Lula’s Foreign Policy Ignores Brazil’s Biggest Security Threat

Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s foreign policy often prioritizes grand geopolitical objectives, such as reforming the United Nations Security Council and positioning Brazil as an emerging Global South power on the world stage. Meanwhile, he is set on making sure Brazil remains South America’s uncontested political leader. But a year into his third presidential term, Lula’s foreign policy agenda has dealt little with the most pressing concrete risk facing Brazilian security: transnational organized crime. This was also the case during his two previous presidential terms, spanning 2003 to 2010.?

The scale of Brazil’s security challenges is immense: the billionaire organized crime underworld has its hand in the drug trade plus illegal mining, logging, and smuggling. Crime organizations’ disputes not only lead to turf wars on the periphery of densely populated urban areas, but also corrupt government officials, law enforcement agents, judges, and government prosecutors. The presence of organized crime also jeopardizes the business sector through extortion, both in urban and rural areas. Organized crime also affects environmental goals, whether it be criminals running landfills in metropolitan Rio de Janeiro or stealing public land and destroying the unique biodiversity of the Amazon rainforest.

Brazil’s security problem is a South American issue

Brazil’s security problem has an obvious regional dimension. As South America’s largest country, Brazil’s territory shares a border with the world’s three largest coca plant producers: Colombia, Peru and Bolivia. Coca is the raw material for cocaine, and Brazilian ports across its vast Atlantic coast offer many opportunities to export drugs. They mostly end up in the European market, where the retail price multiplies profits for all players across this illicit supply chain.?

Neighboring countries also struggle to combat the illegal drug trade. Chile and Uruguay, smaller countries with better social development indicators than Brazil, have not been immune to organized crime groups’ growing presence in South America. As for Brazil, organized crime is fueled by the country's deep social and wealth inequalities. These factors converge to create a cheap cost of labor for gangs and make government institutions susceptible to corruption. Furthermore, the expanse of Brazil’s international borders makes it inherently hard for the government to control the drug trade. Brazil contains about 16,800 kilometers of international borders. As a comparison, the US-Mexico border is about 3,100 kilometers long.?

Brazil is also home to the largest part of the world's largest tropical rainforest — the Amazon. Criminal organizations use its 6.7 million square-kilometer territory — nearly the size of the contiguous US — to transport drugs through its rivers. These groups take advantage of the Brazilian Amazon’s porous borders and hard-to-penetrate jungle, which are hard for police and the armed forces to patrol. Illegal miners have also been exploiting the region’s rich mineral deposits, setting up shop on indigenous Yanomami lands in Brazil, Venezuela’s Orinoco Mining Arc, and the Ecuador-Peru border.

The networks of Brazilian cartel group Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC), founded in S?o Paulo in the early 1990s, now operate inside Paraguay and Bolivia’s overcrowded prisons. They slaughter inmates belonging to rival gangs and spread crime activities to those countries. Despite this, President Lula rarely talks about security during his international speeches, as pointed out by Funda??o Getúlio Vargas (FGV) International Relations Professor Matias Spektor.

Brazil’s regional security strategy: lots of talk, little action?

Brazil’s current diplomatic efforts in South America have not yielded any sense of what kind of common ground the country wants to reach with its neighbors regarding organized crime in the region. It has not given any indication of the technological and financial resources it would be willing to dedicate toward developing a shared vision to combat organized crime.?

Sure, Brazil has made high-profile announcements about its work in this area. Brazil and Paraguay recently signed an agreement to fight corruption and organized crime. Brazil is building an international police center in Manaus, the Amazon region’s largest city. Brazil has also participated in forums including the Organization of American States-sponsored REMJA initiative and the Americas-based anti-money laundering network GAFILAT. Brazil also recently signed an agreement to create Ameripol, a mechanism to integrate police forces from the entire American hemisphere.

However, these regional foreign policy initiatives trying to tackle transnational organized crime are scattered and inadequate in scope. None of these projects are the top priority for leading political figures in the capital of Brasília. For example, Brazilian authorities have met with Peruvian and Argentine cabinet members, but these meetings have little weight because they lack a strategic vision. These initiatives are often mere protocol meetings or vague diplomatic statements that yield few concrete follow-up actions.?

