Oh jeez.  To paraphrase Michael Corleone, every time I try to get away from the Olympics, I get sucked back in.

I don’t know what’s up with the usually reliable Passport blog over at Foreign Policy magazine, but all of a sudden they seem to have lost their bearings.  First came Blake Hounshell’s argument that Michelle Obama should have thanked the Condi for being “assertive” over the past seven years, and now we have this gem from Patrick Fitzgerald:

We’re still a year away from learning who will host the 2016 Summer Olympics. But, while Beijing is fresh in our minds, I thought it’d be high time to consider the lessons and legacies of the 2008 games with an eye on the future.

If we learned one thing from Beijing 2008, it’s that the Olympics are a perfect pretext for a massive security crackdown. So why not award the 2016 games to a city that could actually use a massive security crackdown?

The murder rate in the state of Rio de Janiero is down to 39 per 100,000, from a high of 64 per 100,000 people in the mid-1990s. That’s still high, and one still encounters machine guns while browsing shopping stalls. Some think meditation may do the trick, but an Olympic effort to crack down on petty crime (not political opposition, mind you) could do wonders.

Now here’s what Human Rights Watch said last year about the Police in Rio — make sure you note what it says in the last graph:

According to government figures quoted in press reports, 44 people were killed during a two-month police operation aimed at dismantling drug trafficking gangs in Complexo do Alemão, Rio de Janeiro’s poorest neighborhood. Violence reached a peak on Wednesday, when 19 people were killed during confrontations with the police. According to allegations widely reported in the Brazilian media, the police carried out many of the killings through summary executions.

“A thorough investigation of these killings is absolutely critical for establishing the truth and improving public confidence in local law enforcement,” said José Miguel Vivanco, Americas director at Human Rights Watch. “The state must ensure independent inquiries that will lead to successful prosecutions, no matter who the perpetrators are.”

According to the state’s Secretary of Security, José Mariano Beltrame, all of the deaths occurred in confrontations with the police. However, in media reports, residents said that police killed and wounded unarmed bystanders. Three teenagers, ages 13, 14 and 16, were identified among the dead yesterday. Residents also claimed that police had killed a 10-year-old boy.

Last year, 1,603 people were killed in alleged confrontations with police in the state of Rio, according to the Institute of Public Security (ISP), the official statistics bureau for public security information. In the first four months of 2007, their bureau registered some 449 deaths, an increase of 36.5 percent in relation to the same period last year.

The operation in the Complexo do Alemão occur[ed] just two weeks before the beginning of the Pan-American Games in the city.

Like Fitzgerald, I think there are plenty of compelling reasons to give the games to Rio.  As he notes, a South American city has never hosted the Games, and it’s about damn time that someone do so.  But let’s not openly encourage a police department that operates like a death squad to undertake a “massive security crackdown,” because last time they did it in advance of a major sporting event, forty-four people died.

And let’s not give Brazil ideas about imitating China.  Brazil is now a stable democracy (albeit, as the HRW report shows, one with significant problems), but it is not that far removed from a series of dictatorships that trampled human rights and silenced dissent.

I don’t know who’s running things over at Passport, but this is now two really ignorant posts in two days.

Related posts

• Wonk’d: How to Cover the Olympics
• What Were You Thinking, Mary Carillo?
• The Olympics’ Real Legacy: Greater Repression
• Reindeer Games: Bush, Human Rights, and China
• How to Become a Good Delegator