The Collapse of Public Security in Brazil

Glênio Sabbad Guedes, Lawyer in Brazil 

There was a dawn — October 28th, 2025 — when Brazil once again looked into the mirror of fear. The “Operação Contenção”, carried out in Rio de Janeiro’s Penha and Alemão complexes, left more than a hundred dead and a nation paralyzed between horror and déjà vu. Once again, the Brazilian State tried to reclaim control over crime through weapons — and lost it through words.

Because this is not only a war fought in the streets. It is a war fought in language. Each government baptizes its violence with a new grammar: pacification, neutralization, collateral damage. Euphemisms have become shields, and words, trenches. The country now lives, as writer Sérgio Rodrigues says, in a semantic swamp: a place where meanings sink under their own weight, where words no longer resemble what they name. In Brazil, segurança pública — public security — no longer means the protection of life; it has come to mean the license to kill.

The old semantic triangle of Ogden and Richards — symbol, thought, and referent — has been broken. The word security no longer refers to life or law, but to the political will of whoever utters it. Each administration imposes its own grammar, and through grammar, invents its own world. Elusiveness has become a State policy. And just as language has been distorted, so has reality itself.

Economist Joana Monteiro, from the Fundação Getúlio Vargas in Rio, summarized it in a single phrase:

“The two police forces are making all the decisions. Civilian leadership is absent.”

Power has slipped away from elected officials into the hands of uniformed institutions. Politics has been replaced by policing; deliberation by deployment. Every major operation ends with a brief illusion of victory, followed by a deeper loss of legitimacy. As Monteiro warns, violence has become an electoral instrument — a way to win votes, not to save lives.

Meanwhile, organized crime evolves with intelligence and technology. Journalist Rafael Vazquez and researcher Bruno Paes Manso have shown how the Comando Vermelho and the Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC) run encrypted financial networks, cryptocurrency laundering, and logistics systems that surpass those of the State. As Alberto Kopittke writes in his Manual de Segurança Pública Baseada em Evidências (2024):

“Most police actions in Brazil lack any empirical foundation. They are costly, ineffective, and endlessly repeated.”

That blindness is confirmed by Bruno Langeani and Natalia Pollachi in Blind Fire: The Rise of Military-Style Firearms amid Regulatory Failures and Data Deficiency in Brazil (2025), published in the Journal of Illicit Economies and Development. They show that the circulation of military-style firearms increased by more than 30 percent between 2019 and 2023 — weapons once restricted to the army now fueling organized crime. Their conclusion is devastating: Brazil lacks both transparency and traceability, and thus, it lacks knowledge. The State is armed but blind, reactive but not rational. It fights without understanding what it is fighting.

This collapse of reason cannot be explained by the police alone. It has its roots in the very architecture of the State. As Geraldo Di Giovanni and Marco Aurélio Nogueira explain in Dicionário de Políticas Públicas (Unesp, 2023), Brazil’s problem is not only institutional — it is conceptual. Governments confuse action with policy, and reaction with governance. Public policies, the authors remind us, should be rational, continuous, and transparent. In Brazil, they have become spectacles — flashes of improvisation that vanish with each electoral cycle.

From a broader Latin American perspective, Bruce Mac Master, in his El Continente de los Países Resignados (2023), diagnoses a deeper malaise: structural resignation. Latin American societies, he says, have lost the ability to plan and the faith to persevere.

“We do not have development strategies that are sufficiently robust, long-term, and comprehensive.”

That resignation explains our tolerance for failure, our acceptance of tragedy as routine. The world of crime operates as a business; the State, as a memory lapse. And so long as this resignation persists, violence will remain not an emergency, but a culture.

Public security, then, is not a police issue. It is a human development issue. Without education, employment, and social justice, no operation can restore order — only the illusion of it. The solution lies in long-term planning, in rebuilding institutions, and in governing through evidence, not emotion. Brazil must abandon its culture of improvisation and embrace the discipline of continuity.

The path forward demands a new republican pact — one that unites intelligence, transparency, and civil authority. A nation that refuses to plan its future will endlessly repeat its tragedy.

Like most of Latin America, Brazil must recover the right to dream strategically. Dreaming, in this sense, is not utopia — it is governance. As long as the State keeps mistaking noise for government and death for authority, it will remain trapped in its semantic swamp, believing that naming a problem is the same as solving it.

Only when the word security once again means life — and not fear — will Brazil’s State truly be reborn. Until then, violence will remain the official language of a nation that lost meaning long before it lost control.