On November 5, São Paulo’s Military Police shot and killed a four-year-old boy, Ryan da Silva, in the coastal city of Santos in southeastern Brazil. The boy was killed during an operation in his neighborhood, a community that has long suffered from heavy-handed police interventions under the guise of combating crime. Nine months prior, his father was killed in the same place, by the same police unit. Following the killing, public outrage spread across Brazil, with protests demanding accountability and justice. Activists and human rights organizations amplified their calls for the Public Ministry to denounce the case, calling the killing a glaring example of systemic police brutality.
Authorities, however, claimed that officers were responding to gunfire and acted in self-defense—a justification often used to deflect scrutiny. Witnesses refuted this claim, and no evidence has emerged to substantiate the police’s version of events. This incident underscores the culture of impunity that shields officers from accountability that silences marginalized communities.
Da Silva’s death is not an isolated incident. In early December, a man who had stolen soap from a supermarket was killed by the Military Police in São Paulo. During the 2022 Carnaval in Salvador da Bahia, Military Police officers entered a favela, took three young black men to an abandoned house, and murdered them at point-blank range. The officers claimed the victims were gang members who had shot at the officers. It was later determined that the officers planted guns on their bodies before reporting the killings as self-defense. These killings are emblematic of the extreme brutality that is endemic to the Brazilian police, one of the most violent and militarized police forces in the world. By training and arming this force, the United States has helped aggravate Brazil’s public security crisis.
The Brazilian police kill an average of 17 people per day. In 2024, the Military Police in Brazil killed 6,296 people, equivalent to eight times the rate of people killed by police in the United States. The overwhelming majority of these victims are Black, poor, young, male, non-educated, and living in urban peripheries. Prominent politicians, activists, and scholars, including Rio de Janeiro city councilwoman Marielle Franco—who was herself assassinated by former Military Police officers in 2018—have referred to this as a “genocide.”
U.S. Weapons Behind a Failed Policing Strategy
Brazil currently has about 800,000 police officers, half of which are military officers, representing 1,595 security agencies. The Military Police have access to high-caliber weapons, aircraft equipped with weaponry, armored cars, and even tanks. Most of the weapons used by Brazilian police come from U.S. suppliers. The country’s Military Police and Special Operations Forces, meant to carry out raids against gangs, rely on the United States as their primary foreign supplier of weapons and equipment. This includes Colt M4 carbines, Mossberg 590A1 shotguns, Browning M2 machine guns, various sniper rifles, night vision systems, armored vehicles, and helicopters—all North American-made.
Brazilian gangs use illegally acquired U.S. weapons, sold to intermediaries without strong checks by U.S. manufacturers. Often, criminal groups procure weapons directly from police officers with links to gangs and militias. Those weapons were once legally sold by the United States to the Brazilian police.
As Brazil’s militarized policing has continued to expand, so have the country’s primary criminal groups, including the Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC) and Comando Vermelho (CV). 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, with that number continuing to increase. Large gangs also have major stakes in real estate, mining, petroleum, gambling, and cryptocurrency, valued at billions of dollars. There have been hundreds of cases of Brazilian police, whether on-duty or retired, working directly for organized crime, including as contract killers and enforcers.
As Brazil’s police force has grown and become increasingly militarized, so too have the country’s criminal networks. In Rio de Janeiro, militias—most often staffed by current and former police officers—control most of the city’s criminal areas. Despite claiming to fight drug trafficking and organized crime, these informal armed groups have become Rio’s largest urban criminal factions. The Bonde do Zinho, the city’s largest militia, has been linked to civil police officers.
Despite claims by Brazilian right-wing politicians that the government is “disarming the police,” militarized policing in Brazil is very much on the rise.
Brazil’s “shock” policing strategy has failed. This shock approach, which uses electric-shock weapons and is also referred to as militarized policing, intervention policing, and tactical policing (including anti-riot strategies), has been prioritized by Brazil’s security policy establishment for decades, with increased staff, equipment, budgets, and powers. Where these strategies are employed, there are now more gangs than ever, including in the states of Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Bahia. Meanwhile, the Brazilian Amazon, which has the highest rates of police per capita, has seen a huge increase in criminal activity, with gang networks using the largely-ungoverned territory to traffic drugs, weapons, people, and forest resources. The Brazilian Amazon’s homicide rate has shot through the roof in the last decade. A quarter of all violent deaths in the region are at the hands of police. In some cities in the Amazon and in the state of Rio de Janeiro, the share exceeds 60 percent, meaning that the police are responsible for most violent deaths.
“A Good Criminal is a Dead Criminal”
Violence in Brazil, both at the hands of gangs and police, has become a common fact of life throughout the country. A 2015 Datafolha poll found that 62 percent of Brazilians living in urban areas are afraid of aggression by the Military Police, while a 2023 Latinobarómetro poll found that 59 percent of Brazilians are worried “all the time” about being victims of crime. In turn, the country’s insecurity crisis and the perpetual cycle of violence between gangs and police forces creates further regional instability, affecting migration flows. Since 2019, the number of migrants from Brazil to the United States has quadrupled. According to the Migration Policy Institute, over two million Brazilian nationals reside in the United States, 195,000 of whom do not have legal status. A significant share of recent migrants cite security issues as a leading factor in their decision to leave the country.
