Essay On Drugs In Brazil

The original mission of the police was to maintain peace and harmony. However, this mission is lost, contaminated by the militarization explicit in the policies regarding Brazil’s “drug war” (Kucinski 105). By the 1980s, millions of workers were unemployed and this, in combination with an accelerating poverty rate, proved combustive for the Colombian drug cartels to expand their services into brazil (Hinton 96). Due to this influx of drugs in Brazil, the government has taken several steps in order to combat and curtail this problem. Thus, it is this “‘war on drugs’ [that] is the main driver of police operation in shantytowns, which often end in death” (Muñoz and Canineu). These operations do little to actually combat the drug problem in Brazil and have just lead to increasing number of homicides, a number that is extremely high compared to other nations. According to Kucinski:
In 2013 [alone], 54,269 people were murdered in the country. The number corresponds to a crowded Itaquerão stadium, as in the opening match of the World Cup, only of corpses. This is a rate of 26.9 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants. The World Health Organization (WHO) considers the violence that causes more than ten victims per 100,000 inhabitants to be epidemic or out of control (37).
The increase …show more content…
Through different studies, researchers have been able to conclude that the driving forces behind this high rate of violence are Brazil’s transition from an authoritarian to a democratic state, its high levels of social inequality and discrimination, the high incidence of crime in the country, and the lack of accountability within the police force. All these aspects contribute to this climate of violence. Nonetheless, many people have tried different policies and reforms in order to help Brazil’s police brutality problem. However, there is much more work need if Brazil wants to cure this fatal