What is the most violent city in Brazil?

It can be said that two cities compete for this unfortunate title: the small Juruena, in Mato Grosso, and Serra, one of the largest municipalities in Espírito Santo. In pure and simple statistics, Juruena would be the most violent: she has a rate of 139.7 people murdered per year for every 100,000 inhabitants. The problem with this statistic is that the base number of 100,000 inhabitants (used in worldwide surveys) can generate distortions in municipalities like Juruena, which has only 6,000 residents. “That death rate per 100,000 population doesn’t work very well in small towns. A municipality with 10,000 people may have had a massacre of 10 individuals in one year and not have any murders in the next”, says economist Daniel Cerqueira, from the Institute of Applied Economic Research (IPEA), the body that produced the study with these data. about violence in the country. That is why experts prefer to consider cities with more than 300,000 inhabitants in this ranking. And, within this group of medium to large-sized municipalities, Serra, in the metropolitan region of Vitória (ES), is the champion of violence, with 97.62 murders per year for every 100,000 inhabitants. The largest cities in the country, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, have many deaths in absolute numbers, but proportionally they are not that violent – ​​the two are not even among the 20 most dangerous cities in the country among those with more than 300 thousand inhabitants.