Taiza Carine da Costa got her first taste of gambling when she was just 9.

Growing up in the rundown fringes of Rio de Janeiro, Ms. Costa’s godparents would send her down the block, a few coins in hand, to bet on a popular lottery that, though illegal, has been a staple of life in Brazil for over a century.

The habit stuck and, as an adult, she would bet daily on the game, in which players place wagers on animals represented by sets of numbers. Like many Brazilians, whenever she dreamed of a creature, she saw it as a sign to bet on the lottery, known as “jogo do bicho” — or animal game — in Portuguese.

“If I dream, I bet,” said Ms. Costa, 37, a clothing vendor.

But, lately, Ms. Costa is turning to a different game of chance that is at her fingertips around the clock: a digital slot machine offering big rewards if she can draw three matching symbols.

Tigrinho, or Little Tiger in Portuguese, mimics a popular Chinese slots game and has led the way as mobile betting apps have exploded in popularity since Brazil legalized digital gambling in 2018. Ms. Costa plays Little Tiger every day and her gambling — and her losses — have picked up as a result. She estimates she has lost roughly $80,000 over two years on the app.

“It’s hard to stop,” she said.

Online betting games, from digital casinos to soccer wagers, have sparked a fever in Latin America’s largest nation, fueling a fierce debate — like elsewhere in the world — over how to regulate the booming industry and shield lower-income people who often pile on debt or lose big chunks of meager earnings betting.

The gambling frenzy is also threatening Brazil’s animal lottery, which has links to murderous mobs and has been an unshakable part of popular culture since it was created in Rio de Janeiro in the 1800s and took off across the country.

While decades of crackdowns have failed to stamp out the lottery and the criminal gangs that run it, the analog game now appears to be in the throes of an existential crisis as fewer Brazilians are willing to physically place bets with a local bookie.

Digital alternatives — offering bigger jackpots and infinite chances — now draw over $23 billion in wagers each year, about ten times more than the animal lottery, according to the Legal Games Institute, a nonprofit that studies gambling in Brazil.

While the analog game has six draws per day, online gambling is nonstop.

“The Brazilian gambler now has a casino in his pocket,” said Magno José Santos de Souza, the institute’s president.

The animal lottery, on the other hand, “hasn’t been able to renew its base,” said Luiz Antônio Simas, a Rio historian who has written a book about the game.

The game was created in the 1890s by a baron seeking to draw more visitors to his newly-created zoo in the Vila Isabel neighborhood of Rio. People with admission tickets were entered into a raffle, with an animal drawn at the end of each day.

The lottery soon became more popular than the zoo itself, and similar games of chance began popping up across the city. Fearing the game would hurt government lotteries, authorities banned it three years after it was created.

But the lottery’s advance was unstoppable. Before long, bookies taking bets outside bars and newspaper stands became a fixture across Brazil, with the game reaching even the most remote corners of the Amazon rainforest.

By the 1970s, the animal lottery had grown into a multimillion dollar business fueling bloody disputes among Rio’s mafias, as they wrestled for territorial control. The gambling bosses eventually divvied up the city — and the country — into zones.

To protect their illicit dealings, lottery kingpins bribed judges, politicians and police officials. In working-class areas of Rio, they won hearts and minds by buying local soccer teams, funding lavish Carnival parades and handing out Christmas presents.

“They built this playful, fun facade,” said Fábio Corrêa, a federal prosecutor in Rio de Janeiro who leads a task force combating organized crime. “They wanted to create this image of Good Samaritans.”

Over the years, the authorities repeatedly tried to crack down on the mafia-run lottery and, in 1993, they finally had a breakthrough: a judge sentenced 14 lottery bosses to six years in prison. But, before long, many of the game’s most powerful kingpins were out, free to expand their empires.

On a recent afternoon in the neighborhood of Vila Isabel, the birthplace of the animal lottery, three bookies — each manning a different corner — took bets from regulars. Few of them looked younger than 50.

“I always bet on the pig or the tiger,” said Germano da Silva, 71, a retired publicist. Digging into his wallet, he pulled out an old ticket that won him $450 the week before. “My children don’t know how to play,” he added. “Whenever they want to bet, they come to me.”

