I live in Rio de Janeiro, and I worked here as a judge for almost twenty years. I can say that unfortunately these tragic data are not something exceptional that happened only in 2007.

In fact, at least in the last ten years, 20% of all murders in Rio de Janeiro have been summary executions that happen during police operations against drug dealers in the "favelas". This is Brazil's own war on drugs.

These tragic police actions are not surprising. In fact, police officers are formally or informally authorized and stimulated to be violent, to torture, and to kill.

In 2007, a Brazilian movie called "The Elite Squad" was a great success here (I think a theater in NYC also showed it). It is a movie about a police department, a kind of SWAT, and it shows very violent actions played by the main characters, which appear as heroes fighting against drugs. A well-known critic of Variety qualified this film as "a one-note celebration of violence-for-good that plays like a recruitment film for fascist thugs". His article can be found here.

During several exhibitions of the film in Brazil, some people applauded the scenes of torture. It's not surprising that police officers go on killing in their real war on drugs.

In the Brazilian war on drugs, drug dealers that live in the "favelas", or any people that look like them are seen and treated as the "enemies". In a war, the main goal is to eliminate the "enemy".

Maybe police officers feel powerful when they kill. They don't realize that they are doing wrong, and that their actions are really weakening the profession of policing. In Brazil, most people don't respect the police (naturally including those people that applauded that movie). Most people, especially poor people that live in the "favelas", don't feel safe when the police come. Rather, they are afraid of the police. They are more afraid of the police violence than of drug gangs' violence. These feelings surely weaken the profession of policing.

The drug dealers that survive to this war are overcrowding Brazilian prisons. Brazil has now about 440.000 prisoners, which is about three times the number that we had in 1995. It's much lesser than the US, but the increase on the number of prisoners in Brazil, due especially to drug related sentences, follows the same trend."

What’s more, the reduction of violence isn’t even the best reason to walk the path to decriminalization. More important is to remember the warning of Nils Christie that the worst danger of criminality in modern societies is not crime itself, but, rather, that the fight against it ends up conducting those societies to totalitarianism.

Best regards.

Maria Lucia