All night, residents of Penha drove trucks up to a wooded ridge, loaded bodies and carried them back to the square. By early Wednesday at least 50 bodies, mostly young men with their shirts off, lay in rows on the ground. Hundreds of residents and relatives stood around them. Some cried. Others shouted “massacre,” and later switched to “justice.”
Penha was one of two sites hit in Rio de Janeiro’s deadliest police operation on record. Officials put the dead at 132, including 60 suspected gang members and four police officers.
A toll that doubled overnight
The figure came from the Rio public defender’s office and was more than double Tuesday’s count. State authorities had reported at least 64 dead that day. Governor Claudio Castro said the first tally covered only the bodies already processed at the public morgue.
About 2,500 police and soldiers took part, on foot and in helicopters and armored vehicles. The state said they were going after a major drug gang, the Red Command, which has tightened its grip on favelas in recent years. The stated aims were to capture its leaders and stop it spreading. The government reported 81 arrests, 93 rifles and more than half a ton of drugs seized.
Gang members hit back. Buses were dragged across roads as barricades, schools closed, a local university canceled classes, and the state government posted a video on X that appeared to show a drone firing a projectile at police.
“There’s no other way to describe it”
Raull Santiago, a local activist, said his team found about 15 bodies on the ridge before dawn. “We saw executed people: shot in the back, shots to the head, stab wounds, people tied up,” he said. “This level of brutality, the hatred spread – there’s no other way to describe it except as a massacre.”
Castro described Rio as at war against “narco-terrorism,” and the state government said those killed had resisted police. Non-governmental organizations and the U.N. human rights body raised alarm about the death toll and called for investigations.
Rio has seen deadly raids before. Twenty-nine people died in the Baixada Fluminense region in March 2005, and 28 in the Jacarezinho favela in May 2021. Neither comes close to this one.
Politics
Castro, of the conservative opposition Liberal Party, said Rio was “alone in this war” and took a swipe at the federal government of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. The Justice Ministry replied that it had renewed the deployment of national forces at the state’s request 11 times. Lula’s chief of staff, Rui Costa, asked for an emergency meeting in Rio on Wednesday with local officials and Justice Minister Ricardo Lewandowski.
Filipe dos Anjos, secretary general of the favela rights group FAFERJ, doubted the raid would change much. “In about thirty days, organized crime will already be reorganized in the territory, doing what it always does: selling drugs, stealing cargo, collecting payments and fees,” he said.
