On All Souls Day, Brazilians visit the graves of loved ones to celebrate their lives and grieve their loss. This year, there is a special poignancy for those who care to see it. The Day of the Dead dawned hours after the release of figures revealing that 2016 was the most murderous year in Brazil’s history. One person was killed every seven minutes in the country last year, a total of almost 62,000 lives lost to violence.

This “genocide” of Brazilian people – especially her young, black people – overshadows this year’s festivities. Between 2005 and 2015, the average homicide rate rose from 26 to 29.9 murders per 100,000 people. Most were young, and in 2015 seven out of 10 were black. Black people are more vulnerable in virtually every state in the country, regardless of socioeconomic status.

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The murder of young black people is a long-term dynamic. The black movement in Brazil calls it the genocide of black youth, a concept coined by the late scholar and activist Abdias do Nascimento. As the facts make plain, this is much more than a metaphor. The term “genocide” suggests deliberate intent, with a specific section of the population targeted.

Brazil seems willing to waste a whole generation – to leave people dead, imprisoned or excluded from formal education and employment – just to keep a segregated political structure based on the national heritage: slavery. When the possession of slaves was banned in 1888, a famous diplomat, Joaquim Nabuco, predicted that slavery would long remain the country’s distinctive stain. He was right.



Black and young people may be the chief victims of violence, yet they are looked upon as potential killers. More than 80% of Brazilians support lowering the age of criminal responsibility from 18 to 16. The criminalisation of poor and black children and teenagers is part of a violent police and institutional control project, which in 2016 was responsible for 4,224 deaths, 6.9% of the total number of violent deaths in Brazil and 21% higher than the previous year.



Measures to combat, repress and punish violence are cravenly focusing on young people, leaving untouched the causes of unrest and ignoring the need to improve the public security system. It is up to the state to tackle these challenges, but preference has instead been given to innocuous shows of repressive power like the deployment of federal troops to keep the peace in states such as Rio de Janeiro and Espírito Santo.



The Brazilian state is today more fragile than ever. The president represents the interests of rural oligarchies and big business, and public policy is not geared towards attaining peace in society. A constitutional amendment, approved in 2016, capped the growth of public spending, which has tended to decrease every year. Last year, public spending on safety dropped from an already ridiculous 0.5% in 2015 to 0.45%.

In the face of the Brazilian recession, such a narrow austerity policy contributes to worsening social indicators. It creates inequality, conniving with the escalation of violence and the murder of young black people. The conservative measures taken after the impeachment of former president Dilma Rousseff in 2016, and the rise of Jair Bolsonaro, a far-right candidate for next year’s presidential elections, express not so much a moment of crisis, as in other countries, but rather a reversion of the timid efforts made in the past few decades to overcome the historic slave-holding heritage. Intentionally.