Brazil's Bloody Cycle: Politics and Violence

Brazil's recent police operation in Rio de Janeiro's favelas left many dead, raising questions about the country's approach to crime and politics. Over 2, 500 officers, backed by drones and armored vehicles, stormed the areas, resulting in dozens of deaths. Governor Cláudio Castro called it a success, but for the families of the victims, it was a tragic loss. This event highlights a deeper issue: Brazil's political system often relies on violence to maintain control. For decades, the country's efforts to combat organized crime have not reduced its power but have instead made repression a tool of governance. The so-called war on drugs has become an industry that trades lives for political gain. Since Brazil's redemocratization in 1985, every administration has promised to end the reign of traffickers through tougher policing, but each has overseen more deaths. Between 2014 and 2024, police operations killed 60, 394 people. In Bahia alone, police killed 1, 556 people in 2024, more than all police killings in the United States that year. Despite these efforts, Brazil remains a key player in the global cocaine trade. The country exports tons of drugs through its ports each year, and seizures are on the rise. This paradox is not accidental; the spectacle of repression feeds political life. Governors pose with seized drugs, and body counts are read like electoral polls. The symbiosis between violent repression and politics has created a market for security. Police, gangsters, and politicians all profit from the cycle of repression and fear. Confidence in law enforcement is low, yet funding and autonomy for militarized policing keep expanding. The state's legitimacy depends more on displaying strength than delivering safety. Organized crime has evolved alongside this logic. Groups like the Comando Vermelho and Primeiro Comando da Capital now operate as diversified conglomerates involved in gold mining, cyberfraud, and public procurement. In the Amazon, criminal economies are even more expansive, with traffickers, miners, and local officials operating through shared logistics and protection schemes. The timing of mega-operations against organized crime is often strategic. The recent raid in Rio unfolded just as the city prepared to host the C40 World Mayors Summit, sending a message to the world that Rio is tough on crime. Some speculate that Governor Castro, a staunch ally of former President Jair Bolsonaro, sought to embarrass President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva on the eve of the U. N. climate change summit. The spectacle of repression only deepens the cycle it claims to confront. Violence becomes an instrument of political projection, aimed at both international and domestic audiences. Beneath the theatrics lies an institutional machine that is remarkably consistent. The militarized architecture built to fight drugs has long outlived its mandate. Special police units, emergency decrees, and legal immunities have become permanent features of Brazilian public security governance. The same tactical infrastructure used against violent traffickers now targets squatters, protesters, and other vulnerable people. What began as a war on illicit drugs has become a template for coercive rule, expanding wherever the state feels threatened. The result is a set of legacy infrastructures of drug prohibition—the interlocking apparatuses, economic circuits, and moral narratives that allow violence to reproduce itself. These structures now operate independently of drug policy itself. Even if prohibition were to end tomorrow, the infrastructures that it built would endure. Hard-line defenders point to the recent drop in murders as evidence that the strategy is working. It is true that Brazil's homicide rate fell to 21. 2 deaths per 100, 000 inhabitants in 2024, the lowest in more than a decade. But the decline owes more to a truce between the main criminal groups and an aging population than it does to more effective law enforcement. In Rio, operations such as the latest one have done little to alter the underlying calculus of violence. Every spectacular raid simply rearranges the balance of power among rival factions. Within days of the Alemão incursion, traffickers will likely regroup, militias will advance into the newly “pacified” zones, and the cycle will begin anew. Lula's response to the Rio killings has been deliberately cautious. While he has suggested that there was a “massacre” and that there should be an official probe into the matter, he has refrained from any sustained commentary or criticism of the police or of Governor Castro. Instead, he has pointed to his proposed constitutional amendment on public security as evidence that reform is under way. Yet critics warn that the bill is “timid” and does little to restrain police lethality or dismantle the political incentives behind it. By constitutionalizing coordination without addressing accountability, the plan risks reinforcing the existing architecture of coercion under a new administrative veneer. Lula's tempered approach to the Rio operation suggests an awareness of how politically costly it remains to challenge Brazil's police establishment, even after the country's deadliest raid. A credible public security agenda must begin by demilitarizing policing and confronting the collusion between state forces and militias. This would require unifying Brazil's two main state police corps—the Military Police and the Civil Police—and placing them under strong public oversight, establishing an independent federal mechanism to investigate killings by officers, and dismantling militia-run businesses through targeted financial auditing and prosecution. Public security should be redefined around measurable outcomes—such as solving crimes and seizing criminal assets—rather than body counts. At the same time, Brazil needs to strengthen international cooperation against organized crime, which increasingly connects domestic networks to partners in Europe, Africa, and Asia. That effort would involve more robust data-sharing, joint investigations, and harmonized asset-recovery mechanisms through frameworks such as the Organization of American States and the U. N. Office on Drugs and Crime. Castro's depiction of Rio's criminal gangs as “terrorists”—including with apparent attempts to have them classified as such by the US government—will do little other than to sow confusion. Combined with better intelligence, forensic capacity, and community-based prevention, international investigations should treat organized crime as a governance challenge rather than a theatrical enemy. As families in Rio de Janeiro wait to identify their dead, the question facing Brazil is not so much how to end the war on drugs, but how to end the political economy that it created. The country's violence is not chaos. It is a system, and it is one that has lasted far too long.