Lula’s “Security Bill” strengthens police state in Brazil

Eduardo Parati & Guilherme Ferreira

Civilian and Military Police deployed in Sao Paulo's "Operation Summer," which claimed the lives of at least 56 civilians [Photo: SSP-SP]

This week, the Brazilian Congress began discussing a Proposed Amendment to the Constitution on Public Security drafted by the government of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, of the Workers Party (PT). If approved by a two-thirds majority, it will bring about a significant concentration of police powers at the national level.

The bill provides for the integration and coordination of Civil and Military Police and Municipal Guards between the federal government, states and municipalities through the Unified Public Security System, expanding the federal government’s role in policy-making and combating organized crime. It also expands the powers of the Federal Police, Federal Highway Police and Municipal Guards, and elevates national security funding to constitutional status to guarantee specific resources.

Echoing the rhetoric of far-right politicians who advocate a policy of “zero tolerance” even for minor crimes, Lula declared in March: “We will not allow criminals to take over our country. We will not allow the ‘republic of cell phone thieves’ to start scaring people on the streets of this country.” He added: “That is why we are presenting a Security Constitutional Amendment so that we can say that the state is stronger than the criminals.”

The Lula administration also sees the PEC as a way to respond to the Brazilian population’s growing concern with violence, an expression of the intensifying social inequality in the country, for which the PT’s capitalist government has no solution. An April poll by Quaest showed that 29 percent of Brazilians cite violence as their main concern. In October 2024, violence was the main concern of 16 percent of Brazilians.

Numerous public security experts have criticized the violent and reactionary nature of the Lula government’s bill. Gabriel Feltran, a sociology professor at the Federal University of São Carlos, said earlier this year in an interview with the Humanitas Unisinos Institute that the bill reinforces “our public security model, which is militarized... produces a military war against crime, produces a very high rate of police lethality.” He drew particular attention to the fact that the text “makes the Federal Highway Police the ostensible federal police, which would receive much more resources from now on and become a federal military police.”

Despite its reactionary character, the bill’s progress has been marked by disputes between the federal government and politicians allied with Brazil’s fascist former president Jair Bolsonaro. The governor of the state of Goiás, Ronaldo Caiado (União Brasil), declared last November: “[The bill] is unacceptable, it is a usurpation of power, it is an invasion of a prerogative that is already guaranteed to us governors.”

The PT government responded to those criticisms of “usurpation of power” from the states by making significant concessions to the far right. In January, the government amended the proposal, maintaining the power of the states to legislate on “general rules of public security, social defense, and the prison system.” But these changes did not reduce the resistance of the fascistic political opposition.

The disputes surrounding the bill include a clear electoral component. Caiado and other governors, such as Tarcísio de Freitas of São Paulo, are concerned about losing a crucial constituency among the police just over a year before the 2026 elections. Both are positioning themselves as far-right presidential alternatives to Bolsonaro, who is ineligible to run, and are vying for the ex-president’s voters.

Above all, the fascist forces see Lula’s campaign to strengthen the repressive apparatus as a misappropriation of a political flag that belongs to them.

Caiado, Tarcísio, and other figures in Bolsonaro’s sphere model themselves closely on the fascist politics of El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele. Under the pretext of fighting criminal gangs, Bukele has promoted a brutal increase in repression and mass incarceration of the population, without due process, in prison camps that violate the most basic human rights. His police state measures have served as a platform to subvert the constitutional regime and move toward establishing a presidential dictatorship in El Salvador.

The clashes surrounding the Public Security bill took place amid the release of the Brazilian Public Security Yearbook, published in July, which revealed a situation of violence comparable to countries at war. In 2024, Brazil recorded 44,127 intentional violent deaths, with 6,243 of them caused by police forces—a figure about five times higher than that recorded in the US. While the total number of violent deaths decreased by 31 percent between 2017 and 2024, deaths caused by police increased by 21 percent during that period.

In São Paulo, police lethality increased by a staggering 61 percent between 2023 and 2024, from 504 to 813 deaths. Last year, the Military Police commanded by Governor Freitas, Bolsonaro’s former Minister of Infrastructure, was responsible for one of the bloodiest police operations in recent years in Brazil.

Freitas used the death of a special forces officer, which occurred on July 27, 2023 in Guarujá, as a pretext to launch a bloodbath in Baixada Santista, on the coast closest to the state capital, São Paulo.

