Eulogy of Pablo Dreyfus

Presented at the Joint Conference of the International Studies Association and Associação Brasileira de Relações Internacionais PUC/RJ, 23nd  July 2009, Rio de Janeiro

I am grateful to the organizer of this panel, particularly to Kai Michael Kenkel, for the honor of inviting me to make the eulogy of  Pablo Dreyfus.

Pablo Dreyfus, Viva Rio’s senior researcher on firearms control, and his wife Ana Carolina Rodrigues were in the Air France flight that disappeared this June. Born in Argentina, Pablo was recognized as one of the most renowned international experts on small arms and light weapons control. He was travelling to Switzerland, on his way to attend the annual meeting of the Small Arms Survey, the most prestigious yearbook on the matter; he was one of its research staff members, as is my friend Robert Muggah, present here today. In the same accident we also lost Ronald Dryer, a Swiss diplomat and member of the SAS yearbook.

The rare and essential qualities of Pablo’s work, as a political scientist, was his ability to perfectly combine fine and sophisticated academic skills with empirical action to transform his ideas and analysis into public policies. Usually, we may be good in one of these fields, but it is extraordinarily difficult to be excellent in both. He felt as comfortable investigating the involvement of the FARC narco-traffickers in the jungles of Colombia, or firearms smuggling through the small rivers in the Brazil-Paraguay border, as he was giving classes in the most prestigious universities or speaking at the United Nations Conference.
     
Pablo’s dissertation for the Graduate Institute of International Studies, in Geneva, was on the illicit drugs traffic: “Border Spillover: Drug Trafficking and National Security in South America¨. His challenging and risky investigations in the field induced him to analyze one of the most relevant factors of violence in Latin America: the proliferation of small arms. He was one of the pioneers in this new area of research, developed with the new phenomenon of increasing urban violence.

Pablo’s findings led him to conclude that Brazil was the country with the highest rate of fire arms victims in the world, in absolute figures. Anguished with what he considered “a genocide”, Pablo decided to come to work in Viva Rio, refusing job offers from governments of different countries. He said to me: “I want to keep my autonomy, and work where the situation is worse”.

His arrival in Brazil, seven years ago, spurred a qualitative upgrade in the arms control studies in our country. His contribution was decisive for the elaboration of the new Brazilian gun law, known as the Disarmament Statute, and in improving the arguments which convinced Brazilians to voluntarily give away half a million firearms in the Disarmament Campaign four years ago. Pablo also coordinated pioneering research into small arms and light weapons at national level, published as “Brazil: The Arms and The Victims” (Ed. 7 Letras, Rio, 2005), revealing for the first time the quantities and characteristics of the guns circulating in our country: an estimated 17 million arms, half of them illegal, outside state control, and 90% in the hands of society: a dramatic example that shows that an armed society is a violent one, reinforcing our conviction that we need a country protected from guns, not protected by guns.

During the Congressional Hearing Commission on Firearms Illicit Traffic and Organized Crime (2005), Pablo analyzed 36,000 seized arms, demonstrating that an important part of them have been diverted from regular stores, from private security forces and even from the public police itself. His study is now leading to the reformulation of the internal control procedures of the Police Department, where he became a close collaborator, especially for the Rio de Janeiro Secretary of Public Security, and for the Federal Police.

Professor of the Public Security Graduation Program, offered for policemen by FLACSO (Faculdade Latino-Americana de Ciências Sociais) and  by Viva Rio, Pablo was about to initiate the training on arms control of all the 27 Brazilian states Police Departments, teaching them how to use the “Manual for Identification and Tracing of Small Arms and Ammunition”, that he authored. Responding to a request from the Congressional Public Security Commission, and from the Ministry of Justice, Pablo’s last work was the creation of a National Arms Control Ranking. The study, “State Ranking on Small Arms and Ammunition Control”, applying an original model created by him and by statistician  Marcelo Nascimento, is to be made public soon. The work evaluates how state governments have been implementing the arms and ammunitions control measures, what are their major deficiencies and how the federal government can contribute to better combat illicit traffic. By comparing the situation of each state, the Ranking intends to promote emulation among their governments that will lead to improving arms control. The team that worked with Pablo is here: Julio Cesar Purcena e Natasha Leite.

Dreyfus has worked with several countries in the analysis of arms proliferation, pointing out creative solutions to enhance their firearms control and reduce the number of victims. He has helped the government of Mozambique map the sources of illicit traffic and firearms and ammunition diversion. He advised Paraguay to reformulate all the legislation on this matter and to declare a moratorium on imports of Brazilian arms and ammunition for civilians. Along with Resolution 17, that increased the export quota of small arms and ammunition from Brazil to Latin-American countries, these measures led to a huge reduction in the arms smuggling from this country to Brazil. We demonstrated it through our field work in the region.

