Police Brutality in Rio de Janeiro
2017 - on going
Since 2008, the city of Rio de Janeiro has undergone various “pacification” projects through police operations.
The term pacification stems from the flawed logic that the urban warfare waged mainly in the city's suburbs can be resolved through military strategies to combat crime. In a highly contested election year, Brazil finds itself once again facing a new blow to public security— and, indeed, to national security.
In 2008, with the World Cup and Olympic Games imminent, the city has undergone a rapid process of militarization.
The UPPs (Pacifying Police Units) implemented to infiltrate the military police into Rio's favelas have become a burden both for community residents and for the police themselves who operate in the city.
The militarization process also included the 2017 Federal Intervention, a political move in which the Rio de Janeiro state government delegated public security to the country's armed forces.
The outcome of this bloody episode was, once again, rampant killing and minuscule advances in the utopia of peace. Studies indicate that from 2007 to 2018, more than 9,000 people died as a result of police lethality in the state of Rio de Janeiro.
In the 2018 elections, Rio de Janeiro (as well as Brazil) experienced yet another process of extreme militarization.
With the defense of police violence brought about by far-right candidates came political violence, directed mainly at politicians from peripheral neighborhoods. Notably, the murder of councilwoman Marielle Franco, a black, lesbian woman from the Maré favela, commissioned by political opponents, was a point of no return for warmongering rhetoric in the city's daily life.
Since then, police operations have become increasingly bloody.
In 2021, a highly publicized operation launched by Governor Claudio Castro, the favorite candidate of former President Jair Bolsonaro, killed 29 people in one morning in the Jacarezinho favela.
Months later, the same governor coordinated the operation that became known as the Vila Cruzeiro Massacre, where another 25 people died.
In 2025, the deadliest operation in the history of Rio de Janeiro led to the deaths of 120 people in Vila da Penha and Complexo do Alemão.
Once again, punitive rhetoric regarding the city's peripheries prevailed, and the political outcome for far-right candidates was quite positive.
Between 2018 and 2025, security forces in the state of Rio de Janeiro were responsible for approximately 10,600 deaths resulting from police intervention.
Even so, it is estimated that 34.9% of the population of the Metropolitan Region is under the control of organized crime, a figure three times higher than in 2007.
In the city with the police force that kills the most and also suffers the most deaths, the scenario of interventionism and militarization has proven to be useless for pacifying the peripheries.
With the uncertainty of the global scenario in the face of US interventionism, in 2026 Brazil faces with great fear the categorization of criminal groups as terrorist organizations - a premise that has already led at least four Latin American countries to suffer military incursions in recent months.
The fear of foreign intervention is becoming increasingly real, and the dilemma of how to tackle organized crime while defending national sovereignty will define the 2026 elections.
