A decade of struggle, a lifetime dedicated to memory: 10 years since the Osasco and Barueri Massacre

Wherever responsibilities are sought, it is usually the instinct that wishes to judge and punish that is being sought. (...)

Looking more closely, it is war that produces these effects—war for liberal institutions, which, as war, causes illiberal instincts to endure. (...)

Our institutions are worthless: on this there is unanimity.

The problem does not lie with them, but with us. (...)

All the means by which humanity has, until now, sought to make itself moral have been, at their core, immoral.

Friedrich Nietzsche

And so ten years have passed...

In 2015, at the beginning of a still ongoing process of major institutional changes in Brazil, the metropolitan region of São Paulo was the stage of what remains the largest massacre in the state’s history. Numbers vary among newspapers, internet portals, police inquiries, and criminal proceedings, but what we know is that between August 8 and 13, 2015, at least 29 people were shot, more or less randomly, in the cities of Carapicuíba, Osasco, and Barueri. News reports recorded that a hooded group, formed by more than a dozen police officers, spread terror in a retaliatory response to the deaths of police officers – first a military policeman at a gas station and, days later, a municipal guard of Barueri in a local market – who were working off-duty as security guards in neighborhood businesses.

Faced with such facts, venturing into the realm of judgment and criminal investigation is to treat as reasonable and normal the extreme violence regularly perpetrated by security professionals and armed bureaucrats, whether legal or illegal. At the center of this macabre event are the executions of August 13, when hooded men entered Juvenal’s bar – located at the end of Diretriz Avenue, right on the administrative border between Barueri and Osasco – and fired at those inside, killing eight and injuring two. One of the survivors, who was left with severe lasting effects, passed away last year. The case is relatively well-known, and details can be accessed through the press by those interested¹. What matters here, however, is another aspect this 10-year mark reveals.

Precisely in this decade marking the case, the country has been embroiled in institutional arrangements and breakdowns, engaged in fierce disputes at the highest levels with coups and counter-coups, battles of narratives, heroes and villains, beloved and hated politicians, judges as saviors or persecutors, police and military elevated to celebrity status, a profusion of quests for institutional, legal, personal, physical, and public security. All of this fits within the broader international discourse on a global crisis of modern Western democracies, disputes over the meaning and content of human rights, and the search for institutional, economic, political, and social stability.

However, when descending into the daily reality of cases like this, we conclude that the truth of democracy in Brazil can be revealed, in full, in the case of the 2015 Osasco and Barueri Massacre. A democracy that, at LASInTec, we conventionally call securitarian, as it is founded on the pursuit of security in its many contemporary dimensions, including the production of a “feeling” of security, whatever that strange expression may mean. By saying this, we are not posing a matter of scale, for beneath and beyond the agreements of the higher spheres, the immediate forms of democracy today can be observed in this scandalous yet routine case of brutal executions. As has been sung through the alleys and streets of São Paulo, the truth is in the newspapers and on the streets.

Since 2019, LASInTec has worked alongside the 13 de Agosto Association and other university groups and social movements dedicated to the case. As is also known, the Massacre has a judicial conviction that, at the time, sentenced four police officers, of whom two were acquitted. The defense, in addition to acting along a line of delegitimizing the victims and witnesses, put forth absurd theses that were accepted by the court. A clear example was the uncritical acceptance of the argument that the deletion of text messages exchanged between the acquitted defendants – at the beginning and end of the massacre, seemingly indicating coordinated actions – was done by one defendant merely to “free up memory space.”² The procedural outcome was the acquittal of a military police officer – today reinstated into the São Paulo Military Police by act of the current governor – and of a municipal guard from Barueri.

In these six years, we have participated in countless meetings at the home of Zilda Maria de Paula, leading figure of the 13 de Agosto Association; in a series of public acts at Munhoz Jr./Mutinga and at the Osasco pedestrian concourse in front of the CPTM Osasco station; in a tense demonstration, amidst COVID-19 restrictions, in front of the Osasco Criminal Court, in Jardim das Flores, which ultimately acquitted the two police officers accused of involvement in the massacre; and in many lunches, coffees, discussion circles, debate panels, and moments of sharing amidst grief and the obstinate memory of mothers. 

