Rio residents fear police violence under far-right rule

The residents were chatting outside when the police helicopter swooped over the polluted river at the end of their street in Rio’s sprawling Mare favela complex. They fled as the officers riding in it fired volleys of bullets during a raid to catch a renegade gang boss.

Controlled by two rival drug gangs and a paramilitary group, the roughshod community has grown used to violence and gunfights. But the police response was extreme even by those standards.

Four gang members sought refuge in a nearby house. Police found two in its entrance corridor, shouting: “I surrender.” A police officer cursed. “My order is to kill,” he said – and both were shot dead, a resident who witnessed the killings told the Guardian.

Two more were killed on its rooftop terrace while a 15-yearold girl and a neighbour cowered in a bathroom, and four others who the police said were also gang members were killed nearby. Police seized weapons and arrested three people. The gang boss got away.

During campaigning last year, Rio’s new, far-right governor, Wilson Witzel, promised a “slaughter” of gun-toting drug gangsters using helicopters and snipers – leading to comparisons with the Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte’s bloody drug war. Now fears are growing that the policy is being implemented

in Rio, fed by a record high of 434 deaths in confrontations with police in the first three months of this year.

This was the second alleged massacre of gang members in recent months. In February, 13 men connected to a drug gang were killed in the Fallet favela. Pedro Strozenberg, ombudsman of Rio’s Public Defender’s Office, called it an “emblematic” massacre with “with strong signs of execution after surrender”.

There are also eight cases of helicopters shooting into densely populated favelas and accusations that a sniper in a police tower overlooking the Manguinhos favela shot two men dead and injured another.

This indicates “a procedure orientated as a state-orientated policy”, said Strozenberg. “The issue is whether it is legal.”

Witzel – an ally of the far-right President, Jair Bolsonaro – rubbished complaints about the Mare operation. “If you complain about the police, it’s better not to have police,” he told reporters.

Days earlier, he had shared videos of himself on social media in a helicopter with police during a recent operation in Angra dos Reis, a seaside town 200km from Rio, promising to end “banditry”. The SBT channel screened more video shot during the operation over gang-controlled areas, showing a police officer firing towards a tarpaulin structure on a hillside. Locals told SBT it was a women’s toilet erected by a church. Nobody was arrested.

Renata Souza, the chair of the human rights commission at Rio’s legislative assembly, wrote to the UN rapporteur on extrajudicial killings that Witzel was “legitimising” police violence in favelas. In Mare, speaking anonymously for fear of reprisals, the resident who witnessed the killings said: “I can’t sleep at night because what comes into my mind are the shots and those guys dying.”

A 15-month military occupation that ended in 2015 failed to dislodge the gangs from Mare. The day after the operation, a man with a machine gun sped past on a motorbike in the area controlled by the Comando Vermelho (Red Command). A man with an automatic rifle stood in a busy intersection in the zone controlled by the Terceiro Comando Puro (Pure Third Command) gang targeted in the police raid.

Their presence leads many to assume everyone in favelas is involved in the drug trade, said David Vicente, 20, a violinist with the Maré Orchestra who led screaming children he was teaching out of range when the helicopter clattered overhead. “We’re not. We work. We pay taxes,” he said.

A spokesman for Witzel said police operations were carried out within the law, citing official figures showing that homicides in March had fallen 32% on last year to the lowest level for 28 years. Car and cargo thefts fell and 8,500 people were arrested in the first quarter of the year, a fifth more than 2018. “In operations in conflagrated areas, the primary goal is arresting criminals and seizing weapons,” he said in an e-mail.