School massacres are no longer just an American problem v

 

 

 "For decades, school massacres have seemed a distinctly American disease. But now Brazil is infected, too.

In the past four years, Latin America’s largest nation has suffered 17 school attacks. Twenty-six people have been killed and dozens wounded. In the last eight months alone, the country has endured 11 assaults, alarming many Brazilians who now fear that the carnage is just beginning.

 Many of the perpetrators fit a profile Americans will recognize: young, disaffected White men and boys in the grip of online groups that worship the killers of schoolchildren. Some have adopted the iconography of hate groups based in the United States: the skull masks of the white-supremacist Atomwaffen Division, swastikas and other hate symbols. Several, including the boy in Aracruz, were inspired by the 1999 Columbine massacre in Colorado.

In the debate over whether the abundance of guns in American life is leading to increasingly deadly school attacks, the Brazilian assaults offer a unique, if tragic, case study.

The two sprawling countries are in many ways similar: bound by a shared history of colonialism and slavery, and characterized today by political polarization, racial strife, economic stagnation and social media obsession.

But one difference divides them."

 

READ REPORT BY TERENCE MCCOY AND MARINA DIAS