‘It doesn’t shock that it’s Black people getting killed’: inside a deadly police operation in Rio

Police action targeting organised crime in the Brazilian city’s favelas has left communities reeling, with more questions than answers

The Guardian has just published the first in-depth media investigation of “Operation Containment”, an historic bloody raid on favelas in Rio de Janeiro targeting members of the criminal organisation Red Command. What followed was a massacre, mainly of Black people. I spoke to our South America correspondent, Tiago Rogero, about how it all spiralled out of control and revealed Brazil’s deep race and class fissures.

Tiago was reporting in Argentina when he heard the news of the massacre. His colleague Tom Phillips, the Guardian’s Latin America correspondent, was in Rio following events closely. “Operation Containment”, the most fatal police operation in Brazil’s history, launched just before dawn on 28 October and lasted 17 hours, killing 122 people in the Rio de Janeiro favela complexes of Penha and Alemão. Tiago’s heart and mind were in Rio, where he and many of his friends and family live. He felt “pretty anxious and worried” he told me, when news of the rising body count began to come through. He knew a lot of people from the two favelas and so was gripped with “a lot of bad feelings”.

He also knew, because of the racial makeup of the favelas, that most of the dead would be Black. “Black people are the majority in the favelas, almost 80%,” Tiago said. In Brazil, more than 50% of the population identifies as Black or mixed race. He was right. Police refused to disclose the race of those killed, but a variety of sources confirmed that the vast majority of casualties were Black “reinforcing research showing police violence disproportionately affects Afro-Brazilians”. (In this new piece, Tiago and Tom explore the untold story of Rio’s deadliest day.)

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An operation that spun out of control

The account of the operation reveals a tragic and chaotic debacle. “This is historical for Brazil – almost no operation here goes by the book, or adheres to legal standards,” Tiago told me. But there was something exceptional about this one. The operation was conducted in a massive neighbourhood of favelas within Penha and Alemão. Between them lies the “Hill of Mercy”, a place of irregular terrain and dense vegetation, through which criminals would cross for refuge between the favelas when they were raided.

In the past, the police would not enter the hill, Tiago said, because it “could get messy” and lead to a high number of casualties on both sides. But this time, they did. While most police forces entered Penha, a special unit battalion came in through Alemão and positioned itself at the top of the Hill of Mercy. Things started to go sideways when the officers went after the criminals entering the woods; the shootings became more intense. Five members of law enforcement were killed, and 20 were injured, an unusually high number. “It became a rescue operation,” Tiago said, to retrieve police officers who were injured or stranded. The result is that the operation is shrouded in darkness. Tiago is struck by the fact that “more than three months after the operation, we still don’t know how the killings happened. We don’t know what happened inside in the woods.”

All the crime scenes were dismantled, and no forensics were done. The police left most of the bodies where they fell, and the families retrieved the dead. “There is an obligation under Brazilian law that police should wear body cameras during operations of this kind,” Tiago said, but fewer than half did. And only a handful of the cameras were still on, creating a challenge for the public prosecutors investigating the event to determine what actually happened.

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Arrests and ambiguity about who was being targeted

There was also ambiguity about the nature of the people who were targeted. “This operation could not, in my opinion, be considered successful,” Tiago said. “The police spent months planning and secured 100 arrest warrants from the judiciary for drug trafficking.” Of those 100 earmarked for arrest, the police only managed to arrest 17 people. Scores of others were arrested for on-the-spot infractions. None of the 117 people who were killed in the favelas were subject to arrest warrants, and the police conceded that 17 of those killed had no criminal record. Among the dead was a bricklayer who was hiding from the crossfire and a 14-year-old boy.

This is an inevitable outcome of a poorly trained police force and a security policy that targets areas where large numbers of people live, Tiago told me. “The police claim that about 1,000 members of the Red Command live in the two complexes, but we have 110,000 people living there. A very small portion of the population is involved in drug trafficking.” These special units, he said, “are not known for their ability to solve crimes through due process, forensics, etc, the result is the frequent killings of Black people”.

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A devastating apathy

I told Tiago that I was struck by how little attention this event has received, the scenes of the bodies being lined up in the streets as the sun came up on the day after the operation were singularly shocking. “This is the devastating part of it,” he said. Activists and intellectuals are terrified by this operation, “but the general feeling among the population, the first response, was of support for the police”. That response is the result of “years and years of people being told that everyone who goes to jail only serves a short sentence and reoffends”, and so there was support for extrajudicial killings.

But the problem goes to the heart of Brazil’s race and class prejudices. Those who were killed “are not usually seen, understood or heard as a real part of Brazilian society, like they are 100% citizens. If you are Black and living in a favela, then your life definitely doesn’t have the same value as a white person,” said Tiago.

Even though the operation claimed an “absurd number of lives, something which we have never experienced in Brazil, it’s something that the population and the media, have become used to. It doesn’t shock that it’s Black people that are getting killed.”

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