By Manuela Andreoni, Fabio Teixeira and Luciana Magalhaes
RIO DE JANEIRO, Dec 20 (Reuters) – Just after midnight on October 28, a group of police officers were startled by roughly 20 armed men on motorcycles fleeing the Alemão favela, one of the headquarters of Rio de Janeiro’s most notorious gangs.
A shootout broke out. Two of the men were hit and fell. As they lay dying from their wounds, they told the officers the group had “leaked information” that police were closing in on the headquarters of the Comando Vermelho gang, and they were looking to escape, according to a police incident report from that day seen by Reuters.
A couple of hours later, fireworks rang out over Alemão and the neighboring Penha favela, a common way of warning that police were approaching, two residents told Reuters. People started taking shelter wherever they could.
“Your adrenaline is sky-high,” said Wazen Ferreira, a local journalist who hid in a bar with other residents when the fireworks started. “Your mouth goes dry, and all you feel is thirst.”
At around 4 a.m., over a dozen black armored trucks and several police cars started converging on the favela complex carrying hundreds of officers into dimly-lit streets.
Gang members set fire to rolls of tires and old cars to block Penha’s wider streets, sending dark fumes curling into the sky where police drones struggled to track the gang’s movements in a maze of alleyways and dirt tracks.
What came next was a 17-hour firefight that left at least 121 dead, including four police officers. A fifth officer died weeks later from his injuries.
The police operation, the deadliest in Brazil’s history, was designed to neutralize the local leadership of the Comando Vermelho gang. Officials have called the operation a success and promised more of its kind.
But a Reuters review of depositions from eight senior officers, witness interviews, police reports and video evidence paints a different picture: leaks sent suspects fleeing, police fell into a deadly trap that forced a rescue mission, and the leadership of Comando Vermelho emerged unscathed.
Two weeks after the raid, Reuters had to go through makeshift barricades and gang checkpoints to access the favela.
A dozen residents, local leaders, and government officials told Reuters that the raid had done nothing to break the gang’s hold on the community.
“They still believe in this failed public safety plan,” Albert Alves, who heads a local education nonprofit, said of authorities as he inspected bullet holes in the mirror of their ballet room. “It has gone on for a long time and has no results.”
WALKING INTO A TRAP
By the time police rolled into the neighboring Penha and Alemão favelas, gang leader Edgar Alves de Andrade, known as Doca, and his closest lieutenants may have known they were coming for days.
Inclement weather, which spoils visibility for police drones, had led security forces to reschedule the raid repeatedly, allowing rumors to circulate online, Andre Luiz de Souza Neves, one of the police directors who planned the raid, told prosecutors.
Though officers told prosecutors they did not identify any leaks of their plans, some said the decision to employ an extraordinary number of trucks and troops may have alerted gang scouts who follow police movements.
“We didn’t get there with the element of surprise,” said Fabricio Oliveira Pereira, who heads the civil police special unit, in his deposition.
Although the gang knew they were coming, police pressed ahead with their plan to serve warrants at Doca’s home, known as the “Bear’s Den,” where the Comando Vermelho was thought to have stashed weapons, drugs and accounting records.
They never got there. As they approached the address before 9 a.m., officers leading the advance were hit with gunfire from the hillside above, according to police depositions and incident reports.
Officer Bernardo Leal Annes Dias, 45, was in an alley behind Doca’s house when he took a bullet to the right leg, later amputated in the hospital after he was rescued on the back of a motorcycle.
Around the corner, Detective Marcus Vinicius Cardoso de Carvalho, 51, was killed with a shot to the chest.
Police realized the men had walked into a trap.
The officers running the raid decided they needed to send backup to “contain” the gang members firing from the hillside, said Moyses Santana Gomes, head of the anti-narcotics division, in his deposition.
But not all the civil police officers that they sent in were ready for what awaited them.
That team included 34-year-old Rodrigo Velloso Cabral, who had joined the service two months before.
Police drone footage showed five of his colleagues walking shoulder-to-shoulder down a dirt track leading to forested hills that commanders had seen gang members entering hours earlier.
