In September 2025, the project “Slavery and Its Legacies: Contestations, Memory and Change” had just begun when a team of curators, academics, and filmmakers gathered for our first in-person meeting in Niterói, Brazil. This meeting was both deeply meaningful and highly anticipated, as it was the first time all 18 members of the team had met face-to-face. Since our group is spread across Ghana, Brazil, Dominica, Canada, and different parts of the UK, for some of us it was even the very first time meeting one another. We arrived in Rio de Janeiro at the beginning of a new collaborative journey and a long-awaited encounter.

Rio de Janeiro - more specifically, a region known as Pequena África (“Little Africa”) - is one of the project’s main research sites. On the second day of our meeting, the entire group visited the area and its most significant historical sites connected to the transatlantic slave trade and the Black communities established there afterwards. During our visit, we went to the Valongo Wharf, the port that received the largest number of enslaved Africans in the Americas. We also visited the André Rebouças Warehouse Docks, designed by the first Black engineer in Brazil, after whom the building is now named. Remarkably, it was the only structure built during the slavery period that did not use enslaved labour — a non-negotiable condition imposed by André Rebouças himself.

After lunch, we continued our walk through the city. Passing by Central do Brasil station, we took the cable car that crosses over Morro da Providência, widely recognised as Brazil’s first favela. The community emerged after Black residents were expelled from tenement housing by the state under urban “sanitisation” policies. 

Forced out, they climbed the hill and settled there from 1897 onward. We were heading toward the Museum of Afro-Brazilian History and Culture (MUHCAB), an institution committed to preserving the history, memory, resistance, and cultural development of Afro-Brazilian communities in the Pequena África region. But we never reached it.

At that moment, we did not yet know that the state government of Rio de Janeiro had launched a major police operation against the organised crime group Comando Vermelho in two favelas in the city’s North Zone — Complexo do Alemão and Penha. As the death toll increased, tension spread throughout the city to the point that businesses and cultural institutions, including MUHCAB, closed their doors. By the time we arrived at the museum that afternoon, it had already shut down to visitors, and we were advised not to remain in the streets.

Amid the growing fear and lack of information, our local partners took us to the headquarters of IPN — the Instituto de Pesquisa e Memória Pretos Novos (Institute for Research and Memory of the New Blacks), which preserves what is considered the largest cemetery of enslaved Africans in the Americas. There, behind closed doors, we listened to our partners speak about the violence and the dead of the past while we waited for news about the violence and the dead of the present.

On that tragic day, October 28, 2025, the lives of 122 people were interrupted — 118 alleged suspects and 4 police officers. The violence did not simply disrupt our schedule; it affected us profoundly as individuals and professionals - curators, academics, and filmmakers who research and work with narratives surrounding not only the violent past of the transatlantic slave trade, but also its legacies and continuities in contemporary society.

When we finally returned to the hotel, after tensions in the streets had somewhat lessened due to fears of retaliation from the criminal group, we were confronted with devastating news reports and horrifying images of bodies being carried by residents themselves. The state had arrived, carried out a massacre, and left the community to collect its own dead.

Unfortunately, this reality is not uncommon in Brazil. A 2015 report by Amnesty International already identified the Brazilian police as the deadliest police force in the world. Since then, the number of deaths caused by police operations has nearly tripled, reaching 6,393 victims in 2023 and 6,519 in 2025. Despite these alarming figures, very little has been done to change this reality. On the contrary, political interests continue to sustain confrontation-based security policies. Brazilian policing remains marked by the use of heavy weaponry and low levels of accountability for abuses.

In his book A História da Polícia no Brasil: Estado de Exceção Permanente? (“The History of the Police in Brazil: A Permanent State of Exception?”), Almir Felitte (2023) argues that the history of policing in Brazil has been more closely linked to the control of free Black populations than to the policing of enslaved people themselves. Fellite describes how the control once exercised privately by slaveholders during the nineteenth century was transferred to the state after abolition, with police institutions becoming central to the criminalisation of poverty and Black populations. It is therefore no coincidence that favelas remain the primary targets of the country’s most violent military operations.

The profile of the victims remains constant: predominantly young Black people from peripheral neighbourhoods and favelas. Data from the report Pele Alvo: Crônicas de Dor e Luta (“Targeted Skin: Chronicles of Pain and Struggle”), produced by the Rede de Observatórios da Segurança, reveals that 86.2% of individuals killed by police were Black. This selectivity - combined with the lack of meaningful public policy aimed at reducing these numbers - demonstrates that police lethality continues, as it has since its formation, to function as a mechanism for controlling Black bodies.

An analysis of the judicial decision authorising the October 28 operation in Alemão and Penha revealed that none of the 118 individuals killed was on the list of suspects with pretrial arrest warrants. Nevertheless, the governor of Rio de Janeiro publicly described the mega-operation as a success, stating that the police officers killed were the only victims.

Governor Cláudio Castro’s statement revealed a profound disregard for and dehumanisation of Black favela lives in Brazil. As a democratically elected governor, he made no call for investigation, nor did he express concern for the affected families and communities - despite the fact that approximately 33% of Rio de Janeiro’s population currently lives in favelas. The supposed “war on drugs” and the police forces that are theoretically meant to protect citizens instead become instruments of dehumanisation in its crudest form.

The scale of the violence deeply affected our group. We decided to dedicate the following day to reflection - to process our emotions, our outrage, and even our disbelief at what we had witnessed. Although we are an international group of professionals who study the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade, we were certainly not prepared for this kind of violence, nor for how normalised it has become, how quickly life continues as if nothing had happened.

After the governor’s statement, there was very little public or political pressure for a proper investigation or meaningful changes in policing practices.

Violence continues in an extremely normalised way, much like slavery and Black suffering were normalised during the formation of this country. It often feels as though very little has changed. As Ynaê Santos (2022) argues in her book Racismo Brasileiro: Uma História da Formação do País (“Brazilian Racism: A History of the Formation of the Country”), the history of Brazil is marked far more by continuities than by ruptures or transformation.