A report entitled "Summary Executions in Brazil 1997-2003"...

A report entitled "Summary Executions in Brazil 1997-2003" compiled by the Center for Global Justice and the Center for Afro-Brazilian Studies (NEN) names Brazil as one of the world's most brutal countries with a system of "extermination and oppression" perpetrated daily by state agents.
The report documented 349 executions and found that amid the reigning state of impunity, state leaders and justice officials were responsible "by omission", according to Global Justice legal director Sandra Carvalho.
State agents were said to have either direct or indirect connections to the killings. While in 2000, Brazil's states reported 1,519 people died in police custody, Global Justice found that press reports in 1999 alone pointed to 13,917 murders committed by police or extermination groups - the latter usually linked to police.
The report found that some states gave incentives for killing, such as wage bonuses and promotions, or guaranteed police impunity.
The victims were almost always young poor males living in marginalized settings. Among cases investigated, the now disbanded Gradi - a police group dependent upon Sao Paulo's Security Secretariat - was accused of putting prisoners' lives in danger by having them infiltrate high risk operations. Some 22 of Gradi's police were investigated 162 times in homicide cases, one of them in 32 homicides between 1998 and 2001.
"The failure of the state to investigate and prosecute even the most horrendous crimes is particularly worrisome in the case of summary executions committed by or with the tacit approval of state agents," the report said.
"More worrisome still is impunity in the face of evidence demonstrating the practice of summary executions to be a policy of state public security.
"Death squads, which generally involve police and other state agents, are often a strategy designed by merchants, traders, businessmen, and others to eliminate those deemed socially or politically undesirable," the report said.