As the group came under fire, one officer fell to the ground, grasping at his leg. Another lifted a bloody hand.
As they took cover, Cabral, several meters behind them, retreated with another colleague toward safer ground. Just after that, senior officers said, he was killed with a shot to the head.
None of the men were wearing helmets.
AMBUSHED FROM ABOVE
In Brazil, the civil police are in charge of investigating crimes, while military police are responsible for preventing them.
Both forces have tactical units, including the military police’s BOPE division, which has been involved in some of Brazil’s deadliest raids and whose emblem – a skull pierced by a dagger – is known throughout the country as a symbol of police lethality.
In the raid against the Comando Vermelho, civil police were deployed into the favela to search for suspects and seize evidence, while the more militarized BOPE division took up positions on the surrounding hills above the Penha and Alemão favela complexes in northern Rio, where some 280,000 people live.
The two favelas are separated by more than a kilometer of rolling hills known as Serra da Misericordia, or Mercy Ridge, carved by rock quarries and draped in thickets of tropical forest.
In prior raids on the favelas, gang members had escaped and received reinforcement across the hills. To prevent that, a BOPE unit climbed from Alemão to the top of Mercy Ridge shortly after 5 a.m. to apprehend suspects and keep watch over the civil police serving warrants below.
“More important than the war is who stands by our side in the trenches,” BOPE commander Corbage told his officers before the raid, in a video later shared online. “Let’s fight for our brothers!”
Around 10 a.m., when news of the first police casualties reached the BOPE unit on Mercy Hill, some abandoned their positions for what their commander Marcelo Corbage later called a “rescue mission,” while a second group stayed back to hold their strategic position on the hill.
Only their unit had paramedics, he told prosecutors in a deposition.
Police estimated there were some 500 armed gang members in Penha, and hundreds more in Alemão.
Victor dos Santos, Rio’s secretary of public safety, told Reuters that the plan was to dispatch a total of 2,500 officers to the area because they wanted a five-to-one numerical advantage.
Santos said that ratio meant “in theory, the criminal would be intimidated by this police force and would surrender.”
But in reports filed to prosecutors, police only said they had sent 1,100 men into the Penha complex that morning, or roughly a two-to-one ratio.
Marcelo de Menezes, head of Rio’s military police, declined to confirm that number, but told Reuters in an interview that the 2,500 officers cited by the government included a contingent supporting the raid from a distance, including patrols of the surrounding neighborhoods.
As BOPE came out of the hills, they found their colleagues under fire. Police drone footage showed dozens of suspected gang members, many armed with rifles and dressed in camo-patterned combat fatigues, had entered the lower fringes of the forested hills.
A police drone showed two BOPE officers dragging Cabral’s body down a dirt trail, as gang members hid behind trees nearby.
With two police officers already dead and five wounded, BOPE Captain Jansen Ferret told prosecutors the officers had to keep the gang from “decimating” more of their colleagues.
At that moment, he said, their mission “turned into a fight for life.”
Reuters could not determine how a group of BOPE officers fought off the gang to rescue the rest of their wounded colleagues.
By around 1 p.m. the BOPE rescue team had lost one of their own officers with a shot to the head; another was rushed to the hospital with a shot to the chest and died after doctors tried to resuscitate him for 40 minutes. Seven others on the team were injured.
Among the gang members who hid in the woods was Wellington Brito, 20, whose mother Taua told Reuters that she had noticed he was bringing home more money since he started consorting with gang members. Reuters could not verify if he was armed.
As gunfire echoed through the favela, Taua texted her son and found out he was on the run.
“I told you to stay home,” she wrote at 7:12 a.m. in texts viewed by Reuters. “You don’t need to go through this.”
Fifteen minutes later, he wrote back that his hope was to “clear my name,” adding: “I just want this all to end.”
‘WE WON’T MAKE IT OUT OF HERE ALIVE’
None of the edited footage police released to the press showed what happened that afternoon in detail, though civil rights organizations and public defenders have pressed prosecutors and the Supreme Court to release footage from drones and the bodycams police officers wore.
