The incursion of police forces commanded by Cláudio Castro, Rio de Janeiro State Governor, in the early hours of Tuesday, October 28, generated the deadliest military operation in Brazil’s history. A massacre, a true massacre, was carried out, with numbers (probably still under-reported) of 128 deceased victims.

A crime committed by the State, a barbaric violence that reinforces the spiral of the so-called war on drugs policy, which surrounds the communities and favelas of Rio, placing the working-class population in the line of fire between state forces and criminal factions (whether militias or drug traffickers). The death toll surpassed the Carandiru massacre, in the 1990s, which took place in São Paulo.

Chaos, violence, and state responsibility

Following the operation, chaos spread throughout the Rio de Janeiro metropolitan area. Hundreds of points between the North Zone, Lapa, and São Gonçalo were blocked. Buses were hijacked and impounded. The retaliation from drug traffickers (the Comando Vermelho group – Red Command in a free translation) canceled school and university classes, generated panic, and held hundreds of thousands of people hostage over the past 40 hours in Rio.

The UN issued a statement calling it a barbaric crime. The case of the largest bloodbath in a single action exacerbates other massacres, such as those that previously occurred in Morro do Alemão, Vila Cruzeiro, and Jacarezinho (Rio de Janeiro favelas). Governor Cláudio Castro directly ordered the operation, seeking media attention and prestige at the cost of lethality and a battle over narratives. The use of the justification of “narcoterrorism” is a further step in the plot of the far-right, in the style of Trump, which militarily and politically provokes Venezuela and Colombia, seeking to destabilize their governments and exert direct influence over both countries. The common thread in both is neo-fascist barbarism.

What happened in the operation was the use of heavy weaponry by the Comando Vermelho, where it is claimed that 90 rifles were apprehended, and the police also denounced the use of high-tech drones.

The media-driven and genocidal action of the governor of Rio, motivated in part by his electoral interests, must be condemned as the main culprit for this massacre. The operation was not only a disaster, but also had consequences that dismantled all legality by hiding corpses, manipulating data, in the biggest attempt to criminalize the favelas and communities in Brazilian History.

Farce and genocide

The action of the Rio de Janeiro Military Police is a farce. We know that the policy of “war on drugs” or “war on crime” has the only goal of escalating the communities’ militarization and expanding the genocide of the poor and Black youth in the country’s deprived areas.

Drug trafficking and gunrunning involves a whole industry that operates not only within the framework of state impunity or complicity, but in a deep interconnectedness.

Police actions against the upper echelons of organized crime – whether the one that seized rifles at Ronnie Lessa’s house or the one carried out a few months ago on Faria Lima (a high profile financial sector area) in São Paulo – have resulted in no deaths or even had a single shot fired.

The actions of factions, traffickers, and militias oppress all communities in Rio and Brazil, having the freedom to move fortunes in a deliberately illegal sector to go on the flow of these true millionaires, who fuel corruption within police institutions with businesses in various sectors: real estate, entertainment, and the sports industry.

Out with Castro, end the war on drugs, and active the mobilization

There are structures from the Brazilian military dictatorship that remain unchanged, militarizing social life, with systematic repression of popular movements and a security policy based on the war on favelas and against the poor. In this sense, as stated in the recent programmatic update of the PSOL (Socialism and Liberty Party), the demilitarization of the police and the construction of “a new drug policy that confronts the genocide of Black people and mass incarceration, focusing on public health and care in freedom, combating the privatized model of therapeutic communities, replacing the logic of punishment with restorative justice alternatives with a gender and race perspective and the reparation of territories affected by police repression” are fundamental. This means seriously discussing the demilitarization of the Military Police and the decriminalization of drugs.

Several social movements, especially those linked to the Black movement and the peripheries, have already indicated the need for a strong street response on the 31st, where we will have demonstrations in several capital cities throughout Brazil. It is crucial to join in this effort and mobilization.

Finally, as an immediate task, built upon the broadest unity and social mobilization, the demand is for “Castro Out!”. The criminal Cláudio Castro must leave Guanabara Palace for prison, otherwise we will see new massacres perpetrated by the State and disguised as public security policy.

Israel Dutra is a sociologist, Secretary of Social Movements of PSOL, member of the National Leadership of the party and of the Movimento de Esquerda Socialista (MES/PSOL).