Sadly, the more they remain the same. Here's some of the latest:
Pará remains a den of corruption and impunity:
Emival Barbosa Machado, 50, was shot three times Friday in the eastern city of Tucurui, the Globo TV network said. No arrests have been made.
Machado had often reported illegal logging and shipments of lumber in Para, a largely lawless state where American nun and rain forest defender Dorothy Stang was killed in 2005.
Machado told the environmental protection agency Ibama that locals were forced to deliver wood to loggers and were killed if they refused.
"He made various complaints to us, and we seized lumber and boats thanks to his reports," Anibal Picanco, Ibama's superintendent in Para, said in a televised interview.
The police in Rio are still trigger happy:
Police combed the alleyways of a Rio de Janeiro slum on Saturday in search of an alleged gang leader who escaped a raid that killed 11 people, including a 70-year-old woman.
Friday night's bloody operation failed to turn up the suspected head of the drug trade in the City of God shantytown, a man known as Tota, said a policeman who gave his name only as Sgt. Freitas in accordance with police policy.
"He's in hiding," Freitas said. "But we're there and looking for him.
Police said 10 of those killed on Friday were alleged drug gang members. Seventy-year-old bystander Jocelia Afonso was killed by a stray bullet, and two other elderly residents were wounded in the crossfire, Freitas said.
Sorry, but I don't believe them, As the article notes, 1,260 civilians were killed by police last year. That number should be unacceptable.
I suppose the people in Rio can some comfort in this news about Recife, but any such comfort should be cold:
This seaside city, a favourite of European tourists, gets much more attention for the shark attacks that have killed 18 people since 1992 than for its human killings - at least 2,617 in the metropolitan area last year. While tourists are warned not to take valuables to the beaches, as in most Brazilian cities, little is said about the murder rate mostly because the violence largely stays in the poor areas.
While Rio de Janeiro's bloody drug war makes international headlines, this balmy city of 1.5 million has a homicide rate of 90.9 per 100,000 - more than twice as deadly as Rio, according to the Latin American Technological Network's Map of Violence.
That last sentence in the first paragraph goes to the core of the problem. As the article notes, some journalists are trying to put faces on these victims here (link in Portuguese). I wish them much success, but they have a difficult struggle to really make a difference.
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