For newcomers, the lottery’s rules can seem daunting. Players bet on combinations of two-, three- or four-digit numbers, which are linked to any one of 25 animals, from a cow to a monkey. Wagers start at a few cents, but payoffs can reach into the thousands of dollars.

Most animal lottery players, though, are not placing bets in the hopes of getting rich, according to Mr. Simas, the historian. “They want to win a little money for a beer at the end of the day,” he said. “Playing the game is part of street culture.”

In Brazil, a deeply superstitious country, bets in the animal lottery have long been drawn from dreams, lucky animals, or the dates of big life events like birthdays, deaths or marriages.

“Each person has their favorite play,” said Nena Coelho, a 60-year-old secretary who was betting on the dog, inspired by a stray that had followed her friend home.

While most gambling, including casinos and slot machines, is barred in Brazil, lawmakers legalized digital games but delayed drafting concrete oversight rules. Experts say the lag has opened the door for thousands of unregulated platforms, some of them fraudulent, to flood Brazil.

This echoes the experiences of countries like Britain and the United States, where legislators, eager to capture tax revenues, were quick to legalize digital gambling but were later left racing to impose regulations, said Lia Nower, director of the Center for Gambling Studies at Rutgers University.

“Most legislators don’t have a real awareness that this is potentially addictive,” Ms. Nower said.

Digital games were an instant hit in Brazil, a nation of 203 million with one of the world’s highest rates of internet use. Platforms promising a fast path out of poverty quickly gained popularity among low-income people in a country marked by deep inequality.

Colorful and childlike, the apps were often promoted by social media influencers who told followers that they could win tens of thousands in cash on sites that turned out to be rigged. (Some were later arrested, accused of tricking fans into betting on unauthorized platforms.)

Brazil’s government estimates that nearly a quarter of the population started gambling online over the last five years. Brazilians now spend about $3.5 billion each month on online wagers, with sports betting making up a huge segment in soccer-crazy Brazil, according to figures from the country’s central bank.

Rushing to bring the sector under control, Brazilian authorities began enforcing a new law this month requiring betting companies to pay a fee and comply with federal rules on fraud, responsible marketing and money laundering.

The animal lottery remains illegal, but the shift to digital betting has opened new revenue streams.

Lottery bosses are using legal betting sites to launder money amassed from illicit activities like the animal lottery, the authorities say.

“They are infiltrating the digital space,” Mr. Corrêa said. “They want to give an air of legality to activities that, at the end of the day, are illegal in origin.”

But even as many move on from the animal lottery, there are still those who are not quite ready to let go.

Matheus Resende, 30, remembers his father teaching him how to calculate odds and craft bets. “He’s the Google of the animal lottery,” said Mr. Resende, a beverage distributor from Rio.

These days, Mr. Resende is one of millions of Brazilians placing digital wagers on soccer games. Still, he has a soft spot for the animal lottery and, every week, he stops by his local bookie too.

He knows about the game’s criminal links, he says, but he’s still sad to see it fading away.

“It’s a family tradition,” he said. “So there’s a certain nostalgia there.”

There seem to be no limits to the dark revelations laid bare by the downfall of Syria’s 54-year Assad regime.

Prisons have emptied, exposing the instruments of torture used on peaceful protesters and others considered opponents of the government. Stacks of official documents record thousands of detainees. Morgues and mass graves hold the gaunt, broken-bodied victims, or at least some of them.

Many others have yet to be found.

For these and many other atrocities, Syrians want justice. The rebel alliance that overthrew President Bashar al-Assad last month has vowed to hunt down and prosecute senior regime figures for crimes that include murdering, wrongly imprisoning, torturing and gassing their own people.

“Most Syrians would say they can only achieve closure to bring this dark 54-year era to an end when they bring these guys to justice,” said Ayman Asfari, chairman of Madaniya, a network of Syrian human rights organizations and other civic groups.

But even assuming that the new authorities can track suspects down, accountability will be hard to achieve in a country as vulnerable, divided and battered as Syria. The experiences of other Arab countries whose despotic regimes collapsed testify to the challenges: None of those countries — not Egypt, not Iraq, not Tunisia — succeeded in securing comprehensive, lasting justice for the crimes of earlier eras.