The first phase, called Operation Shield, was launched the day after the officer’s death and officially ended with the conclusion of Operation Summer in April 2024. The brutal nature of the operation, which resulted in 56 deaths, was pointed out by the São Paulo State Police Ombudsman Cláudio Aparecido da Silva, who explained to Agência Brasil: “Among those killed were disabled people, people who used crutches, blind people, and a mother of six children.”

The São Paulo Military Police, however, is not the deadliest in Brazil. According to the Yearbook, police killings in Bahia, a northeastern state governed by the PT since 2007, are almost double those in São Paulo, reaching 1,556 last year. According to a July report by Intercept, as a result of policies such as an infamous “Police Performance Award,” which rewards battalions for police performance and channels resources to special units with a history of high lethality, the “proportion of deaths caused by police officers has tripled since 2014, rising from 5 percent to more than 25 percent in 2023.”

What is happening in Bahia is the result of a long process of intensified repression overseen by federal and local PT governments. During his first terms in office (2003-2010), Lula waged a “war on drugs” that caused the prison population in Brazil to explode. It is now the third largest in the world. During the administration of PT President Dilma Rousseff (2011-2016), laws on criminal organizations and anti-terrorism were passed, both of which were used to indict political demonstrators and deploy the army to repress social protests.

In Ceará, a state in northeastern Brazil ruled for a decade by the PT, in October 2023 the Brazilian Bar Association (OAB) made an official request for the removal of Luís Mauro Albuquerque Araújo from the position of Secretary of Penitentiary Administration and Resocialization. The association justified its request by denouncing “the illegalities and abuses of the measures adopted in the state’s prison units,” which include mistreatment and torture of prisoners. Governor Elmano de Freitas, however, defended his actions and kept him in office.

The OAB’s complaint is far from surprising. In 2018, a year before Albuquerque Araújo took office in Ceará, the torture in prisons under his command in the state of Rio Grande do Norte had already been compared by a Ministry of Justice agency to “crimes committed by US troops” in Abu Ghraib, Iraq.

In Rio de Janeiro, the mayor of Maricá (RJ) and one of the vice presidents of the PT, Washington Quaquá, has been working in the area of public security in close contact with the governor of Rio de Janeiro, Claudio Castro, a close ally of Bolsonaro. In early April, Quaquá said he intends to arm the Municipal Guard and create a special group to fight organized crime. Echoing the rhetoric of Brazilian fascists, Quaquá stated that “criminals in Maricá will have no chance” and will “go to the grave.”

Quaquá’s attitude is even more alarming given that Governor Castro oversaw a brutal massacre in 2021 in the Jacarezinho favela in the northern part of the capital of Rio de Janeiro. In this episode, the Civil Police killed 27 people, 11 of whom had no criminal record, and only three arrest warrants were served among the 21 used as a pretext for the operation. In 2022, Castro called the victims “bums.”

The PT’s growing alignment with a defense of police violence in terms previously restricted to open fascists is a manifestation of the shift to the right by the entire Brazilian capitalist establishment. This shift includes the pseudo-left satellites of the PT, whose main representative is the Socialism and Freedom Party (PSOL).

Covering every reactionary step of the PT government, the PSOL was tasked with fabricating arguments to present Lula’s Public Security bill as a progressive move. On the day of its approval by the congressional commission, state representative Talíria Petrone of the PSOL in Rio de Janeiro praised the PEC, stating that “Brazil needs standardized procedures, the use of body cameras, and limits on the use of force.” State representative Pastor Henrique Vieira, from the same party, defended the public ombudsman offices provided for in the proposal, demanding only more precision in the definition of “ombudsman” and “internal affairs.”

Africa and Asia face rising hunger as giant grain traders and food corporations rake in profits

Jean Shaoul

While the world’s media bring terrible images of hungry Palestinians in Gaza to our screens—facing starvation due to Israel’s war of annihilation—rising levels of hunger in Africa and Asia go virtually unreported.

This year’s The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) estimates that between 673 million and 720 million people, (7.8 and 8.8 percent of the world population), experienced hunger in 2024.

Children eat porridge prepared at a feeding center in Mudzi, Zimbabwe, on July 2, 2024. In Zimbabwe, an El Nino-induced drought is affecting millions of people, and children are most at risk. [AP Photo/Aaron Ufumeli]

There has been a significant increase in “most subregions of Africa and Western Asia [Middle East]”. In 2024 hunger affected about 307 million people in Africa and 39 million in Western Asia, 20.2 and 12.7 percent of the population, respectively.