In 2005, after the referendum, when the prohibition of civilian trade on guns and ammunition in Brazil was voted down, Pablo’s way to overcome our disappointment with our first serious defeat, was to use our vacations to explore the Brazilian border to identify points of arms smuggling. The result was field research which report we published as “Vecindario Bajo Observación: Un Estudio Sobre las ‘Transferencias Grises” de Armas Pequeñas y Munición en las Fronteras de Brasil con Paraguay, Bolivia, Uruguay y Argentina” (Viva Rio, Rio de Janeiro, 2006)

Pablo expanded his generous cooperation by participating in international negotiations for firearm control and as a consultant for the governments of Bolivia, El Salvador, Haiti, Uruguay and Colombia. The MERCOSUR Working Group on Firearms became more practical and less bureaucratic due to Pablo’s advice. The Brazilian Delegation at the United Nations Conference on Firearms Illicit Traffic introduced the subject of ammunitions marking, putting it in the international agenda, based in Pablo’s technical assistance. The UN commission for an International Treaty on Arms Trade (ATT), the OAS Secretary for Public Security, the International Action Network on Small Arms Control (IANSA), and many other international, regional and national organizations benefited from Pablo’s recommendations on disarmament and gun control.

In 2001, answering the UN appeal, we promoted, together with the Brazilian Army and the Police of Rio Janeiro, the public destruction of 100,000 guns – an international record; the analysis of that armament was coordinated by Pablo, working together with the Civil Police of Rio. One year later, with the intermediation of UN-LiREC (the UN Office for Latin America and Caribbean), the Governor of Rio de Janeiro State was able to deliver to 14 ambassadors the list of thousands of firearms, produced in their countries and seized with criminals in Rio. They were asked to provide information on the first purchasers of these weapons, for tracing purposes. All that exhaustive work was coordinated by Pablo.
  
He never forgot Argentina. In 2001, I offered the Argentinean Government a list of rifles and grenades that, originally produced and owned by the Argentinean Army, had been seized by the police in Rio. This work, conducted by Pablo, led to a congressional investigation, reporting that the arms in question had been diverted from the Army, to the Argentinean Police, and from it, to organized crime in Brazil. Two years ago, the Minister of Public Security of the Province of Buenos Aires asked Pablo to analyze the illegal firearms traffic and mismanagement in that region. The work, co-authored by Argentinean and Brazilian sociologists, was published this year as “Argentina: The Arms and The Victims” (Gobierno de Buenos Aires y Universidad de San Andrés, 2009). Over the past year, Argentineans have been able to implement a National Volunteer Buy-back Campaign on Small Arms and Ammunition. Improving on the Brazilian Campaign, incorporating our experience transmitted by Pablo, Argentina was able to collect more than 100,000 guns.

Recently, we have been together in Angola, evaluating a volunteer disarmament campaign, which has already collected 250,000 rifles and machine guns; and we were getting ready to develop analysis on the armament dispersed across the country after the civil war. Before his last trip, Pablo was concluding preliminary research on the gun control situation in the Central American countries, for CASAC/UNDP.

In his last week of life, Pablo was worried about the heavy lobby in Congress, the so called “bancada da bala”, the “bullet gang” of representatives, that again and again pressures to mutilate the Disarmament Statute, in a bid to turn it into a harmless piece of law. Before getting in the plane on that tragic Sunday, Pablo had called me from the airport to schedule our next trip to Brasilia, precisely to discuss with representatives ways to protect the new law.

Completely in love with Rio, Pablo got married with sociologist Ana Carolina Rodrigues, also from Viva Rio. Ana was dedicated to the prevention of violence against youths and children in the slums of São Gonçalo. They got to know each other when she was working in projects for Culture of Peace carried by the Konrad Adenauer Foundation. After the meeting in Geneva, they intended to have their honey-moon in Paris, because, married two years ago, they still hadn’t had the time to enjoy it. An exemplary couple!

If we have all lost an expert who helped the world be less violent, we Brazilians have an infinite debt of gratitude with this “porteño”, who enchanted the Brazilians when he sang tangos whenever he was filled with nostalgia for his country. No one did more than he did for the good relations between Brazil and Argentina. Due to all that has been said, I suggest to this Conference that you vote a decision to join the campaign to convince the government of Brazil and the government of Argentina to decorate Pablo Dreyfus post-mortem.

The prohibition of carrying guns by the civilians, and the collection of half a million firearms – two measures which have counted with Pablo decisive collaboration –, resulted in the reduction of 18% in the firearm related deaths in the last 5 years in Brazil. How can one accept the premature disappearance of someone who has avoided the deaths of more than six thousand Brazilians? We have enormous reasons to mourn the deaths of Pablo Dreyfus and Ana Carolina Rodrigues.