Syria faces some distinctive hurdles. The country’s new de facto leaders come from the country’s Sunni Muslim majority, while the senior ranks of the deposed regime were dominated by Alawites, a religious minority. That means prosecutions for Assad-era abuses could risk fueling Syria’s sectarian tensions.

The justice system was for years little more than a tool for Mr. al-Assad, making it ill equipped to handle sweeping, complex human rights violations. Many thousands of Syrians could be implicated, more than can possibly be prosecuted, raising questions about how to handle lower-level officials.

And after years of war, sanctions, corruption and mismanagement, it is an enormous task just to sort through the damage while transitioning to a new government.

Nine in 10 Syrians live in poverty. Cities lie in ruins. Homes have been destroyed. Tens of thousands of people were unjustly detained for years or decades. Hundreds of thousands were killed in the fighting. Many are still missing.

Syrians will need time and many discussions to design a sound accountability process, said Nerma Jelacic of the Commission for International Justice and Accountability, which has been gathering evidence against Syrian regime figures for years.

“These are things that take time, and they never happen overnight,” she said.

But there is enormous pressure on Syria’s new leaders to begin punishing the old, and the transitional authorities in the capital, Damascus, have promised to do so.

“We will not relent in holding accountable the criminals, murderers and security and military officers involved in torturing the Syrian people,” Ahmed al-Shara, Syria’s de facto leader, said in a post on Telegram in December. He added that they would soon publish “List No. 1” of senior officials “implicated in the torture of the Syrian people.”

Hunting down such figures will be difficult, if not impossible. Mr. al-Assad has found refuge in Russia, which is unlikely to give him up. Many of his top associates have melted away, with some reportedly in hiding in Lebanon or the United Arab Emirates.

Still, Syrian human rights groups in exile began laying the groundwork more than a decade ago, gathering evidence for prosecutions that were mounted in other countries — and someday, they hoped, in their own.

But Fernando Travesí, executive director of the International Center for Transitional Justice, which has worked with such Syrian groups, cautioned that, before beginning prosecutions in Syria, the authorities should first earn citizens’ trust by building a state that meets their needs.

Doing so would avoid the missteps of a country like Tunisia, where a lack of economic progress in the years after the 2011 Arab Spring revolution left many people embittered and disenchanted. By 2021, Tunisians had turned on their fledgling democracy, throwing their support to a president who has grown increasingly authoritarian. Efforts to bring members of the feared security services and regime cronies to justice are now functionally suspended.

“Any process of truth, justice and accountability needs to be coming from institutions that have some legitimacy and credibility with the population, otherwise it’s a waste of time,” Mr. Travesí said. Providing crucial services, he added, would encourage Syrians to view government as “not a tool for repression; it’s taking care of my needs.”

The transitional government can take basic yet vital steps such as helping refugees who left years ago obtain new identification, adjudicating what should happen to property that was stolen or occupied during the war, and providing stable electricity and running water. It will need to deliver humanitarian aid and economic improvements, though those may only be possible with the help of other countries.

And it must do all this in an evenhanded way, or Syrians might see accountability efforts as selective or politically driven. After the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq in 2003, the United States-led occupation and successive governments purged and blacklisted even junior functionaries in the former ruling party without due process, which analysts said undermined faith in the new system.

“The only way to heal the wounds with the other communities is to make sure they’re fairly represented,” Mr. Asfari said.

The Syrian authorities are signaling that they understand. They have vowed repeatedly to respect minority rights and have promised amnesty to rank-and-file soldiers who were forced to serve in Mr. al-Assad’s military. Most government employees have been allowed to stay on to keep institutions running.

Any prosecution “has to be a good process, otherwise it’ll look like score-settling,” said Stephen J. Rapp, a former international prosecutor and former U.S. ambassador for global justice who has worked on Syrian abuses for more than a decade. “And that can play a key role in reconciling a society and defusing efforts to settle scores, for instance, against the children of parents who committed these crimes.”

In an added complication, some of the documents that will be crucial to mounting any prosecutions have been damaged in the chaos following Mr. al-Assad’s downfall, with regime prisons and intelligence agency archives ransacked, looted or burned, said Ms. Jelacic of the Commission for International Justice and Accountability.

Because Syria remains under wartime sanctions, her group and others trying to safeguard these papers for future use in court cannot operate across much of the country, further jeopardizing their efforts.

