Dark side of the Yoon: South Korea’s chaos

Hey, Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile. You know, one of the perks about having four kids that you know about is actually getting a direct line to the big man up north. And this year he wants you to know the best gift that you can give someone is the gift of Mint Mobile's unlimited wireless for $15 a month. Now you don't even need to wrap it. Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment.

Of $45 for a three month plan equivalent to $15 per month required new customer offer for first three months only.

Speed slow after 35 gigabytes if network's busy, taxes and fees extra. See mintmobile.com.

The Economist.

Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. I'm Rosie Blore.

And I'm Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

Brazil has long been plagued by gang violence, but in a growing number of places, local armed groups are now infiltrating the political arena.

And if I say the word badminton, I know what comes to mind. Computational fluid dynamics Seriously, though, in few sports is the gentle movement of air so consequential? We look at attempts to design the most breeze free badminton arena. But first, The chaos that gripped South Korea yesterday has continued into today. It threatens political instability for a long time to come. It all started late in the evening when the country's President, Yoon Suk Yeol, declared martial law. The reason, he said, was to protect against the threat of North Korean communist forces and to protect the free constitutional order. The constitutional order was thrown into disorder pretty quickly. Lawmakers barricaded themselves in the parliament building in Seoul, the capital. Outside, thousands of people gathered in protest, Their martial law. Marching orders in hand, armed forces broke into the parliament, But inside, lawmakers voted against President Yun. Martial law declaration. Mr. Yun, perhaps surprisingly by this point, relented. There's a lot of testing of the world's democracies going on these days, but this one, this one came as a big surprise.

The events that happened last night are incredibly shocking. This is the first time martial law has been imposed in South Korea for over 40 years.

Emma Hogan is our Asia editor.

The whole country responded in shock to the decision by President Yoon, which was reversed six hours later. But President Yoon now faces calls to resign. And this is essentially the biggest constitutional crisis the country has faced for many decades.

So let's wind back a little bit. Do we know why the president imposed martial law in the first place?

He claims that the national assembly had become a monster. He didn't provide Any evidence of this? President Yun is the head of a minority government which is controlled by his opponents, the Democratic Party. He was implying essentially that they had collaborated with North Korean Communist forces.

But you say there's no evidence of that Yun supplied.

Absolutely none. The Democratic Party say it as a coup. Many don't understand the reasoning behind what Yun was doing. Even the head of his own party came out against it. One analysis suggests that it could have been a preemptive move by Yun. He was already in a very weak position in parliament, and so he may have been trying to do this to shore up his support in some way.

So the suggestion that it is or was a coup attempt isn't necessarily super wide of the mark.

No, indeed not. And I mean, it's very worrying for what this means for the state of Korean democracy. Already, relations between Yoon and the Parliament had deteriorated. He'd refused to attend the opening session in September, and last week Parliament voted against his budget. Now he's facing calls for impeachment. About 190 lawmakers from six opposition parties have come together to say that they want to impeach him. It would only require about nine members from his own party to defect for this to happen. This would then trigger a constitutional trial, and that could go on for months. The Democratic Party, the opposition, would be likely to win a new election. And that change in power could have really big implications for the region and beyond.

In what way?

Although Yoon is now better known for his imposition of martial law, previous to this he was stabilizing relations between South Korea and Japan and had deepened the alliance with America. He's been far more hawkish on North Korea and was also supplying, indirectly, munitions to Ukraine. By contrast, the Democratic Party are slightly more skeptical of Japan because of its historical abuses in the country. They favor engagement with North Korea, and they're opposed to direct aid to Ukraine. So this may just seem like an event in South Korean domestic politics, but actually it has huge political reverberations across the world.

And so, in short, Mr. Yoon's plan backfired entirely with. With possible onward implications for, I guess, us all. Do we have a sense for why he took such an extreme measure? This was a fairly dramatic way to try to. To get people back on side.

Indeed, it was incredibly dramatic, and I think it looks likely that an impeachment will occur. I think the events last night point to a really deeper problem in South Korean politics. Polarization between the different political parties has become entrenched, and criminal prosecution of South Korean leaders has become incredibly common. So the question is whether this draws a line or will lead to further division in South Korean politics, where you will have increasing criminalization of different political parties, distrust between the different groups, and where it may be incredibly unstable constitutionally for quite a long time.

Thanks very much for your time, Emma.

Thank you, Jason.

On an upcoming special Christmas show, our writers and editors will be discussing the books they've been reading that best predict what the future will look like. We want your recommendations, too. Is there a book that you think tells us what's coming next? It can be fiction, nonfiction, recently published or centuries old. Send an email. Or even better, send a Voice Note to podcastseconomist.com with your recommendations.

