The necropolitics of a massacre in Rio de Janeiro

 

The Massacre  

 

On October 28th 2025 the city of Rio de Janeiro lived through a day of chaos. Before the break of dawn, a "mega-raid" was launched by a 2500-strong police force at the heart of two densely populated neighbourhoods - Penha and Alemão - with a combined population of 230,000. The official reason given for the operation was to disrupt operations, re-take territory, and fulfill 100 arrest warrants for members and leaders of Rio's largest organized crime faction: the CV (Commando Vermelho, Red Command). 

 

For the next 20 hours, the heart of the metropolitan region became a war-zone with helicopters, armoured vehicles, burned barricades, closed streets, cancelled bus lines, constant shootouts, and an improvised bomb-dropping drone. What followed was a familiar experience for the entire city: closed businesses, cancelled classes, delayed flights, and many calls to check on family and friends. Official statements at the end of the day announced 64 dead, including 4 police officers. The police also arrested 133 suspects, seized 93 rifles, and apprehended over one ton of drugs. The Governor overseeing the operation declared it a success. 

 

Around midnight, the local community formed search parties to look for the missing and unaccounted in a forest up the hill. By daybreak, over 60 bodies had been found, and were lined up in the street for identification. Some had tied hands and signs of summary executions. One was decapitated. 

 

The massacre totalled 133 dead, registering as the deadliest police operation in Brazil's history. What follows is a perspective on how we got here. 

 

The Beautiful City  

 

Rio, once the capital of the nation during colonial times, has two major geographical features: a huge bay facing the Atlantic - with calmer waters that function as a natural harbour - and a collection of mountains and hills that at one time housed thick rainforest vegetation. 

 

The bay was central during the Atlantic slave trade between Portugal and Britain, exchanging coffee, sugar, and enslaved people as commodities for over 300 years. No land reform was ever implemented following the end of legalized slavery, resulting in one of the world's highest rates of wealth inequality. Today, major banks originally funded with inheritances from the slave-tradecharge one of the world's highest interest rates for a population that lives overwhelmingly in debt. It's financial-capital refined to the tune of sugar cane plantations. 

 

The hills create a unique dynamic in how this inequality plays out. Unlike in São Paulo, where the poorest live at the periphery of the city, Rio's geography and its chaotic urbanization process created over 1000 slums on its many hills: "favelas". Spread everywhere throughout the city and flanking many of its main commuter routes, these favelas house the most neglected by the government's austerity policies. And because, as a rule, there are no political vacuums, organized crime took over. 

 

The Vicious Cycle  

 

Rio's organized crime factions have been growing and expanding their territories for decades. Though every crime organization has its zone of influence, Rio's favelas have the particular tactical advantage of high-ground vantage points with irregular and labyrinthian streets, making access especially difficult to outsiders. In practice, this means that a faction's territory is always in potential dispute by a rival faction and their control over it must be backed by numbers and firepower. Within their territory, a faction sets the laws, the prices, and can walk in broad daylight with open-carry firearms. Operationally, drugs and guns are as relevant as supply chains, cash flows, and franchises, making these factions very similar to any profit-seeking enterprise but with violence as the rule rather than the exception.

 

The communities who live under their control are subjected to a whole new level of oppression, exploitation, and social marginalization that make joining the local faction a tantalizing proposition. As a result, the poorest and overwhelmingly non-white (black or mixed) population both suffers from and is blamed for the city's ever increasing epidemic of phone thefts, car robberies, murders, kidnappings, shootouts, and all manner of crime and violence. 

 

There once existed a path, now untaken, to prevent the current state of affairs. In the years following the end of the 21-year military dictatorship, Rio elected one of the most forward thinking and prepared Governors the country had ever seen. Leonel Brizola put into action a plan for educational revolution: the large-scale deployment of high-quality public schools for marginalized communities. In addition to the more direct socioeconomic development aims of the project, there was an aspect of public safety in the understanding that there would never  be any lasting solution to organized crime that didn't involve providing an alternative future to the youth who make up the bulk of its labour force recruitment. 

 

Instead, after Brizola's tenure, the project was kneecapped and defunded. In the decades that followed, the marriage of electoral politics and rampant State corruption gave rise to one of the most disgruntled and reactionary electoral blocks in the country. To date, almost all elected Rio de Janeiro Governors since Brizola (6 out of 8) have been charged and found guilty of  corruption schemesrelated to election vote-buying, embezzlement, and briberies, with multiple of them still under arrest. Claudio Castro, the current Governor and member of Bolsonaro's far right party, won as a Vice-Governor slate candidate together with the latest Governor to be arrested for corruptionwhile still in office, making him the current Governor. 

 

And yet, it gets worse. Investigation reportssuggest that up to half of Rio's current Legislative Assembly has connections to organized crime. Most of them are investigated, charged, or found guilty of being involved in all imaginable mannerof cover-ups, widespread bribery, money laundering, and even a high-profile execution. A major feature of this degree of organized crime is an almost mandatory insertion into State institutions and the financial market. There is only so much money you can launder with churches and gas stations, and recent police investigations have revealed high-profile cases of organized crime factions embedded into tech-financial institutions like e-banks and betting apps. 

 

Not to be left out of their share of profits, off-duty or former police and military formed "militias": paramilitary groups that collect protection rackets to "displace" local factions.

 

Occupying a significant chunk of the city, these militias have their own rivalries, disputes, turf wars, and often get into the same businesses as the crime factions, from service surcharges to money laundering and executions. These militias are often backed by local politicians and deadly police operations rarely happen in their controlled areas. 

 

Meanwhile, with an electorate lacking even their basic needs like food and safety, long-term and high-minded socioeconomic projects don't win elections: outrage does.

 

Academic and polite politics fundamentally fail to appeal to a people who - just to survive - must think with their bellies before their heads. And it is in that context that the dehumanization of "others ” becomes increasingly acceptable. A people who must live in constant fear for themselves and their families have no issue with policies that say that "a good thug is a dead thug" and that the State should deal with crime with "bullets, beatings, and bombs", not sociology.

 

And because "if it bleeds, it leads", both traditional and social media play a profitable role in this perpetual erosion of empathy. Polarization engages, and after each massacre, a new low is reached with a torrent of "not enough dead" comments. Pollsters hit the streets and report overall support for latest police operation, in particular within faction-occupied neighbourhoods, while spreadsheets are filled for someone's next electoral map. Though there is also popular mobilization to condemn the police violence, they are labelled as faction sympathizers and soft leftists protecting criminals. It's "us versus them" like cops and robbers. Nuance be damned. 

 

To complete this vicious cycle, the inefficacy of these policies in addressing the issue of  organized crime becomes not a downside, but a feature for maintaining power through elections under capitalism. When wealth and votes are the keys to power instead of results, corrupt elites can reliably funnel embezzled funds into marketing and outreach for their re-election's anti-corruption slogans and tough-on-crime soundbites. The result is an ever more militarized and lethal police force, with a higher rate of suicides and incidents of violent crime, and a matching response from organized crime factions that know few prisoners will be taken. 

 

In the realpolitik of necropolitics, success is measured by the body count.