In 2025, Brazil recorded its lowest homicide rate in over a decade. It also recorded rising extortion, surging cybercrime, increasing police killings, and a record number of disappearances. The Trump administration then designated its two most powerful criminal organizations as foreign terrorist organizations.
All of those things are true simultaneously — and understanding how requires looking beyond the single statistic that has dominated the coverage.
The Homicide Numbers
Brazil recorded 34,086 homicides in 2025, down from 38,374 in 2024 — continuing a trend that began in 2020, with a 25% reduction in homicides over five years. The homicide rate fell to 16 per 100,000 inhabitants, the lowest in over a decade.
The decline is real and sustained. From a peak of approximately 64,000 murders in 2017 — the country’s deadliest year on record — Brazil has cut its homicide count nearly in half over eight years. Several factors contributed: improved coordination between police forces, state-level security programs, demographic shifts in the young male population, and a negotiated reduction in direct conflict between Brazil’s two dominant criminal organizations, the PCC and the CV, whose 2017 rivalry produced the worst violence in the data series.
The drop in homicides can be partially explained by the consistent movement of criminality towards technology and cybercrime — which involves less physical violence while still causing significant harm to its victims. In other words, the crime didn't disappear. It migrated.
What the Homicide Data Doesn’t Capture
A falling murder rate is not the same as a safer country. Brazil’s crime picture in 2025 is more complicated — and in several dimensions, more alarming — than the headline homicide figure suggests.
Brazil faces a growing cybercrime threat, with attacks increasingly targeting individuals and businesses. Ransomware and banking trojans are persistent threats, and Brazil is a key target for cyberattacks in Latin America, accounting for a significant share of regional incidents. Banking trojans originating in Brazil have come to dominate the global landscape, filling the gap left by Eastern European cybercriminals who have shifted to ransomware.
Cases of extortion such as “gota-a-gota” loansharking have been on the rise and are major drivers of insecurity. Criminal groups have also started to extort sex workers. Environmental crime has increasingly been behind violence in the past five years, with gang killings of environmental defenders, Indigenous leaders, and mine workers.
Police killings increased by 4.5% in Brazil in 2025. In October, police killed over 100 people in Brazil’s most lethal operation to date in Rio de Janeiro. Brazil’s homicide statistics include police killings — meaning that as the state has intensified its enforcement operations, a share of the homicide “decline” reflects not less violence but a shift in who is doing the killing.
Brazil has also registered a record number of disappearances since 2015 — suggesting the drop in its homicide rate may be due at least in part to undetected murders.
Some states saw increases in violence — Acre, Rondônia, Roraima, and Rio Grande do Norte in the north; Rio de Janeiro in the southeast; and the Federal District in the center-west — with northern states reporting high levels of violence due to fighting between the PCC and CV and local gangs.
The Transnational Dimension
The Trump administration’s designation of the PCC and CV as foreign terrorist organizations on June 5 was not based on Brazil’s domestic homicide statistics. It was based on what those statistics were never designed to measure: the groups’ operational presence inside the United States.
According to U.S. officials, the FBI identified PCC and CV cells operating in at least 12 U.S. states — including Florida, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Tennessee — engaged in gun trafficking and money laundering.
In March 2026, the U.S. Attorney’s Office charged 18 Brazilians with firearms trafficking offenses tied to the PCC. U.S. officials noted that 113 people were denied visas to enter the United States in 2024 due to connections to Brazilian organized crime.
Extortion and protection racketeering are entrenched across Brazil, particularly in urban centers where police-backed militias charge for protection services, exploiting police resources to coerce payments from miners, business owners, local politicians, and residents. Collusion with state officials allows these groups to evade law enforcement while infiltrating political institutions and shaping electoral outcomes.
This is the portrait of organizations that have not weakened — organizations that have professionalized, diversified, and expanded their reach across borders while reducing the most visible and measurable indicator of their activity: bodies on Brazilian streets.
Two Legitimate Arguments
The Lula government’s response to the designations was pointed. A country with a declining homicide rate, functioning democratic institutions, and a record of security cooperation with the United States, it argued, does not warrant the same legal framework reserved for organizations like Al-Qaeda and ISIS.
The designations, Brasília said, amount to electoral interference — timed to arrive four months before Brazil’s presidential election at the personal request of opposition candidate Flávio Bolsonaro following a White House meeting.
Analysts supporting the designations make a different argument: that falling homicide statistics are precisely the kind of surface-level data that obscures the depth of PCC and CV penetration into Brazilian institutions, financial systems, and international criminal networks.
The organizations became less visibly violent, this argument goes, by becoming more structurally embedded — and the designation reflects that evolution rather than contradicting Brazil's crime data.
Both positions are grounded in real evidence. The homicide rate went down. The organizational reach went up. The criminal threat migrated from the street to the screen, from bullets to banking trojans, from local rivalry to transnational networks operating on two continents.
Whether that evolution justifies the FTO framework — with its secondary sanctions risk for Brazilian banks and its implications for bilateral relations ahead of October's election — is the question that will define U.S.-Brazil relations for the remainder of 2026.
