As the drug trade piggybacks on environmental plunder, a spike in homicides is borne by the rainforest region’s neglected urban areas.
Framed by an elegant riverside promenade and a modest skyline with streets enviably free of gridlock, Macapá is that rare major Brazilian city with a lingering small-town vibe.
But lately residents of the so-called urban “jewel of the Amazon” have come to know a less-charming side to this fast-growing regional capital. Hardly a week passes in this sprawling metropolis on the left bank of the Amazon River without word of another homicide, brazen assault or contract killing.
Latin America’s biggest nation is no stranger to violent crime: Brazil accounted for a disproportionate 10.3% of global homicides in 2023 for only 2.6% of world population. What’s new is the shift in lethal violence from cities on the country’s densely populated southeastern seaboard to the Amazon Basin, where ambitious drug syndicates are extending their reach. In 2023, the homicide rate in the rainforest region hit 34 per 100,000 people in 2023, compared to 22.8 per 100,000 nationwide.
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Security pundits and international policy analysts warn of the wider consequences of the crime diaspora in the Amazon Basin, where governing institutions are as weak as the forest is vast, monitoring is patchy, and the arm of the law falls chronically short.
Moving cocaine procured in Colombia, Peru and Bolivia through Brazil to international ports, drug traffickers share the same clandestine supply chain that drives the growing cabal of environmental pirates who plunder the rainforest and hurl carbon into the atmosphere, corrupting local authorities and overrunning Indigenous communities along the way. In 21st century Amazonia, the climate emergency is also a public security crisis — in the forest and on the asphalt.
For all the danger to the storied tropical habitat, the Amazon crime wave is an acutely urban affliction. Armed robbery, kidnapping, femicide, extortion and murder have metastasized through rainforest cities like Macapá. Four of Brazil’s 15 most dangerous cities and 13 of the worst 50 are Amazonian datelines.
While urban violence in the Amazon draws scant global attention, defenders of the storied tropical biome ignore it at their peril.
“The problem is not just the violence in the region but that the institutions and agencies tasked with enforcing public safety are inadequate, weak, or both,” the Brazilian Public Security Forum found. “Existing statestructures cannot confront this enormous challenge on their own.”
The backdrop for the crime spike is a broader demographic upheaval that is redrawing the Brazilian map, markets and skyline. Once second- and third-tier towns have swollen into metropolises and become magnets for migrants and opportunity seekers.
Take Macapá, a deceptively sleepy-looking town of 487,000 that has seen its population grow fivefold since 1970. Last year, this city on the equator clocked 71.3 homicides per 100,000 residents, the deadliest of 27 regional capitals, and 9th worst among major cities nationwide. And no Brazilian city was more dangerous than the contiguous port of Santana (93 killings per 100,000), crowded with cargo ships and favelas. Lethal violence in these and other Amazon cities now outpaces that of legacy metropolitan crime hotspots like Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo and Recife.
As Macapá’s population has grown, urban sprawl has pushed the city limits headlong into the soggy ressaca, or riverside floodplains. Here, where the Amazon is 50 kilometers wide, the poor raise homes on stilts, mostly beyond the reach of running water, sewage mains, social services — and the law.
At least eight local and national drug “factions” battle over turf and sales of marijuana, cocaine, and synthetic drugs in Amapá, especially in Macapá, a recent study by the Institute for Applied Economic Research (IPEA) concluded. Most homicides are clustered in a handful of slums at the edges of Macapá and the adjacent city of Santana.
“More than 80% of violent crimes are directly tied to the war between drug factions over control of local markets, with considerable collateral damage,” Amapá State Secretary of Justice and Public Security José Lima Neto told Bloomberg. “Our main crime problem is an urban problem.”
In a frontier region where the population skews young, poor and jobless, gang leaders have plenty of manpower to do their bidding. “Social inequality, extreme poverty, and a lack of opportunity lure teens and young adults to drug trafficking and robbery,” IPEA reported last year.
Authorities know that thwarting Amazon crime takes more than muscle. Strengthening surveillance, financial intelligence and command and control across the river basin are all critical to stopping the traffic in drugs, ill-gotten timber and gold, and dirty money over porous forested borders. Those efforts are vexing works in progress.
Research by Leidiene Souza de Almeida, a major with the Amapá military police, shows that policymakers must also confront the neglect in these fast-growing urban outskirts, where lack of access to essential services such as community policing, waste collection, potable water, electricity and streetlights creates the conditions for crime to flourish. Policy initiatives in some other Amazonian cities are attempting to tackle these issues by providing free services from internet to health care and expanding police-community relationships.
Still, in Macapá, it is heavy-handed “mano dura” policing for which the city is renowned among many frightened citizens.
In 2023, Amapá police logged 29.1 killings per 100,000 people, making it the nation’s most lethal force. Such belligerence is often applauded by the city’s bien-pensants and social media influencers, said Federal University of Amapá anthropologist Marcus Cardoso, who tracks the buzz through police fan pages on Instagram and Facebook. “There’s a kind of glamorization of police truculence,” Cardoso said.
Aggressive policing has also filled the region’s prison complex well beyond capacity — exacerbating a cycle of gang violence that often starts behind bars.
Brazil has the third-largest prison population after the US and China, according to the Institute for Crime and Justice Policy Research, and more than 1.3 prisoners for every cells. Overcrowding is acute in the Amazon region, where the incarceration rate has grown 67.3% over the last decade compared to 43.3% nationally, the Brazilian Public Security Forum and Mãe Crioula Institute report.
Among the new detainees are a growing number of ranking drug gang leaders, who turn prison yards into recruitment centers and command posts for their expanding crime networks.
Packed penitentiaries fuel fierce gang rivalries, leading to violence within the prisons and beyond. Rainforest cities have seen some of the nation’s bloodiest prison riots: 33 dead in a Boa Vista jail, in 2017; 57 killed in one bloody day in Altamira in 2019, and 55 deaths in two separate revolts in Manaus the same year.
Officials and policy experts alike agree that stemming gang violence means reforming dysfunctional prisons. For some policy analysts like my former colleague Robert Muggah, co-founder of the Igarapé Institute, reducing the prison population is essential to this reform. That likely means locking up fewer people pretrial — the case of 31.7% of prisoners in the Amazon Basin, compared to 27.8% nationwide — as well as reforming the penal code to keep out low-level offenders.
Authorities in the region, meanwhile, are focused on more immediate efforts. Amapá’s director of state prison affairs Luiz Carlos Gomes has overseen a battery of security sweeps of the aging state penitentiary on the outskirts of Macapá to seize contraband mobile phones, chargers and sim cards.
The police blotter in Macapá is replete with street crimes that began with a phone call behind bars, where convicted drug dons gave orders and capos on the outside obeyed or died trying. “We cannot ensure public safety unless we have a secure prison system,” says Lima Neto.
More recently, public safety authorities are pushing to decapitate prison gangs by separating convicted crime bosses from the general prison population and holding them incommunicado in a new high-security facility, with no wall plugs in the cell blocks or hackable standard light fixtures. “Cell phones are no good if they can’t be charged,” Gomes said.
This may sound more like damage control than prison reform. But at least for a while, the violence is abating: Lethal street violence briefly surged then fell 32% statewide in the six months to July compared to the year before.
“For now, we are basically just releasing steam from the pressure cooker,” Gomes said. “But crime is dynamic, and criminals adjust to circumstances.”