At least 132 people, including four police officers, were killed Oct. 28 in Rio de Janeiro after 2,500 police officers and soldiers launched a massive raid in two of the city’s slum areas. The raids targeting the Red Command criminal group in the Alemão and Penha favela complexes were the deadliest such raids in Brazil’s history, coming just weeks ahead of Brazil’s hosting the COP30 U.N. climate change conference. What does this operation indicate about security strategy in Brazil, and what will result from the deadly Oct. 28 raids? How big of a threat does organized criminal activity pose to large-scale international events in Brazil like COP30? What challenges does Brazil’s government face in tackling organized crime and insecurity?
Amanda Mattingly, former U.S. diplomat and founder of ACM Global Intelligence: “The raid targeting the Red Command in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro resulted in more deaths than the police raids of 2021 and 2005 combined, indeed making this the deadliest operation in decades. While Rio State Governor Cláudio Castro believes the raid has sent a strong ‘law and order’ message, there are concerns about how the police conducted it, allegations of summary executions and no real indication that the raid did anything to actually dismantle the Red Command. Reportedly, the Red Command is already reorganizing. Instead, the chilling scenes have raised questions about justice and the use of force in Rio. The raid also reveals a decentralized and politicized security strategy in Brazil, with a right-wing governor at odds with left-wing President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who said he was ‘stunned’ by the violence. While the international visitors heading to the COP30 U.N. climate summit are unlikely to be affected by any follow-on violence between gang members and police, the overall threat level for Rio has ticked up. Yes, Brazilian authorities need to go after criminal networks that profit from drug trafficking, arms smuggling, racketeering and extortion. Yes, they need to take back control of communities fueled by criminality and lacking basic services. But breaking up criminal networks that have gained ground throughout Latin America since the pandemic requires more than a brutal show of force—whether in the favelas of Brazil or off the waters of Venezuela. It requires a more coherent security strategy, coordination at the local and national levels, intelligence sharing often across borders, disrupting financial flows, vetting and training police, fighting corruption and of course, investing in vulnerable communities.”
Mariana Peinado, Latin America analyst at ISI Markets and Prysmo: “The massive raid exposed limitations in Brazil’s security strategy. A major source of ineffectiveness stems from the weak integration and coordination between federal and state authorities. The lack of intelligence sharing and the existence of fragmented information is caused by diverse reasons: bureaucratic overlapping, leak concerns, electoral considerations, the risks of blame or credit for security operations, rivalry between governors and the federal government, and efforts from states to protect their political autonomy. At the local level, urban violence in slums reflects years of entrenched criminal activity, and it is unrealistic for individual states to contain organizations that operate across state lines, just as it is difficult for any single country to contain illegal criminal groups that operate regionally. Effective action requires institutional coordination across different levels, yet political and administrative constraints often discourage information-sharing. With Brazil’s 2026 presidential elections approaching, the deadly operation in Rio is likely to have political repercussions. Recent polling suggests strong public support for the operation, although there have been protests opposing it in Rio and São Paulo. Meanwhile, right-wing actors may tend to use this moment to shape a narrative against President Lula’s potential reelection. Concerns on security and criminal activity has become one of the country’s most salient issues, and the raid will likely deepen existing political polarization leading into the 2026 campaign. Despite the tragic toll of 132 deaths, there is no significant risk to major international events in Brazil. The violence was concentrated within specific favelas, and there has been no broader escalation of conflict in other parts of the state.”
R. Evan Ellis, Latin America research professor at the U.S. Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute: “The scale of criminal activity in Alemão and Penha reflects the reinforcing dynamic between gang and militia activity in marginalized urban neighborhoods and the expanding power of the First Capital Command (PCC) and the Red Command (CV) in global narcotrafficking and other criminal activities. While Washington focuses on drug flows to the United States, for decades, PCC and CV have expanded across South America, bringing cocaine and other drugs across the continent, largely to Europe, contributing to local corruption, violence and drug addiction from Peru to Paraguay to Argentina, not just in Brazil. CV has been entrenched since the 1980s in the Rio de Janeiro favelas where the most recent interventions occurred, while the PCC’s historic center is São Paulo. Both operate internationally, yet both are also involved in microtrafficking and other criminality in their Brazilian urban strongholds. Local and state police, and occasionally the national military, have intervened in the favelas since the early 2000s, including in Alemão, Penha, Jacarezinho and Maré, among others. Concerns about the number of deaths in the October 2025 operation echo questions continually raised during two decades of lesser interventions, although such operations certainly put at great risk the lives of security forces entering. The conduct of pre-COP 30 events in Rio such as the COP30 Local Leaders Forum and the C40 World Mayors Summit likely influenced the timing of the latest intervention, but in Belém, where COP30 is being held, problems of infrastructure inadequate for the event outweigh concerns about insecurity.”
