Things are not well in Brazil. The country’s social and economic tensions are rising and seem increasingly prone to erupt into violence. For the past six days, for instance, there has been a frenzy of looting, mugging, rioting, and murder in and around Vitória, which anchors a metropolitan area of about two million and is the capital of the state of Espírito Santo, north of Rio de Janeiro. The reason for the mayhem is the absence of police officers, after Espírito Santo’s force went on strike last Saturday to demand that its pay be doubled. The police union has said that its members have not received raises in four years. Family members of the officers have joined the strike by creating human barricades around the state’s police stations.

The effects were fairly immediate: by Tuesday, there had been fifty-two murders, and by Thursday the body count had reportedly climbed to more than a hundred. (In January, just four murders were recorded in the Vitória area.) The federal government has sent in twelve hundred Army troops as well as a special police task force, but they have not yet halted the chaos—and the police have not yet gone back to work. The country is on edge, and there are fears that a similar police strike could occur in Rio, where hundreds of officers protested government budgets in the run-up to the Olympics last year.

Even with police on the job, and at the best of times, the rule of law is a relative concept in Brazil. The country has dramatic economic imbalances and suffers from extremely high rates of violent crime. Brazil’s police officers are frequently corrupt and violent themselves. In many parts of the country, the police operate unofficial paramilitary gangs that carry out executions and make money from organized crime. The country’s homicide rate, of about twenty-five per hundred thousand, is among the highest in the world. (By contrast, the United States’ rate is about four per hundred thousand.)

In the past two years, Brazil’s endemic problems have been exacerbated by the country’s deepest recession since the nineteen-thirties, caused by a precipitous drop in global commodity prices. The situation came to a head after a judicial inquiry revealed that government officials had engaged in a massive corruption scheme involving the state-owned oil company, Petrobras, as well as private corporations, notably the construction giant Odebrecht. The ongoing inquiry, dubbed Lava Jato, or Car Wash, has led to the arrest of numerous officials, including Eduardo da Cunha, the president of Brazil’s Chamber of Deputies. Meanwhile, impeachment proceedings in Brazil’s parliament led, last summer, to the removal of President Dilma Rousseff, the replacement of her left-of-center Workers’ Party government with political right-wingers, and the installment of a caretaker President, Michel Temer, who has also been accused of corruption.

Upon taking office, Temer and his allies moved quickly to undo the legacy of thirteen years of Workers’ Party rule, by Rousseff and her predecessor, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who oversaw the country’s halcyon years as a top oil-and-commodities exporter at the height of China’s spending boom. Brazil became a BRIC nation and a global player while, at home, a popular program, Bolsa Família, lifted some forty million Brazilians out of extreme poverty. Most of those gains are now at risk, with Temer’s government instituting austerity measures and a twenty-year freeze on all social spending.

With its social cradle crumbling, Brazil has all of the ingredients for more explosions to come. Last month, rival gangs temporarily took over several prisons and fought one another, resulting in grisly massacres in which at least a hundred people were killed. Some were executed in ISIS-style decapitations, while others had their hearts cut out. There were at least two mass breakouts in which more than ninety inmates escaped; on January 25th, the BBC reported that about forty were still on the lam. In a modern twist on such events that is becoming depressingly familiar, prisoners took photos and videos of themselves as they carried out their atrocities. Escaped prisoners also posted videos of themselves as fugitives on the run.

The devil-may-care posturing by Brazilian criminals suggests a disturbing degree of impunity that, in the end, is the common thread linking all of Brazil’s current crises. As for the situation in Espírito Santo, Brazil’s Army chief, General Eduardo Dias da Costa Villas Bôas, said on Thursday that he would reinforce the troops there with paratroopers, armored vehicles, and military aircraft. “The mission will be accomplished,” he tweeted. Despite this triumphalist assurance, there is almost certainly more unravelling to come.