25 KILLED IN POLICE RAID ON TRAFFICKERS IN RIO
Rights groups outraged over heavily armed officers turning favela into war zone, in operation that was one of the deadliest in the city’s bloody history
A massive police raid on drug traffickers in a Brazilian favela has left 25 people dead, turning the Rio de Janeiro slum into a battlefield and drawing condemnation from rights groups.
Media reports said a policeman was among those killed in the raid early on Thursday in Jacarezinho, where residents awoke to explosions, heavy gunfire and helicopters overhead.
Activists and media reports, citing the police, put the total death toll at 25 – which, if confirmed, would be one of the deadliest police operations in the history of Rio de Janeiro state. A 2005 raid in Rio’s violent northern outskirts killed 29 people.
“Who are the dead? Young black men. That’s why the police talk about ‘24 suspects’. Being a young, black favela resident automatically makes you a suspect to the police. They just keep piling up bodies and saying: ‘They’re all criminals’,” said Silvia Ramos, head of the Security Observatory at Candido Mendes University.
“Is this the public security policy we want? Shoot-outs, killings and police massacres?”
Amnesty International lambasted the loss of life.
“The number of people killed in this police operation is reprehensible, as is the fact that, once again, this massacre took place in a favela,” said Jurema Werneck,
executive director of Amnesty International Brazil.
Large groups of heavily armed police could be seen streaming into the favela as frightened residents tentatively went about their business once the gunfire died down.
Residents reported seeing corpses lying on the pavement in pools of blood, and numerous bodies being taken out in an armoured police vehicle, a local community leader said, asking for safety reasons that his name not be published.
At least two people were wounded when the subway train
carriage they were travelling in was apparently caught in the crossfire, news site G1 reported.
Television network GloboNews showed aerial images of armed suspects fleeing from one residence to another in the densely packed neighbourhood during the raid, passing what looked like high-powered rifles from hand to hand.
Rights groups and residents later inspected the houses targeted, some with blood stains and damage from the shoot-out.
Police said the operation targeted a gang suspected of recruiting children and teenagers for drug trafficking, robberies, assaults and murders.
They said the sting grew out of a surveillance operation that obtained a warrant to wiretap suspects’ communications.
That led them to identify 21 gang members “responsible for ensuring the gang’s territorial dominance”, the police added.
The group “had set up a warstyle structure with hundreds of ‘soldiers’ equipped with rifles, pistols, grenades, bulletproof vests, camouflage fatigues and other military accessories”, they said.
The neighbourhood is considered a base for the Comando Vermelho, or Red Command, the city’s biggest drug gang.
However, rights activists asked why recruiting minors – a common practice among Brazilian gangs – would lead to such a deadly raid.
There were also questions about the timing: the operation came despite a Supreme Court ruling barring police from carrying out such raids in Brazil’s impoverished favelas during the coronavirus pandemic except in “absolutely exceptional circumstances”.
Police did not immediately respond to a request for further information on what led to the raid.
Rio, a city of 6.7 million people, is notorious for its violence.
Rio de Janeiro state was placed under military intervention in 2018 in a bid to rein in the carnage, which includes a troubled history of deadly police shootings.
Last year, at least 1,245 people were killed by police in the state, according to ISP, Rio’s public security institute.