A day of terror for the more than 150,000 inhabitants of the Penha and Alemão complexes, who spent hours under gunfire and explosions in a police operation that also affected all those who had to travel along the city’s main roads, in several neighborhoods of the capital of Rio de Janeiro, which has not yet ended.
THE Operation Containment which lasted throughout this Tuesday (28), left at least 64 people dead – including four police officers -, interrupted traffic on the city’s main roads, closed schools, health centers and commercial establishments. According to the state government, 81 people were arrested and 93 rifles seized, as well as pistols and grenades. This is the largest operation in the last 15 years and also the most lethal in the state’s entire history.
For experts, the operation had a major impact on the capital of Rio de Janeiro and did not achieve the objective of containing organized crime, on the contrary, actions like this only strengthen violence.
“This logic of measuring armed military force with drug trafficking structures has always resulted in increasingly greater deaths, increasingly intense suffering, loss of access to public services, loss of urban mobility, the most fragile will always suffer much more. The economy is directly affected and the problem has never even been scratched”, says the professor of the Department of Social Sciences at the Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRRJ), José Cláudio Souza Alves.
According to the professor, combating organized crime requires other strategies, including offering opportunities and quality of life to vulnerable populations.
“Create new ways of intercepting, investigating, tracking money, arresting people, placing limitations on this operation, providing a real alternative for this population. You have to fight hand in hand in these territories, these populations that are easily convinced by the money from drugs, weapons, the money from illegalism, from coups. If we don’t think about this, we are absolutely compromised, we won’t succeed”, he argues.
“Everything you’re seeing today, exploding all over Rio de Janeiro, is just a huge, gigantic smokescreen, a gigantic roll of smoke blinding everyone”, says Alves.
Political-operational mess
In an interview with the program Rio Magazinefrom the National Radio of Rio de Janeiro, the professor at the Department of Public Security at the Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF), Jacqueline Muniz, classified the operation as amateur and a “political-operational mess”.
According to her, tactical errors were made that are in line with what is stipulated in the public safety regulations themselves.
“To deploy 2,500 police officers, you have to make a forecast of 7,500 to 10,000 police officers, because there are three work shifts and scale. This means that to carry out this operation, which I called a political-operational mess by Governor Castro, policing had to be removed from 3 million to 5 million people in the metropolitan region”, he says. “On the one hand, it heated up the situation in a critical area, it did not reduce the operational capacity of crime, on the other hand, it made possible the death of police officers, the injury of police officers, of citizens without this meaning an advance on organized crime”.
She adds:
“This is very serious because it puts the lives of police officers at risk, it puts the lives of the population at risk, it makes the movement of people and goods unfeasible. We are causing the closure of the Yellow Line, the Red Line, Avenida Brasil, tying up the entire metropolitan region. In other words, heating up the situation and multiplying insecurity”, he says.
She explained that the operation had a reason to exist, but was poorly conceived. “Its purpose was political, putting the lives of law enforcement agents and the population at risk, with results that are not sustainable in the face of the doctrine of police operations, let’s be clear, because there are technical criteria, yes, the police are not amateurism, the police are a profession.”
Advance of organized crime
The objective of the operation, according to the state government, was to execute arrest warrants and contain the territorial expansion of Comando Vermelho. The joint action mobilized 2,500 civil and military police officers, with the participation of the Public Ministry.
According to research released last year by the Study Group on New Illegalisms at the Fluminense Federal University (Geni/UFF) and the Fogo Cruzado Institute, the Red Command was the only criminal faction to expand its territorial control from 2022 to 2023, in Greater Rio. With an increase of 8.4%, the organization surpassed the militias and now accounts for 51.9% of the areas controlled by criminals in the region.
The research showed that Comando Vermelho regained leadership of 242 km² that had been lost to the militias in 2021. That year, 46.5% of the areas under criminal control belonged to the militias and 42.9% to Comando Vermelho.
Population on the firing line
For the Fogo Cruzado Institute, an institution that produces data and information on armed violence, and which compiled information about Operation Containment, actions like this do not actually combat organized crime.
“Fighting organized crime requires another logic. It is necessary to attack financial flows, investigate money laundering, strengthen independent internal affairs bodies and combat corruption within the State. Everything that Rio de Janeiro has not done for decades”, he stated in a statement.
“The Rio police started the day with Operation Containment and what was seen was a significant part of the population on the firing line and an entire city at a standstill. Is this the state government’s planning? Operations like this show the state government’s inability to create public security policy”, explained the organization.
THE Institute reinforces that this is the largest police massacre ever recorded in the history of the state of Rio de Janeirosurpassing the tragedies of Jacarezinho (2021) with 28 deaths, and Vila Cruzeiro (2022) with 24 deaths, police massacres that also occurred during the government of Cláudio Castro.
