Brazilian police raids leave at least 45 dead in a week
Police raids in Brazil have killed at least 45 people across multiple states in about a week, sparking concerns over police violence, as law enforcement officials step up operations against gangs.
In Rio de Janeiro, 10 people were killed on Wednesday, including two suspected drug-trafficking kingpins, according to Brazil’s state news agency. Two officers were injured by armed assailants in the Vila Cruzeiro favela, or slum area, in the north of the city, where security forces gathered to bust a planned meeting of gang leaders based on intelligence tipoffs.
“We went there to arrest them, but they fought back and ended up dead,” Marco Andrade, a spokesman for the military police, said in a televised statement.
Andrade said they returned fire only after the suspects fired shots first. Most of the officers who participated in the operation didn’t wear body cameras despite a government push for the use of surveillance equipment aimed at improving accountability and reducing abuse.
In the northeast state of Bahia, officials say, 19 suspects were killed over the weekend, according to the Associated Press.
An additional 16 died at the hands of the police during a five-day raid this week in São Paulo, Brazil’s most populous state, after a police officer on patrol was shot dead, Reuters reported.
State lawmakers have called out the Rio government’s strategy for tackling violence and organized crime in recent years, especially officers’ use of lethal force.
Former president Jair Bolsonaro backed harsher tactics against criminal gangs and said in 2019 that criminals should “die in the street like cockroaches.” Under Bolsonaro, Rio police sent armored cars, snipers and bulletproof helicopters into the favelas, even after the country’s supreme court ordered Rio police to restrict violent raids in 2020.
President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has long criticized Bolsonaro’s support of police violence.
Police fatally shot 6,430 people across the country in 2022, according to the 2023 Brazil’s Annual Directory of Public Security.
Talíria Petrone, a member of the Rio state legislature, tweeted that there was no excuse for the state government to turn life in favelas into “hell.”
Her fellow state legislator, Dani Monteiro, called the raid a “massacre.” In a tweet, she slammed the hard-line security policy of Rio state Gov. Cláudio Castro, a close ally of Bolsonaro, noting a similar operation in 2022 that left 25 dead in the same favela complex.
The police killings in São Paulo sparked a protest in the coastal city of Guaruja on Wednesday, with participants holding banners and leaving stuffed dolls on the ground in representation of the dead, the AP reported.
São Paulo Gov. Tarcisio de Freitas, a former Bolsonaro minister and a potential presidential candidate, said there would be an investigation into accusations of excessive force, but he defended police actions by saying fighting crime always comes with “collateral effects,” Reuters reported.