Brazil’s deadliest police raid failed to capture or kill gang leaders

Authorities in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil say at least 64 people, including four police officers, were killed in the raids targeting a gang.

RIO DE JANEIRO -- The governor of Rio de Janeiro has touted the deadliest police raid in Brazilian history as a success, but none of the 117 people killed by police were among the 69 suspects named by prosecutors in the complaint providing the basis for the raid.

Only five of those named in the criminal complaint were arrested that day and none were senior leaders of the notorious Comando Vermelho gang, according to a Reuters review of the full police report on the operation shared with the Brazilian Supreme Court.

The raid, known as Operation Containment, left 121 people dead, including four police officers and two teenagers, and 99 suspects were taken into custody.

The raid also failed to arrest or kill senior figures in the Comando Vermelho gang that investigators say is headquartered in the neighborhoods the police raided. The main leader of the gang, Edgar Alves de Andrade, known as Doca, remains at large.

One mid-level gang leader was detained without a shot fired, according to the police report, reviewed exclusively by Reuters.

The findings challenge the official account of the raid, carried out in two densely-populated working-class neighborhoods known as favelas on the north side of the state capital. After the operation, local residents lined up dozens of dead bodies in the streets.

The raid, which came a week before world leaders began arriving for the United Nations climate summit COP30, has pitted leftist President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who called it disastrous, against conservatives who say it is a model to fight organized crime.

While Lula’s administration has backed police operations aimed at disrupting organized crime financing, rivals on the right like Rio Governor Claudio Castro argue for aggressive raids to seize weapons and arrest or kill gang members, despite the high human cost.

Rio’s public safety secretary, Victor dos Santos, who oversees the police, confirmed to Reuters that the government’s goal in the raid was to arrest the men who had been charged. But, he added, “it wasn’t very easy to look for 69 people among the 280,000” who live in the favelas that were targeted by the raid.

Although 19 of the men killed had no prior criminal record, according to documents in the investigation, Santos said he was 100 per cent certain that they were criminals.

He argued that the number of people killed and arrested showed that “the picture is a lot worse than what the investigation showed.” He said other raids are planned for the coming months in the favelas of Rio.

Still, the initial results of the raid fueled criticism from the families of the victims, as well as human rights advocates, that police killed indiscriminately instead of pursuing clear objectives based on long-running investigations into the Comando Vermelho gang, one of the largest and most violent in Brazil.

The police “detain them, execute them and it’s all good, because they know there is no law here,” said Samuel Peçanha, whose 14-year-old son Michel was killed during the raid. “In Brazil, that’s normal.”

Though Peçanha said his son Michel, one of the teenagers, was part of the gang, he still had hopes of convincing him to take a different path.

“He was still a child,” he said. “Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get him out.”

‘I just want this to end’

Taua Brito, 36, said she had been waiting in anguish for hours for a response from her 20-year-old son, Wellington, when she decided to leave her home and go looking for him.

Wellington, a member of the local gang, told her he had been hiding in the forested hills above their favela as police raided the neighborhood. In one of his last messages to her, reviewed by Reuters, he said he planned to clear his name: “I just want this all to end already.”

She hiked into the woods in the middle of the night using her cellphone to light the path. “I must have seen some 50 bodies,” she said. “I found my son at around 1:30 a.m.”

Wellington, his mother said, was shot in the head, she said, and stabbed in the arm.

Brito was among the many mothers and other residents who ventured into the hills overnight and came back with dozens of bodies they later lined up in a busy street where locals shop and children play soccer.

The body of 19-year-old Yago Ravel was headless, according to public records and a video reviewed by Reuters.

Others had stab wounds, residents say.

Santos, the public safety secretary, said the gruesome injuries were likely inflicted by members of the gang, adding that preliminary analysis showed the decapitated man was already dead when his head was cut off.

“It’s likely criminals themselves did it to create this barbaric scene,” said Santos. “Forensics will tell.”

Police say that residents have compromised the crime scene, making it difficult to investigate what happened in the forested hills behind the favela. No forensics team was called to analyze the scene later, Santos said.

Beatriz Nolasco, Yago Ravel’s aunt, said she had no faith that the family will ever find out what happened to her nephew.

“We will never be able to accept how he was killed, with his head torn off and placed on a tree,” she said.

Brazil recorded 44,127 intentional violent deaths in 2024, down 5.4 per cent from the previous year, according to the Brazilian Forum on Public Safety. In 2024, 6,243 people were killed by police, an average of 17 deaths per day.

Santos argued the raid involving 2,500 police officers “showed that the state holds the monopoly on the use of force.”

Critics say it will not curb the gang violence that has plagued the city of Rio for decades.

“For a moment, you disassemble an armed group, a movement linked to drug trafficking, but it doesn’t end,” said Pedro Carriello, a public defender assisting family members of those killed. “What remains are the losses of the families.”

Though a nationwide survey by AtlasIntel published on Friday showed 55 per cent of Brazilians backed the police operation, family members of the victims said the police did not do their job.

“The police had the right to arrest my son,” said Brito, Wellington’s mother. “But not to kill him.”

Reporting by Ricardo Brito in Brasilia and Luciana Magalhaes and Fabio Teixeira in Rio de Janeiro, Rodrigo Viga Gaier contributed reporting from Rio de Janeiro; Writing by Manuela Andreoni; Editing by Brad Haynes and Michael Learmonth, Reuters