Rio de Janeiro: A Topography of Fear
Rio is not just a city; it is a laboratory of disorder. A map where the State and organized crime overlap with the precision of an X-ray: the same territories, identical logics of power, similar instruments. The so-called Operation Containment, which left 132 dead in the favelas of Penha and Alemão, was not an extraordinary incursion but the culmination of a predictable cycle: when the State enters the margins, it does so with the grammar of war.
The official narrative — a legitimate offensive against the Comando Vermelho — faces another, more uncomfortable one: that of a massacre reminiscent of the institutional violence rituals of the nineties, when terror was legitimized in the name of order. From the Carandiru massacre (1992) to Jacarezinho (2021), Brazil has normalized the extermination of the poor as a method of governance. The novelty is not the violence, but its scale and its silence.
The Internal Enemy: Narco, State, and Legitimacy
The Comando Vermelho is not a simple criminal group. It is, in many ways, a parallel political structure, a product of the decay of the Brazilian State. Its genesis in the prisons of the seventies, during the military dictatorship, reveals the tragic irony: it was repression that incubated the germ of organized crime. What began as an alliance of common prisoners and political militants became a network with codes, hierarchies, and an order alternative to the state.
Today, that structure dominates territories, regulates economies, and administers justice. Faced with such factual power, the State oscillates between two temptations: to co-opt or to annihilate. But the dilemma is fallacious because both strategies share the same root: the systematic abandonment of the margins. When the police enter the favelas with helicopters and rifles, they are not combating crime: they are updating it under another uniform.
The Politics of Death
Achille Mbembe called necropolitics the power that decides who can live and who must die. In Brazil, that decision is neither abstract nor theoretical: it has a postal address and skin color. The favelas are areas where state sovereignty is exercised through extermination. There is no public policy, there are military campaigns; there is no social justice, there are “containment” operations.
What scandalizes about the operation in Penha and Alemão is not only the magnitude of the dead but the indifference surrounding it. An international investigation is demanded, but the internal debate seems anesthetic. On social media, polarization trivializes the tragedy: some celebrate the “blow to drug trafficking,” while others denounce a genocide. Both discourses reduce complexity to a hashtag.
Ideological Hypocrisy and the Comfort of Silence
If this massacre had occurred under Jair Bolsonaro, the streets would be ablaze. International organizations would have multiplied their statements, and progressive sectors would demand justice. But it happens under a government of another political sign, and silence becomes selective. Public morality, so loud in some cases, becomes mute in others.
State violence does not change its nature due to the color of the party executing it. Condemning crime — whether that of gangs or law enforcement — should not have a flag. However, contemporary politics seems to have renounced ethical coherence: indignation is activated by convenience, not conviction.
The Culture of Crime as a Common Enemy
The majority of the dead, according to authorities, belonged to networks linked to drug trafficking: men and adolescents trapped in the economy of crime, victims and perpetrators of a system that renders them disposable. This culture of crime — which glorifies violence, prostitution, and the business of death — has achieved something that neither politics nor religion have managed: to unify entire communities under its logic.
The common enemy of humanity is not ideological differences but the global crime industry that devours lives, resources, and futures. From Mexico to Sicily, from the Balkans to the favelas of Rio, organized crime functions as a transnational parallel power, sustained by state corruption, illegal consumption, and moral indifference. Combating it requires more than operations: it demands an ethical and cultural revolution.
Between Legitimacy and Barbarism
Governor Cláudio Castro defended the operation as an act of “territory recovery,” but in practice reaffirmed the old Latin American equation: authority without legitimacy, order without justice. Every bullet fired in the name of the law undermines the very rule of law it claims to protect.
The UN demands explanations, but the Brazilian State responds with technicalities. And while governments discuss competencies, bodies continue to pile up in the squares. The inhabitants of Penha and Alemão, accustomed to surviving between two fires, returned to carry the dead with improvised stretchers. In their silence, there is more dignity than in all the political discourse of Brasilia.
Epilogue: The Echo of Gunfire
Perhaps the real failure lies not in the violence but in our ability to justify it. When society accepts extermination as routine, crime has already won.
Brazil does not need more bullets or more speeches, but a moral catharsis. A collective consciousness capable of recognizing that there can be no possible peace while human life remains disposable material.
The question that hangs over the rooftops of the favelas is not who is to blame, but how much longer can a democracy that kills to sustain itself survive.
Can a society build justice on the grave of its margins? Or is it doomed to repeat violence as an act of political faith?
The future of Brazil — and perhaps that of Latin America — will depend on whether we learn to distinguish between security and vengeance, between authority and authoritarianism, between justice and spectacle.
Because as long as blood remains the language of order, civilization will not have triumphed: it will only have changed uniforms.
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