Women in Organized Crime in Brazil

Abstract

Brazil is a federative republic with 26 states, a federal district, and 5,560 municipalities, 200 to 300 of which can be considered large. The geographic area of Brazil is 8,514,215.34 km2, making it the fifth-largest country in the world. States and municipalities enjoy a high level of autonomy, not as much as in the United States, but greater than what is common in Europe. The 2000 census placed the Brazilian population at 169,544,443 (4 million more than in 1991): 86,120,890 women and 83,423,553 men; 17.6 million people were illiterate, especially in the northeast of the country. The number of women with higher education is not only growing, but has surpassed that of men; in 1998, for example, there were 184,352 women versus 116,409 men with higher education.1 The population is predominately urban, with 137,696,970 urban inhabitants as opposed to 31,847,473 rural inhabitants. In the area of public safety,2 data are not only scarce but also unreliable. In fact, many state governments tend to distribute only part of their data, fearful of it being divulged. This makes it impossible adequately to plan public state policies or to carefully examine the level of efficiency of the P.A. The latest prison census (1995) suffers from the same defects, and, moreover, according to the National Justice Secretariat of the Justice Ministry, they are not correct. For this reason, a federal system is being developed for computerized data collection from the states. In addition, resistance has been noted to making the already computerized data more transparent, particularly in the areas of security and penal justice, two of the most vulnerable institutions left from the last military dictatorship (1964 to 1985), since they were the ones most used to legitimize the criminal acts of those who held power at the time.