When the solar rose over Rio de Janeiro on Tuesday, Oct. 28, it illuminated a metropolis below siege. Greater than 2,500 cops, backed by drones and armored autos, superior into the favelas of Alemão and Penha. By the point that the gunfire subsided, a number of dozen folks have been useless—presumably as many as 132, in accordance with the Rio public defender’s workplace—in what’s now the deadliest police operation in Brazil’s historical past. Gov. Cláudio Castro referred to as it “successful,” describing the targets as “narco-terrorists.” For the households who recognized the our bodies on show in São Lucas Sq. the subsequent morning, it felt much less like a victory than a ritual of loss that the town is aware of too nicely.
This was not chaos unfolding, however order imposed. It was the predictable rhythm of a political system that has discovered to control by violence. For many years, Brazil’s marketing campaign in opposition to organized crime has not dismantled its enemy. As an alternative, it has institutionalized repression as a software of energy, constructed markets round illegality, and turned bloodshed into political foreign money. The nation’s so-called conflict on medicine now not capabilities as a coverage. It has develop into an business that trades lives for legitimacy.
When the solar rose over Rio de Janeiro on Tuesday, Oct. 28, it illuminated a metropolis below siege. Greater than 2,500 cops, backed by drones and armored autos, superior into the favelas of Alemão and Penha. By the point that the gunfire subsided, a number of dozen folks have been useless—presumably as many as 132, in accordance with the Rio public defender’s workplace—in what’s now the deadliest police operation in Brazil’s historical past. Gov. Cláudio Castro referred to as it “successful,” describing the targets as “narco-terrorists.” For the households who recognized the our bodies on show in São Lucas Sq. the subsequent morning, it felt much less like a victory than a ritual of loss that the town is aware of too nicely.
This was not chaos unfolding, however order imposed. It was the predictable rhythm of a political system that has discovered to control by violence. For many years, Brazil’s marketing campaign in opposition to organized crime has not dismantled its enemy. As an alternative, it has institutionalized repression as a software of energy, constructed markets round illegality, and turned bloodshed into political foreign money. The nation’s so-called conflict on medicine now not capabilities as a coverage. It has develop into an business that trades lives for legitimacy.
Each administration for the reason that nation’s 1985 redemocratization has vowed to finish the reign of traffickers by more durable policing, and every has presided over extra deaths. Between 2014 and 2024, police operations in Brazil killed a staggering whole of 60,394 folks. Within the state of Bahia alone, cops killed 1,556 folks in 2024—greater than all police killings in the USA that 12 months. In Rio, elite items corresponding to BOPE and CORE have remodeled the town’s hillsides into theaters of counterinsurgency.
But Brazil stays each a significant shopper market and a key logistical hub within the international cocaine commerce, exporting tons of the drug by its ports annually (Brazil’s Federal Police seized 74.5 tons in 2024, a determine that’s on the rise) and shifting it onward to Europe, Africa, and past.
That paradox is just not incidental. The spectacle of repression feeds political life. Governors pose beside seized medicine and rifles, helicopters hover above televised raids, and physique counts are learn like electoral polls. Because the lethal raid in Rio, a minimum of 9 governors have expressed assist for Castro, and a number of other of them visited him in Rio two days after the operation. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, whereas “appalled” on the variety of deaths, insisted that “organized crime can’t proceed to destroy households.”
This symbiosis between violent repression and politics has created what is likely to be referred to as a marketplace for safety—a system wherein police, gangsters, and politicians every revenue from the identical cycle of repression and worry. Confidence in legislation enforcement is shaky at greatest—in a ballot carried out in late 2024, 51 % of Brazilians reported feeling better worry than belief within the police—but funding and autonomy for militarized policing preserve increasing. The state’s legitimacy relies upon much less on delivering security than on displaying power.
In the meantime, organized crime has developed alongside this logic. The Comando Vermelho (CV) and Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC)—the nation’s two strongest prison networks—have lengthy transcended drug trafficking. They now function as diversified conglomerates engaged in gold mining, cyberfraud, and public procurement. The PCC launders billions by every thing from gasoline stations to stylish funding portfolios, whereas the CV manages export routes stretching from the Amazon to Brazil’s Atlantic ports and past.
The so-called militias that management Rio’s western neighborhoods, as soon as comprising off-duty policemen promising to “liberate” communities from traffickers, now rule a few quarter of the town’s territory, extracting funds for fuel, web, transport, and actual property.
Within the Amazon, prison economies are much more expansive. The identical smuggling networks as soon as constructed for cocaine now transfer gold, timber, and wildlife. Right here, drug trafficking and the infrastructures that have been put in place to manage it merge with the frontier’s rising extractive industries: Traffickers, miners, and native officers function by shared logistics and safety schemes. Some estimates counsel that Brazil’s illicit economic system accounts for as much as 4 % of its GDP. What unites these illicit markets is the profitable state of exception wherein they thrive.
