In 2025 Police Murders in Brazil Reach a New High

Featured image: The police are responsible for the high murder rates. Source: AND

We hereby share an unofficial translation of an article by A Nova Democracia.

Data shared by the so-called Ministry of Justice and Public Security and the Violence Atlas 2025 show that the Brazilian police murdered 6,519 people last year, which represents a 4.5% increase from the previous year. In practice, the old State executed 18 people per day, which reveals a reactionary civil war against the poor, black and peasant people that lasted for decades. Brazil has four years been at an absurd level of lethal attacks, with repression the main public policy towards the masses.

A superficial analysis of data shows no difference among the parties of the old order regarding extermination of the population. All are implicated in the carnage, – from the false left of the PT to the Bolsonaro followers, or the “center”. Bahia, governed uninterruptedly by the PT for over 20 years, currently by Jerônimo Rodrigues, continues being the most lethal State of the country in terms of numbers, with 1,569 murders committed by the Military Police (MP) in 2025. Following that, São Paulo, under the rule of the Bolsonaro supporter Tarcísio de Freitas (839 murders) appears, and Rio de Janeiro with Cláudio Castro (789 murders), shows that repression is the common approach among the different rulers.

The most alarming case in 2025 took place in Rondônia, a State governed by the reactionary colonel Marcos Rocha (PSD). There, the number of murders committed by the police skyrocketed from 8 to 47 cases, representing a staggering 488% increase. This brutal increase is no coincidence: Rondônia is one of the main scenarios of the armed peasant struggle in Brazil. The police repression in the State serves as the armed wing of the latifundium, using extermination as a means to suppress the struggle for land and the Agrarian Revolution.

The “war on crime” in Rondônia is, in reality, a frantic persecution against the land seizure and revolutionary areas of the League of the Poor Peasants (LCP). The old State attempts to criminalize the just peasant struggle, labeling it as “terrorism” or “organized crime” to justify the use of special forces, such as the Special Operations Police Battalion (BOPE), in operations that always end up in extrajudicial murders.