It was lunchtime when the first WhatsApp messages started coming through. “Are you ok?” “Stay safe”. “Be careful.” The police of Rio had launched a “mega operation” in two favelas, Complexo do Amemão e da Penha, about a 20-minute drive from where we were. People started to check their phones. By 14:29, the news was reporting “24 dead, 81 arrested, 42 machine guns apprehended.” At 15:16, I got a screenshot from a friend watching TV: “64 dead and 75 machine guns apprehended.” The sub-headline: “CV orders the closing of main highways.” Now it had spilled over into the city. In one of the social media posts from CV asking residents of the communities to film to ‘stop the massacre’, it ends by saying, “Together we are strong. United we are unbeatable.”

CV, Commando Vermelho (Red Command) are the largest criminal group in Rio, with operations nationally and transnationally. Operations in Rio are nothing unusual, and for now, we understood it was happening in other parts of the city. I was part of an international project looking at ways in which the history of transatlantic slavery is represented in museums. We moved on from our lunch towards the Institute of the New Blacks (IPN), a museum commemorating Afro-Brazilian history and culture in an area known as Pequena Africa (Little Africa) because of its historical links as a slave port. Today, we were going to see Cais do Valongo, a wharf where, between the 16th and 18th centuries, an estimated 1 million Africans were forcibly taken to be sold into slavery. According to UNESCO, it is likely to be the largest landing port of enslaved people in history. Brazil was the last country to abolish slavery. IPN was at first a residential home until the owner renovated and found skeleton remains from adults and children of African descent - a mass grave of formerly enslaved people. 

As we walked towards IPN, it slowly became clear that things were changing quickly in the city that day. News was coming in of the increasing death toll. By late afternoon, the streets were almost empty in this usually busy part of town. People sat looking at their phones and saw on their social media scenes of constant gunfire and explosions, with armed drones also reportedly being used by the drug-traffickers to fire at police. We sat in one of the few bars still open. It faced a military police station. A policeman there said officers had been ordered to stay put, regardless of whether their shift was over. He told me that minutes before speaking with me, local members of CV had gone to the few local business owners who had not yet complied with the group’s memo to close their doors. The policeman made the point to show they did this right in front of him, and that he had no power to do anything. “The business owners know where the power lies.” He said it with a tone of resignation, a shrug of the shoulders, with sadness and a sense of defeat. 

Just as the state shows no sign of valuing the lives of favela residents to the same level as those ‘in the city’, military police salaries also exemplify the lack of value given to them. With a starting monthly salary of 5,200 reais (USD 1025), such a low wage means that, at the same time as effectively fighting a war in which they risk their lives, they may also be driving an Uber on their days off to make ends meet. This policeman lives in a favela. He walks past armed criminals on his way to and from work, seeing drugs sold openly. He can do nothing. The laws of the city do not apply there. That is how Rio is: divided. Borders, mostly invisible. People up inside the favelas out of sight, out of mind. Mostly. Then days like this day happen. Not the first either. In September 2002, the head of CV at the time, Fernandinho Beiramar, ordered the city to shut down. And it did. 

The next day, Wednesday, things were becoming clearer. 2,500 police had taken part in the operation - four of them killed. In total, 122 people died, all except the police, presumed to be part of the criminal group. It is likely the killings were a combination of shootouts and executions. Rio’s deadliest day ever in this undeclared war. The most lethal operation in the country's history. The weapons seized in the raid included AR-10s, AR-15s, AK-47s, FALs and G3S; weapons from Argentina, Belgium, Germany, Peru, Russia and Venezuela. In the local war of Rio, the origins of the weapons also show a global side. 

In the age of camera phones, some of the violence was recorded. One video shows tens of members of the criminal group who had been cornered and had dropped their weapons, stating clearly they are giving themselves up, and repeating to a local woman filming on her phone as they walk out in single-file, hands up, “Film this aunty, film this.” The camera is their biggest, maybe their only, form of protection from being killed by the police waiting for them outside the door, aware that this could be live-streamed. One of the topless men has a large scar on his belly, most likely from bullet wounds from a previous battle. As the camera turns to the doorway, the police are waiting outside, seemingly calmly. Blood is splattered on the wall by the door. “One of our friends is dead on the floor here,” one of the young men says. 

The image used in the local newspaper O Globo two days later is an aerial view of the dead bodies lined up on a square near Complexo da Penha; residents had gone to the forest to collect them and bring them for the world to see. It will be the historical image of this day. In the photo, I count 54 bodies. 35 are in pants or shorts. The rest are covered in cloths, presumably because their bodies are too deformed. The images of the dead bodies lined up, mostly brown and black males, were reminiscent of the images we’d been seeing and imagining this very day from the times of slavery; of bodies lined up in ships. Or of the mass graves found under a home in Pequena Africa.

Five days later, in another favela also controlled by CV. Men and boys patrol with large weapons. Drugs are sold openly at ‘bocas’ (mouths), large poster menus with prices and offers. Open sewage everywhere, tiny alleyways where, at times, only one slim body can fit. Women carry their shopping as they climb, stopping for rests along the way. Less than a hundred meters away, there are homes that a quick Google search shows can sell for over a million dollars. At the top of the favela, a debate is taking place between residents about what happened on Tuesday. These residents are poor and black, just like most of the 118 men and boys killed on Tuesday. Many have kids around the ages of those killed. And most people here support the killings. This is not a surprise. Bolsonaro got to power partly on this ticket: a military solution; overpower the violence with force and violence. According to one poll, support for the operation among the general population was 62.2%; among men in the favela, 80% supported it.

For them, it comes down to what they think is possible, and the question of choice and agency. For those who, despite all the hardships life throws at them, manage to live within the law and stay away from crime, they know that it is possible not to go down the wrong path. No parent raising a kid in the favela can tell their son that the choice is hard between breaking the law or not; you need to remove that choice; it cannot be a choice. And yet, the fact remains: no kid from the middle and upper-class apartment blocks, with swimming pools, private education and health, holidays abroad and access to the world, chooses to become a foot soldier in this war. And if they do, the police would think more than twice before entering their neighbourhood and gunning them down. And if that happened, that kid’s name would be known across Brazil. Unlike the 118 men and boys killed in Alemão and Penha on Tuesday, none of whom - it seems - have names nor a life story to tell.

There is an undeclared war in Rio de Janeiro. A confined war. By-in-large, it is a war that takes place in the favelas, between the poor and the poor, and between the poor and the police. It is mostly physically separate from the other, formal parts of the city. Everyone knows about it, talks about it. Turn on your TV and you will see it - daily, live, on-air operations. It is over there. Even if ‘over there’ might be in a favela close by, it is confined. The proximity in Rio is staggering. There are many parts where you could literally throw a stone, the distance between a poor community and a rich one. Rio is one city, but there are invisible borders everywhere, where rich and poor live side by side, but their worlds don’t collide.

 

The day after, O Globo newspaper ran the headline “City Held Hostage” (A Metrópole-Refém). Two days after the operation, things went back to normal in the city. Life also went back to normal for the people in the favelas, except normal means being caught in the middle of this war. Abandoned by the state. Forced to live under oppressive rule. Citizens but not citizens. Invisible.