This is the New World Report. I'm John Bapser with Ernesto Arrujo and Joseph Umiron.

I go immediately to Ernesto, who's been educating me about the gangs of Brazil.

I've associated Brazil with a successful democracy, admittedly a very large country with great

resources and terrific positioning, also a growing population, which is always an advantage

anywhere in the world, but especially in the Americas. However, Ernesto, the gangs that

you've, there's one particular gang you've talked about. Is it part of the influencing

of the government, the way gangs have influenced the government in Bogota or in Bolivia? Do

the gangs have senators and representatives in Congress?

Well, they do, they do. They have a lot of weight on politics. And that's something that

has been built over the last maybe 30 years in an increasing way. First, we start with

the politicians trying to get votes from a certain area that's controlled by a gang, so they

start to make agreements so that they go there and the gang bosses tell those people

to vote for him. So it starts like a normal, let's say, political strategy. And then

it developed towards some cases in alliance. And this got mixed along the 90s, especially

2000s, with the same process that went on across the region, the Narco Socialist Project,

which is basically this symbiosis of socialist projects and an organized crime. So more

and more, you see the effects of that. For example, recently, Lula's Justice Minister

visited that same favela, that same area that I sent you to pictures about without any

sort of security. And why did he go there? Certainly to express his, I don't know, friendship

for those people. So in a few, a couple of months later, those people are demonstrating

with heavy weapons openly, without any sort of mask and this sort of, of anything. Also,

last week, because the justice, the judicial system is part of that process. For some reason,

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