Last year, we witnessed the sad and painful ritual of exhumation of the executed bodies in Barueri’s municipal cemetery, and we now continue with the construction of this 10-year manifestation which, due to the round date and the decade’s events, stands as a milestone offering a brutal diagnosis of the present we live in. Part of the records of these activities – because not everything should be public and communicated, it must be said – can be found in texts, photos, accounts, testimonies, and videos accessible on LASInTec’s website and other outlets that reported on the case, as well as in the record-keeping, political analysis, and activism we collectively pursue from it.

But why think of these ten years as marking an event that reveals the truth of our current democracy? We can point to curious connections, which may seem like coincidences only to minds guided by the poverty of cause-and-effect logic, but which, under close analysis, reveal themselves between the case and the country’s recent history. To begin with the bullets: the ammunition used by police in the 2015 executions came from the same batch of 9mm rounds diverted from the Federal Police in Brasília, which later reappeared in 2018 as the bullets that executed city councilor Marielle Franco and her driver Anderson Gomes in downtown Rio de Janeiro.

Brazil’s current Supreme Court minister, Alexandre de Moraes, was São Paulo’s Secretary of Public Security at the time; the state governor in 2015 was Geraldo Alckmin (PSDB), today Brazil’s vice president for the PSB and a leading figure of Brazilian capitalist interests abroad; the current Secretary of Public Security, Military Police Captain Guilherme Derrite (PL), was at the time assigned to the 3rd Company of the 14th Battalion of the São Paulo Military Police, located in the Quitaúna neighborhood of Osasco. He built a career as a YouTube policeman, became a Federal Deputy with a killer’s discourse, and at the end of 2023 inaugurated the new headquarters of the battalion, awarding a medal to the city’s mayor³. The higher spheres move in circles while blood runs through the streets. 

In 2017, the Institute for Applied Economic Research (IPEA), together with the Brazilian Forum for Public Safety (FBSP), began producing the Atlas of Violence, which compiles data on lethal violence in Brazil from the Ministry of Health’s Mortality Information System (SIM). At its creation, the figure that drew attention was a 10% increase in the country’s homicide rate between 2005 and 2015, reaching nearly 60,000 deaths per year⁴. The common comparison is to war numbers, but in a decade marked by what became known as the “War on Terror” (after the 9/11 attacks in the U.S.), the comparison that drew press attention was that “all terrorist attacks worldwide in the first five months of 2017 did not surpass the number of homicides recorded in Brazil in three weeks of 2015.”⁵ The press reported that, according to Esri Story Maps and PeaceTech Lab, 3,314 people died worldwide in 498 attacks. Meanwhile, SIM records showed “around 3,400 people were murdered in Brazil every three weeks in 2015.”⁶

Also in 2017, on the very first day, 56 people were brutally executed in the Anísio Jobim Penitentiary Complex in Manaus; a military police strike in Espírito Santo, in the days leading up to Carnival, left more than 200 dead in about a week – an episode still scarcely remembered in Brazil – highlighting, among other things, the strategy of spreading panic through instant messaging apps, as well as the explicitly political-electoral motivations of the strike, with direct participation from police relatives and police-parliamentarians.

