Rio de Janeiro: Police Violence and Solidarity — CEPR

On May 31, hundreds of people in Rio de Janeiro, the second largest city in Brazil, protesters around the world in marching against police brutality. While the protest was in solidarity with the wave of Black Lives Matter protests in the US following the killing of George Floyd, Brazilian protesters were marching against their own police brutality problem as well. The state of Rio de Janeiro has one of the highest rates of police violence on Earth, with an average of five killings of civilians each day during the first four months of this year. What is happening in Rio illustrates how a combination of anti-Black racism, militarized law enforcement, and a lack of social services leads to tragic levels of state violence…

Though the magnitude of the problem may be different, many of the conditions that have led to this tragic level of state violence would likely be familiar to Black communities in the United States. It’s worth noting that the state of Rio de Janeiro is home to the second-largest number of Afro-Brazilians in the country.

You can read the rest at CEPR’s The Americas Blog.

Originally published at https://cepr.net on June 15, 2020.