Beyond Brazil’s 2025 Homicide Data

Brazil saw an 8.5% drop in homicides last year, but as a massive country with a very complex organized crime panorama, the homicide figures don't tell the full picture.

The InSight Crime Team spent November in Brazil’s largest city, São Paulo, and visited its favelas and ports to investigate violence and trafficking. Many of these areas are controlled by Brazil’s most powerful gang, the First Capital Command (Primeiro Comando da Capital – PCC). Since the group established a monopoly over criminal markets in the state of São Paulo, local violence has dropped.

The PCC helped turn São Paulo’s port of Santos into a major cocaine launch pad to Europe. However, as authorities recently increased investments in intelligence and enforcement in the port, the group has spread to other ports and diversified cocaine routes. Fighting over control of these routes has historically been the source of violence between organized crime groups in Brazil’s north and northeast, even as murders fell nationally. Besides that, disappearances may also be disguising higher levels of violence.

Moreover, Brazil has a grim record of police violence. In 2025, police killed over 100 people in a violent raid in Rio de Janeiro. The operation was the country’s most deadly, overtaking a prison massacre that led to PCC’s emergence as the most violent law-enforcement operation in recent history. The country’s violent police interventions suggest these operations may actually boost rather than reduce criminality. 

Criminal groups, especially the PCC, are increasingly investing in technology to further criminal markets and profit, and have been connected to major financial and tech scandals in the country. And while visible violence decreased in some areas, digitalization has increased criminality.

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