American taxpayers fund police brutality in Brazil

On November 7, the São Paulo Military Police (PMESP) Four-year-old boy shot dead Ryan da Silva in Santos, a port city on the outskirts of São Paulo. The authorities’ excuse, as is often the case in police killings in Latin America, was that the police perceived a threat. There is no evidence for this claim.

The murder is endemic to the extreme brutality of the 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 Brazilian Military Police recorded having killed 6,296 people (approximately 17 people per day), eight times the fatality rate of US police, but evidence suggests that the real number is much higher. The overwhelming majority of victims are black, poor, young, male, uneducated, and living on the urban peripheries. Prominent Brazilian politicians, activists and academics have referred to this as a “genocide“.

As Brazil’s militarized police have continued to expand, so has gang 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 the gangs have control of entire cities and the prison system. They have significant holdings in real estate, mining, oil, casinos and cryptocurrencies, valued at billions of dollars. There have been hundreds of cases of police working directly for organized crime, including as hitmen, creating an incentive against eliminating crime.

This cannot be achieved with unarmed police action. Brazil currently has more than 800,000 police officers, half of whom are in the Military Police, drawn from 1,595 security agencies. The Military Police has access to high caliber weapons, aircraft equipped with weapons, armored vehicles 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 unlike the raids one might see from the US military in areas of war.

Most of the weapons used by the Brazilian police come from the US. suppliers. This includes the Colt M4 Carbinethe Mossberg 590A1 shotgun, the Browning M2 machine gun, various sniper rifles, night vision systems, armored vehicles and helicopters—All made in the United States.

Gangs also use American weapons, sold to middlemen without strict controls by American manufacturers (and very often provided by police officers involved in gangs and militias). These American weapons were once sold legally by the American government to 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 policing per capita, has been rife with gangs, using the largely ungoverned space to smuggle drugs, weapons and people to the southern border of the United States. The homicide rate in the Brazilian Amazon has skyrocketed, more than double that of Iraq’s war zones, despite the fact that almost a quarter of all violent deaths are at the hands of the police. In some cities in Brazil, this proportion exceeds 50 percentmeaning that the police are responsible for most violent deaths.

Brazil’s police action affects the United States. The Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC) and the Comando Vermelho (CV), the country’s two largest gangs, now have networks in the United States, including Miami and Boston. (Some Brazilian citizens affiliated with local gangs have already been deportee of the US) A few weeks ago, in broad daylight, the PCC murdered a businessman at the São Paulo international airport, firing 29 shots at the door of the airport terminal and wounding three other people.

The security crisis creates greater regional instability and migration. Since 2019, the number of Brazilian migrants in the United States has increased quadrupled. Currently there are more than 2 million Brazilians residing in the United States; at least 195,000 without legal statusaccording to the Migration Policy Institute. A significant proportion of them cite safety concerns as the main factor that led them to leave their home.

The violence also affects US trade with Brazil. Currently, the United States is the country of Brazil. second largest trading partner, after China, according to the World Bank. The United States is responsible for about 20 percent of all foreign direct investment in Brazil, which, increasing each year, is projected to reach $100 billion by 2030. In 2023, U.S. exports to Brazil were valued at more of 38 billion dollars.

Beyond its advanced weapons, the United States shapes Brazil’s hyper-militarized police culture, where most police institutions flaunt the motto “a good criminal is a dead criminal.” Under this philosophy, everyone who lives in the poor peripheries is considered a criminal, since they reside in “criminal areas.” Physical and psychological torture is still taught in Brazilian police academies. There are hundreds of cases of victims who suffered abuse at the hands of the police, including judges, prosecutors, activists and journalists. Adriano Magalhães da Nóbrega, former officer of the Police Special Operations Battalion (BOPE), headed one of the largest hitman, drug trafficking and gambling networks in Latin America. In particular, he used the training he gained at BOPE to brutally torture and kill his targets, some of whom were prominent figures.

This is, in part, a result of the training that the United States has given them.

The United States Department of State, together with the FBI, has provided various training programs and exercises to the Brazilian military police. one of these programsPromoted by the Trump and Biden administrations, the “Active Shooter Rapid Response Course,” began in 2019 and aims to “respond quickly and effectively to attacks involving shooters in public spaces.” In the overwhelming majority of police killings in Brazil, officers and their police stations insist that they “were met with gunshots,” even though many high-profile cases show that the police shot first.

One of the most atrocious cases was the summary execution of 12 civilians by nine Military Police (PM) agents in the neighborhood of Cabula in Salvador da Bahía, one of the largest cities in the country. The PMs, during the judicial process, sent death threats to the victims’ relatives, while the governor referred to the act of “the footballers hitting the ball into the net.” The judges and prosecutors, intimidated by the governor and the police, acquitted the agents, while two prosecutors resigned of the case. This type of cartoonish interpretation of justice through extreme state violence, with political support, is common in Brazil.

In some of these “Rapid Response to Active Shooter” cases, PMs used excessive force, shooting randomly in public spaces, with extremely high civilian mortality rates. The police lethality rate in Brazil has increased at a significantly faster rate than homicide and violent crime rates, demonstrating that police lethality has been disproportionately used as a deterrent and response element against criminal actors and factions. Police lethality, as a PMESP officer recounted, “is the State’s way of containing crime and providing order and justice.”

The joint State-FBI training program is carried out with all Brazilian law enforcement agencies, including the Military Police, in the country’s largest states, the most important being São Paulo, where rates of homicide are shooting. The FBI, along with the LAPD and Chicago police, have also provided riot and protest control. training to the Brazilian police, as protests in Brazil are often met with excessive police brutalityincluding the use of tear gas and rubber bullets.

The current Military Police is a vestige of Brazil’s military dictatorship, which also had the support of the United States Department of State, the FBI and the CIA during the Cold War. Later, the Military Police was used as political hammer to hit political opponents, union leaders and any communist threats. The U.S. government produced homegrown anti-communist propaganda while funding and arming state death squads. US agencies also trained Military Police to use some of the most extreme tactics still used today.

A democratic Brazil has done little to reform the ruthless and repressive practices of the Military Police, with continued support from the United States. Last year, the US State Department awarded 11.7 million dollars to the Brazilian security state, returning to the figures of the Bush era despite the little progress made. The overwhelming majority of US security assistance went to Brazilian law enforcement, financially rewarding ineffective policing.

The enduring legacy of unchecked militarized policing and US state involvement (funded with our taxpayer dollars) continues to fuel a cycle of violence that affects both Brazilian society and regional stability at large.