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Rio drug raid leaves at least 25 dead, drawing international condemnation

A massive police operation against drug traffickers in a Brazilian favela Thursday left 25 people dead, turning the impoverished Rio de Janeiro neighborhood into a battlefield and drawing condemnation from rights groups.

A policeman was among those killed in the early morning raid on Jacarezinho, on Rio’s north side, where residents awoke to explosions, heavy gunfire and helicopters overhead.

Police confirmed the toll, identifying the other 24 dead as “suspects”. They 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,’” said Silvia Ramos, head of the Security Observatory at Candido Mendes University.

“Is this the public security policy we want? 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 numerous bodies being taken out in an armored police vehicle, a local community leader told AFP, asking that his name not be published for safety reasons.

“Unfortunately, there were many clashes in the area. There is nothing to celebrate with this toll,” one police official told a press conference, adding that the officer killed was shot in the head.

“This is one of the largest death tolls in a police operation in Rio, surpassing 19 at Complexo do Alemão slum in 2007, except we did not lose one of ours then,” police chief Ronaldo Oliveira told Reuters.

A 2005 raid in the Baixada Fluminense in Rio’s violent northern outskirts killed 29 people.

International outrage

The bloodbath prompted criticism from human rights groups including Amnesty International, who lambasted the police for the “reprehensible and unjustifiable” loss of life in a neighborhood mostly populated by Black and poor people.

“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, referring to the informally organized neighborhood with few public services.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) said that Rio de Janeiro prosecutors have a constitutional obligation to oversee the police and pursue criminal investigations of police abuses. It called for a thorough and independent investigation into the deaths.

According to HRW, Rio police killed 453 people and at least four police officers died in police actions during the first three months of the year.

The neighborhood where the raid took place is considered a base for the Comando Vermelho, or Red Command, the iconic beach city’s biggest drug gang.

However, rights activists questioned why recruiting minors—a common practice among Brazilian gangs—would lead to such a deadly operation.

There were also questions about the timing: The operation came despite a Supreme Court ruling barring police from carrying out raids in Brazil’s impoverished favelas during the coronavirus pandemic except in “absolutely exceptional circumstances.”

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 woman said.

“I only had time to take my children out back… 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,” said the Igarape Institute, a think tank.

Robert Muggah, the institute’s co-founder, said the deadly raid was “the predictable outcome 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.

(AFP)

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