Military police occupy favela in Rio de Janeiro,April 2015.Demotix/Fabio Teixeira.All rights reserved.Imagine a place where eight Michael Browns are killed every day. Imagine a place where extortion, rape, torture, and killings are routine. This is Brazil. Police terror in Brazil has become so banal that it has lost the media’s interest. Some of us may recall the global media’s coverage of massacres such as Candelaria (1993), Carandiru (1992), Eldorado dos Carajas (1996), and Crimes de Maio (2006). Now, more than ever, slaughter has become the police’s modus operandi. One would expect that with the social achievements promoted by the Workers’ Party in the last decade (40 million people came out of poverty in Brazil), police terror would disappear or at least be far less frequent. Quite the opposite has occurred. In Brazil, there is one thing that unites both left and right-wing governments: their incapacity to fight against police terror. At times, governments in both camps have been complicit with the police state.
Slaughter as a routine practice in Brazil is not an overstatement. The Brazilian police are so corrupt, brutal and out of control that in the last eight months (from January-August 2015), there had been fifteen slaughters with 56 victims in the city and metropolitan region of São Paulo. Although investigations are ongoing, everything indicates that the highly corrupt and delinquent Military Police is implicated in the killings. Each time a new report on killings by the police is disclosed, it reveals astonishing levels of death tolls. No one seems to care. After all, the majority of the victims are black residents in the favela.
Perhaps you care: so let’s review the numbers. In the last ten years (from 2002-2012), the Brazilian police force killed 11, 200 individuals allegedly for resisting arrests. In 2014, the police killed 3022 civilians, according to preliminary numbers by the Brazilian Forum of Public Safety. As of September 2015, the São Paulo and Rio’s military police has killed 494 and 459 people respectively. According to Amnesty International, the police are responsible for as much as 15% of the homicides in Rio de Janeiro. In São Paulo, the police are responsible for as much as 1 out of every 5 violent deaths.