The wartime mass graves and torture devices are only the most glaring evidence of abuses overseen by Mr. al-Assad and his father, Hafez.

Nearly every Syrian, in some sense, has been wronged by the former regime. So it is not enough to prosecute individuals for crimes committed during the civil war, say veterans of justice efforts in other countries that underwent political transitions.

Mr. Rapp called for a “larger truth-telling process” that could help “really begin to understand the system of state repression that was Syria for the last 54 years, and this machinery of murder that was Syria” since 2011.

One model could be the post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, which heard testimony from victims and perpetrators of rights violations, offered reparations to victims, and in some cases granted amnesties.

Ms. Jelacic said Syria would need a broader reckoning with the Assad regime’s legacy that “doesn’t contribute to the divisions, but that it contributes to healing.”

Before trials begin, experts said, Syria should overhaul its police and court systems and build a legal framework to handle rights violations, perhaps creating a special tribunal to prosecute the most serious crimes. An equally urgent priority is finding out what happened to the estimated 136,000 people who remain missing after being arrested by the Assad regime and identifying bodies uncovered in mass graves.

But Syria cannot wait too long to prosecute former regime officials. Slow-moving official justice leaves room for angry people to take matters into their own hands, which could set off cycles of violence and deepen sectarian divisions. Already, scattered revenge killings and threats against minorities who were favored by the Assad regime have been reported.

After Tunisia’s revolution, lengthy delays in bringing cases against former security officials added to citizens’ sense that their new democracy was bankrupt.

Lamia Farhani, a Tunisian lawyer who has long sought justice for her brother’s fatal shooting while he protested the previous regime in 2011, said that her country’s disillusionment had permitted the current president, Kais Saied, to dismantle its democracy.

“We had a nascent democracy that failed at the first storm,” she said. “And all this happened because there was no real reconciliation.”

Struggling to raise funds for the restoration of his cathedral’s antique organ, a priest from St.-Flour, a small town in France’s heartland, came up with a creative solution. He turned one of the bell towers into a curing workshop where farmers could hang their hams to dry.

For nearly two years, after being blessed by a local bishop, pork legs swayed in peace in the dry air of the cathedral’s north tower, bringing in much-needed funds and delighting charcuterie lovers. Then an inspector for the organization that oversees France’s architectural heritage stepped in.

After noticing a grease stain on the floor of the bell tower, as well as other infractions, the inspector ordered that the hams be taken down. They were a fire hazard, he said in a report in December 2023, according to cathedral officials. When the cathedral refused to remove the hams, the dispute escalated all the way to the country’s minister of culture, Rachida Dati.

The battle over the St.-Flour hams was widely derided as an example of how overzealous officials can quash innovative local initiatives. It also spoke to a larger issue that aging churches across France have been grappling with as they face costly reparations: Who is going to pay to maintain the country’s vast religious heritage?

After the French Revolution, church properties were seized by the state, which eventually took responsibility for overseeing most of them. But the central government and local municipalities have struggled to fund the maintenance of the country’s cathedrals and churches.

The restoration of Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris, which was ravaged by a devastating fire in 2019, was funded by about $900 million in donations. But religious buildings in the rest of the country have been largely left to fend for themselves.

Across France, an estimated 15,000 religious buildings out of 45,000 are classified as historical monuments, according to the Culture Ministry. More than 2,300 of them are in poor condition, and 363 are considered endangered, the ministry said.

“The situation is alarming,” said Hadrien Lacoste, the vice president of the Religious Heritage Observatory, an independent nonprofit group. “There’s a drop in religious practice,” he added, “and there’s a drop in demographics in rural areas.”

Despite a decline in church attendance, towns like St.-Flour, which has a population of about 6,400, see their cathedrals and churches as defining elements of their identities and feel a strong need to maintain them.

“We’ve realized that each of our churches is a little Notre-Dame, that the village without the church is like Paris without Notre-Dame,” said Mathieu Lours, a French historian who specializes in religious architecture.

In France — as has been the case elsewhere in Europe — decaying churches are often transformed into gyms, restaurants, hotels or housing.

In St.-Flour, a renaissance church adjacent to the cathedral was deconsecrated and is now a market and a cultural venue.

