In 2025, Brazil was the scene of the largest police operation against drug trafficking in peripheral neighborhoods of the country. Operation Containment deployed 2,500 Rio de Janeiro State Police officers in the Alemão and Penha complexes, leaving more than 120 people dead, most of them of African descent. The intervention turned these territories into scenes of war, with reports of homicides, raids without a court order or arbitrary detentions.
It is not an isolated event. The militarization of impoverished areas inhabited mostly by people of African descent responds to a global pattern linked to the so-called war on drugs. In 2010, in Kingston (Jamaica), an anti-drug security operation in popular sectors left at least 73 people dead after several days of militarized assault.
The same pattern is observed in the United States, where punitive drug laws have contributed to the overrepresentation of young people of African descent in prisons. This is not due to higher levels of consumption or trafficking, but rather to the selective application of anti-drug policies in certain neighborhoods where the African-American population is concentrated.
In reality, behind these practices are political decisions about who to monitor, detain and imprison. The war on drugs operates as a control mechanism used by the Police and the prison system to reproduce racial hierarchies.
Although this phenomenon affects men of African descent to a greater extent, Afro-descendant women are one of the groups that is growing the most in prison systems. The increase responds to the disproportionate impact of harsh drug laws, even though many are involved in the lowest levels of activities criminalized by these policies.
The war on drugs also manifests itself in the tightening of laws. In 2024, the Nigerian Senate proposed increasing penalties for trafficking and incorporating the death penalty as the maximum sentence, in line with a broader trend: more than 30 countries maintain the death penalty for drug-related crimes, even though this contradicts their international human rights obligations.
Despite this punitive escalation, the UN concludes that the punitive approach has not reduced traffic or consumption, despite the enormous investment of resources. On the contrary, it has had a devastating impact on the rights of African and Afro-descendant people, by consolidating mass incarceration and prison overcrowding, favoring the spread of diseases and promoting death sentences and the loss of lives during anti-drug operations.
Therefore, it is urgent to abandon punishment as the central axis of anti-drug policies. We must move towards approaches that prioritize prevention, treatment and harm reduction to protect the life, dignity and health of affected people and communities. This requires reviewing current criminal sanctions and considering models that allow controlled access to certain substances under public health criteria. When the punitive approach is applied disproportionately to racialized people and territories, security is not strengthened, but rather a system that reproduces inequalities under the rhetoric of narcotics control is perpetuated.
