Brazil maps gun trade, urges international controls

RIO DE JANEIRO, July 28 (Reuters) -- Brazilian researchers on Friday published a study mapping an international gun trade that is turning Rio de Janeiro slums into a war zone.

The Research Institute of Religious Studies (ISER), in conjunction with police and Viva Rio anti-violence activists, traced the origin of more than 44,000 confiscated arms in the hope that other countries will help bring a stop to the deadly trade.

"In 1999 alone, 10,000 guns were seized, marking a new record," said Rubem Cesar Fernandes, president of Viva Rio and executive director of the study. "What we want to do is talk to the countries that are supplying them."

The guns are mostly used by Rio's notorious drug gangs who work out of hillside shantytowns. They help make Rio one of the most dangerous city's in Latin America with a homicide rate more than twice as high as New York's peak 1990 murder rate.

Ironically, Brazilian gun manufacturers are the biggest culprits in the guns trade, researchers showed. They churned out more than 80 percent of the arms that have been seized by police, followed by the United States, Argentina and Spain.

But while activists are fighting to pass a law making gun sales in Brazil illegal, they also hope to deter international suppliers from stepping in to fill the void.

"We have information that Brazilian arms are being substituted by Spanish, Italian, Austrian and Israeli guns," Fernandes said.

They are urging the countries listed in the study to help track the trade by determining how the guns arrived in Brazil.

But perhaps more importantly, they are asking other nations to suspend sales to neighboring Paraguay - a black market paradise that is suspected of providing a huge number of guns to Rio.

The United States halted sales to Paraguay in 1997 and even Brazil stopped sales on suspicion that its own guns were legally exported and then illegally brought back into the country.

"We know that Paraguay is an important channel for guns that end up in the shantytowns," said Ignacio Cano, a researcher at ISER and executive coordinator of the study.

Earlier this week, Paraguayan military officials shut down an arms importing firm that had been linked to 105 Brazilian-made Taurus pistols that were seized as part of a major drug bust at the beginning of the month in Rio.

The study will be sent to the countries that have provided arms.

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