Most dangerous city in the South had 91 murders – 07/24/2023 – Panel

Data from the Public Security Yearbook for 2023 showed the growth of violence in the southern states of Brazil – contrary to the national reduction of 2.4%, the region had 3.4% more intentional violent deaths.

In the list of the 50 most violent cities with more than 100,000 inhabitants, the presence of Rio Grande (RS) stands out as the 24th on the list, the largest in the southern region. There were 91 homicides in the Rio Grande do Sul municipality of 191,900 inhabitants in 2022.

In 2022, Rio Grande experienced a brutal year, according to the SSP, due to a dispute between rival drug dealers. With 11 homicides in January alone, the then lieutenant governor and secretary of Public Security, delegate Ranolfo Vieira Júnior, transferred the Pelotas Shock Police Battalion to the neighboring municipality.

It did little good. There were 6 homicides in February and 13 in March. In May, there was a new explosion of crimes, with another 13 homicides. Amid the conflict between factions, one of them forged an escape plan for a rival leader, arrested in Charqueadas (RS), which would involve explosives and the help of a helicopter.

The idea was to get the Government of Rio Grande do Sul to transfer the convict to another state as a precaution, paving the way for the rival group. The Civil Police, however, discovered the hoax.

Another critical point of the crisis in Rio Grande was the execution of a 14-year-old teenager in September. The executioners filmed the boy’s “trial” on the edge of Praia do Cassino, executed him with more than 30 shots and distributed the video on social networks.

According to the current sub-secretary of Public Security of RS, Mario Ikeda, a policing and investigation effort managed to reduce homicides in the city by 60% in the first semester. Still, the 23 homicides in the first half of 2023 are close to the entire year of 2021, when there were 28.

At the end of 2022, the Government of RS announced the installation of a specialized police station in the municipality, restructuring the police stations that already existed in the region. According to the SSP, it went into operation in early 2023. Over the previous year, the Civil Police in the region implemented a task force with agents from other police stations to investigate the homicides.

Another city that worries the authorities in Rio Grande do Sul is the capital Porto Alegre, which turned out to be the most violent among the South, Southeast and Midwest regions, with 30 violent deaths per 100,000 inhabitants. In Rio de Janeiro, this index is 21.2. On Friday (21), a human head was found on a public road in the Vila Cruzeiro neighborhood. The Civil Police attributed the death to the dispute between drug dealers in the region.

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