For years, Brazilians have been haunted by an unsolved murder. In 2018, Mariela Franco, a politician and icon of the left, was killed. She had spoken out about the human cost of violence in Rio de Janeiro. And the growing links between drug gangs, militias and local government. Those views may have cost her her life. Two former policemen were recently convicted for that murder. They were sentenced to a combined 138 years in prison. Justice has been done, the judge said, but someone ordered those policemen to fire those shots.

Marielle Franco's death captured the public imagination in Brazil because it was so brazen.

Anna Lankes is our Brazil correspondent.

It was a sign of just how far local armed groups had infiltrated politics. Her death was probably ordered by powerful local politicians. And Brazilians are worried that in other parts of the country that connection between armed groups and local politics may be increasing.

So what's really going on in Rio? Tell me a bit more about the history of militias and gang violence within the city.

So Rio has always been a slightly distinct case from the rest of Brazil because you have had drug traffickers from the 1980s, 1990s, and you have several different factions that fight for territory. So you have turf wars between drug gangs. But then you also had vigilante groups founded by former policemen which became known as militias. And they gained prominence in the 90s. And they initially had a lot of support from favela residents, neighbors of drug gangs that were terrified by narcos and local politicians. So in fact, Brazil's former right wing president, Jair Bolsonaro, when he he was a congressman, sometimes praised the militias. People thought that they were really bringing order to places that had none. Then the militias started looking much more like gangs. They started getting into drug trafficking themselves and they started charging residents in areas that they controlled for a security tax. So they started extorting people. And in Many places at the militias control, you have to pay a tax for electricity, gas, public transport. So Rio has a lot of violence because of battles between militias and local drug gangs. The rest of Brazil looks slightly different.

So what's going on elsewhere in Brazil?

You've long had drug traffickers, but you didn't really have this presence of the militias. Now what's happening is that the drug traffickers in some places like Sao Paulo, are increasingly funding, or seem to be funding local politicians. So I'll give you an example. Sao Paulo has long been safer than Rio. Rio has a homicide rate of around 21 per hundred thousand. And Sao Paulo has a homicide rate similar to Delaware. And that's because it's controlled by a single gang, the First Capital Command, or PCC by its Portuguese acronym. The PCC was founded by inmates as a mutual defense organization after a prison massacre in Sao Paulo in 1992. But it spread massively as Brazil's incarceration rate ballooned in the 2000s. So today it's South America's biggest gang, and it's also starting to get involved in politics and launder its money in the legal economy. I spoke to the person that has done the most to prosecute the pcc. He's a public prosecutor for the state of Sao Paulo. He's called Lincoln Gakia. And he told me that Brazil is experiencing what Italy experienced in the 1990s. They're starting to resemble a mafia.

What does that look like on the ground in Rio?

You can go to a favela and you'll see a teenager with a massive gun. You don't see that in Sao Paulo. In Sao Paulo, the PCC is very sophisticated. So they control gasoline stations, they've gotten involved in public health care services, in real estate, in illegal gold mining, in the north of Brazil, in rubbish collection. Just this year, the city's local government took over two private bus operators, which together transported over 16 million passengers per month. After an investigation led by Lincoln Gakia found that those companies were being used to launder money for the pcc. So they've gotten into white collar crime. When Gakia started investigating the PCC in 2004, he told me he thought they were making less than $2 million per year. Today, they're thought to make about $1 billion annually. And most of that comes from business outside of Brazil.

So, Anna, either way you look at it, whether you've got militias emerging or you've got gang monopolies, you've got a hu huge corruption of the political state, right?

So the militias, like I said, are very Rio specific. And there for a long time you've had corruption of the political state totally. The worry is that especially in smaller municipalities where it might be easier to buy off local politicians, or in places where the PCC is so powerful, like in Sao Paulo, that you might be getting an infiltration of armed groups into politics. So this year you had municipal elections and Brazilians voted for thousands of mayors and city councillors. And in the run up to those elections, Sao Paulo police arrested dozens of people and carried out dozens of search and seizure operations as part of an investigation into illegal campaign financing by the pcc. Also, attacks against officials in Brazil's local elections this year were much higher than in the last local elections. And police believe that organized criminal groups are behind that. SURGEON The PCC doesn't want to run a political party or overthrow the state. What they want is to finance politicians and then obtain benefits like get public bids for their companies.

So are there any solutions? Anna?

