The strike by police officers in Brazil’s northeast state of Bahia seemed to lose its momentum on Thursday with the arrests of several of the movement’s leaders. But a vote on Thursday night by police officers here in Rio to strike immediately, and the threat of other work stoppages by police unions in several Brazilian states, have kept regions of the country on edge. More than a thousand police officers and firefighters gathered in downtown Rio on Thursday night to pressure lawmakers to vote for a measure that would raise their salaries. Sérgio Simões, a state defense official, told reporters here that the federal authorities had agreed to make 14,000 soldiers and national police officers available to maintain order in the state of Rio de Janeiro in case a strike took place. In the northeast, the authorities registered at least 142 homicides during the strike in the metropolitan area of Salvador, Bahia’s capital, more than double the number in the same period last year. The strike has also been marked by clashes between rebellious police officers and federal security forces sent by the authorities in Brasília, the national capital, to reassert order on Salvador’s streets. A strike could be even more tumultuous in Rio, especially during Carnival later this month, when throngs of visitors flood the streets and violent crime is a concern even when the regular police force is working. The strike in Bahia revolved around demands by the military police, who do most of the street policing in Brazil, for wage and benefit increases, focusing new attention on Brazil’s income disparities. An array of social welfare programs have lifted millions of Brazilians from dire poverty over the last decade, but salaries for many public employees, including police officers and schoolteachers, remain relatively low. While Brazil’s cost of living rivals that of the United States and surpasses it in some places, police officers in Bahia earn about $1,250 a month. Salaries for police officers in Rio de Janeiro are lower, roughly $1,170 a month when some benefits are included. About one-third of Bahia’s 31,000-member military police force adhered to the strike, which began when Bahia’s governor, Jaques Wagner, was away in Cuba. “This strike should be a wake-up call for the entire country,” said Romeu Karnikowski, a sociologist who specializes in Brazil’s public security policies. “Brazil now has the world’s sixth-largest economy, but our policing model is an embarrassing failure.” The strike opened a window into the disorder and disparity that characterize some of Brazil’s police forces. Other states, like Ceará in Brazil’s northeast and Pará in the Amazon, have recently suffered similar strikes. Elsewhere, corrupt police officers, like the militias and extermination squads of Rio de Janeiro, have been implicated in carrying out hideous crimes. Scholars who study the police attribute some of the corruption to low salaries and a lack of prestige. Policing on the street level is often left to large contingents of low-paid, relatively untrained recruits in the military police, a force that is considered an auxiliary of the Brazilian Army and that is subordinated to state governments. Meanwhile, administrative duties like investigating crimes are often the responsibility of each state’s civil police, who enjoy somewhat higher status and better salaries. Here in Rio, both the military and the civil police voted to go on strike, as did the state’s firefighters. Brazil also has a well-paid federal police force, which investigates crimes like drug trafficking and ranks among Latin America’s most respected law enforcement entities. In Bahia, intercepted cellphone conversations among leaders of the police strike, recorded by intelligence officials and broadcast on the Globo television network, suggested that rebellious police officers were plotting acts of vandalism and were trying to extend the strike to Brazil’s two most powerful states, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Brazil’s president, Dilma Rousseff, speaking on Thursday from the northeast state of Pernambuco, said she was “terrified” after hearing the intercepted calls. “I do not consider the increase of murders in the street, burning buses, to be the correct way of leading a movement,” she said. Still, the arrest of the leaders of Bahia’s police strike failed to put a definitive end to it, with officers there opting Thursday to continue the stoppage. Veja, a leading newsmagazine, said that police officers in as many as eight states were considering going on strike, timing their decisions ahead of Carnival. The Bahia strike has divided Brazil’s judges and legal scholars as to whether it is legal, since the military police are subordinated to the army. One federal judge, Marcus Orione Gonçalves of São Paulo, argued that the police had the right to strike. But João Oreste Dalazen, the president of Brazil’s Superior Labor Tribunal, described the events in Bahia as a “rebellion” instead of a strike, telling reporters that the police there were carrying out an “aggression” against the democratic rule of law. At the same time that Bahia’s police strike stunned the country, Brazil’s judges have been defending generous benefits of their own, adding to a debate over the country’s broad discrepancy in public-sector pay. In the state of Rio de Janeiro, for instance, the so-called super-salaries for some judges are $23,000 to $87,000 a month, according to a report in the newspaper Estado de São Paulo.
