A ghastly attempt to boost TV ratings

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I'm speechless that someone would actually do this! It sounds like the wild, wild west!
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Brazil TV host turns himself in
A Brazilian TV presenter accused of ordering killings to boost his programme's ratings has turned himself in to police after going on the run.

Authorities had been looking for Wallace Souza since he disappeared when an arrest warrant was issued.

Mr Souza, also a former local politician, is accused of murder and drug trafficking offences. He denies the allegations.

He enjoyed legislative immunity until stripped of a political post last week.

"Souza turned himself in to the police this morning," a police spokesman in the Amazonas state capital, Manaus, told AFP news agency.

'Removing rivals'

Mr Souza has insisted that the accusations were an attempt by rivals to smear him and that there was no evidence to back them.

Authorities in the Amazonas region claim he ordered several killings in order to get rid of his rivals, while afterwards TV crews from his programme would mysteriously arrive at the crime scenes before the police, enabling them to secure graphic footage.

Police are reported to have become suspicious about Mr Souza's programme last year, when a report showed the body of a suspected drug dealer burning in the woods long before police arrived.

One of the arrest warrants described Mr Souza - a police officer whose career ended in disgrace - as the "mentor" of a gang that killed rival drug traffickers.

He is accused of being part of a criminal grouping which includes 40 members who face charges of murder.

Authorities say the former TV star's alleged crimes removed potential drug-trafficking rivals and also increased audience figures for his "Canal Livre" programme.

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http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/10/05/091005fa_fact_anderson
If you read the New Yorker article called Gangland , you'll see that lives aren't worth much in Rio or the rest of Brazil. The narco gangs and police hit squads are killing thousands of people a day...they're going around in trucks to pick up the bodies.

1 Reply

@Reyn,

Reyn wrote:

He enjoyed legislative immunity until stripped of a political post last week.

That could be an interesting post all by itself.

0 Replies

@panzade,

panzade wrote:

If you read the New Yorker article called Gangland , you'll see that lives aren't worth much in Rio or the rest of Brazil. The narco gangs and police hit squads are killing thousands of people a day...they're going around in trucks to pick up the bodies.

This is complete nonsense. Rio has about 5,000 murders a year, not "thousands of people a day". Brazil's homicide rate (23.8 per 100,000 residents) is lower than Washington DC's (30.8 per 100,000 residents), and the US has several large cities with a higher homicide rate than even Rio to put it into more realistic perspective.

2 Replies

@Robert Gentel,

Robert Gentel wrote:

panzade wrote:
If you read the New Yorker article called Gangland , you'll see that lives aren't worth much in Rio or the rest of Brazil. The narco gangs and police hit squads are killing thousands of people a day...they're going around in trucks to pick up the bodies.

This is complete nonsense. Rio has about 5,000 murders a year, not "thousands of people a day". Brazil's homicide rate (23.8 per 100,000 residents) is lower than Washington DC's (30.8 per 100,000 residents), and the US has several large cities with a higher homicide rate than even Rio to put it into more realistic perspective.

Dude, gotta compare Apples with other Apples.

Rio's Homicide rate is 33 per 100k - and that's down from 39 last year.

http://www.usatoday.com/sports/olympics/2009-09-19-rio-crime_N.htm

Can't compare the whole country to the worst city in America. Unfair. Though you are right to say that Detroit and Newark are worse...

Cycloptichorn

1 Reply

@Cycloptichorn,

Cycloptichorn wrote:

Dude, gotta compare Apples with other Apples.

Rio's Homicide rate is 33 per 100k - and that's down from 39 last year.

This is orders of magnitude less than what he had claimed. You sure your quibble makes sense?

His claim didn't restrict itself to Rio, so I included comparisons of both Rio and all of Brazil. It's simply nothing at all like what he was portraying, with thousands of murders a day and trucks hauling away the bodies.

My point wasn't that Brazil isn't more violent than the US, it certainly is, but the picture he portrayed isn't even in the same ballpark.

Quote:

Can't compare the whole country to the worst city in America. Unfair.

DC is not the worst city in America. Compare Rio with it's City of God image to Detroit and it still comes out better. What he claimed is simply outlandish, hundreds of times worse than reality.

1 Reply

@Robert Gentel,

Yeah, it is outlandishly exaggerated; but still pretty grim. I was just quibblin.

Cycloptichorn

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@Robert Gentel,

My mistake, I misread the totals for the whole country.
But these I did not misread:
Rio is the top ranked city in the world for "violent intentional deaths"
5,000 a year does not include the numbers from "rape resulting in death or "riots resulting in death"

22 policemen were murdered last year.

Rio's police kill more people than police anywhere in the world. In 2008 they acknowledged killing eleven hundred and eighty eight people who were "resisting arrest."

By comparison, American police killed 378 people or "justifiable homicides" in the entire United States in the same period.

Rio is one of the few cities in the world where there are whole areas controlled by armed forces that are not of the state.

Dude, I didn't mean to slight your birth country. I was just pointing out that there is a level of lawlessness right now that is hard to comprehend.

1 Reply

@panzade,

panzade wrote:

My mistake, I misread the totals for the whole country.

It's still exaggerated by over 100% even if you take that into account.

Quote:

Rio is the top ranked city in the world for "violent intentional deaths"

I don't think this is true anymore either, but by some way of cutting the statistics at some time it probably was.

Quote:

22 policemen were murdered last year.

That actually sounds low. Hell, yesterday 17 police were killed in India in a single gunfight.

Quote:

Rio's police kill more people than police anywhere in the world. In 2008 they acknowledged killing eleven hundred and eighty eight people who were "resisting arrest."

That sounds plausible.

Quote:

Rio is one of the few cities in the world where there are whole areas controlled by armed forces that are not of the state.

This is exaggerated, they aren't armed forces like a paramilitary (e.g. FARC in Colombia) they are just heavily armed drug dealers. The main difference between them and US gangs of 80s and 90s is that they have territorial advantages due to the way favelas develop (labyrinth, hard to penetrate for outsiders).

Quote:

Dude, I didn't mean to slight your birth country. I was just pointing out that there is a level of lawlessness right now that is hard to comprehend.

Brazil isn't my birth country, it was the 1oth country I lived in. And while it certainly is a violent place the picture you painted just doesn't happen in modern history without a war or a completely failed state.

Detroit is worse than Rio, where there is the biggest problem with heavily armed drug dealers. But third world countries get exotic (and exaggerated) reputations. I'm not trying to make it sound rosy, but let's put it into perspective. The bad areas in Brazil are little different than the bad areas in the US.

1 Reply

@Robert Gentel,

I'll apologize once again for my numbers snafu.

Quote:

I don't think this is true anymore either, but by some way of cutting the statistics at some time it probably was.

It's true according to the latest New Yorker

other than that...fair enough.

1 Reply

@panzade,

panzade wrote:

I'll apologize once again for my numbers snafu.

No worries, it's not something that offended me personally. I would have felt the same if it were about Colombia, which I've never been to (yet).

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A ghastly attempt to boost TV ratings

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