Europe, then to the United States and then to the rest of the Western Hemisphere. Already economically handicapped by its dependence on commodity exports since the beginning of the Chinese slowdown, Latin America suffered from the successive restrictions in the different geographical areas, and finally also entered a crisis of production and consumption and a health and labour catastrophe. The region is expected to be one of the hardest hit, with effects also in the field of security.

This annual report , however, focuses on American regional security in 2019. Although in some respects it includes events from the beginning of 2020, and therefore some early effects of the pandemic, the impact of the pandemic on issues such as regional geopolitics, state budgetary difficulties, organised crime and citizen security can be found at report next year.

To the extent that other security developments in 2019 have been somewhat transitory in recent months, Venezuela has remained the main focus of regional insecurity over the past year. At report we analyse Iran's return to the Caribbean country, after first China and then Russia preferred not to see their own economic interests harmed; we also note the consolidation of the ELN and part of the ex-FARC as binational Colombian-Venezuelan groups.

In addition, we highlight the progress made in the first time that Hezbollah has been designated by several countries as a terrorist organisation, group , and we provide figures on the drop in Russian arms sales to Latin America and the relative lack of marketing in the region of the defence material produced by Spain. We also quantify the contribution of Latin American troops to UN peacekeeping missions, as well as Bolsonaro's success and AMLO's failure in the evolution of homicides in Brazil and Mexico. In terms of drug trafficking, 2019 saw the first coca crop eradication operation in the VRAEM, the most complicated area of Peru in the fight against drugs.