And *THIS* I believe clarifies the real incident. I believe the Brazilians felt the Americans were not respecting their Machismo, and so had to be taught a lesson as to who was the man and who was the punk.
When it blew up in their faces by becoming an international embarrassment, once again the Machismo demanded that they had to make the behavior of their "short man syndrome" corrupt police look reasonable in the eyes of the world.
Again, it has been established that the four individuals holding the Americans were off duty Rio police guarding a gas station in the middle of the night, and I think one or more of them must have had a high ranking relative in the Rio Police department who intervened to keep them out of trouble.
In other words, the whole thing was a Machismo "pissing contest" that went bad.
We agree on this, very likely. Which is why law enforcement and government in these places often doesn’t make sense to us, because it MAKES NO SENSE, it has a large amount of emotional BS.
The problem is, when we walk into that, we live in their stupid world of nonsense. I analogize it to walking into certain parts of Chicago. You can do it, but it is IMPERATIVE to realize you aren’t in Kansas anymore, even if it IS ostensibly a part of a major city in the United States of America. You have to conduct yourself differently, and have different expectations of things you will encounter, and the different outcomes.
It has to be the same when outside the USA as a citizen.