Brazil cracks down on surprising new threat: Neo-Nazis

A renovated park in the southern state capital of Porto Alegre, Brazil, includes an original design from the 1930s that resembles a swastika, which drew citizen complaints, July 12, 2023. The Brazilian government has raided neo-Nazi groups across 10 states this year, part of a push by the new administration of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva to prosecute far-right extremists. [Victor Moriyama/The New York Times]

NOVA PETRÓPOLIS, Brazil - In southern Brazil in July, Laureano Toscani and João Guilherme Correa were smoking cigarettes along a busy road in their prison-issued garb, shorts and sandals, waiting for a ride after seven months in jail.

Toscani was once convicted of stabbing a group of Jewish men, and Correa has been accused of murdering a couple leaving a party. But this time, they were behind bars for attending what they said was a harmless barbecue.

Brazilian authorities, however, say it was something far more sinister: a meeting of the Hammerskins, a neo-Nazi group founded in Dallas in 1988 that they say has recently found its way thousands of miles south, to Brazil's most starkly conservative region, reflecting a surge in far-right extremists in Latin America's largest nation.

In September 2022, state police in Santa Catarina began trailing the Hammerskins...

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