Brazilians rank crime and drug trafficking as their top concern, along with corruption. And more than a third of them expect a rise in gang related murders in the next six months. So it's really top of mind. And the president, Luis Ignacio Lula da Silva, called together all the regional governors to present them with a plan for tackling organized crime. He did this just a few weeks ago and he warned that gangs were moving into politics. So his plan would basically integrate different intelligence systems between investigative agencies to facilitate cross referencing data on crimes. And it would also grant the Federal Highway Police new powers to also inspect railways and rivers. But some governors are pushing back hard. They think that the federal government is taking away states rights to set security policies. I spoke to some security analysts though, that told me that the lack of national integration on security policies is precisely what may be allowing gangs to infiltrate lower level politics. So if Brazil wants to kick out the gangsters, it first has to unite the governors.

Ana, great to have you on the show. Thank you.

Thanks for having me, Rosie.

Anyone who's tried to play a game of badminton just for fun in their back garden or at the beach in the summer will appreciate why the competitive version of the sport is played indoors. The shuttlecocks are so light and they're sort of covered in feathers. Even the slightest gust of wind is enough to send them going so completely off course.

Tim Cross is a senior science writer at the Economist.

But it turns out that even indoors you can't eliminate the effect of wind entirely. So the way that the ventilation system in the hall works or Even people opening and closing doors can have an effect. And so for that reason, we've now seen some Indian researchers who've decided they're going to seize this ball by the horns and do some pretty hardcore computational fluid dynamics modeling of what the absolute best way is to design a badminton reader to minimize this problem.

And this problem is such that it really needs some hardcore computational fluid dynamics.

To solve it seems to be, yeah. So if you look at the most recent Olympics, there were a couple of American players who were knocked out kind of early. And one reason they gave for their early exit was that they hadn't quite mastered the drift of their shuttlecocks in the arena, which was newly built for the Games, and they hadn't played in before. If you go back even further, you can find even more dramatic examples. So at the Asian Games in South Korea in 2014, the Chinese team accused the South Koreans of fiddling with the aircon to try and give the home team an advantage.

So what's the nature of the solution here? Are we changing the shape of the arena or the way the ventilation system is made? What's going on?

So really it's both. And if you want to properly fix the problem, you have to design the arena with this in mind. And that was the upshot of this paper that we're talking about, which was published in a journal called Physics of Fluids by a group led by an engineer called Karthik Jayana Rasimhan from the Savita Institute of Medical and Technical Sciences in Chennai. And they looked at a kind of common design for a lot of sports arenas, which is a barrel roof design. So if you imagine something like water barrel or a Coke can, and you cut it straight down, so you cut it along the long axis and then plonk it on top of an arena. Give it a sort of semi cylindrical roof, I guess, a little bit like a Dutch barn or a train carriage or something like that. And this is a reasonably common, reasonably popular design because it gives you plenty of vertical room, which you also want, you know, both to get the spectators in, because some of the shots can go quite high. It gives you nice unobstructed sight lines, and it's, you know, reasonably cheap and reasonably strong. And they looked at two different ways of ventilating it. So in one of those designs, they had the ventilation holes at the gable end of the building. So if you imagine the building is a train carriage, the air is kind of flowing down the length of the carriage from the front to the back. And in the other example they swapped the holes round, so they were on the front and back walls. So again, if you imagine it's a train carriage, the air is flowing kind of crossways from the left hand seat to the right hand seat and out. And then for each of those configurations, they looked at three different roof heights, which gave them six different arena designs to have a look at.

Okay. And what came out on top for elite badminton players.

So after they'd crunched all the numbers, it turned out that the best design was one with the ventilation openings on the gable end. So in other words, at the front and back of the train, with the ventilation running down the carriage, as it were, that gave you the calmest conditions on court. And importantly, it did it without sort of compromising the ventilation too badly so that the people inside won't find it unbearably stuffy.

And so do you think this is the sort of research that will inform future arenas, or are we just going to know what the perfect solution is and know that we're not there?

I think it might eventually. And I mean, the thing is, you know, badminton in the west maybe is more like a pastime than a serious sport, but that isn't true everywhere. So in East Asia and places like China, Japan, India, it's. It's competitive sport, it's quite big business. So if you're going to design an arena primarily to play badminton in, or even if you're just going to design, you know, multi use sports arena guys playing basketball or indoor football or whatever, they aren't going to complain if there's a little bit less wind indoors. So it seems to me, you know, there's no real cost to doing this and potentially some benefits. So, yeah, maybe we will see arenas built like this in future.

Tim, thanks very much as ever.

Thanks, Jason.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. We'll see you back here tomorrow. Sam.