… we must dare to be free, even as we weep at the pain of those who offer up their own flesh to the hot steel, as have the police who have fallen these last months, watering the soil with blood and honor so that the seeds of peace may be sown.

The author is Lt. Col. Mário Sérgio de Brito Duarte, former commander of BOPE, the "trooper elite" of the Rio military police, and currently in charge of strategic planning for Rio de Janeiro's state department of public safety, who writes a Web log on Blogspot.

He offers two frequent media talking points: (1) human rights-based policing "is not appropriate to the Brazilian social reality and (2) "social inequality is not the sole cause of criminality," and increasing social equality will not reduce crime.

For years, confronting this problem, accepting the challenge of casualties and collateral damage, was postponed and countless experiments in controlling crime were tried, based on eccentric formulas, thought up by intellectuals anchored in some curious sociological worldview, that everything can be explained by social inequalities. Thus, we come down to the present day up to our necks in terrifying disorder that can only be resolved through the joint efforts of the legal and legitimate authorities and the population, based on a realistic vision of the gravity of the situation and the psychosocial ingredients that compose the scenario.

Having recently read an interesting treatise on the Brazilian intelligence services and its didactic methods in agent training, I find the phrase "the psychosocial ingredients that compose the scenario" has a certain recognizable ring to it.

Scorn for those who think that "social inequality is the sole cause of criminality" — rather than, say, the fact this world is an illusory inferno of bestiality concocted by the evil Demiurge, so you might as well just get used to it — is possibly the most common commonplace of apocalyptic rhetoric in the very, very common "let us rise from the barracks and purify the nation with fire and steel!" genre of contemporary Brazilian public discourse.

I will be translating a number of posts by this senior Rio de Janeiro "strategic planning" official -- whose strategic plan seems to be to march down the middle of the street, rocking 'n' rolling in the general direction of anything that moves.