2017: a rough year for Brazil

Brazil began 2017 in a macabre fashion, with mass killings and violent deaths reaching alarming levels over the twelve months. In the first hours of the year, news spread of a deadly prison uprising in prisons in the North and Northeast, where brewing tensions between rival drug trafficking gangs in overcrowded penitentiaries killed upwards of 140 inmates.

Unfortunately, this was not the only massacre in Brazil this year: in September, ten members of a previously uncontacted indigenous tribe in a remote area of the Amazon were murdered by gold miners. Meanwhile, activists and human rights watchdogs say that indigenous groups and quilombolas have both been subject to even higher levels of lethal violence this year.

But individual acts of violence have also been rising. In January, a police strike in the state of Espírito Santo caused chaos, with mass lootings, assaults, and more than 120 murders in just one week. Meanwhile, one year on from the Olympics, Rio de Janeiro has had its most violent year in almost a decade,...