The same trend happened during Jair Bolsonaro’s previous presidential administration. Brazil did discuss creating a unified police force with Paraguay and signed a cooperation agreement with Colombia to fight transnational crime. Still, none of these efforts from various government agencies amounted to a clear diagnosis and goals for how Brazil should handle security. And while Brazil’s Federal Police has a network of attachés at 22 Brazilian embassies — mostly in South America — they have not been effective in the fight against organized crime. Consecutive federal administrations reportedly have used liaisons between Brazilian authorities and host countries’ police investigators to please allies or drive away police officers who are not aligned with the government’s direction. For example, many high-ranking officers during the former Bolsonaro administration were relocated to embassies abroad after Lula’s administration took power.

When Brazil does take direct action, such as its Federal Police force offering investigative assistance to Ecuador, the moves are tactical and do not belong to any comprehensive security strategy. For now, power brokers in the Lula administration are not thinking ahead about how diplomacy and law enforcement could be mutually reinforced.?

Brazilians cite drug trafficking and violence as top concerns?

Lula’s lack of concrete policy to combat transnational organized crime in the region comes as drug trafficking and violence are top of mind for Brazilian citizens.?

According to the think tank Brazilian Forum of Public Security, Brazil’s 2022 homicide rate stood at 23.3 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants. During that year, Brazil registered about 47,000 murders. The latest survey from polling firm Atlas Intel found that 59% of respondents nationwide think that violence and drug trafficking are Brazil’s worst problems.

On a rare occasion when Lula acknowledged the scale of the organized crime problem during a January 2024 event in Brasília, he admitted to the audience that he did not know how to fight it. “Organized crime has become a multinational company — even larger than General Motors, Volkswagen, or Petrobras,” the president said.?

Lula has a few broad ideas for how to deal with the issue, which he then mentioned in the same speech. He praised government financial support to low-income high school students who might be targets for gang recruitment. He also praised a harm-reduction approach to drug policy, saying that police should not treat people using crack in rundown areas of Brazilian cities the same way they treat rich and powerful drug traffickers.?

These approaches are consistent with Lula’s alignment with the left-wing Worker's Party (PT), a group born out of a union between landless peasants, university students, and organized labor. Fighting organized crime was never top of mind for these groups, as most of Brazil’s left insists on the vague statement that crime is purely a social problem, rather than a more complex issue involving a billion-dollar international industry. Conservatives, on the other hand, prioritize and embrace hardline security tactics.?

Lula’s domestic policy is mainly a rebranding of flagship initiatives touted by previous PT administrations that do little to address organized crime. For example, he implemented a higher monthly payout under the Bolsa Familia cash-transfer program aimed at low-income families, and created the umbrella programs PAC 3 and the New Brazilian Industry to oversee public construction projects aimed to improve housing, transportation, infrastructure, defense, and shipyards.

While Lula’s administration has announced new security initiatives, they also seem to be a collection of tactical measures rather than parts of a cohesive strategy.

Take the Justice Ministry’s National Program on Fighting Criminal Organizations (Enfoc), which launched in October 2023 and promises to pour roughly USD180 million into new equipment for state police forces while integrating 27 different state policies over the next three years. However, the Justice Ministry left his post to join the Supreme Court shortly thereafter, and his post remained vacant for two months. That gap is evidence of how little attention Lula’s administration pays to security.?

Moreover, Lula has championed restrictions on legal gun purchases after his predecessor Bolsonaro dramatically expanded them. Security analysts observe that Bolsonaro’s policies helped criminals legally acquire war-like weaponry using third-party buyers.?

Is doing nothing a real alternative?

It is not an easy task for any government in the region to come up with a concerted strategy for how to deal with organized crime. South American governments don't have enough money to pay for many things like fixing roads, adding hospitals, and hiring public school teachers.

For Brazil, the cost of keeping the status quo is that criminal organizations are more deeply entrenching themselves into Brazilian society. They are not just in the drug business, but laundering money, setting up healthcare companies, and winning bids to run local hospitals in the S?o Paulo metropolitan area and clearing Amazon land for cattle ranches.

On the global stage, South American security is visibly lacking from Lula’s foreign speeches. Instead, he highlights topics including climate change, the Russia-Ukraine war, and the Israel-Hamas war. It’s worth pointing out that this administration has not even created a communication strategy for the tactical security measures it has implemented — even just as a marketing tactic.

If Brazil continues to avoid prioritizing security in the region and creating a clear vision to quell violence at home, one must ask: When is the point of no return? Whatever the answer, Lula’s administration does not seem hard-pressed to figure it out.

(With additional reporting by Joseph Bouchard.)

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