“We are deeply shocked by the high number of murders” during police actions, especially in Sao Paulo, “supposedly aimed at combating drug trafficking and organized crime”, the spokeswoman of the entity, Marta Hurtado, quoted by the column of journalist Jamil Chade, of the portal UOL, said.

She recalled that the number of deaths of Afro-descendants caused by police officers has increased in the last years in Brazil.

For Hurtado, the homicides occurred “after cases of police violence and denunciations of extrajudicial executions in past years, in circumstances that have never been fully clarified and whose perpetrators have not been held accountable”.

The new crime figures “make this one of the bloodiest weeks in many years,” the spokeswoman stressed. Last Wednesday, the Public Security Secretariat of Sao Paulo confirmed that the number of dead in the Military Police (PM) Operation Shield in the city of Guaruja, triggered after the murder of an agent in the municipality, increased to 16.

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