Some of the worst affected countries in Africa are Sudan, where 24.6 million people (around half the population) are acutely food insecure and 637,000 (the highest anywhere in the world) face catastrophic levels of hunger; South Sudan, where around 60 percent of the population face hunger and food insecurity; Somalia (nearly 50 percent), Central African Republic (50 percent), Sierra Leone (40 percent), Nigeria (25 percent) and Ethiopia (25 percent).

In Western Asia, 80 percent of Yemen’s population faced hunger in 2024, Syria (60 percent), Iraq (25 percent), Lebanon (50 percent), and Jordan (14 percent), as well as Gaza.

(The research includes an interactive FAO “World Hunger Map 2025” presenting the latest global estimates of hunger and food insecurity. See here).

The FAO does not expect the situation to improve very much, with 512 million people projected to face hunger in 2030, 60 percent of whom will be in Africa, meaning that Sustainable Development Goal 2 (Zero hunger), one of the 17 agreed by all UN member states in 2015, will not be achieved.

This fact is testimony to the refusal of the United Nations— dominated by the capitalist politicians and billionaires who control world’s imperialist centres—to challenge the giant food corporations and their political backers responsible for this horrendous situation.

It is these same food-poor countries, such as South Sudan and Somaliland, that US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are bullying into accepting the ethnically-cleansed Palestinians from Gaza—while dangling a few miserable carrots in the form of aid and military support, or an oil deal to South Sudan and political recognition for an independent state in the case of Somaliland.

About 2.3 billion of the world’s population were moderately or severely food insecure in 2024. Globally and in every region food insecurity is more prevalent in rural areas where people work in agriculture and animal grazing, and affects more women than men.

Food prices rose throughout 2023 and 2024, pushing up the cost of a healthy diet globally to 4.46 purchasing power parity (PPP) dollars per person per day from 4.01 PPP dollars in 2022. While globally the number of people unable to afford a healthy diet fell from 2.76 billion in 2019 to 2.60 billion in 2024, this surged in Africa from 864 million to just over 1 billion (from 64 to 66.6 percent) in the same period.

Among some indicators of child nutrition, stunting in children under five declined from 26.4 percent in 2012 to 23.2 percent in 2024, while the prevalence of child overweight (5.3 percent in 2012 and 5.5 percent in 2024), and in child wasting (7.4 percent in 2012 and 6.6 percent in 2024) was largely the same.

The report noted a global rise in adult obesity from 12.1 percent in 2012 to 15.8 percent in 2022 and in the incidence of anaemia among women aged 15 to 49, from 27.6 percent in 2012 to 30.7 percent in 2023.

The FAO report cited the surge in food prices in 2021-2023 as a major cause of the lack of progress in reducing hunger in Africa and Western Asia, pointing to a range of factors that precipitated it, including:

* The COVID-19 pandemic, with governments and central banks meanwhile intervening to prop up the banks and corporations with a massive $17 trillion in fiscal and monetary support—equal to 10 percent of global GDP over two years.

* The war in Ukraine and sanctions on Russia, limiting exports of wheat, grain and sunflower oil that accounted for 12 percent of globally traded calories in 2021, and their fertiliser and oil exports.

* Extreme weather events.

Food price inflation was consistently greater than headline inflation: in January 2023, food inflation hit 13.6 percent, 5.1 percentage points above the 8.5 percent headline rate, up from 2.3 percent in December 2020. This particularly affected low-income countries, where food price inflation reached 30 percent in May 2023 compared to the median global rate of 13.6 percent.

While median global food price inflation increased from 2.3 percent in December 2020 to 13.6 percent in early 2023, it climbed much higher in low-income countries to 30 percent in May 2023. At the same time, wage recovery has been highly uneven across countries, with many facing a sustained decline in wages.

In Egypt, surging food prices, driven by dependency on food, fertiliser and energy imports and foreign currency shortages, have significantly outpaced wage increases since mid-2022. In countries, such as Lebanon, Myanmar, Sudan and South Sudan, wars and conflicts have affected access to food.

