Rio de Janeiro's military police carried out an operation on Tuesday in the Complexo da Penha favela, ostensibly to prevent the expansion of the Comando Vermelho (Red Command), considered the city's largest criminal group and one of the most powerful in Brazil. The assault on this impoverished neighborhood involved 2,500 officers, supported by 32 armored vehicles, two helicopters, and an undetermined number of drones. They clashed with criminals, some heavily armed, in the streets and alleyways of the favela, which is home to approximately 200,000 people.
Initially, the forces under the command of Bolsonaro-aligned Governor Cláudio Castro reported 64 deaths, at least four of whom were police officers, as well as around 80 arrests. This figure already made the operation the deadliest in the city's history, with the second and third deadliest being police operations ordered by Castro himself in 2021 and 2022. However, hours later, residents found fifty more bodies in a wooded area on the outskirts of the favela. The Public Defender's Office of the province raised the death toll to 132, making the episode the worst massacre in modern Brazilian history. To find a comparable case, one must go back to 1992, when the São Paulo military police ended a prison riot by executing 111 inmates, many of whom had no connection to the unrest.
While the number of victims is appalling in itself, the events have taken on truly horrific dimensions with the discovery of torture marks, execution-style killings, extreme violence, and even a decapitation among the bodies left exposed to the elements. Such acts simultaneously highlight the historical and deplorably normalized brutality of Brazilian police forces and the degree of dehumanization to which they have been subjected by far-right politicians in recent years.
Given the celebration of barbarity by powerful figures, the media, and citizens intoxicated by punitive sadism, it is imperative to remember that in a state governed by the rule of law, murdering people is not a sign of progress, but a descent into barbarism, and that calling such carnage a “success”—as Governor Castro did—denotes a horrifying moral degradation. The task of a police force is not to kill, but to prevent crime, identify the alleged offender, arrest them, and bring them before the judicial body that will decide on their guilt or innocence. Lethal force should only be used in exceptional circumstances, when the lives of third parties or the officers themselves are in imminent danger.
It is also crucial to understand that politicians who resort to punitive populism (that is, using state violence and disproportionate punishments to gain support) are not interested in eliminating the root causes of crime, but rather in criminalizing poverty to divert attention from their own crimes and white-collar crime in general, as well as from the responsibility of an economic model that exacerbates inequality and destroys the social fabric. This perverse logic, exemplified in Mexico by Felipe Calderón, leaves behind not security or social peace, but a trail of innocent victims and fractured communities that become fertile ground for more crime and cruelty.
On the political front, the Complexo da Penha tragedy places President Luis Inácio Lula da Silva in a compromising situation, since he would be morally and institutionally obliged to distance himself from this atrocity and repudiate it, but if he does so he will surely face a frontal attack from the powerful Brazilian right-wing media.
In short, it is necessary to condemn the aforementioned barbarity and investigate the role of the authorities involved – in particular, that of Cláudio Castro – as well as reject the false dichotomy between fighting crime and punishing police brutality: condoning the latter in the name of the former is not protecting institutions, but turning the State into a murderer.
