RIO DE JANEIRO — When a Brazilian police officer killed Ana Paula Oliveira’s 19-year-old son in a Rio de Janeiro favela in 2014, the mother of two didn’t think she would survive the grief.
Founding a group with other grieving mothers — attending judicial hearings, protests and commemorative events together and providing essential psychological support to one another — saved her life, Oliveira says.
“Without any doubt, if I had been alone I wouldn’t have made it here, 12 years later,” she said, at a recent event at her son’s old school marking the anniversary of his death. “We need one another to cry together, to smile together and to fight together.”
Oliveira and other Brazilian mothers turn to activism to ensure that their sons are remembered as more than a statistic. Now, they are demanding a nationwide policy to support relatives of victims of state violence and are seeking public funding to finance their activities.
The nonprofit Crossfire Institute said 460 people died during police operations in Rio last year, the highest number since 2016 and a 52% increase from the previous year.
Much like the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, a human rights organization created by women whose children were kidnapped by the military dictatorship that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983, Oliveira and her group draw attention to the pain generated by police killings and seek judicial accountability — sometimes successfully.
Last year, they traveled to the capital Brasilia and met with the judiciary, legislative and executive branches to present their project, developed with the support of Raave, a network of organizations supporting people affected by police killings in Rio.
“Raave is negotiating with the federal government to implement a pilot project … developed by the mothers, so that we can provide care and guarantee the rights of this population,” said Guilherme Pimental, a coordinator for Raave.
As in other Latin American countries, including Peru and Colombia, crime is a key issue for voters in Brazil’s elections in October.
Supporters and allies of presidential hopeful Sen. Flávio Bolsonaro, son of former President Jair Bolsonaro, argue that police must be given full support in their fight against heavily armed gangs in favelas, or impoverished sprawling urban communities.
But grieving mothers and nonprofits contend that Brazil’s police too often use excessive force, sometimes ending in death.
Oliveira’s son Johnatha was shot in the back as he passed through a street in Manguinhos favela in Rio after visiting his grandmother, his mother said. He later died of his injuries.
“Police officers allege that they shot him to disperse a crowd” that was protesting, said Oliveira, who wants the law enforcement official who fired the shot convicted of intentional homicide. In 2024, a jury convicted the official of manslaughter without intent to kill. Prosecutors successfully appealed, but a new court date for a second trial hasn’t been set.
Like Oliveira, Monica Cunha also transformed her pain into activism. After her 20-year-old son was killed by police in 2006, she became a councilwoman and this month will launch her precandidacy to run for state lawmaker in the upcoming October elections.
“I fight for memory, truth, justice, reparations and guarantees of nonrepetition — not only for myself, but so that no other family has to endure this pain,” Cunha said in an Instagram post on the 18th anniversary of her son’s death. “The racism that kills our children and loved ones is not an isolated problem, and it must be confronted through state policies. I will keep going, turning grief into struggle.”
Brazilian police have killed more than 6,000 people every year since 2018, according to the Brazilian Forum on Public Safety, a prominent nonprofit. The largest number of victims are age 18 to 24, while 82% of victims of lethal police violence are Black, the nonprofit said in its 2025 annual publication on violence in Brazil.
Anti-gang tactics in Rio’s favelas came under scrutiny once again last year, when police killed 117 suspected gang members in the state’s most lethal raid ever, targeting members of the criminal group Red Command in two favelas. Five police officers also died. Officers arrested 113 people, seized 118 weapons and confiscated more than a ton of drugs in that operation, police said.
Then-Rio Gov. Cláudio Castro, a Bolsonaro ally, defended the operation, which he said targeted “ narco-terrorists ” — a term echoing U.S. President Donald Trump. Last month, the Trump administration classified the Red Command as well as its rival First Command Capital as foreign terrorist organizations.
Nadia dos Santos’ sons Cleyton and Cleyverson were both killed by police: the former in 2015 when he was 18 and the latter when he was 17 in 2022. Police also killed the son of her sister, Glaucia dos Santos, Fabricio, in 2014 when he was 17. A memorial honoring and depicting the three boys covers the front wall of the family’s home in Rio’s Chapadao complex of favelas.
The sisters founded support groups and began the long work of investigating the circumstances of each boy’s death, seeking accountability through the courts.
In 2023, the police officers involved in the death of Fabricio were sentenced to nine years in prison, a decision that was celebrated by other mothers and gave them hope, Glaucia dos Santos said.
“We want others to stay alive, so we have to stay upright” despite the immense toll of the grief, said Glaucia dos Santos.
Her sister Nadia said the mothers need a nationwide public policy on restitution that she went to Brasilia to demand.
“The state should have the obligation to give us mothers who lose our sons because of the state’s violence reparations. … We fight, we work, but we become ill. We need solutions,” she said.
Oliveira suggested restitution could take the form of placing victims’ names in public places and naming facilities after them, such as schools, hospitals and daycare centers.
“There are other forms of reparation as well, such as building other public policies of nonrepetition that would help prevent new cases. … Many things need to be done, repaired, so that this barbarity does not continue,” she said.
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Associated Press journalist Diarlei Rodrigues contributed to this report.
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