Brazil: 5 People have been Murdered in a Police Massacre
We hereby share an unofficial translation of a report of A Nova Democracia.
Five people have been assassinated while an operation of the Coordination of Special Resources (Core) [Translator’s note: Special-Ops unit of Rio de Janeiro] of the Civil Police yesterday (15th of April) in Ladeira dos Tabajaras, southern zone of Rio de Janeiro.
The operation is characterized through an extreme brutality by the police troops. In one occasion, the agents of Core dragged a corpse of a dead man meanwhile they crossed the way of a girl in the favela. The mother had to cover the girl’s eyes, so she hadn’t to see the dead.
This is the first big police operation in Rio de Janeiro with an outcome of various deaths, after the approbation of the ADPF 635 [Translator’s: Demand for do not accomplish the fundamental rule], the ADPF of the “Favelas” in the Federal Supreme Court (STF). The ADPF opened the way for way more bloody operations, eliminating restrictions about the use of helicopters and permitting operations near schools, hospitals and clinics without previously informing the directors and responsible medics.
If earlier the policemen already weren’t respecting the restrictions, now they are free to abuse: in the operation in Tabajaras, the residents filmed an helicopter flying on low heights for 30 minutes over the favela. “The helicopter passed over my balcony in circles. You could observe how it flew rapidly over Tabajaras meanwhile you could hear a tremendous shooting. It goes like this for already an half an hour. This hasn’t happened for a long time. The streets kept completely empty”, told a lawyer that lives in Barrio Peixoto to the media outlet Tempo Real RJ.
Operations of Vengeance
The operation of Core is implementing the police strategy to spread terror against the people in the favelas using extreme violence. These are more often operations of vengeance, like the actual one, that was launched after the death of a policeman which has been shot for reacting to an assault.
According the study “Estado Letal”of year 2023, by the Institute Fogo Cruzado, the policemen of Río commit on average three massacres daily in the metropolitan region of the state. 18 of these occurred after that a policeman got shot dead or wounded, leaving 117 people dead in total. According the statistics the police operations that are being held under the motive of vengeance are 70% more lethal then the rest of them.
Some of the mayor massacres in Rio have been executed with purposes of vengeance. In 2021, a year after that the STF demanded the end of the police operations in the favelas, the civil police executed minimum 29 people shooting and stabbing them. According to accounts the operations got even more cruel after a policeman was been shot dead in a confrontation.
Also in 2021, military policemen of the Special-Ops battalion (Bope) executed by shots and stabs, minimum 13 residents of Complex Salgueiro. In that occasion the military officers invaded a house, made a barbecue and then left, taking bags full of money of the population with them. In that occasion they shot more then 1,500 bullets against the residents of Salgueiro.
Increase of police violence in 2025
In 2025 while the first 75 days of the year, the number of victims increased by 58% through stray bullets. 66% of these have been shot as a direct result of police operations, bringing up 27 cases in total, of which seven ended with the murder of victims.
The civil police invaded the campus of Fiocruz, in the suburb of Manguinhos, during a police operation in 8th of January. On that occasion four people were murdered, and the person in charge of the security of Fiocruz was arbitrarily arrested while he tried to evacuate the schoolyard, on which were children, elders and medical patients. The laboratory of vaccines Bio Manguinhos got one of their windows broken as the result of a bullet that was shot by a policeman’s assault rifle and a worker got wounded by the glass splinters.
According to a new study, that was published by the Press monopoly O Globo, 147 people died in confrontations initiated by the police in the period between January an February 2025 in the state of Río de Janeiro, resulting in an increase of 27% of deaths comparing with the same period in 2024.
