Brazil & Southern Cone - February 2026

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva appointed a former public prosecutor, Wellington César Lima e Silva, as Brazil’s new minister for justice and public security following the resignation of Ricardo Lewandowski (2024-2026) on 8 January. Given that opinion polls often rank crime as among the top public concerns, the minister is expected to face heavy scrutiny in the months ahead of the 2026 elections, in which Lula is running for re-election.

Lima e Silva is a veteran legal professional who joined the Bahia state prosecutor’s office in 1991. He rose through the ranks to become the state’s chief prosecutor (2010–2014), having been nominated to the post by former governor Jaques Wagner (2007-2015), who is currently the leader in the senate of the governing coalition led by Lula’s left-wing Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT).

He almost embarked on a career in politics during the presidency of Dilma Rousseff (2011-2016), under whom Wagner served as chief of staff from 2015-2016. Rousseff appointed Lima e Silva to be her justice minister and he was officially inaugurated in March 2016, but less than two weeks later the supreme court (STF) blocked the appointment on the grounds that he had not resigned from his post as a public prosecutor.

In more recent years, Lima e Silva has cultivated strong ties with the Lula administration, which took office in January 2023. He worked as a legal adviser to the government from 2023-2024, and in mid-2024, he was appointed as the top lawyer for the state-controlled oil giant Petrobras, a position he held until his recent appointment to the ministry of justice.

On 15 January Lima e Silva was formally sworn in as the minister for justice and public security, assuming the role for which he was appointed but never got to serve nearly a decade earlier. On that day, he gave a press conference which indicated that his tenure as justice minister would mark continuity from his predecessor Lewandowski, who resigned from the post due to personal reasons.

Predecessors

Before being appointed justice minister in 2024, Lewandowski had served as an STF justice from 2006-2023. This means that Lewandowski was already a relatively well-known public figure. However, Lewandowski is not a career politician and is not affiliated with any party, unlike his predecessor Flávio Dino, who served as justice minister from 2023-2024 before assuming a seat on the STF in 2024. During his political career, Dino became a well-known figure on the Brazilian left. Having moved between various left-wing parties, including the Partido Comunista do Brasil (PCdoB) and the Partido Socialista Brasileiro (PSB), Dino served as a federal deputy from 2007-2011, led the federal government’s tourism agency (Embratur) from 2011-2014 under the Rousseff administration, and served as the governor of the north-eastern state of Maranhão from 2015-2022. While he was justice minister, Dino also gained a reputation for being a combative figure who frequently clashed with right-wing opposition figures, especially in 2023 during the political fallout of the Brasília riots, when thousands of far-right rioters stormed the seats of government on 8 January 2023.

Dino was then replaced by the more discreet and non-confrontational figure of Lewandowski, and it is expected that Lima e Silva will be more similar to Lewandowski than Dino in this vein. However, he is somewhat of an unknown. When Lula confirmed Lima e Silva’s appointment, reports in the national press highlighted that he was a relatively unknown figure in Brasília. Daily newspaper Folha de São Paulo cited several members of the national congress as saying that they did not know what to expect of Lima e Silva.

It is unclear whether the appointment of a relatively unknown figure will boost or hinder Lula’s re-election bid. On the one hand, having a minister who does not seek the limelight and who has little political baggage would give opposition candidates less ammunition for political mudslinging against Lima e Silva and the federal government. On the other hand, public security is a hot-button issue, and the Lula administration will likely be keen to communicate to voters how it has been tackling crime and plans to reduce it. It is uncertain whether a minister who is not a seasoned politician, who might feel more comfortable operating behind the scenes rather than delivering policy announcements, will be a natural campaigner who can help boost Lula’s popularity in the run-up to the elections.

Despite not being a career politician, Lima e Silva has a political reputation by proxy. He is associated with the so-called ‘Bahia faction’ of the ruling PT, key figures of which include Wagner and Lula’s outgoing chief of staff Rui Costa, who is expected to step down from his post in March this year to run for a senate seat in the October general elections. Costa succeeded Wagner as the governor of the north-eastern state, serving two terms from 2015-2022, and Costa’s anointed successor Jerônimo Rodrigues (PT) won the Bahia gubernatorial race in 2022 and is planning to run for re-election in October this year. Lima e Silva, as a former Bahia state prosecutor, is considered an ally of Wagner and Costa, which suggests that his reputation is to a great extent tied to the political establishment of Bahia, a state which has in recent decades been a stronghold for the PT. 

Lima e Silva’s links to Bahian political grandees could prove to be a double-edged sword during the election campaign this year. The northeast is known to be a more left-leaning part of the country, and Lula will likely seek to shore up the support of his traditional voter bases in Bahia and the northeast, so it could be a strategic move for Lula to have more Bahian representation in the federal government. However, right-wing figures could easily accuse Lula of packing his government with a clique of left-wing loyalists from the northeast rather than deepening relations with centrist and centre-right allies.

The Bahian connection could also allow the opposition to attack Lima e Silva on the grounds that Bahia has high levels of violence, with Bahian municipalities frequently appearing on the annual rankings of deadliest towns and cities published by the think tank Fórum Brasileiro de Segurança Pública (FBSP). In 2024, five of Brazil’s top ten deadliest municipalities were in Bahia. The north-eastern state’s murder rate is also much higher than the national average. FBSP’s data shows that Brazil’s rate of intentional violent killings stood at 20.8 killings per 100,000 people in 2024, while the figure for the state of Bahia was nearly double, with 40.6 killings per 100,000.

Although Lime e Silva never served as an official in Bahia’s state government and is therefore not directly responsible for addressing gang violence and high murder rates, it is unlikely that opposition figures will give him an easy ride. Instead, they may well seek every possible opportunity to build their argument that the Lula government is failing to address the public’s concerns over crime.

During his first press conference as minister on 15 January, Lima e Silva highlighted the need to combat criminal organisations by improving police intelligence and through other institutional reforms. This suggests that Lima e Silva will try to pick up from where Lewandowski left off and will aim to push through the security reforms that were not passed under his predecessor, such as the ‘PEC da Segurança’, a constitutional amendment proposal (PEC) that seeks to boost integration and coordination between different federal and state law enforcement institutions. This PEC is one of the government’s top legislative priorities this year, but it remains stalled in congress.

Anti-gang bill

Right-wing figures in Brazil have been making more efforts to promote their credentials as tough-on-crime hardliners. One conservative lawmaker who is expected to play a prominent role in security debates is federal deputy Guilherme Derrite (Progressistas, PP), a former military police officer who served as São Paulo’s state security secretary from 2023-2025. Last year he was the rapporteur appointed to oversee the passage of the ‘anti-gang’ bill, which proposed measures such as longer prison sentences for gang members. The bill passed the lower house in November and passed the senate in December. It will be reviewed in the lower house again this year, as senators made changes to the text approved by deputies.

Financial crimes

As part of his rhetoric on improving police intelligence during the press conference on 15 January, Lima e Silva stressed the need to crack down on financial crimes. He highlighted the ongoing police probes that have made headlines in recent months, such as the high-profile fraud investigation involving the collapsed bank Banco Master and the money laundering busts in São Paulo investigating the suspected involvement of powerful criminal organisations such as the Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC) in various economic sectors, including the financial and fuel sectors.