Drug Trafficking and Homicides

A Correlational Study Based on the "Pact for Life" in Pernambuco

Abstract

https://doi.org/10.1590/2179-8966/2025/79598

The Pact for Life, a public security program inaugurated in 2007 in the state of Pernambuco, aims to primarily reduce the rate of violent and intentional crimes The state legislation that resulted from the program established financial bonuses for public security agents who collaborated to reduce this rate, through productivity in indicators such as drug seizures, which demonstrates that a causal relationship was drawn between this market and the expansion of lethal violence. In fact, literature has observed some association between illicit drug markets and high levels of violence. Therefore, the present study aims to test the correlation between drug trafficking incidents and the rate of intentional homicides in Pernambuco, using monthly data from the years 2011 to 2021. The Pearson correlation test was conducted, with the rate of intentional homicides as the dependent variable (y) and drug seizure data as the explanatory variable (x). The result yielded a moderate correlation, which demonstrates, within the scope of this study, that it is not possible to infer a causal relationship between drug trafficking repression and the reduction of the homicide rate, suggesting that other variables affect the phenomenon of homicide.