At least 132 people were killed in what authorities described as Brazil’s largest police operation against drug gangs, officials said on Wednesday. In Rio de Janeiro, residents lined a street with dozens of bodies recovered overnight following the raids.The bodies of the men were placed in a single row along the pavement of a square on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro. Residents said many were stripped to their underwear to help relatives identify them, while others were covered with bedsheets.
Brazil’s state police said the raids, aimed at dismantling a major drug gang, had been planned over two months and were intended to force suspects into a forested hillside, where a special operations unit was positioned to intercept them.“The elevated lethality of the operation was expected but not desired,” Victor Santos, Rio state’s head of security, said at a news conference, as cited by Reuters. He added that authorities would investigate any instances of police “misconduct.”Residents of Rio’s Penha neighborhood collected dozens of bodies from the surrounding forest overnight and placed more than 70 of them along the center of a main street.“More bodies kept coming,” Rene Silva, a community leader from the neighborhood where the raids took place, was quoted as saying by the New York Times. He estimated that volunteers recovered between 50 and 60 bodies through the night. “Mothers, wives, children were there, crying,” Silva added. Uncertainty remained over how the large-scale operation unfolded and whether civilians were among the victims. An official later acknowledged that the operation had not achieved its primary goal of capturing a top gang leader.President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva reportedly dispatched a ministerial committee to Rio de Janeiro on Wednesday and pledged federal support for the forensic investigation.“We cannot accept that organized crime continues to destroy families, oppress residents, and spread drugs and violence throughout the cities,” Lula said through a post on X. Rio state governor Cláudio Castro described the raids as a “success”, as he cited the arrests of 113 alleged members of the Red Command gang, along with the seizure of 118 weapons and a considerable amount of drugs.Castro said the operation was intended to curb the Red Command’s growing influence and prevent the gang from expanding its control over larger parts of the city.The latest raids marked the deadliest police operation in Brazil’s history. The previous highest death toll was recorded in 2021, when 28 people were killed during a police anti-drug raid in Rio’s Jacarezinho neighborhood.