Nowhere in its 234-page report does the FAO explain the underlying economic processes that have put food out of reach for millions of people around the world. There is no mention of the Big Four—ADM, Bunge, Cargill and Louis Dreyfus (LDC), otherwise known as ABCD—the giant commodity trading corporations that operate across the entire middle of the food supply chain.

This provides them with multiple opportunities to extract massive multi-billion dollar profits by buying and selling grain on the international markets; storing and transporting commodities; food processing, selling seeds and fertilisers that are typically patent-protected and thus command high prices to farmers; and above all speculating via their active trade in derivatives, futures and hedging instruments on food prices.

The New York Stock Exchange Building on August 4, 2011, when Bunge celebrated the 10th anniversary of its listing on the New York Stock Exchange [Photo by David Shankbone / CC BY 3.0]

With the rise of commodities markets, food is a financial product traded on exchanges. Corporations like Cargill and ADM often speculate on the prices of food staples, buying up stocks of grain or oilseeds and then selling them at a premium during times of crisis. This causes prices to rise without reflecting a real shortage of food.

These agribusiness monopolies, via their control of all the intermediate levels of the food chain, have taken advantage of the wars, sanctions, energy and fertiliser shortages and climate-induced crop failures, to set prices and influence supply chains, accumulating vast profits while hundreds of millions of people face hunger on a daily basis.

Little has changed since Dan Morgan wrote his groundbreaking book Merchants of Grain in 1979 describing the seven secretive families and far-flung companies that control the world’s food supplies.

Merchants of Grain, by Dan Morgan [Photo: Goodreads]

In contrast, farmers, who face high costs from these suppliers and low prices set by the self-same corporations and the World Trade Organisation’s rules (1995 Uruguay Round)—that have led to the increased dumping of subsidised agricultural commodities resulting in steep falls in their prices—often live a hand-to-mouth existence.

As well as the commodity traders, there are the giant food corporations that rake in huge profits at the expense of consumers. These include:

* Other food processors such as Nestle, PepsiCo, General Mills and Tyson Foods that have massive marketing power due to their global supply chains.

* Retailers such as Walmart, Amazon, Kroger and Carrefour whose bulk buying power and vertical integration give them enormous financial muscle.

* The fast-food chains such as McDonald’s, Starbucks, Subway, KFC and Domino’s extort vast profits via their ownership of the property, franchises and patents to the extent that some are little more than property corporations fronted by food outlets. These are the same corporations selling the ultra-processed and fast foods linked to obesity and nutrition deficiencies.

Cargill barge loading facility on the Mississippi River seen from St. Louis, Missouri, United States [Photo by GFDL/Self-created photograph by Jonathunder]

All of these corporations have hiked their prices far higher than the wages of both their workers and their customers.

Like so many of capitalism’s economic processes, these corporations, their activities and finances, are largely invisible and unknown to the international working class that both produces their wealth and buys their ultimate products.

Death rate for US children surges 25 percent in 10 years

Benjamin Mateus & Evan Blake

Baby and mom near the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, April 5, 2020 [Photo by https://www.vperemen.com / / CC BY 4.0]

The death rate for US children has surged by 25 percent over the past decade, according to a study published last month by pediatrician Dr. Christopher Forrest and colleagues in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Even as the child mortality rate has slowly fallen in other developed countries, it has surged in the US, along with every other indicator of chronic illness.

The research underscores the American ruling elites’ complete disregard for children’s well-being and safety, especially for the children of the working class.

In 2014, US children were about 1.6 times more likely to die than their counterparts in peer countries. By 2022, that gap had widened dramatically: American children were now 2.3 times as likely to die.

The authors estimated that between 2007 and 2022, an additional 316,000 US child deaths were attributable to the gap in mortality compared to other developed countries. This is equivalent to a staggering 54 excess child deaths per day in the US.

Data from the Human Mortality Database (HMD) showing increase in mortality rate among children in the United States. [Photo: JAMA]

From 2011 to 2023, the prevalence of children aged three to 17 with chronic conditions rose from 39.9 percent to 45.7 percent within the healthcare systems studied. US children aged 1 to 19 were 15.3 times more likely to die from firearms compared to their peers in other developed nations, with these rates steadily rising over the study period. In 2020, firearm mortality overtook motor vehicle crashes as the leading cause of death in US youth.

The study also documented alarming trends in mental health and chronic conditions. Major depression among children increased by 230 percent from 2010 to 2023, while sleep apnea tripled, eating disorders increased by 220 percent, and childhood obesity rates rose from 17 percent in 2007-2008 to 20.9 percent in 2021-2023.

