How Brazils Lord Of Guns Armed Rios Drug War With U.S. Weapons

[Judi Lynn]

Weak U.S. laws mean it’s not just our guns being trafficked; it’s our gun violence, too.
By Travis Waldron
03/07/2018 10:19 pm ET

The guns were cached in swimming pool heating units ― pools and their accessories being the sort of thing you can ship from Miami to Rio de Janeiro without arousing suspicion. The smugglers had gutted the units and filled them back to their original weight with rifles and ammunition.

There were 60 assault-style rifles and ammo in the shipment that arrived at Rio’s international airport on June 1, 2017 ― 45 of them manufactured in the United States. And they were all almost certainly intended for the drug gangs fighting among themselves and against local police in Rio’s favelas, helping drive a sharp spike in violence across Brazil’s second-largest city. These were Brazilian turf wars, waged with weapons manufactured in Maine, Vermont, Massachusetts, Illinois, Minnesota, South Carolina, Alabama and Florida.

The shipment was no one-time deal. The Brazilian traffickers had a routine, with code words rooted in Portuguese lingo. The assault-style rifles were flechas in the traffickers’ slang — arrows. The cartridges were biscoitos, or cookies. Bullets and ammunition were jujuba de Smith: jujuba like the candy, Smith as in Smith & Wesson. At one point in their investigation, Rio’s Civil Police listened in on a phone call between two men, one identified as Gil dos Santos Almeida, the other as João Victor Silva Roza, who police say helped negotiate weapon sales in Rio de Janeiro. The following is a translation of a transcript of the call included in Federal Police records and documents from Brazil’s Federal Public Ministry:

More:
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/weapon-smuggling-us-brazil_us_5aa053d8e4b0d4f5b66d14e8

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