Brazil’s deadliest police raid that saw 121 killed failed to capture or kill gang leaders

The governor of Rio de Janeiro has touted the deadliest police raid in Brazilian history as a success, but none of the 117 people killed by police were among the 69 suspects named by prosecutors in the complaint providing the basis for the raid.

Only five of those named in the criminal complaint were arrested that day and none were senior leaders of the notorious Comando Vermelho gang, according to a review of the full police report on the operation shared with the Brazilian supreme court.

The raid, known as Operation Containment, left 121 people dead, including four police officers and two teenagers, and 99 suspects were taken into custody.

The raid also failed to arrest or kill senior figures in the Comando Vermelho gang that investigators say is headquartered in the neighbourhoods the police raided. The main leader of the gang, Edgar Alves de Andrade, known as Doca, remains at large.

Firemen carry bodies found in the woods of the Penha neighborhood a day after a massive anti-gang police operation took place at the Complexo da Penha and Alemao favelas on October 29th, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Photograph: Wagner Meier/Getty Images

One mid-level gang leader was detained without a shot fired, according to the police report.

The findings challenge the official account of the raid, carried out in two densely-populated working-class neighbourhoods known as favelas on the north side of the state capital.

After the operation, local residents lined up dozens of dead bodies in the streets.

The raid, which came a week before world leaders began arriving for the United Nations climate summit Cop30, has pitted leftist president Lula da Silva, who called it disastrous, against conservatives who say it is a model to fight organised crime.

While Lula’s administration has backed police operations aimed at disrupting organised crime financing, rivals on the right like Rio governor Claudio Castro argue for aggressive raids to seize weapons and arrest or kill gang members, despite the high human cost.

Rio’s public safety secretary, Victor dos Santos, who oversees the police, confirmed to Reuters that the government’s goal in the raid was to arrest the men who had been charged.

But, he added that “it wasn’t very easy to look for 69 people among the 280,000” who live in the favelas that were targeted by the raid.

Although 19 of the men killed had no prior criminal record, according to documents in the investigation, Santos said he was 100 per cent certain that they were criminals.

He argued that the number of people killed and arrested showed that “the picture is a lot worse than what the investigation showed”.

Police officers escort suspects arrested during the Operacao Contencao (Operation Containment) out of the Vila Cruzeiro favela, in the Penha complex, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Photograph: Mauro Pimentel/AFP/Getty Images

He said other raids are planned for the coming months in the favelas of Rio.

Still, the initial results of the raid fuelled criticism from the families of the victims, as well as human rights advocates, that police killed indiscriminately instead of pursuing clear objectives based on long-running investigations into the Comando Vermelho gang, one of the largest and most violent in Brazil.

The police “detain them, execute them and it’s all good, because they know there is no law here”, said Samuel Peçanha, whose 14-year-old son Michel was killed during the raid. “In Brazil, that’s normal.”

Though Peçanha said his son Michel, one of the teenagers, was part of the gang, he still had hopes of convincing him to take a different path.

“He was still a child,” he said. “Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get him out.”

A man stands next to cars burned during the operation in the Vila Cruzeiro favela. Photograph: Mauro Pimentel/AFP/Getty

Taua Brito (36) said she had been waiting in anguish for hours for a response from her 20-year-old son, Wellington, when she decided to leave her home and go looking for him.

Wellington, a member of the local gang, told her he had been hiding in the forested hills above their favela as police raided the neighbourhood. In one of his last messages to her, reviewed by Reuters, he said he planned to clear his name: “I just want this all to end already.”

She hiked into the woods in the middle of the night using her phone to light the path. “I must have seen some 50 bodies,” she said. “I found my son at around 1.30am.”

Wellington, his mother said, was shot in the head, she said, and stabbed in the arm. Brito was among the many mothers and other residents who ventured into the hills overnight and came back with dozens of bodies they later lined up in a busy street where locals shop and children play soccer.

The body of 19-year-old Yago Ravel was headless, according to public records and a video reviewed by Reuters. – Reuters