Why the War on Crime Threatens Democracy

Last month Rio’s police conducted the deadliest police operation in Brazil’s history, killing 117 people. It is one episode in a long history of state violence. Not only are such iron-fisted methods ineffective, they pose a danger for democracy itself.

By Nicholas Barnes, Henrique Gomes, and Juan Masullo

November 2025

In the early hours of Wednesday, October 29, 2025, distraught residents of Vila Cruzeiro, a neighborhood in Rio de Janeiro’s Northern Zone, carried dozens of dead bodies from the forest bordering their community and laid them side-by-side along one of the main streets. The bodies were those of their neighbors and family members, men whom the authorities had killed during the previous day’s “Operation Containment” as 2,500 Rio de Janeiro State police backed by helicopters and armored vehicles poured into the Northern Zone neighborhood looking for members of Comando Vermelho (Red Command or CV), Brazil’s oldest and largest drug-trafficking organization. Founded in Rio’s prisons in the 1970s, CV governs large portions of the city, whose metro-area population is about seventeen million people.

The police raid focused on Alemão and Penha, two large favelas (informal, impoverished neighborhoods) that include Vila Cruzeiro and are home to an estimated 150,000 residents. More than a thousand favelas are spread across the city. In the majority of these communities, one of several different prison-based drug-trafficking gangs operate: CV, Terceiro Comando Puro (Third Pure Command), and Amigos dos Amigos (Friends of Friends). Hundreds of other favelas are dominated by racketeering groups, known as milícias (militias), whose ranks often include former (or merely off-duty) members of the security forces.

The advance by Rio’s Civil Police and Military Police (backed by special tactical units from each force) began shortly before 5 a.m. on October 28. The move culminated a year-long investigation; more than a hundred arrest warrants had been obtained. Members of CV reacted quickly, setting up barricades, torching vehicles, and even deploying weaponized drones to drop explosives on special-forces teams. Dozens of gang members fled into the forest beyond the community. Police were waiting for them and opened fire, leaving more than seventy bodies for residents to recover the next day. The operation lasted for nearly twelve hours, trapping tens of thousands of terrified residents in their homes. The death toll was four police officers and 117 alleged gang members. More than eighty more people were arrested, and large quantities of drugs and weapons (including ninety-three semi-automatic rifles) were seized.

A New (and Ongoing) Record of Violence

Operation Containment was the most violent police operation that Rio and indeed Brazil have ever seen—yet it should not be understood as an isolated event. It sprang from decades of militarized policing in Rio—rooted in the country’s authoritarian past and reinforced by contemporary (electoral) politics. Since Brazil’s two decades of military dictatorship (1964–85), successive governments have treated the favelas as internal security threats, deploying heavily armed police to confront drug gangs but also often targeting the mostly nonwhite residents in the process. The level of police impunity on display in these operations is not found in any other parts of Rio. The militarized approach has created what can fairly be called a permanent state of exception for citizens who dwell in these communities.

While the scale of the violence in Operation Containment is shocking, deadly police raids on favelas have been occurring for several decades. From 2007 through 2022, police committed a staggering 629 massacres (chacinas), in which they killed three or more people in one operation. Of those incidents, twenty-seven are considered “mega-massacres,” featuring eight or more citizens killed. In fact, Rio’s police are perhaps the world’s most violent, averaging more than a thousand killings per year since 2003.

Figure: Police Killings in Rio de Janeiro

Data from the Institute of Public Security (ISP-RJ 2025).

This historical perspective should by no means diminish the magnitude of the most recent police massacre. Brazil’s Supreme Court, human-rights groups, and local residents have all denounced the indiscriminate use of lethal force and the further militarization of public security. The governor of Rio de Janeiro state, Cláudio Castro, an ally of convicted far-right ex-president Jair Bolsonaro, hailed the operation as a success, expressing sorrow only for the four police officers who lost their lives. The others, he claimed, were not victims but “narcoterrorists” with whom the city was “at war,” despite only 78 of those who were killed had criminal records. To use the language of war, given Rio’s history of so many massacres, is to imply that arresting and prosecuting suspected CV members should take a back seat to simply killing them. For Governor Castro—as for many in Rio—the old phrase made popular by far-right politicians still applies: bandido bom é bandido morto—“a good criminal is a dead criminal.” In fact, four of Rio’s five most violent police operations have come during Castro’s tenure, which began in 2021. One of these four is the infamous 6 May 2021 raid on CV in the favela of Jacarezinho. Twenty-eight citizens died that day along with one police officer.

The huge and tragic irony hovering over this record is that despite all the state violence committed in the name of combating crime, Rio’s gangs and milícias are as powerful as ever. Even Operation Containment’s death toll of well more than a hundred did nothing to weaken CV control in Alemão and Penha. The police maintain no constant presence in either community, and CV continues to run the show in both. Residents still lack access to a responsive criminal-justice system and suffer various forms of official neglect. Public security in Rio costs an enormous amount in terms of human and financial resources not to mention the lives lost, but has produced little or no discernible improvement in the lives of citizens who inhabit favelas.

Government reliance on spectacular shows of force has been amplified by electoral competition, as politicians routinely seek votes with “tough-on-crime” rhetoric. In this context, lethal police raids serve as performative acts of state power—blurring the line between public safety and repression—and driving public debates about the acceptable level of violence the state should use to combat or eliminate groups such as CV. In the weeks following the massacre, opinion surveys found that most Brazilians supported the operation and its use of violence.