Erika Robb Larkins, professor of anthropology and director of the Center for Brazilian Studies at San Diego State University: “For decades, political leaders and the media have cast low-income, working-class Black communities shaped by a long history of structural racism and state violence as dangerous conflict zones, ruled by ruthless enemies. This way of thinking about favelas dehumanizes residents and informs the growth of extremely violent, militarized policing in Rio. In fact, massacres like the one we saw last week do very little to transform the global drug trade or combat organized crime. Rather, they inflict unwarranted suffering on already marginalized families and communities. More impactful forms of reducing organized criminal activity would include addressing extreme income inequality, investing in poor communities, adopting anti-racist policies, dismantling structures where state actors run organized crime and extortion networks, and ‘following the money’ or ‘following the weapons trade’ to specifically target the most important players in the global drug trade, who most certainly do not live in Penha or Alemão. For this reason, we should take special note of the introduction of the term ‘narcoterrorism’ into the lexicon of Brazil’s longstanding war on drugs, a term that does not well reflect the on-the-ground reality. For me, it stands out as an attempt on the part of Rio’s far-right governor, Cláudio Castro, to insert Brazil into a renewed interest in the war on drugs in Latin America on the part of the Trump administration.”
Alfredo Attié, justice at the Supreme Court of São Paulo: “Public security is the unresolved problem in the construction of Brazil’s democracy. The country has a fragile constitutional framework in the sense that there is an absence of coordination of public policies by the federal government and of creation of bodies to control the work carried out by state police forces that are sometimes unaware of their constitutional duties. The operation launched in Rio is yet another chapter in the course of these uncoordinated actions and exposes a government incapable of solving the security problem. The fight against organized crime requires federal coordination, given the nature of this crime and the interests and resources available to its organizations. In Rio, it involves the practice of various crimes with the use of illegal channels to obtain and distribute economic resources. It also involves militias—informal security bodies that have the illegal participation of state police officers and end up allying themselves with other organizations to commit crimes in order to raise money for criminal organizations. It is difficult, in the climate of tension between the federal government and state governors, for security to be effectively guaranteed. That is, unless the public reaction to the results of the operation in Rio leads governors to adhere to the federal government’s proposal for a normative reform of security and the federal government demonstrates that it can accept the need to reoccupy the territories currently invaded by criminal organizations in Rio.”
Vanda Felbab-Brown, senior fellow for foreign policy at the Brookings Institution:“The Comando Vermelho’s power and proclivity toward violence have dangerously grown and need to be curtailed. But the brutality of last week’s police operation in Rio de Janeiro, likely the deadliest ever, is unjustifiable and counterproductive. The CV is a significant source of violence in Rio and in Brazil. In Rio, the criminal group controls favelas, erecting ever more potent barricades to keep outsiders and law enforcement out and residents sometimes penned in. Deep in the neighborhoods under its control, the CV even provides safe havens for criminal bosses from across Brazil. Its ‘Robin Hood’ veneer has rubbed off, as its delivery of services and goods inside the favelas has become monopolistic and greedy. As research by Júlia Quirino shows, water, electricity, gas canisters, the internet and other goods are more expensive in areas under CV control than elsewhere in Rio, including in areas controlled by police-linked militias. Plus, the criminal group has been expanding its drug trafficking, retail, extortion and other criminal ventures across Brazil. But its own violence doesn’t justify police brutality. The CV fights the police tooth-and-nail, including with weaponized drones and high-caliber weapons, like during last week’s operation that apparently sought to drive various CV cadres from densely populated favelas into a hillside ambush. But various credible sources reported scores of young, mostly Black men killed, some shot or stabbed in the back and some with their hands tied. That’s extrajudicial killing, not self-defense. Promoted by the far-right Bolsonarista governor of Rio, Cláudio Castro, laws that pay police officers a financial bonus for every suspect killed in a raid turn law enforcement officers into murderers. The ‘false positive’ killings in Colombia in the 2000s, during which the military murdered some 6,400 civilians and passed them off as leftist guerrillas to collect bonuses, are a prime example. Not only are such actions illegal, but they once again turn the favela population that has soured on the gangsters against law enforcement. And the state’s territorial control remains elusive.”
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