The untold story of Brazil’s deadliest police raid

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:08today rio's bloodiest day

0:16that was a very strange day it was one of those days where you wake up with a start and you think my god something's happened it's in that slight daze i answered my phone and it was a photographer a friend who, to my surprise, was in Villa Cruzeiro, a favela in North Rio, having received a tip in the middle of the night and said, Tom, you've got to get here now. There are dozens and dozens of bodies being carried down from the hills. So I jumped in the shower, had a cup of coffee and we drove in a convoy with the emergency lights flashing and drove very, very slowly through the darkness into the main square of Villa Cruzero, which sits at the foot of the Peña complex.

1:03Tom Phillips, The Guardian's Latin America correspondent, has lived in Rio for years now. And he's often reported on violent clashes between the police and the drug gangs that dominate the favelas. But this day, last October, it was different. Oh, my God, there's the bodies. There's corpus there. Put on there. You can see the food coming out from under the plastic. They're just lying out there in the sea.

1:37And as I arrived, I could hear the sound of engines and motorbikes and pickup trucks as they came down from the hills above, bringing more and more bodies.

1:50The people here are saying that they think there may be more than 100, maybe even more than 150 people who have been killed totally.

1:59By far the biggest police killing that I have ever covered here or that I think there has ever been in Rio. Tom was right. By the time the operation was finally over, it was clear that this was the bloodiest day that Rio has ever seen.

2:25This week, The Guardian is publishing a forensic investigation into what happened that day and why it could change Brazil. From The Guardian, I'm Annie Kelly. Today in Focus, inside Operation Containment.

2:44Tom Phillips, you're The Guardian's Latin America correspondent. Could you start this story by telling us about Peña, this favela in Rio de Janeiro, where this police operation took place? So the Complexo da Peña is an enormous labyrinth of about 13 small favelas spread across a hilltop or a series of hillsides in northern Rio, home to tens of thousands of people. And which also in recent years has become, police say, the most important headquarters of the Red Command drug faction, which is one of the two biggest organized crime groups in Brazil. streets are blocked with barricades made out of train tracks burnt out cars and they are the law to such an extent that if you visit this favela or others like it you will see handwritten signs on the wall saying don't drop litter here from the directorship i mean there's effectively no government presence in these areas and and this operation was police say an attempt to tackle that problem by going in, grabbing some of the Red Command's most senior leaders and gathering intelligence on their operations, knocking down those barricades and trying to bring change to one of hundreds of favelas in Rio, which are now controlled by a variety of armed groups.

4:11And you've done reporting from this favela yourself. Could you tell us a bit about what kind of daily life is like for the people that live there? Outside of these explosions of extreme violence, they are deprived communities, home to many of the city's workforce. But they can also be wonderful places. They are vibrant, they call them comunidades in Rio, communities, because there is a real sense of community, people pull together. They are absolutely vibrant sources of culture and talent. But unfortunately, they have also fallen over the last few decades because of government neglect into the hands of different armed groups in the case of the complex of the Baye and the Red Command drug faction and they are also the stages for absolutely appalling and terrifying episodes of violence.

5:09And for the people living in the favela can you talk us through what they started seeing and hearing at 3am on that Tuesday, the 28th of October. In those first few hours, the community was turned into an absolute war zone. I mean, the pictures are terrifying. These huge black clouds rising into the sky because of all the burning barricades that the drug traffickers had set alight to stop the police advance. Just constant gunfire back and forth between one side and the other, police firing up. taking fire as the drug traffickers tried to stop them, advancing further into the favela. That in itself was not unusual.

5:57The Complexo de la Peña has seen many police operations before, but it started to become clear over the coming hours as residents started to flock to the Residents' Association at the foot of the favela that this was not your ordinary operation, that something different was taking place. just the sheer quantity of women flocking to that building, starting to receive messages from their sons, brothers, husbands, many of whom seem to have been drug traffickers who were holed up in the forests above the community, exchanging fire with the police and also exchanging these frantic messages with their mums and sisters and wives saying, get me out of here.

6:40What is going on? Please come and help.

6:54This operation, its focus was on the Penha and the Alemão favela complexes where 110 ,000 people live. And police believe that over there, there are between 800 and 1 ,000 traffickers from the Red Command criminal group, Comando Vermelho. Tiago Ruggiero, the Guardian's South America correspondent, has also been investigating this raid. Police were after one individual in particular, weren't they? Could you tell me about him? Yeah, police was after this criminal whose nickname is The Bear. He is believed to be the leader of the Red Command in that particular region. He is described by the police as a very violent leader.