The timing of mega-operations in opposition to organized crime is never unintentional. The Alemão-Penha raid unfolded simply as Rio was getting ready to host the C40 World Mayors Summit. The message to the world was clear: Rio is hard on crime and firmly in management. One might additionally speculate that Castro, a staunch ally of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, sought to embarrass or upstage Lula on the eve of the U.N. local weather change summit (COP 30), as Brazil once more takes heart stage earlier than international leaders.
In any case, the actual fact stays that the spectacle solely served to deepen the cycle that it claimed to confront. Violence turns into not a response to insecurity however an instrument of political projection, aimed as a lot at worldwide audiences as home ones.
Beneath the theatrics lies an institutional machine that’s remarkably constant. The militarized structure constructed to combat medicine has lengthy outlived its mandate. Particular police items, emergency decrees, and authorized immunities have develop into everlasting options of Brazilian public safety governance. The identical tactical infrastructure used in opposition to violent traffickers now targets squatters, protesters, and different susceptible folks, together with individuals who use medicine and want assist, not repression. What started as a conflict on illicit medicine has develop into a template for coercive rule, increasing wherever the state feels threatened.
The result’s a set of legacy infrastructures of drug prohibition—the interlocking apparatuses, financial circuits, and ethical narratives that permit violence to breed itself. The primary are materials: armored autos, surveillance drones, and items educated for fight quite than safety. The second are monetary: rents from extortion, safety, and corruption that join police, politicians, and prison enterprises. The third are symbolic: the ethical vocabularies of “cleaning” and “order” that sanctify deadly drive.
These buildings now function independently of drug coverage itself. Even when prohibition have been to finish tomorrow—the Brazilian Supreme Court docket has already determined to decriminalize possession of as much as 40 grams of hashish—the infrastructures that it constructed would endure.
Exhausting-line defenders level to the latest drop in murders as proof that the technique is working. It’s true that Brazil’s murder price fell to 21.2 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants in 2024, the bottom in additional than a decade. However the decline owes extra to a truce between the primary prison teams and an getting old inhabitants than it does merely to simpler legislation enforcement.
In Rio, operations corresponding to the most recent one have performed little to change the underlying calculus of violence. Each spectacular raid merely rearranges the steadiness of energy amongst rival factions. Inside days of the Alemão incursion, traffickers will probably regroup, militias will advance into the newly “pacified” zones, and the cycle will start anew.
Lula’s response to the Rio killings has been intentionally cautious. Whereas he has prompt that there was a “bloodbath” and that there ought to be an official probe into the matter, he has avoided any sustained commentary or criticism of the police or of Governor Castro As an alternative, he has pointed to his proposed constitutional modification on public safety as proof that reform is below method. The modification, he argues, would strengthen the federal authorities’s potential to plan and consider safety insurance policies.
But critics warn that the invoice is “timid” and does little to restrain police lethality or dismantle the political incentives behind it. By constitutionalizing coordination with out addressing accountability, the plan dangers reinforcing the prevailing structure of coercion below a brand new administrative veneer. Lula’s tempered method to the Rio operation suggests an consciousness of how politically pricey it stays to problem Brazil’s police institution, even after the nation’s deadliest raid. In latest days, polls have revealed that 55% of Brazilians assist Governor Castro’s police raid, whereas 60% of the inhabitants maintain an general unfavorable view of Lula’s report on public safety.
A reputable public safety agenda should start by demilitarizing policing and confronting the collusion between state forces and militias. This might require unifying Brazil’s two essential state police corps—the Navy Police and the Civil Police—and putting them below sturdy public oversight, establishing an impartial federal mechanism to research killings by officers, and dismantling militia-run companies by focused monetary auditing and prosecution. Public safety ought to be redefined round measurable outcomes—corresponding to fixing crimes and seizing prison belongings—quite than physique counts.
On the similar time, Brazil must strengthen worldwide cooperation in opposition to organized crime, which more and more connects home networks to companions in Europe, Africa, and Asia. That effort would contain extra strong data-sharing, joint investigations, and harmonized asset-recovery mechanisms by frameworks such because the Group of American States and the U.N. Workplace on Medication and Crime. Castro’s depiction of Rio’s prison gangs as “terrorists”—together with with obvious makes an attempt to have them labeled as such by the US authorities—will do little apart from to sow confusion. Mixed with higher intelligence, forensic capability, and community-based prevention, worldwide investigations ought to deal with organized crime as a governance problem quite than a theatrical enemy.
As households in Rio de Janeiro wait to establish their useless, the query going through Brazil is just not a lot methods to finish the conflict on medicine, however methods to finish the political economic system that it created. The nation’s violence is just not chaos. It’s a system, and it’s one which has lasted far too lengthy.
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Felipe Krause is a political scientist and the top of the Brazilian research program on the College of Oxford
