Racists behind bars: Brazil is at the vanguard of the fight against discrimination

When he arrives at his office in the morning, Rio de Janeiro Police Chief Rita Salim knows that throughout the course of the day, two or three people will come in to report having been a victim of racism. Some will do so after having lived a life of discrimination based on the color of their skin. “Many victims come when they can’t take it any more, the drop that made the cup overflow,” she says in an interview at her office. It’s a sorry state of affairs — but at the same time, there is hope. The veil of silence and shame that historically covered up this kind of discrimination is lifting. Brazil documented more than 7,000 complaints of racism in 2025, 67% more than the year before.

Specialists see this as the beginning of the end of underreporting, and attribute the rise to a combination of factors: strong laws, a better-trained police force and above all, greater social awareness. Brazil, which was the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery, in 1888, now has the most advanced anti-racism laws in the region.

This takes some tourists by surprise. Argentinian Agostina Páez was detained after yelling “monkey” and imitating the animal to offend a Black bar employee. “There is a law in Brazil that is quite severe,” she said upon returning home after serving two months of preventative prison in an apartment and paying a $20,000 fine to return to Argentina. She is now awaiting a verdict in her case.

In recent months, the number of foreigners incarcerated for racism has multiplied. The latest was another Argentinian, who photographed a child on a tourist train, joking that he wanted to take the youngster home as his slave. He has now spent two weeks behind bars. In light of Brazilian laws, such words can be punished with between two and five years in jail. Punishment can be double that if the crime is committed by a group, or shared on social media.

Salim’s station, which specializes in crimes of racism and other kinds of discrimination (against the LGBTQ+ community, disabled people, or based on religion), opened eight years ago and is staffed by around 20 officers. Others like it are becoming more common, and are already operating in states like Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Minas Gerais and Bahía. They are among the key factors helping to increase the number of complaints.

Their officers are better prepared, participate in workshops, courses, and conferences, and have direct contact with non-profits and anti-racist organizations. But anyone can report a racism-related crime in any neighborhood police station, where the goal is for there to always be an officer on duty who specializes in the subject. Salim says that many people are afraid of registering complaints due to fear of being re-victimized by the officer who receives them. “They are afraid of getting to the station and being discriminated against, again. Here, we work to eradicate that kind of intimidating behavior.”

Victims come from all walks of life, and are not restricted to a single age group or social class. Nor are their aggressors, though the commissioner explains that on many occasions, older people are unaware of the seriousness of their acts. “Sometimes we interrogate them and they use extremely discriminatory words, corroborating their beliefs without realizing it. Then they try to fix it by alleging that their best friend is Black, that they have a Black family member… but one thing has nothing to do with the other.”

Something similar takes place with the foreigners who say they were unaware of the situation in Brazil. In their case, they are more likely to be placed in preventative detainment, due to the fear that they will flee the country. When a person is arrested in fraganti (typically with the help of witnesses and smart phone recordings) it’s very common that a judge will authorize preventative prison, because there is a sufficient level of proof.

Brazil is the Blackest country outside of Africa; 56% of its inhabitants identify as Black or mixed, according to the latest census. The number of Brazilians who cite their African heritage in the definition of their racial identity has risen over the years alongside anti-racist awareness and affirmative policies. Little by little, Brazil is taking down the myth of “racial democracy” that had been installed in the collective consciousness, that of the tropical paradise where the mix of Europeans, Africans, and Indigenous communities had created a harmonious society in which segregation did not exist, in contrast to South Africa and the United States.

This new consciousness of a Brazil taking on its own structural racism has slowly reshaped its legal framework. One decisive step was the country’s updated racism law, which was first created with the 1988 Constitution. In 2023, the crime of racial slurs was added to the law. What before was an offense against an individual’s honor is now an attack on an entire community. In consequence, punishments became harsher. While before, a racial insult was resolved though community service or paying a fine, offenders are now more likely to wind up in prison. Plus, the crime of racism cannot be resolved by paying a fine.

“From a legislative point of view, Brazil is out in front of all the countries in the Americas,” explains Adilson Moreira, a Harvard-educated doctor of law who was one of the leading specialists on anti-discriminatory law in Brazil. He was one of the pioneers in legal approaches to the concept of “recreational racism,” in which humor is used as a form of racial discrimination. Such situations are explicitly included in the legislation, as is racism committed in sporting environments.

On paper, Brazil looks good when it comes to anti-racism — but things appear a bit different at street level. Complaints, investigations and detentions have grown significantly in recent years, but there have been few sentences handed down. At the end of March, there were more than 1,000 racists serving sentences, 309 of whom were in prison.

The biggest challenge, says Moreira, is a mentality that is still common among prosecutors and judges: “They try to employ all kinds of subterfuge to keep white people from being convicted for crimes of racism. Judges demand a much higher level of proof of the intention to discriminate than they do for other crimes,” says the specialist, who notes that the large majority of Brazilian judges are white and have had little training on racial issues. Commissioner Salim also believes there would be more results if prosecutor’s offices and courts were inspired by the police to create specialized units, like those that already exist for organized crime, for example.

Despite that, optimism prevails, because social change is on the move, and there is no sign of its retreat. Quotas for Black and Indigenous individuals, as well as public university students, have been making historically white law schools more diverse, and for a little over a decade, the anti-racism movement, always present in the country’s history, has occupied a central position in the media, academy, soap operas, and books. Djamila Ribeiro’s Pequeno manual antirracista (Little anti-racist manual), for example, has spent six years on the nation’s bestseller list.

President Lula’s administration has made the fight against racial discrimination a priority, particularly in especially sensitive cases, like that of the insults and threats hurled at Real Madrid player Vinícius Júnior that nearly led to a diplomatic conflict with Spain. “It really depends on the racial awareness of the police chief, the prosecutor, and the judge, but things are making good progress,” sums up Moreira, who takes his leave before going to give a talk to a group of judges interested in the topic.

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