What is certain is that little of it was planned. Civil police filed legal documents that morning for an operation concluding by noon. Military police told the prosecutors overseeing police activity that they expected to be done by 5 p.m.
BOPE’s Corbage told prosecutors his unit did not think to bring spare batteries for the 77 bodycams they brought for the 215 officers deployed, because they did not expect the operation to last more than six hours.
Brazil’s Supreme Court ruled in 2022 that every police officer deployed to Rio favelas must be equipped with a working body camera.
That decision was part of Brazil’s response to its conviction before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights for Rio police killings in 1994 and 1995. The record death tolls have only climbed since then.
As the carnage stretched on that afternoon, fear took hold of officers, said Neves, one of the police directors, in his deposition.
“We won’t make it out of here alive,” he recalled one colleague telling him after the raid.
Neves said as the hours passed, police learned which of their colleagues had been shot, creating “a huge sense of anguish” for officers still in the line of fire.
In some of Rio’s most lethal police operations, death counts have soared after early police casualties, including a raid that left 28 dead in the nearby Jacarezinho favela in 2021 – previously Brazil’s deadliest.
“There is a recurring pattern of revenge, where officers enforce their own sense of justice,” said Adilson Paes de Souza, a former military police officer in the state of Sao Paulo, who researches police lethality.
Santos, Rio’s secretary of public safety, told Reuters that there was “no massacre,” and that people were killed because they decided to confront the police.
“Obviously, it’s not reasonable to expect an officer not to try to save his own life or that of a colleague,” he added.
BODIES PILED
As rifle fire rattled through the afternoon, schools shut down, bus lines stopped circulating, and major streets across Rio were blocked with buses burned in retaliation by criminals, police said.
Victims, most already dead, began arriving in a nearby hospital. Families missing relatives gathered at police headquarters for news.
The shooting slowed after sunset, when Brazilians learned on the nightly news that the body count had risen to 64, already enough to make it the deadliest raid in Rio’s history.
But many Penha residents still had friends and relatives missing. Erivelton Vidal, a community leader, was with several families who set out from their residents’ association below the hill in Penha to go looking on Mercy Ridge.
When they arrived, they could still see an armored truck, he said.
The elite police unit had collected dozens of bodies, their commander Corbage said in his deposition, citing the instructions of a senior officer overseeing police forensics.
Witness videos show a caravan of five mortuary vans arrived at the Rio police morgue after 10:30 p.m. that evening.
Transporting corpses before forensic analysis creates serious challenges for an independent investigation of the dozens of killings that day.
“The removal of the already lifeless bodies constitutes a violation of the current legislation,” said Cassio Thyone, a forensics expert with the Brazilian Forum for Public Security, a think tank.
Around 9 p.m. on the night of the raid, Vidal said residents came upon several corpses in the area.
One group found a severed head stuck between tree branches, registered in a video that was verified by family members and a congressional report.
Taua Brito, Wellington’s mother, was among them. By the light of her cell phone, she followed a path into the woods past dozens of bodies without finding her son.
Vidal said the citizen search party decided to bring the bodies down to a main street in the community so residents could identify their loved ones.
“I asked them not to, because there is a kindergarten there,” he said. But, he added, “the majority prevailed.”
Through the night, residents told Reuters that they hauled dozens of bodies into pickup trucks and carried them down to Penha’s main square, removing bloodstained clothes from many of the corpses.
Mothers and children watched the line of undressed men grow, some with their organs spilled out, others with faces mangled beyond recognition, stabbed, headless or missing limbs.
Brito found her son Wellington’s body under a blood-stained sheet, lined up with dozens of bodies in the middle of the street. She kneeled next to him and cried, stroking his face.
(Reporting by Manuela Andreoni, Fabio Teixiera, and Luciana Magalhaes in Rio de Janeiro. Additional reporting by Janaina Quinet in Rio de Janeiro. Editing by Brad Haynes and Michael Learmonth)
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