Today, through the same Atlas of Violence, the reduction of annual homicide rates is celebrated: from nearly 60,000 killed in 2018 to 45,503 in 2019. The 2025 Atlas records 35,365 executions in 2024, compared to 37,754 in 2023. The highlight of the increase this year lies precisely in killings committed by police officers⁷. Despite what is presented as a consistent drop in homicide rates and absolute numbers in Brazil, nearly 40,000 people executed annually remains a frightening figure of state terrorism practiced through public security policies. It is not the purpose here to discuss the alleged causes of this drop, which range from local territorial dominance of criminal factions and militias, to citizen security programs following the concept of “Peace Territories” created in 2007 by PRONASCI (Brazil’s National Program for Public Security with Citizenship), and which unfolded into programs such as Rio’s now-defunct UPPs (Pacifying Police Units), Espírito Santo’s “Estado Presente,” Pernambuco’s “Juntos pela Segurança,” or Bahia’s “Bahia pela Paz.” Moreover, the same Atlas records an increase in the number of people who disappeared in the country. While disappearance may correspond to multiple causes, it can also be a way in which state and non-state agents produce terror and extermination, whose very nature of concealing bodies obscures execution statistics. Perhaps mere coincidence, but the Brazilian states with the greatest increase in disappearances – Bahia, Sergipe, and Amapá – recorded drops in intentional violent deaths.

In São Paulo, the state with the lowest homicide rates per 100,000 inhabitants, the securitarian panacea is called Muralha Paulista (state program) and Smart Sampa (municipal program). Beyond the rhetoric of security as a fundamental right, combating organized crime and territorial dominance of peripheries and so-called vulnerable zones, the bet is on monitoring technologies, now bolstered by facial recognition software, national criminal activity databases, and processing by Generative AI⁸. The utopia of total control rests on the technical capacity to produce predictive policing capable not only of anticipating future crime but of producing a crime-free future – which, of course, will never arrive. We will return to this reflection later in this newsletter and in other LASInTec spaces; here and now, what matters is to conclude how this “progression of peace” relates to the 10 years of the Osasco and Barueri Massacre.

Two convergences between the 10 years of the Osasco and Barueri Massacre stand out: the synchronicity with the fierce disputes among Brazil’s higher spheres just over a decade ago, and the current statistical trend of falling homicide rates, suggesting a peace curve through institutional public security programs. On one hand, the first convergence shows how disputes at the top are played out upon a social ground of conflicts and make use of it to propel public figures into institutional stardom.

On the other hand, living and sharing this struggle with the mothers of the August 13 Association shows us that:

1. even if homicide rates are declining, nearly 40,000 corpses per year continue to be piled up like wartime numbers, and just one death on the side of security forces is enough to trigger the machinery of government effects, fear, surveillance, and monitoring – inside and outside legality – if not efforts to subsume reality a posteriori into legality, blurring those lines further; and

2. each death, like the 29 of the Osasco and Barueri massacre, when recorded as statistical data, routinizes this slaughter and turns it into material to be hammered by security programs and policies that remake peace plans as pacification – meaning: the crushing of those beneath the plan – rather than battlefields of memory for those who suffer the state’s double violation, in life and in grief.

Finally, beyond plans, programs, and security policies, what insists and resists against the slaughter is memory and struggle. That is what matters most in these ten years, what this movement personifies in a fight carried out through memory and presence, exposing the materiality coldly reflected in the data.

¹ See: Paulo Batistella. “O que foi a Chacina de Osasco e Barueri” In Ponte Jornalismo. São Paulo: Ponte, 12/08/2025, available at: https://ponte.org/o-que-foi-a-chacina-de-osasco-e-barueri/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=chacina_de_osasco_10_anos_-_email_1&utm_source=RD+Station

² BRASIL. Tribunal de Justiça do Estado de São Paulo. Voto nº 11594. Appeal nº 0022580-51.2015.8.26.0405. Reporter: Otávio Rocha. p. 48. Available at: https://www.conjur.com.br/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/voto-victor-cristilder.pdf. 

³ See: “Prefeitura e PM inauguram nova sede da 3ª companhia do 14º BPMM”. Prefeitura de Osasco, 2023. 

⁴ See: “Atlas da Violência”. Ipea e FBSP, 2017.

⁵ See: “Violência no Brasil em 2015 matou mais que ataques terroristas no mundo em 2017”. Agência , 2017.

⁶ Ibid.

⁷ See: “Atlas da Violência”. Ipea e FBSP, 2024.  

⁸ See: LASInTec - 40 Boletim (Anti)Segurança