Cycle of violence

On May 6, residents of Rio de Janeiro’s Jacarezinho favela were awakened by gut-wrenching screams and sounds of gunshots. Once the mayhem subsided and they gathered enough courage to step outside their homes, they came face to face with dozens of bloodied corpses scattered in the favela’s narrow alleyways.

What they were witnessing was the aftermath of the most lethal police operation in the city to date.

In the early hours of the morning, some 200 heavily armed police officers stormed Jacarezinho with bulletproof helicopters and armoured vehicles in search of ‘suspects’ from the ‘Red Command’ – the criminal group that is currently ‘governing’ the favela. A few hours later, 28 people, including a police officer, were dead.

Violent police operations, extrajudicial killings and other state-sanctioned human rights violations are hardly a rare occurrence in Rio’s favelas. According to research by the Fogo Cruzado Institute, at least one ‘massacre’ – an action that results in the killing of at least three people – per week was registered in the metropolitan region of Rio de Janeiro since 2016. Three out of four of these mass killings reportedly took place during police operations.

Nevertheless, this month’s deadly raid in Jacarezinho should not have happened – according to the Brazilian Supreme Court.

In June 2020, Supreme Court Justice Edson Fachin ruled that, during the coronavirus pandemic, police should conduct operations in favelas only in “absolutely exceptional cases”.

The ruling had an immediate and substantial effect on the levels of violence in Rio’s numerous favelas. By September 2020, there was a 71 percent reduction in police killings compared with the same period in 2019. But the calm did not last long. In October, one month after the acting governor, Cláudio Castro, took office, the police once again started regularly conducting operations in Rio’s favelas. In the following months, the city saw an average of nearly one raid every day, according to a report by Geni, a research group at the Federal Fluminense University (UFF).

This escalation reached a new peak on May 6.

On that day, the police conducted an ‘operation’ in Jacarezinho not only in blatant disregard of the Supreme Court’s ruling, but also with unprecedented aggression and violence. There were reports of several summary executions, and even a photograph showing the corpse of a person “posed” in a humiliating position – presumably by the officers who killed him. Homes were raided without warrants, and one person was killed inside a private residence, in front of an elderly relative.

Soon it emerged that a police officer was shot in the head and killed at the very beginning of the operation. This led many to conclude that the police attacked the favela with such force to avenge the death of their colleague.

But why did the police conduct this operation in the first place, in the middle of a devastating pandemic and despite a Supreme Court decision banning it?

The police initially claimed that the operation was conducted as part of an investigation not only into drug trafficking, but also other serious crimes such as “soliciting of minors, homicides and robberies” committed by people living in the favela.

Excerpted: ‘Is there no end to Rio de Janeiro’s cycle of violence?’

Aljazeera.com