Surprisingly, Brazilian homicide rates declined in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Rates had been increasing steadily during the 1980s and 1990s, rising to 25.7 per 100,000 population in 2003. But under the Lula government there was some improvement, with numbers dropping back to a low of 22 per 100,000 by 2010. Several trends explain

national crime statistics show a sharp rise in the murder rate. Having edged downwards between 2003 and 2010, homicide rates then climbed to reach 30.5 per 100,000 in 2017. In part this rise was a result of the recession and failed policing. In Rio de Janeiro, for example, the military police – which is responsible for day-to-day operations – found

Since the 1990s the homicide rate had quadrupled in the state of Ceará, the state in which Fortaleza is the biggest city. When I visited, the annual murder rate stood at 50 in every 100,000 of Ceará’s inhabitants – or one in every 2,000 people – one of the highest rates in the country. In the most violent neighbourhoods, where factions allied to Br

In March 2017, just as the national homicide rate started to rise, the Brazilian Forum of Public Security, an NGO that brings together academics, policymakers and police officers, found alarming evidence that the fear of falling victim to crime explained a surprisingly high degree of support for authoritarian right-wing politics.

But the rise in crime nationally masked some very sharp regional differences. While homicide rates in the southern and south-eastern states such as São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro remain lower than they were in the 1990s, violent crime has escalated in the north and north-east, ravaging states – such as Ceará – that were generally much more peaceful t