Emerging South

When oh when is De Morgen going to give Lode Delputte the boot?  The man basically writes every piece on Latin America in De Morgen and is o so biased.  The man even never lived in Latin America, traveled some times up and down and considers and confuses his very coloured political views with journalism.  Today he wrote a piece in De Morgen on crime in Sao Paulo.  He takes the PCC, some rumors he must have heared on what is happening in Paraisopolis and writes a story.  It is clear the man has no clue of the history of the Primeiro Comando do Capital; let be of what is going on in Paraisopolis.
The problems in Paraisopolis started with abusive PMs entering the favela; you can read all on it here. Yes, the PCC is a criminal gang; but they have a huge support in the local communities; not only by criminals.   If you truly want to report on crime in Sao Paulo, you need more than Lode Delputte's shallow articles.

What was most disturbing in the article however was the only piece of factual information it contained, quote:
"Omdat de moordcijfers er hoe dan ook erg hoog liggen -120 per 100.000 volgence cijfers die vorig jaar op de Urban Age conferentie werden geciteerd-".  120 homicides per 100.000 ?!
Why is this so absurd?
1. To begin with: the source that Lode Delputte mentions, Urban Age, has no homicide data whatsoever and never published homicide data on Sao Paulo.
2. Secondly: you will find in no publication whatsoever a Sao Paulo homicide rate higher than 45 per 100.000 (whereas Le Delputte mentions the absurd figure of 120.  That peak happened in the 1990s when Sao Paulo saw a bulge in the proportion of 19-24 year-olds, which coincided with a rise in youth crime. Even in the most crime-ridden favela of Sao Paulo, Jardim Ângela, a poor suburb of São Paulo, the peak crime rate has never topped the 112 murders per 100.000 in 1995.
3. What Lode Delputtefails to mention is that crime in Sao Paulo has seen a drastic decrease since 2000; actually the murder rate in the state of São Paulo has been cut in half since 2000. As a journalist, Lode Delputte should have known of the "unsung story of Sao Paulo's Murder rate drop.   Why didn't you write about this downward trend.  Real journalists wrote ablout it in The Economist. Have you ever heard about the recent "Dry Law" and its impact on crime?  The data that Lode Delputte publishes is 600% higher than the data the Economist publishes.  Who do you tend to believe: the economist or some obscure  biased Belgian journalist?

4. Actually, the murder rate in São Paulo dropped below 20 per 100.000 in 2008.  This is a lower homicide rate than the following American cities in 2007:
Atlanta
Baltimore (45:15 more than Rio)
Buffalo
Cleveland
Detroit (46: 16 more than Rio !)
Newark (more than Rio !)
Oakland (same as Rio)
Philadelphia (!)
St Louis
Washington (Washington has a slightly higher homicide rate as Rio !)

Any country requires a healthy dose of critical journalism, also Brazil.
But such journalism needs to be factual; and if there is one element on which Brazil is proceeding in the good direction, then it's crime.  

I wrote Lode a mail pointing him to the ridiculous facts he states in his article; let's see what he responds.