Death toll in Rio drug raid surges as residents find more bodies • FRANCE 24 English

Death toll in Rio drug raid surges as residents find more bodies • FRANCE 24 English

Our top story this hour then, Brazilian officials say at least 132 people have lost their lives during a large-scale operation against organized crime and drug trafficking in Rio de Janeiro. Over 2,000 security personnel then plus armored vehicles were deployed for the sting operation which took place inside two FLLA complexes which housed the notorious crime family, the Red Command. Well, scores of weapons were seized and 81 people were arrested. Human rights groups though have called for an investigation into those deaths, calling it urgent. Let’s get the very latest on this story. Tim Vickery is standing by for us in Rio de Janeiro. Tim, what’s the latest? The death toll has uh risen significantly uh since uh we first got news of these rates. Yes, it has. The the death toll announced by the authorities was 58. Four of whom uh are police officials. um overnight and uh this is still ongoing. Residents from those fllas have been going into the woodland between the fllas which is where the conflict appears to have taken place and it’s the residents who’ve been finding bodies and bringing them to the the principal square of that favlla. Uh and so far they have found 74 bodies and the searches are ongoing. So the death toll keeps rising. Um before the grim record for deaths in a Rio police operation was 28 in an operation 5 years ago. This one is 132 and rising. Rising indeed. Uh Tim, there is it’s thought that there’s some political motivation between be behind these big sting operations. What more can you tell us about that? Well, there are three levels of governments. Um there there is the the city of Rio which has a mayor. There is the state of Rio which has a governor and there is of course the national government. This security operation was carried out by the governor of the state of Rio. Now he is a right-wing figure uh and uh he is saying that this operation was a success and with the exception of the four dead police officers, everyone else here is a member of the red command. Now, this very much plays into a very strong rationale here. This is a city traumatized by the reality of urban crime. That the only good bandit is a dead bandit. Specialists, however, will would argue that such operations do nothing to combat the real problem. This this has much more to do with the politics of spectacle than it really does with the politics of public safety. um specialists will argue that all of these uh let’s assume that all of the dead with the exception of four police are members of the commander of vill the red command that they can be replaced very very quickly and the rifles and weapons captured by the police can also be replaced quickly because we are dealing with a major social force here in uh in in this criminal group um which started in the late ‘7s in the early 80s in Rio’s prisons as a result of contact with left-wing political prisoners. Uh the the criminals learned to organize and then in the 80s when Rio got on the uh the cocaine route, Brazil got on the cocaine route, there was an explosion in drug traffic. But now it goes beyond drug traffic. Uh the Red Command have set themselves up in a number of areas as an alternative state. uh they they charge the the local residents a fee for all of the the the services of of daily life. So combating this needs much much more than a police operation, however spectacular. Um the only way that the authorities can get on top of this is with a coordinated longlasting uh um operation involving not just security forces but levels of the state at all three all three levels at at at the city, state and national level. Now, Lula has just President Lula has just arrived back from Malaysia, be holding meetings with his ministers today and is expected to send a committee to Rio probably tomorrow to uh to to to get together with various branches of government to see if they can come up with some kind of coordinated attempt to deal with the problem of organized crime because it really was a huge impact yesterday. the way that organized crime was able to respond to this police operation by bringing chaos to the city um barricading a number of the leading roads around Rio uh forcing and in in fear and in a climate of tension uh commerce a lot of commerce was closing around 2:00 2:30 in the afternoon with hundreds of thousands of people facing a difficult journey home there’s an eerie silence around Rio at the moment usually in the background you would be hearing the sound of civil construction workers. That’s all quiet. There’s an eerie silence as Rio has woken up today uh to the reality of just how thin the veneer of public order is in a city where organized crime is so strong.

The Rio de Janeiro public defender’s office on October 29 said a total of 132 people died in the bloodiest police raid against drug gangs in the Brazilian city’s history, as grieving residents laid out dozens of bodies in the street. FRANCE 24’s Tim Vickery tells us from Rio about the local political context that led to this raid.
#RioRaid #BrazilianPolitics #RioDrugTrafficking

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