A large police operation in opposition to drug traffickers in a Brazilian favela Thursday left 25 folks lifeless, turning the impoverished Rio de Janeiro neighborhood right into a battlefield and drawing condemnation from rights teams.
A policeman was amongst these killed in the early morning raid on Jacarezinho, on Rio’s north aspect, the place residents awoke to explosions, heavy gunfire and helicopters overhead.
Police confirmed the toll — and investigators mentioned it was the deadliest police operation in the historical past of Rio de Janeiro state.
Police recognized the opposite 24 lifeless as “suspects” and said all protocols had been followed before officers opened fire, but rights groups and academics cried foul.
“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,'” mentioned Silvia Ramos, head of the Security Observatory at Candido Mendes University.
“Is this the general public safety coverage we would like? Shootouts, killings and police massacres?” she told AFP.
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, AFP journalists said.
Residents reported seeing corpses lying on the pavement in pools of blood, and numerous bodies being taken out in an armored police vehicle, a local community leader told AFP, asking that his name not be published for safety reasons.
At least two people were wounded when the subway car they were riding in was apparently caught in the crossfire during the operation, news site G1 reported.
TV network GloboNews showed aerial images of armed suspects fleeing from one residence to another in the densely packed neighborhood during the raid, passing what looked like high-powered rifles from hand to hand.
“Unfortunately, there were many clashes in the area. There is nothing to celebrate with this toll,” one police official informed a press convention, including that the officer killed was shot in the pinnacle.
Rights teams and residents later inspected the homes focused — some had blood stains and injury from the shootout.
Child foot troopers
Police mentioned the operation focused a gang suspected of recruiting kids and youngsters for drug trafficking, robberies, assaults and murders.
They mentioned the sting grew out of a surveillance operation that obtained a warrant to wire-tap suspects’ communications.
That led them to determine 21 gang members “liable for making certain the gang’s territorial dominance,” they said.
The group “had set up a war-style structure with hundreds of ‘soldiers’ equipped with rifles, pistols, grenades, bulletproof vests, camouflage fatigues and other military accessories,” they added.
The neighborhood is taken into account a base for the Comando Vermelho, or Red Command, the long-lasting seashore metropolis’s largest drug gang.
However, rights activists questioned why recruiting minors — a standard follow amongst Brazilian gangs — would result in such a lethal operation.
There had been additionally questions in regards to the timing: The operation got here regardless of a Supreme Court ruling barring police from finishing up raids in Brazil’s impoverished favelas through the coronavirus pandemic besides in “completely distinctive circumstances.”
(*25*)
One resident told AFP that a young man had been killed in her home, where he had sought refuge after being wounded.
“The boy had been shot when he arrived here, and as no resident of this community will kick out another, he stayed. But the police saw blood and came in shouting: ‘Where is he? Where is he?'” the lady mentioned.
“I solely had time to take my kids out again… they killed him in the room.”
‘Predictable outcome’
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 violence, 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.
That was down from a record 1,814 police killings in 2019, but still higher than, for example, the 1,127 people killed by police last year across the entire United States.
“It is unacceptable that Rio de Janeiro’s public security policy continues to bet on killing as a strategy,” mentioned the Igarape Institute, a assume tank.
Robert Muggah, the institute’s co-founder, mentioned the lethal raid was “the predictable final result of years of belligerent tough-on-crime rhetoric” from pro-gun, far-right leaders including President Jair Bolsonaro and Rio’s recently impeached governor, Wilson Witzel.
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