For infants under age one, respiratory infections, prematurity, congenital anomalies and sudden unexpected infant deaths were common factors in their demise, speaking to the broader issue of maternal healthcare and medical issues surrounding childbirth in the US. The US mortality disadvantage was driven largely by sudden unexpected infant death and prematurity—conditions directly linked to inadequate prenatal care, maternal health disparities and poverty. US infants were 2.2 times more likely to die from prematurity and 2.4 times more likely to die from sudden unexpected infant death compared to peer countries.

These statistics reflect the systematic destruction of the social infrastructure necessary to support child development and health.

In a companion editorial to the study, titled “How we are failing US children,” Dr. Elizabeth Wolf of Virginia Commonwealth University and colleagues explained that these systemic problems creating disastrous conditions are all preventable and arise from negligence in addressing the welfare and well-being of the US population.

Five percent of US children lack insurance, while 40 percent of children with public insurance have limited access to primary and specialty care simply because the insurance system is rigged against reimbursement and primary care. There is a suffocating deficit of pediatric mental health professionals that cannot keep pace with demands, placing additional burdens on primary care clinics and emergency departments.

Data from the Human Mortality Database (HMD) and World Health Organization (WHO) showing increase in various forms of death among young people. [Photo: JAMA]

The editorial accompanying the study points to five domains that explain the US health disadvantage: healthcare, behaviors, socioeconomic conditions, the environment and public policies.

The US differs fundamentally from peer countries in each domain. The fragmented health insurance landscape provides little help for lower-middle class families and impedes continuous enrollment, while the US has among the highest child poverty rates and income inequality in the OECD.

Environmental factors compound these problems. Persistent underinvestment in childhood health programs limits youth access to health-promoting resources and increases exposure to health hazards. Low-income children have greater exposure to airborne pollutants that trigger asthma and are more likely to live near environmental hazards and high-speed roads without pedestrian safety features.

Much of the increase has occurred since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, underscoring not only the deadly nature of the pandemic but also the failed social and political response that has steadily eviscerated public health and healthcare.

The pandemic itself continues unabated, with more than 350 Americans still dying weekly from COVID-19 as of May 2025, and the US is now in the grips of its 11th wave of mass infection. Since the start of the pandemic, there have now been over 1.38 million excess deaths in the US, with the working class disproportionately affected.

Among children, an estimated 4 percent have now developed Long COVID, according to recent RECOVER Initiative research, translating to approximately 6 million children in the US alone. This condition, which can cause lasting damage to multiple organ systems and dramatically reduce life expectancy, represents a generational health catastrophe that will burden these children throughout their lives.

The Trump administration’s “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) initiative, led by the anti-vaccine fanatic Robert F. Kennedy Jr., represents not a solution but an acceleration of this crisis. MAHA is a smokescreen designed to mask eugenicist policies that will dramatically worsen child mortality.

Since taking office, Kennedy has canceled $500 million in mRNA vaccine research funding, eliminated injury prevention and maternal health programs, and launched “research” initiatives designed to fuel vaccine hesitancy among parents. These policies will further lower life expectancy and set the stage for another catastrophic pandemic.

As Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels observed nearly two centuries ago, class divisions shape every aspect of childhood, and children of the poor suffer the harshest fates in capitalist society. The founders of scientific socialism correctly saw genuine child welfare as impossible under capitalist social relations and advocated for a proletarian revolution to end the exploitation of the working class and social inequality, thereby securing the well-being of future generations.

Objectively, the means exist to ensure that every neighborhood is safe from violence, crime and pollution. Access to nutritious foods, high quality healthcare and public education could be readily available. However, as the Trump administration’s recent and ongoing cuts to healthcare and scientific funding demonstrate, the ruling elites are instead clawing back every gain made by workers through past struggles against the capitalist system.

As the 2024 Oxfam report noted, net profits for 200 of the largest US corporations soared to $1.25 trillion in 2022, a 63 percent increase from 2018, of which 90 percent was paid out to wealthy shareholders. While CEO payouts continue to climb at historic rates, wages remain stagnant, falling behind inflation. Meanwhile, cuts to workplace safety continue to accumulate, endangering the lives of workers without any support from union bureaucrats, who defend corporate attacks on the lives and well-being of the working class.