Brazil protests against own police racial violence

About 200 demonstrators took to the streets of Sao Goncalo, a city in the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, on Friday to protest against racism and the police killings of black people. The protesters, most of them young black students, marched to the City Hall carrying banners reading "Black Lives Matters," and shouting slogans against Brazil's President Jair Bolsonaro and the police.

The demonstrators were not just joining the protests against the death of George Floyd in the United States, but against the killing of hundreds of black people mainly in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. One of the late cases that shocked Brazil was the killing of Joao Pedro Pinto, a 14-year-old boy who was inside his house with his cousins in Sao Goncalo, when police chasing an alleged group of drug traffickers fired shots into the house, killing him.

The body of the Joao Pedro was missing for almost one day, until his parents found him in a forensic institute. Federal prosecutors opened an investigation to clarify the involvement of the police in the operation that killed the boy. At the same time that the homicide rate has fallen since 2019, the killings by police in Rio de Janeiro have increased to an unseen level, according to official figures released by the Public Security Institute.