Murders in Rural Brazil Double in 2025

Featured image source: Fernando Martinho.

The report Conflicts in Rural Brazil in 2025, published by the Pastoral Land Commission (CPT), reveals an alarming increase in lethal violence in the countryside of Brazil. Over the past year, murders doubled, rising from 13 to 26 cases, with 77% (20) directly attributed to big landlords – the primary perpetrators of repression against the people – followed by employers and the government itself. The Amazonia Legal region accounted for 16 of these deaths, linked to the expansion of land grabbing.

Indigenous peasants are the most affected, leading the statistics on violence related to land (258 cases) and water (42), while in Maranhão a “chemical war” was reported through the indiscriminate use of agricultural toxics, which affected 110 communities as a tactic of expulsion. Furthermore, between 2016 and 2025, 24,774 victims were recorded as a result of murders, death threats, attempted murders, imprisonment, and other forms of repression.

Although the total number of conflicts decreased by 28% (from 2,207 to 1,593), reactionary violence became more concentrated and brutal. There was an increase in political arrests (from 71 to 111), acts of humiliation (from 5 to 142 cases), and cases of unlawful deprivation of liberty (105).

The report also highlights the rise in rural slave labor, with a 5% increase in cases and a 23% rise in rescues (1,991 workers), mainly in sectors critical to latifundium, such as mill construction (586 rescues), agriculture (726), mining (170), and livestock (154). These figures reflect the persistence of semi-feudal forms of exploitation, serving bureaucratic and imperialist capitalism.

The reduction in conflicts has not led to a decline in the big-landlord violence, but rather to an escalation of violence against peasants. A Nova Democracia states: “Under these conditions, the agrarian and peasant question is, once again, confirmed as the central problem of the country, and the Agrarian Revolution as the only real way out to put an end to the material basis of this barbarism and hand over the land to those who work it.”

The source of all images is A Nova Democracia.