The LatinNews Podcast is a fortnightly deep dive into key developments from across Latin America and the Caribbean.
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Season 1 | Episode 27
Murders are falling, yet insecurity fears in Brazil increase, what can President Lula do?
Murder rates in Brazil have fallen under President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, but surveys show that people believe violence to have increased in the country. There is little trust in the police and judicial system, 64,2 million live in households with food insecurity, there have been more than 4 million cases of dengue in the first four months of 2024 alone, so how can Lula reduce the massive inequalities in Brazilian society, combat organized crime run from prisons and address poverty?
On The LatinNews Podcast this week we speak to Graham Denyer Willis, Professor of Global Politics and Society in the department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge, how can Brazil address its historical condition to violence and poverty?
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In this episode we discuss:
• Inequality and security in Brazil
• Rise of organized crime groups
• Public perception of security:
• Brazil as a consumer country for narcotics
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Graham Denyer Willis
Graham Denyer Willis is Professor of Global Politics and Society in the Department of Politics and International Studies, and a Fellow of Queens’ College.
A political ethnographer, Graham's research and teaching is concerned with practices and assumptions of power amidst inequality, as they work through cities, institutions and informality. He approaches these questions from historical and contemporary Brazil, to question how direct and indirect forms of violence and social organisation matter in the production and maintenance of political authority.
He is the author of two books, both published by the University of California Press. His first book, The Killing Consensus: Police, Organized Crime, and the Regulation of Life and Death in Urban Brazil (2015), accompanies homicide detectives in São Paulo as they negotiate an incipient organised crime group and police who kill 2.3 times per day.
His second, Keep the Bones Alive: Missing People and the Search for Life in Brazil (2022), examines how and why 20,000 - 25,000 people go missing, per year, in São Paulo.
He is now at work on a third ethnographic monograph, which examines the practices and logics of 'trust and safety' in Silicon Valley as vital to a global regime of security and accumulation rooted in platform capitalism.
Professor Willis is also a 2021 Philip Leverhulme Prize recipient for his work on everyday patterns of political order with attention to policing and inequality, via ethnography and a focus on Brazil.
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The LatinNews Podcast is hosted by Richard McColl, a foreign correspondent in Colombia. Having first travelled to Colombia in the late 90s, McColl made the move to Bogotá in 2007. He holds a Diploma in Conflict resolution and a PhD in Social and Human Sciences both at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá. He has worked as a journalist across Latin America.
Political Analyst, Richard McColl