Crime, violence and homicide are strongly related to political factors, as we can see by the high incidence of police and state violence in dictatorships and totalitarisms or by the role of policy and democratic civil society in reduce them. Using regimes as variables is a fundamental step to understand the evolution of rates of violent deaths or by outside causes in countries that passed through political regime changes as in Eastern Europe and the former soviet bloc. In Latin America, there was no similar picture of extreme social dissolution but, nevertheless, had experienced a significative difference in homicide rates before and after political transitions. Data on Brazil show the tendence of growth of such rates in the military regime and of stability in the post-democratic transition period, what collides with the vision of thinking that occurs the opposite phenomenom, a kind of "wave of violence" following the end of the military dictatorship.
homicide; violence; political change; democracy; Brazil
