What are the characteristics of the illegal industry in Brazil?
What’s surprising about Brazil is that it is experiencing a movement towards illegal arms production, like what you have in Colombia, where they have an internal conflict. The FARC and drug cartels have been making sub-machine guns since the 1990s using military personnel, machines and lathes. In Brazil, the first case I remember was in 2002, when an illegal workshop was discovered in São Paulo, producing the same kind of sub-machine guns that the FARC produces in Colombia. It was a factory with a significant production capacity with metal presses, mechanical lathes, and it was making arms for drug traffickers. Earlier this year, the police shut down another factory, this time in São Paulo, that used the same kind of machines to make assault rifles. A few weeks ago, in Rio, police arrested an arms supplier co-opted by the drug trade who had set up a clandestine weapons factory. A gun supplier is someone who deals in guns, or who works in their production. It could be a civilian or some
