Massacre in Brazil today, by Tom Phillips

I met my first Brazilian friends during my Gap Year abroad in 1966. They were the kindest, best educated and most moral people I had ever met. And we kept writing for years, even after we had all married and left our homelands. But this week, I had to rely on a guest author from the most reliable newspaper:  "This was a slaughter, not an operation" by Tom Phillips in Guardian, Thu 30 Oct 2025

Day had yet to break over Vila Cruzeiro but already dozens of corpses were splayed out along the favela/slum’s main drag after more than 130 people were killed during the deadliest police operation in Rio’s history: grotesquely disfigured, blood-smeared bodies that had been dragged out of nearby forests and dumped on blue tarpaulins and black plastic sheets covering the street.

Residents of Vila Cruzeiro gather bodies after they were killed in pre-dawn assault

The Guardian 

Erivelton Vidal Correia, head of the local residents’ association, bleary-eyed from a sleepless night spent hauling bullet-riddled local men down from the hills, brought 53 down himself. Correia collapsed as he described his relentless nocturnal hunt for the dead after Rio suffered what was one of the biggest police massacres in modern Brazilian history. I’ve never seen anything like this in my life, not even in the Gaza Strip does this happen … I can’t bear to see any more corpses, he wept, covering his face with the surgical gloves he was using.

Rio officials said on Tuesday that dozens of people, including 4 police officers, had been killed after a force of 2,500 launched a pre-dawn assault on Alemão and Penha, the vast patchwork of favelas of which Vila Cruzeiro is part. By early Wednesday the public prosecutor said the death toll had risen to 132, higher than in São Paulo’s notorious Carandiru prison massacre in 1992, when 111 prisoners lost their lives. Between 4.15-9am, when government body collectors finally arrived, the Guardian witnessed pickup trucks delivering dozens of corpses to a Vila Cruzeiro square named after St Luke the Evangelist.

I’ve never seen anything like this … I still haven’t managed to comprehend what has happened. I feel empty. I have no words, said Raull Santiago, a favela activist, as another cargo of corpses arrived. This sent local women scrambling in search of their missing husbands, brothers or sons.

Many of the dead men, most in their late teens, 20s and 30s, are likely to have been members of the local Red Command drug faction, which Tuesday’s operation was intended to target. Most of the corpses were unclothed but a few wore ghillie suits, camouflage clothing used by snipers, hunters and nature photographers to be conceal in foliage. But there was fury among the scores of people who had flocked to the plaza and who claimed police had summarily executed the young men instead of detaining them. Irrespective of whether these people were involved in the local drug trade or not, we don’t have the death penalty in Brazil. They should have been arrested, he said.

Murderers! Murderers! cried Cida Santana, recalling how her son Fabio had messaged her at 3pm on Tuesday to tell her he had been shot in the foot and was trying to surrender to police. 16 hours later Fabio’s corpse was shrouded under a blood-stained floral rug with what looked like knife wounds to his chest. My God! Work a miracle, God! Santana begged, as she collapsed on to the ground beside her child. But there was to be no resurrection for her son, nor for the dozens of other bodies lined up beside him outside a sushi restaurant with bullet wounds to their limbs, torsos and heads. One had been dec-apitated, the person’s head stashed inside an olive green pouch that was placed on the ground. Several men had badly broken bones or puncture wounds in their flesh.

At times, as pickup trucks continued to deliver the dead, a stunned silence fell over the mob. No one had ever seen bloodshed on this scale, not even veteran crime reporters. Rio’s deadliest police attack had been a 2021 raid on another Red Command centre, Jacarezino when 28 people were killed. It’s surreal, said Antônio Carlos Costa, a church leader-human rights campaigner, calling for the immediate removal of Rio’s governor, Cláudio Castro. He is an ally of Brazil’s former far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro.

Costa called the killings a historic humiliation for Brazil just before next month’s Cop climate summit in the Amazon city of Belém. At other moments, onlookers exploded in rage as they took in the nightmarish scene. Shell-shocked friends and relatives of the deceased ripped off the sheets covering their mangled bodies and demanded journalists film the butchery to show the world.

Police officers escort surviving "criminals" arrested at Vila Cruzeiro favela.

Irish Times

Help us, please, implored Cláudia Silva 53 shaking with rage as she denounced what she and others called a genocide. When they come in here, they kill even the rats, she said of the police. This was a slaughter, not an operation. They came here to kill, said Cida Santana as she sat on a blood-covered bin liner next to her son’s corpse. In 30 years working in the favelas this is the greatest act of savagery, the biggest massacre he’d seen, said lawyer Pinheiro Fróes who’d come to support the families of the dead.

Claudio Castro continued to defend the operation amid a growing chorus of outrage, including from the UN’s human rights office which was horrified by the killings. Rio’s governor celebrated a harsh blow to the heavily-armed drug traffickers who have seized control of many of Rio’s hundreds of favelas over the past 40 years. The only victims yesterday were the police, Castro said of the four officers killed during Tuesday’s intense gun battles with criminals he called narco-terrorists. As the governor spoke, Edmar Augusto 50, a priest with a purple stole draped over his shoulders, sprinkled holy water on the 50+ bodies that had accumulated at the entrance to the favela.

We don’t want war. We want peace, Augusto told the favela’s mourners, his voice breaking with emotion. So many families are crying. And I want to cry with them. Society cannot stay silent, the priest bellowed, staring sky-wards to recite the Lord’s prayer. As he waited for another carload of bodies to arrive, community leader Correia recalled how two decades earlier a group of local evangelical missionaries had warned that the favela would one day suffer a momentous bloodbath. We didn’t believe them. We never believed it would happen. But they prophesised it and it came to pass.

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Poor, poor Brazil :( I hope my old friends' siblings and colleagues survived.