It was on Tuesday that authorities cracked down on the Comando Vermelho (“Red Command”), one of Latin America’s most powerful drug cartels. 2,500 police and soldiers attacked Penha and Complexo do Alemão, poor favelas in Rio de Janeiro, to stop the drug trade.
The result was the seizure of approximately 90 firearms and a ton of drugs. But “only” just over 110 suspects were arrested. At least as many, around 120, were killed, in what residents and witnesses describe as pure executions.
“Stop murdering us”
Murderers! shouted protesters who gathered the next day at the Guanabara Palace, where Rio de Janeiro's government sits.
"It was a massacre," Barbara Barbosa, a resident of Penha, told the AP news agency.
She says she lost a son in a previous police raid in the favela.
Are we living under a death sentence? Stop murdering us, says Rute Sales at the same demonstration.
To be questioned
Activists against the violence in the area are questioning the police strategy.
"We found executed people," Raull Santiago told the AP.
They were shot in the back, in the head, stabbed, tied up. This brutality, this hatred that just spreads – you can't call it anything other than a massacre.
Federal authorities in Brazil are also reacting. Alexandre de Moraes, a Supreme Court judge known from the trial of former President Jair Bolsonaro, has demanded that Rio's governor Claudio Castro explain himself. And a meeting where Castro and the responsible police chiefs will be questioned about the operation is planned for next week.