Beyond its advanced weapons, the United States contributes to the Brazilian Military Police’s hyper-militarized culture and training, embodied by the motto—flaunted by most police institutions in Brazil—“a good criminal is a dead criminal.” One Military Police officer in Rio de Janeiro, who wishes to remain anonymous, told me: “If people decide to stay in the favelas, they align themselves with the criminals.” He added, “if you don’t want this filth in your neighborhood, you need to leave before it is too late.” Under this philosophy, anyone living in a poor, majority-Black community can be targeted as a criminal, despite many favela residents having no option to flee or challenge gang activity.
In Brazil’s police academies, physical and psychological torture is still common. Torture techniques are also taught to control “soldiers” and eliminate any sense of fear or mercy, according to training manuals. There are hundreds of cases of victims being abused by police, including judges, prosecutors, activists, and journalists. Adriano da Nobrega, a former Special Police Operations Battalion (BOPE) officer in Rio de Janeiro who ran one of Latin America’s largest contract-killing, drug trafficking, and gambling networks used the training he gained at BOPE to torture and brutally kill his targets, some of whom were prominent figures. He was killed in a police raid in Bahia in 2020, after being the subject of the country’s most extensive manhunt in its history.
This is, in part, a result of training provided by the United States.
A Culture of Violence
The FBI and U.S. State Department have provided various training programs and exercises with the Brazilian Military Police. One of these programs, promoted by the Trump and Biden administrations and called the “Rapid Response to Active Shooters Course,” began in 2019 with the aim to “quickly and effectively respond to attacks involving shooters in public spaces.” In the overwhelming majority of police killings in Brazil, officers and their precincts insist that they “were met with gunfire,” despite many prominent cases showing that the police shot first.
One of the most egregious cases was the summary execution of 12 people by nine Military Police officers in the neighborhood of Cabula, in Salvador da Bahia, in 2015. During the judicial process, the accused officers sent death threats to the victims’ families, while the state governor excused the killings and referred to the officers as “football players hitting the ball into the net.” In the face of intimidation and pressure from the governor and the police, judges and prosecutors acquitted the officers, prompting a response from Amnesty International and other human rights groups.
The police lethality rate in Brazil has increased at a significantly faster rate than the homicide and violent crime rates, demonstrating that deadly force has been disproportionately used as a deterrent and response to criminal actors and factions. Police lethality “is the state’s way of containing criminality, and providing order and justice,” said one officer from São Paulo’s Military Police, who asked not to be named. He continued, “the criminals are causing the problem, not us, we are simply doing what is right, and we have a track record of success.”
During our interview, the officer articulated the Military Police force’s overarching mentality: “We are soldiers, we are warriors, this is a war. In wars, bad things happen, but that doesn’t detract from the good goal, which is eradicating the enemy.”
The joint Brazilian government and FBI training program is run with Brazilian law enforcement agencies in all of the country’s major cities—the most important being São Paulo, where homicide rates are skyrocketing. The FBI, along with the LAPD and the Chicago Police, have also provided riot and protest control training. Protests in Brazil are often met with excessive police brutality, including the use of tear gas and rubber bullets. Last year, the U.S. State Department gave $11.7 million to the Brazilian security state, which has more than doubled in the last decade. The overwhelming majority of U.S. security assistance to Brazil went to law enforcement, financially rewarding violent policing.
The country’s Military Police force is a remnant of Brazil’s military dictatorship, which was also supported by the U.S. government during the Cold War. At that time the Military Police was used as a political hammer to bludgeon political opponents, union leaders, and Communist sympathizers. The United States produced local anti-Communist propaganda while funding and arming the state’s death squads. U.S. agencies also trained the Military Police in some extreme tactics, including torture and sweeping raids, that are still in use today.
A democratic Brazil has done little to reform the Military Police’s ruthless and repressive practices. Despite Brazil embarking on a new democratic path in 1985, the Military Police has not been reformed since its authoritarian foundations despite increasing calls for change. A police force created in the image of dictatorship will embody violence and persecution, rather than democracy and justice.
The militarized policing budget should be redirected towards community-based, non-violent policing, which has produced promising results in some state programs in Pernambuco, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. Accountability mechanisms such as the mandatory use of body cameras, as in São Paulo’s Olho Vivo program, and the separation of police accountability bodies from the security state would also contribute to meaningful reform.
The Lula government has so far failed to seize on what many see as a crucial opportunity for police reform. Despite widespread calls for accountability and change, Lula appointed Bahia’s Governor Rui Costa—who once compared police shootings of civilians to goals in a football game—as his chief of staff, signaling continuity rather than reform. He has also dismissed any public debate about drug policy, while doing little to fight racial discrimination in policing and incarceration, despite his sympathetic rhetoric. The military police culture in Brazil remains deeply permeated by a far right that has only been emboldened by Boslonarismo, a worldview fundamentally opposed to transitional justice and institutional change. This was on stark display during the January 8, 2023 riot in Brasilia when the military police stood by—and some even participated—as agitators stormed the capitol. The event raised questions about police loyalties and further exposed the challenges to reforming Brazil’s security apparatus.
The enduring legacy of unchecked militarized policing and U.S. involvement continues to fuel a cycle of violence that affects both Brazilian society and broader regional stability.
Joseph Bouchard is a freelance journalist and analyst from Québec covering security and geopolitics in the Americas, with reporting experience in Bolivia, Colombia, and Brazil. His articles have appeared in The Diplomat, Le Devoir, La Razón, The National Interest, and La Razón.