7:42He has a very extensive criminal record with more than 200 criminal charges. All across the Peña complex, you can see references to the bear, such as a graffiti at some point of the favela that is identified by local traffickers as the bear's lair, that you will have a graffiti of a bear holding a rifle and using body armour. Capturing the bear would not be easy. So that day to do that massive operation, police designated 2 ,500 police officers. This is at least twice the number deployed in similar operations in the past. I talked to many of them. One of them was Lieutenant Kelly Patricia.

8:39She told Tiago what they were doing was dangerous and it would mean that the police would start the operation, exposed and having to head up into the favelas, up what is called the Hill of Mercy.

8:57She was telling me how difficult it was to climb Penha because some of the favelas in Brazil, not all of them, but some of them, they are on these hills. It's pretty narrow streets and always going up. They have the upper hand because they have the higher ground. But this time, the authorities had a plan.

9:44of favelas, and then the criminals will flee to the other side. So that day, police for the first time decided to occupy the top of the hill to prevent the criminals from going to the other side. Over the past years, police has, like police officials, the high commanders, they have discussed that possibility a lot of times. Like, why wouldn't we do that? But they always decided not to do so because it was too risky. So just to make sure it's clear, so you've got two favelas on either side of this hill with a wooded area at the top. And for the first time, police are attempting to enter, to kind of almost push the drug traffickers up to the top of the hill by entering both the velas at the same time.

10:25Yeah, yeah, that is correct. But especially positioning themselves very, very early in the morning on the top of the hill. Right. So it was essentially a trap. They were pushing them upwards, but they'd already occupied that top of the hill. Yeah. Even though the police officers, they don't use the word trap, they don't admit it was a trap. They used the word wall. They were forming a wall there to keep the criminals from running to the other side. Could you just describe the scene for us at the top of the hill as the Red Command traffickers were being pushed up through the favelas towards the forested area at the top?

11:01So the criminals, at some point, they left, they entered the woods and that's when the fighting began. You cannot see who is shooting at you. Gunfires were coming from everywhere. You could not tell where they were coming from. And most of the killings that they, both by the police and by the civilians, the 117 civilians who were killed, most of them, they were killed in that forest. And this was happening at least eight hours after the operation started. For example, this sergeant that I was talking to, he had his breakfast on 3 a.m. in the morning. He went there to the favelas at 4 a.m. By 4 p.m., he was still engaging in gunfighting.

11:49That was when he was shot. So that's how we ended up with such a high number of victims.

12:11That's unbelievable. Yet another truck is now arriving. The locals are calling the media in to film the bodies as they're brought out.

12:23Community leaders calling out for people to bring more sheets and tarpaulin so these bodies can be laid down because incredibly they've run out of them. There are so many bodies here now. Oh my God, I've never seen anything like it. There's another one coming off now. Another.

12:43And all these women just standing around desperately trying to see if the men who are being unloaded are the relatives.

12:57And of course those women couldn't do anything to help. some of them subsequently told me that they tried to climb up the favela towards the forest and the police either shouted at them or opened fire on them and told them to turn back so they spent the next few hours in an utter state of despair and shock and gradually the messages that they had received stopped arriving one of the women who i spoke to called tawam brito had a 20-year-old son who was in the forest. She later identified him in police footage that showed dozens of armed men climbing up a staircase into the forest and was in contact with him on WhatsApp from about 4.30 until about 9, telling him to pray, to read the Bible, telling him that he needed to sort his life out, leave behind his life of crime, move out of the favela with her, and at some point at around nine those messages simply stopped.

14:00She wrote hello, hello and he had obviously been killed.

14:11We still don't have a very clear picture of what happened. When I arrived the following morning to see the bodies being carried out of the jungle many of those bodies were wearing camouflage uniforms ghillie suits used to blend in with the undergrowth and they were obviously members of the team of drug traffickers responsible for stopping police or rival gangs invading to use their terminology invading their favela and taking over but the families allege that some of those who were killed at least had already been captured when they were killed and that there were cases of extrajudicial executions, something that the police denies, and even just absolutely appalling acts of violence.

15:02One of the most, I mean, the most shocking thing I saw that morning, there was a moment where people just started shouting that one of the bodies had no head. And I looked over at the bodies coming off the truck and one of them had been decapitated and his head was put on the ground in a green pouch. And we subsequently saw a video that had been shot of this young man's head, which had been displayed on a tree as if some sort of medieval film. Police have claimed that the decapitated man was decapitated by the drug traffickers themselves in order to incriminate the police. Well, I don't think we'll ever know what really happened, but many people in the community do not believe that to be the case.

15:51So now we're in the main street and some of the families are just furious and they've started lifting the tarpaulins and the sheets off the dead men, shouting at the journalists here for us to film them to show what the government has done. And one lady has found her son amongst the dead, bullet wound, what looks like a bullet wound to the back of his head. and she's asking God to undo what's been done, but there's no undoing it. And she says she spoke with him shortly before he was killed and shortly he was trying to hand himself in to please. They killed him anyway. They came to kill, she says.

