Deadly shootout stirs accusations of police abuse
RIO DE JANEIRO — A bloody, hourslong gunbattle in a Rio de Janeiro slum echoed into Friday, with authorities saying the police mission killed two dozen criminals while residents and activists claimed human rights abuses.
It was just after sunrise Thursday when dozens of officers from Rio de Janeiro state’s civil police stormed Jacarezinho, a favela in the city’s northern zone. They were targeting drug traffickers from one of Brazil’s most notorious criminal organizations, Comando Vermelho, and the bodies piled up quickly.
When the fighting stopped, there were 28 dead — one police officer and 27 people described by the police as “criminals.”
Rio’s moniker of “Marvelous City” can often seem a cruel irony in the favelas, given their stark poverty, violent crime and subjugation to drug traffickers or militias. But even here, Thursday’s clash was a jarring anomaly that analysts declared one of the city’s deadliest police operations ever.
The bloodshed also laid bare Brazil’s perennial divide over whether, as a common local saying goes, “a good criminal is a dead criminal.” Fervent lawandorder sentiment fueled the successful presidential run in 2018 by Jair Bolsonaro, a former army captain whose home is in Rio. He drew support with his calls to diminish legal constraints on officers’ use of lethal force against criminals.
The administration of Rio state’s Gov. Claudio Castro, a Bolsonaro ally, said in an emailed statement that it la
mented the deaths, but that the operation was “oriented by long and detailed investigative and intelligence work that took months.”
The raid sought to rout gang recruitment of teenagers, police said in an earlier statement, which also cited Comando Vermelho’s “warlike structure of soldiers equipped with rifles, grenades, bulletproof vests.”
Television images showed a police helicopter flying low
over the Jacarezinho favela as men with highpowered rifles hopped from roof to roof to evade officers.
One resident told the Associated Press that a man barged into her home around 8 a.m. bleeding from a gunshot wound. He hid in her daughter’s room, but police came rushing in right behind him. She said that she and her family saw officers shoot the unarmed man.
Felipe Curi, a detective in
Rio’s civil police, denied that there were any executions.
“They were all traffickers or criminals who tried to take the lives of our police officers and there was no other alternative,” he said.
On Friday, protesters gathered outside police headquarters near Jacarezinho to denounce the violence.