It was on Tuesday that authorities cracked down on the Comando Vermelho (“Red Command”) drug cartel. In what looked like a military offensive, 2,500 police and soldiers, equipped with armored vehicles and helicopters, attacked Penha and Alemão, poor favelas in Rio de Janeiro.
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 witnesses describe as pure executions.
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.
“Stop murdering us”
She says she lost a son in a previous police raid.
Are we living under a death sentence? Stop murdering us, says Rute Sales at the same demonstration.
The outrage was fueled by the fact that the authorities initially put the death toll at around 60. Later, relatives found about the same number of bodies in Serra da Misericórdia. It is a green area that is usually used as a hideout for drug dealers. But this time the police were apparently waiting there too.
The bodies that were found were badly mutilated.
"We found executed people," local anti-violence activist Raull Santiago told 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.
Governor Cláudio Castro is described as the driving force behind the police raid. He is allied with the far-right former president Jair Bolsonaro, and shares his brutal line against crime.
“Replaced soon”
Other political sides in Brazil advocate targeting the finances of crime syndicates. This strategy has also been tried in Brazil's and South America's largest city, São Paulo, and is described by many as more effective.
When the police go after pedestrians on the streets, the gangs are actually strengthened, according to Roberto Uchôa at the FBSP think tank.
"Killing more than 100 people in this way does not stop the Comando Vermelho's advance. The dead are soon replaced," he told the AP.
Federal authorities in Brazil are also reacting. Alexandre de Moraes, a Supreme Court judge known from the trial in which Bolsonaro was convicted of attempted coup, has demanded that Governor Castro explain himself. And a hearing of Castro and the police chiefs responsible for the operation is planned for next week.
