Pedro Hungarez lived surrounded by friends, including Mr. Zé Osmar, interviewed by DN in 2018, between the São Paulo cities of Serra Negra, Caieiras, Diadema, Embu, Campos de Jordão and São Paulo, until he died of a heart attack, in 1979, while bathing on Bertioga beach. Hungarez, in fact, was called Josef Mengele and is considered responsible for the deaths of 400,000 people in Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Ronnie Biggs, one of the members of the gang that robbed a mail train in Buckinghamshire in 1963, spent most of his 36 years as a fugitive from the police living quietly in Rio de Janeiro. He even recorded a jazz album and used to tell details of the robbery to tourists at lively backyard barbecues.
Tommaso Buscetta, the powerful head of Cosa Nostra who became the organization’s most famous whistleblower, chose Brazil as an escape route from the Italian authorities on three occasions in the 1970s, a country where he set up a business, got married and started a family.
But in 2010, Nestor Caro-Chaparro, one of Colombia’s four biggest drug traffickers, was arrested in a luxury apartment in Copacabana, not far from the port of Rio, where he was shipping drugs. containers with cocaine to the USA. Less than a year later, agents from the US Marshall Service escorted him to the North American country.
Caro-Chaparro was the first success story of the Fim da Linha program, launched in 2009 by the Brazilian government, with the aim of erasing the country’s reputation as a “paradise for fugitives” because of Mengele, Biggs, Buscetta and other criminals.
The image, however, was not only erased but inverted. Today, the USA is the destination for fugitives.
The former head of the intelligence service, Alexandre Ramagem, sentenced to 16 years in the coup trial, was located in a condominium with an artificial lake and private beach in Florida, last week. The Federal Supreme Court (STF) has already asked for his name to be included in Interpol’s red notice.
Before, it was the turn of Bolsonaro deputy Carla Zambelli to record a video in the USA, where she had escaped via Argentina, despite being convicted of illegal possession of a weapon – she was chasing a journalist with a pistol in her hands on the streets of São Paulo – and for having hacked into the electronic system of the National Council of Justice with a friend hacker.
On the same day that the STF requested the seizure of Eduardo Bolsonaro’s passport, the deputy was already in the USA, where he has been leading a lobby against the Brazilian economy.
His father, Jair Bolsonaro, shortly after losing the elections and even with dozens of legal issues, also went to the USA to remotely monitor the invasion of Praça dos Três Poderes on January 8, 2023.
Bolsonaro supporter Anderson Torres, former Minister of Justice, was already there, in whose house a draft was found with the step-by-step instructions of the coup.
It is time for the USA to approve a End of the Line program so as not to have the reputation of being the “new paradise for fugitives”.
Journalist, correspondent in São Paulo