U.S. Taxpayers Are Funding Police Brutality in Brazil
On November 7, the Military Police of São Paulo (PMESP) shot and killed four-year-old Ryan da Silva in Santos, a port city outside of São Paulo. The authorities’ excuse, as is often the case in Latin American police killings, was that the police perceived a threat. There is no evidence for this claim.
The killing is endemic to the extreme brutality of Brazilian police, one of the most violent and militarized police services in the world. The United States government has helped create this crisis.
In 2023, the Military Police in Brazil recorded having killed 6,296 people (approximately 17 people per day)—eight times the U.S. police lethality rate—yet evidence points to the actual number being much higher. The overwhelming majority of the victims are black, poor, young, male, uneducated, and living in the urban peripheries. Prominent politicians, activists, and scholars in Brazil have referred to this as a “genocide.”
As Brazil’s militarized policing has continued to expand, so have the gangs’ control and influence. Brazilian authorities seized 72.3 tons of cocaine in 2023. Gangs have bought, threatened, and manipulated elections, politicians, and members of the judiciary. Last year, 3,238 people were found to be enslaved by gangs, and gangs have control of entire cities and the prison system. They have major stakes in real estate, mining, petroleum, casinos, and cryptocurrency, valued at billions of dollars. There have been hundreds of cases of police working directly for organized crime, including as contract killers, creating an incentive against eliminating criminality.
This does not come from disarmed policing. Brazil currently has over 800,000 police officers—half of which are in the Military Police—coming from 1,595 security agencies. The Military Police has access to high-caliber weapons, aircraft equipped with weapons, armored cars, and even tanks. Every day, Brazilian police carry out dozens of special operations against drug cartels, using SWAT teams and night vision equipment while following a rigid structure, not dissimilar from raids one might see from the U.S. military in war zones.
Most of the weapons used by Brazilian police come from U.S. suppliers. This includes the Colt M4 carbine, the Mossberg 590A1 shotgun, the Browning M2 machine gun, various sniper rifles, night vision systems, armored vehicles, and helicopters—all American-made.
The gangs also use American weapons, sold to intermediaries without strong checks by U.S. manufacturers (and very often provided by police officers involved with gangs and militias). These U.S. weapons were once legally sold by the U.S. government to the Brazilian police.
Brazil’s “shock” policing strategy has failed. Where these strategies are employed, there are now more gangs than ever, including in Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and the state of Bahia. Meanwhile, the Brazilian Amazon, which has the highest rates of police per capita, has been overflowing with gangs, who use the largely ungoverned space to traffic drugs, weapons, and people—all the way to the U.S. southern border. The Brazilian Amazon’s homicide rate has shot through the roof, more than double that of Iraq’s warzones despite nearly a quarter of all violent deaths being at the hands of police. In some cities in Brazil, that share exceeds 50 percent, meaning the police are responsible for most violent deaths.
Brazil’s policing affects the United States. The Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC) and the Comando Vermelho (CV), the country’s two largest gangs, now have reported networks in the United States, including in Miami and Boston. (Some Brazilian nationals affiliated with local gangs have already been deported from the U.S.) A few weeks ago, in broad daylight, the PCC assassinated a businessman at São Paulo’s international airport, firing 29 shots at the airport terminal door and injuring three other people.
The security crisis creates further regional instability and migration. Since 2019, the number of migrants from Brazil in the United States has quadrupled. There are now over 2 million Brazilian nationals residing in the U.S.—at least 195,000 without legal status, according to the Migration Policy Institute. A significant share of them cite security issues as a main factor in them leaving their home.
The violence also affects U.S. trade with Brazil. Currently, the U.S. is Brazil’s second-largest trading partner, after China, according to the World Bank. The U.S. is responsible for about 20 percent of all foreign direct investment into Brazil, which, rising each year, is projected to reach $100 billion by 2030. In 2023, U.S. exports to Brazil were valued at over $38 billion.
Beyond its advanced weapons,
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