16:38The police really must have wanted this raid to achieve something tangible. You spoke to some of the key lieutenants involved in planning this operation. How long had this all been in the works? Yeah, police say this part specifically of the operation have been in the works for at least two months. It was just one phase of a bigger operation that is aimed on challenging, containing the Red Command. But police say that they are also doing the other parts that are important in this type of battle against organized crime, that is going after the manual and all of that. And it's also very important to say that the bear wasn't found that day.

17:23The police couldn't locate him and he remains at large. of the 100 arrest warrants police hoped to execute that day, only 17 were carried out. And do you think the police saw the operation as a success, even if the bear eluded them? Yeah, even though police considers this to be a success, we had that day five officers who were killed, another 14 who were injured. Never before had so many been killed or wounded in a single operation in Rio.

18:07And could you give me a sense of how the community and the families were reacting as the trucks came down that hill the next morning, loaded up with the bodies of those who died in the forest? Yeah, there was a mood. I don't think I've ever felt covering this kind of thing in Rio. Normally, you know, alongside the shock and the anger, there's also a kind of resignation that this is just part of the rhythm of life in Rio's favelas. People are used to it. But that morning, there was this feeling of just complete disbelief at the scale of it. no one had seen anything like it not the gangland lawyers not the journalists not the photographers you know not even the drug traffickers frankly whose life it is to do battle with police no one had ever seen anything like it so there was just this sort of dazed silence that every now and again erupted into real anger and women would start lifting up the sheets and the tarpaulins covering the bodies and shouting at us journalists, film it, film it, show the world what's happening, show people what's happening.

19:26Another woman saying that she was on a video call with one of the dead men, and he was preparing to hand himself in and asking not to be killed, and here he now is dead on the ground. And it was an appalling, just an appalling scene, and it was even more painful, whatever the rights and wrongs of whatever involvement these guys might have had with the drug gangs to watch their girlfriends and particularly mothers lift up those sheets and just to see these grotesquely disfigured bodies of very mostly very young men um you know I'm a dad I know you're a mum I just I couldn't imagine seeing seeing my son in that state and no actually some of them weren't that much older than my son

20:24what do we know about the people who were killed that day what did you find through your reporting afterwards of some of the people that lost their lives. So please here continue to insist that every single one of the 117 people who were killed that day were drug traffickers. We have discovered that at least one of those people had nothing to do with crime. He was a 46-year-old bricklayer. When the shooting started that morning, this man, Ronaldo Julien de Silva. He left his house because he lived alone. He was separated and he made a beeline for his sister's house. At about four o 'clock that afternoon, his niece took a photograph of Ronaldo with his shirt off, wearing red Bermuda shorts.

21:14And he looks very much like the sort of gentle, kind-hearted chap that locals and relatives we spoke to said that he was. At some point between about 6 and 7 p.m. on the day of the operation, Ronaldo decides to pop back to his house about a five minute walk from his sister's home to see if everything is okay. The shooting seems to have stopped and he never makes it. and a few hours later his ex-wife Giuliana and other relatives are led to this sewage-stained alleyway where Ronaldo was left for dead and he had been shot in the head and in the chest. We're walking down this very steep hill now with Giuliana The spot where her ex-husband was killed at some point, between 7pm and 10pm on the day of the operation.

22:16Sewage running down the middle of the street. All of the houses are closed up, there aren't many people around at all. I went back about a fortnight after the operation to try and find the spot where Ronaldo had been killed. and we drove up into the favela past the barricades which had been set on fire on the day of the operation that had now been entirely rebuilt. Drugs were again on sale and from all accounts had been back on sale from about 24 hours after the police operation and eventually we found the place where Ronaldo had been killed, according to locals. And we walked to his house, the house that he'd been trying to reach, which was right on the edge of the favela near the forest where all those deaths had taken place.

23:10And it's amazing to me that all these weeks after the crime, no other reporting has been done on the fact that this man was completely innocent and devastating for his family who are desperately trying to clear his name. so at least they have that to hang on to, that Ronaldo died and didn't deserve to and was in the wrong place evidently at the wrong time. Maybe it gets some compensation, but I don't think they have any real hope of that.

23:38Coming up, will this deadly raid become a blueprint for Brazil's police?

23:56The President of the National Council

24:02Eddie Veldham was one of the first people I met that morning. Huge guy, spent his whole life in the favela and is the president of one of the local residence associations. and he was one of the people who led that nocturnal search effort in the forest and was helping to bring the bodies down. By the time I met him, he'd already brought, I think, more than 50 bodies down overnight. 50 bodies? With local men and women who joined that mission. And tough guy, seen it all in his 40 years in the favela. and I just asked him why he'd done what he'd just done. Why did you do that?