It was on his return from a meeting to watch a football game in 2015 that the life of Vitor Borges, then 29, changed. He was returning home with friends when shots fired by a soldier hit the car he was in. Vitor needed to have a leg amputated and became paraplegic.
The army corporal who shot was not punished. An investigation by Lighthouse Reports now sheds light on a lesser-known detail of this military operation — which took place during a period of occupation of Maré by the Armed Forces, between April 2014 and June 2015 — and others that impacted Rio’s favelas.
The work, carried out in partnership with Bellingcat and the Swiss vehicles RTS, RSI, SRF and NZZ, shows that armored vehicles used between 2014 and 2018 in military actions in Rio de Janeiro (including the one that left Vitor paraplegic) had been exported to Brazil initially. with humanitarian purpose.
The change in application is in line with the Arms Trade Treaty, ratified by Switzerland, which establishes that arms must not be traded in countries where they may contribute to human rights abuses and violations. Brazil is also a signatory to the text.
Mowag (now part of General Dynamics European Land Systems) confirmed in a statement that 30 Piranha 3C vehicles were exported between 2007 and 2014 with the intention of being used by the Armed Forces on a United Nations humanitarian mission in Haiti — the Brazilian Army led the action of the UN from 2004 to 2017.
The analysis of videos and photographs obtained from open sources, however, reveals the application of Swiss vehicles in police operations inside favelas, sometimes transporting BOPE (Special Operations Battalion) forces. In some of these actions, military shots hit civilians, in a context of human rights violations.
Instituto Sou da Paz requested information about Mowag armored vehicles from the Armed Forces, which confirmed that they were actively used in military operations in Rio de Janeiro between 2013 and 2018.
BOPE was even denounced by the NGO Human Rights Watch as responsible for extrajudicial executions. “The Brazilian police are the ones that kill the most in the world. The law is made to kill black, poor and favela people,” Irone Santiago, mother of Vitor Borges, told Swiss channel RTS.
Data from the Brazilian Public Security Forum indicate that, in 2020, the police in Rio de Janeiro killed 6,146 people, 79.1% of whom were black and 74.3% were under 30 years of age.
According to videos analyzed and geolocated by the Lighthouse Reports team, in May 2015 a Mowag vehicle was also used in an operation in Complexo da Maré in which military personnel fired M-16 rifles. One of the images shows a member of the BOPE forces exiting the tank.
The occupation of the group of favelas, called Operação São Francisco, led to the death of at least 15 people. Among them was Jefferson Rodrigues, then 18 years old — photographs and videos analyzed by the report show the Piranha da Mowag a few meters away from the young man’s body, shortly after he was shot.
“It is shocking to see evidence of Swiss armed vehicles being used by Brazilian police in the context of human rights abuses against the poorest and most vulnerable,” says Hannah Neumann, a German MEP. “Those who made the decision to export in Switzerland may not have intended this complicity, but the case demonstrates the ease with which weapons or armed vehicles can be misused.”
In 2014 and 2019, two inspections by the Swiss Secretariat for Economic Affairs in Brazil found no anomalies in the use of imported armored vehicles. Questioned by the report, Mowag only said that it is not up to the company to evaluate and authorize the export of weapons. “This is a matter for politicians,” the note states.
Hannah Neumann highlights the concern with the topic given the context of the Jair Bolsonaro (PL) administration. “Although there is no evidence that the weapons are still used today in similar police operations, there is a risk that this could happen in the future, given the documentation of human rights violations by police forces.”
Following federal government measures approved to make access to weapons more flexible, since 2020 the import of this material has also increased in Brazil.
Swiss weaponry is just one example of products of European origin ending up in Brazil despite strict export rules. According to Unroca, a database linked to the United Nations, Austria is another prominent location in the export of weapons to the country – according to the Ministry of Economy, in 2020 Vienna was the largest supplier of revolvers to Brazil.
The increase in the circulation of weapons has been criticized by organizations such as Sou da Paz and Fogo Cruzado — the collaborative platform, which uses technology to produce and disseminate open data on armed violence, noted that in 2021 a 15% increase in shootings in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro.
“Today it is much easier for the police to purchase weapons abroad, with less bureaucracy on the part of the Army”, says Bruno Langeani, coordinator of Sou da Paz. “And the president’s speech serves as a public incentive to legitimize police violence.”
The institute launched a study with the organization Terre des Hommes to gather information on foreign weapons in the context of police or military use and hopes that the results of the investigation will put pressure on European governments to suspend arms exports to Brazilian institutions that promote systematic human rights violations.
The Navy, responsible for importing Piranha armored vehicles, highlighted in a note that the structure of the vehicles does not allow the troops to fire when they are on board. According to the agency, the use in Haiti “guaranteed excellent protection for Brazilian forces in stabilization actions, especially at times when they were attacked by armed gangs.”
Outside Haiti, where they remained until the end of the mission, in October 2017, the vehicles demonstrated, according to a statement from the Navy, “perfect applicability to the Law and Order Guarantee actions determined by the federal government [no Brasil] for different purposes, such as security for large events, protection of dignitaries, support for public security bodies in the vicinity of areas threatened by organized crime, among others”.
