HomeBRAZILRIO GOVERNOR RECREATES PUBLIC SECURITY SECRETARIAT

RIO GOVERNOR RECREATES PUBLIC SECURITY SECRETARIAT

Rio de Janeiro state governor, Cláudio Castro (PL), will recreate the state’s Public Security Secretariat. He will appoint federal police officer Victor dos Santos to the position. The new structure of the Security Secretariat will be leaner than previously and should have three sub-secretariats: management, operational and intelligence.

Separation

Former governor Wilson Witzel abolished the secretariat in 2019. After that, the division between the Civil Police Secretariat and the Military Police Secretariat was made and each corporation head gained the status of secretary.

Crisis

Rio de Janeiro is experiencing a public security crisis. Since 6 November, the Guarantee of Law and Order (GLO) decree has come into force at ports and airports in the state. The operation should last until 3 May 2024, and was authorized by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT).

New Secretary

Announced by Governor Cláudio Castro as Rio’s new Secretary of Security, Victor Cesar Carvalho dos Santos, has more than 30 years of experience in the Federal Police and actions against some of the best-known names in Rio’s organized crime.

In 1999, Santos joined the team at the Narcotics Repression Police Station (DRE), when the superintendence dismantled drug gangs and arrested criminals such as Marco Antônio da Silva Tavares, “Marquinho Niterói”, Sandro Mendonça do Nascimento, “Sandrinho Beira-Mar” (general cocaine manager of Luiz Fernando da Costa, known as Fernandinho Beira-Mar) and Júlio Cesar Cordeiro Gomes, responsible for, according to the PF, almost 60% of the drugs and weapons distributed to the favelas and hills of Rio de Janeiro at that time. He stayed until 2001, where he left for the corporation’s Internal Affairs Department before returning to the DRE in 2005.

Conflict with the Federal Government

Sources from the Lula government see the name indicated by the governor of Rio de Janeiro, Claudio Castro (PL), to take over the recreated Secretariat of Public Security in the State as an option to clash with the Ministry of Justice and an operation tied to a future candidacy for Alexandre Ramagem, now federal deputy, to Rio’s city hall.

The new security secretary is close to the former director general of the PF during the Bolsonaro government, Paulo Maiurino, and the former Justice Minister Anderson Torres and also to Ramagem, who was director of Brazilian Intelligence Agency (Abin) under Bolsonaro.

A senior government source sees the choice of name directly connected with the 2024 electoral race and the intention of Jair Bolsonaro’s party, the PL, to make Ramagem a candidate for mayor.

Contrary Statements

The recreation of Rio’s Public Security Secretariat, announced on Monday (27/11) by Cláudio Castro, goes against a statement made less than two months ago by the governor himself.

On 3 October, during a wave of violence in the Metropolitan Region, Castro said in an interview with GloboNews that the secretariat “does not need the slightest”. Before, according to the governor, the institution was an “imminently political body” from which “several people left to become federal deputies and state deputies.”

Folder Extinct in 2019

With the decision, the Civil and Military police cease to be independent secretariats and are once again subordinate to the Security Secretariat, which had been abolished by former governor Wilson Witzel, in 2019. After that, the division between the Civil Police Secretariat was made and the Military Police Secretariat and each corporation head gained secretary status.

Source: G1 [1] [2] [3] [4]; O Globo

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