The bodies of the dead men lay in a single row, on the pavement of a square on the fringes of Rio de Janeiro.
Many were stripped down to their underwear, residents said, so that relatives could more easily identify them. Others were draped by bedsheets, shielded from the crowds and the cameras of journalists and passersby.
Overnight, dozens of the corpses had been pulled out of a nearby wooded area, sharply raising the death toll of a large-scale police operation targeting drug gangs, and laying bare the sheer extent of the violence that had terrorised this low-income area just hours earlier and left many in Brazil stunned.
“More bodies kept coming,” said Rene Silva, a community leader from a neighbourhood where the raids unfolded, estimating that volunteers had retrieved 50 to 60 bodies overnight. “Mothers, wives, children were there, crying.”
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On Wednesday, it was still unclear exactly how many people were killed in the deadliest crackdown on organised crime in Rio’s violent history of confrontations between the police and gangs. Early estimates from the state’s public defender’s office placed the toll at 132 people, including four police officers.
Questions still lingered over how the vast operation had unfolded, whether innocent bystanders were caught in the bloody battle and who exactly was responsible for all of the killings. And, on Wednesday, an official acknowledged that it had failed to achieve its main objective: capturing a top gang leader.
For many residents, the first sign of trouble came at about 3:30am on Tuesday, with the frenzied barking of the dogs. Not long after, they said, the internet and the power cut out. At about 5am, just before dawn, came the crackling sounds of gunfire, as a battle erupted between police officers and gang members.
“We woke up to the sounds of gunshots,” Silva recalled. “Gunshots from here, from there, from everywhere.”
Some 2,500 police officers, in dozens of armoured vehicles, had descended on the area, scouring for drug traffickers they suspected were linked to a powerful criminal group known as the Red Command. Overhead, two police helicopters hovered.
Gang members retaliated, using drones to drop explosives from the sky, according to police images. Plumes of smoke filled the sky above the cinder-block homes, as traffickers set fire to cars, using them as barricades to block the police from entering.
Caught in the middle, residents hid in their homes or rushed out to work in other parts of the city, dodging the hail of bullets. Schools cancelled classes, health centres were shuttered and businesses kept their doors closed.
“It was pure despair,” said one resident, who asked to speak anonymously because of worries about retaliation from the gang controlling the neighbourhood. “I ran and put my kids in my room, the safest corner of the house. We stayed there, not sure what was happening outside.”
By afternoon, the chaos had spilled over to other parts of the city, as members of the gang hijacked buses and used them to block roads across Rio’s northern and western fringes, including one leading to the airport.
Late into the evening, gunfire was still ringing through the area, according to residents. When silence finally fell, they recalled, it was pitch dark again.
The police swiftly declared the vast operation a triumph, claiming it had killed about 60 criminals. But, as a group of volunteers ventured from their homes and began looking for the missing, it became clear that the death toll was far higher.
Through the night, residents combed through nearby woods. By Wednesday, they had recovered some 70 corpses there. It was unclear what, if any, link the people had to the gang, and who was responsible for their deaths.
The extraordinarily bloody episode shocked Rio, a city that is no stranger to scenes of gangs battling the police and each other. It also rattled Brazil just as the Latin American nation prepares to welcome delegations from around the world for the UN climate change conference, with events planned in Rio and the Amazonian city of Belem.
On Wednesday, president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva sent a committee of his ministers on an emergency trip to Rio, and the federal government pledged to help with the forensic investigation. Lula was “stunned” by the death toll, his justice minister told reporters.
The federal government also plans to send financial resources and personnel to Rio to deal with the aftermath of the operation, justice minister Ricardo Lewandowski said on Wednesday evening after meeting with governor Claudio Castro. The two officials said they had agreed to establish a temporary office to fight organised crime in the state.
“We need co-ordinated work that targets the backbone of drug trafficking without putting innocent police officers, children and families at risk,” Lula said in a social media post Wednesday night. He called on Congress to advance a proposed constitutional amendment that would “ensure that the different police forces act jointly in confronting criminal factions.”
The raids sparked intense debate over the heavy-handed methods that the authorities in Rio have long used to fight, with mixed success, organised crime.
Governor Castro had rushed to cast the raids as a success, pointing to the arrests of 113 people that the police believe have links to the Red Command gang, as well as the seizure of 118 weapons and a ton of drugs.
The aim of the operation, Castro said, was to stifle the expansion of the Red Command, which has recently been trying to seize larger chunks of the city.
The group, born in Rio’s prisons in the late 1970s, has expanded rapidly in recent years and now commands territory across Brazil, including in the Amazon region.
“It’s no longer a common crime, it’s narco-terrorism,” Castro said in a social media post Tuesday.
In Brazil, many saw the show of force by Castro, a far-right ally of former president Jair Bolsonaro, as an attempt to score political points with conservative Brazilians ahead of national elections next year.
Experts say that such measures, long a part of life in Rio’s impoverished neighbourhoods, have done little to slow the expansion of groups such as the Red Command because they usually target low-level foot soldiers, rather than the leaders of the organisations.
“We’ve seen time and time again that heavy-handed approaches do not dismantle criminal networks,” said Robert Muggah, an expert on organised crime in Latin America and the research director of Igarapé Institute, a research group. “Yet we see mega-operation after mega-operation in Rio.”
On Wednesday afternoon, Rio’s secretary of public security, Victor Santos, told a Brazilian news channel that the authorities had failed to capture the main target of the operation.
“We weren’t able to catch him,” Santos said. “He uses the foot soldiers as a kind of barrier.”
Rather than hit criminal organisations with brute force, Muggah said, it is often more effective to target their finances, logistics or supply chains. In Sao Paulo, a recent operation struck a rival criminal group known as the First Capital Command by focusing on its links to fuel distribution and financial markets.
“It’s much easier, and perhaps politically rewarding, to throw cops at the problem,” Muggah said, “than do the hard gritty work of actually breaking up the illicit financial flows.”
- This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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