Maintaining the cathedral itself was seen as an essential, if costly, town effort. St.-Flour is at the heart of Cantal, an area of France known for its green hilly landscapes and its local cheese. From a distance, the cathedral, at the top of rocky outcrop, looms over the town like a fortress.

“You know the saying, all roads lead to Rome?” said Patrice Boulard, the meat producer in charge of climbing the tower’s 145 steps to suspend the hams there. “Well here in St.-Flour, all roads lead to the cathedral.”

The idea for the curing workshop in the bell tower was the brainchild of Gilles Boyer, who was at the time the cathedral’s rector, after funds that were supposed to be provided by the authorities for repairing the church’s 19th-century choir organ never materialized.

A food lover who had once managed a restaurant in Paris, Mr. Boyer had already set up beehives on an unused terrace of the cathedral to produce honey for sale. The bell tower was also unused space. Why not use it for hanging hams, a specialty of the region, he wondered?

“It all started as a joke,” he said, “but it wasn’t so dumb after all.”

Altitude, a local charcuterie cooperative made up of some 40 pig breeders, loved the idea, partly for the marketing potential, but also for what they believed to be the special quality of the air and conditions in the tower for curing hams.

“It creates a link between business and heritage, between a product and its terroir,” said Thierry Bousseau, the company’s communication manager.

The project was approved by both state and church authorities, and the first batch of hams was put on sale in markets, in the church and online in the spring of 2022, for about $150 each, about $50 more than what an average local artisanal ham would fetch. The profits, once Altitude recouped its costs, were given to the cathedral.

Overall, about 300 hams have been sold and more than $12,000 was spent to finally restore the organ, Mr. Bousseau said.

The project was called “Florus Solatium,” a tribute to the town’s supposed founder, a fifth-century saint called Florus whose relics are kept in the cathedral. According to legend, the saint miraculously escaped bandits by reaching the top of the cliff, where residents welcomed him with a traditional local ham. “Quid solatium!” he was said to have exclaimed. “What a solace!”

Most of the maturation process for the hams takes place in Altitude warehouses in a nearby town. But Mr. Boyer, the former rector, is convinced that the three months they spend attached to the tower’s wooden beams, exposed to the wind and to the bell’s vibrations, is what gives the meat its special quality.

“Most hams are dried in places where the hygrometry is always the same, the ventilation is always the same,” said Aurélien Gransagne, the chef at Restaurant Serge Vieira, a nearby Michelin-starred restaurant, referring to the humidity in the air. In the bell tower, he added, “you have fluctuations, and that’s what makes a product special.”

The thick, rosy flesh, is as good as the best prosciutto from Italy or jamón from Spain, he said. Mr. Gransagne’s restaurant offers diners rose-shaped slices of the meat alongside other appetizers — and a bit of storytelling about its provenance.

Given the success of the tower-cured hams, Jean-Paul Rolland, who took over as rector from Mr. Boyer in 2022, said he decided to put his foot down when the heritage architect declared the project dangerous.

“The building is dedicated to religious practice,” he said, “so it’s not up to the administration to tell us what we can do or not inside.”

The grease stain probably appeared on the age-old parquet floor long before the hams were brought up, he said.

“It’s like the landlord telling a tenant that he is not allowed to change a painting’s place in the living room,” Mr. Rolland added.

He did make some small changes, like placing carpets on the floor of the towers and barring access to visitors. But the hams would continue to hang, he said.

In October, Ms. Dati, the culture minister, announced a decision: The hams will stay, provided a “detailed study” will have examined the “administrative, material and organizational conditions” for the hams to be matured safely, her office said in an email. That process is still continuing.

Whatever the eventual decision, the hams have become something of a cause célèbre in a country that values the gastronomic offerings of small producers as much as the country’s religious heritage. St.-Flour made national headlines, and sales of the hams have been brisk. The Élysée Palace in Paris has a standing order for hams every three months, and served slices of it at a buffet in June, Altitude says. (It is not clear if President Emmanuel Macron tried some, and the Elysée did not respond to requests for comment.)

Still, not everyone in St.-Flour is happy with the idea of turning the church into something of a marketplace.

“There were bees, now there’s hams. What’s next, cheese?” asked Roger Merle, 68, the owner of a clothing store in the town.