On October 30, Governor Castro—who cannot run for another term and is thought to be eyeing one of Rio’s three Federal Senate seats—met with other right-wing governors to create a “peace consortium” (consórcio da paz). Castro seems to view this as a vehicle for spreading Rio’s security policies while pressing left-wing Federal President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva on the crime issue. On November 3, after feeling pressure from other quarters as well, Lula submitted Bill 5582/25 to the Federal Chamber of Deputies, which defines “criminal factions,” enlarges the government’s power to investigate them, and beefs up penalties for those who associate with them. The bill was quickly approved.

Operation Containment, the massacre of fleeing suspects that became part of it, and the political fallout to this bloody episode illustrate how security policies are ineffective and increasingly undermine the rule of law, erode civil liberties, and place Brazil’s democratic commitments in tension with its punitive instincts.

The “Mano Dura” Approach and Its Toll on Democracy

Mano dura (hard-handed, iron-fist) policies such as those embraced by Castro and many Rio governors before him have been a common response to crime across much of Latin America. With the sole exception of the very particular case of El Salvador—where security forces have committed massive human-rights violations and imprisoned an estimated 1.7 percent of the population—mano dura has not proven effective in curbing criminal violence. On the contrary, there is evidence that limiting violent police operations can reduce not only state but also gang violence, saving many lives. A recent study found a 66 percent daily decrease in police killings and a 58 percent daily decrease in homicides after Brazil’s Supreme Court restricted the use of police raids in Rio de Janeiro amid the covid-19 pandemic and a police-violence scandal.

Yet mano dura remains highly popular among politicians, policymakers, and the broader public. Electoral dynamics sustain this approach and make reforms of authoritarian policing harder, with citizens themselves demanding a more repressive state—often at the expense of their own rights. In Brazil, for example, almost 60 percent of survey respondents agree that “a good criminal is a dead criminal,” with those directly exposed to crime and violence being particularly supportive of unlawful forms of law enforcement.

Despite this broad support, democracy itself is among the casualties of these recurrent displays of force. Authorities insist that Operation Containment was designed to avoid civilian casualties, citing months of intelligence work consisting of surveillance from hillsides overlooking the favelas rather than penetration of residential zones themselves. Police also asserted that all those killed were criminals involved with CV.

Many doubt these claims.

Roughly forty of the victims had no criminal record. Footage shows heavily armed officers patrolling narrow alleys and steep lanes in residential and commercial areas, while residents report that police stormed houses and that gunfire echoed deep inside the community.

Even if official claims are accepted as true, under a democratic order grounded in the rule of law, the security forces can enter a neighborhood armed with the tools of lethal force, but not with an intent to kill. This is a crucial distinction. Criminal suspects have rights to due process, the presumption of innocence, and freedom from arbitrary execution. On October 28, none of these were respected. What occurred instead were summary executions of young men who should have been detained, not killed. Determination of their involvement in the drug trade, and the penalties for that, are matters for courts to adjudicate according to the law. You cannot have a de facto policy of “shoot first, ask questions later” in a constitutional democracy.

Beyond the denial of due process and disrespect for the rule of law, this type of operation undermines democracy in other ways. Militarized responses to crime corrode democratic accountability by expanding the coercive power of the state while insulating security forces from oversight. Such responses will tend to gradually replace civilian police with the military, granting the latter growing political influence. As security forces operate with increasing autonomy and impunity, the democratic principle of civilian control over coercion erodes. Police brutality becomes a common practice, while military directed human rights violations swell. These practices also distort the balance of power, concentrating authority in the hands of the executive. Governments increasingly invoke states of exception or emergency, govern by decree, and adopt temporary suspensions of habeas corpus guarantees.

This is deeply concerning, especially paired with the popularity of mano dura policies in Brazil. Yet, there is evidence that many citizens do not realize the costs to democracy of such operations—an unawareness that may in part underlie their support. Creating awareness of the human toll of these operations, the frequent collusion between law-enforcement personnel and criminals, and the broader negative consequences for democracy might stand a chance of chipping away at public support for heavy-handed policing and building momentum for reform.

Unfortunately, we still know surprisingly little about how favela residents themselves understand and evaluate the behavior of police in their neighborhoods. These citizens are cast as the intended beneficiaries of a more forceful approach to public security, yet they also bear the brunt of highly violent police tactics. What exactly do these communities expect from the state in terms of security? What changes to the status quo do they demand? The reactions of Vila Cruzeiro residents and community leaders who gave interviews shortly after Operation Containment strongly suggest deep opposition to this model of policing. Our ongoing research in another Northern Zone favela complex just a few kilometers from Penha and Alemão combines in-depth interviews with original survey data, and points in the same direction.

If meaningful change is to occur, it cannot be crafted behind favela residents’ backs, nor flow from the barrel of a gun. Any sustainable security strategy will require treating these communities and their people not as targets, but as partners.

Nicholas Barnes is lecturer in international relations at the University of St. Andrews. Henrique Gomes is a community leader in the Maré favela complex and a researcher at the NGO Redes da Maré. Juan Masullo is assistant professor of political science at the University of Milan and research associate at Leiden University. For their research on perceptions of public security in Rio de Janeiro favelas, they were named 2025 Harry Frank Guggenheim Distinguished Scholars.

Copyright © 2025 National Endowment for Democracy

Image credit: MAURO PIMENTEL/AFP via Getty Images