Rio’s bloodiest day: the untold story of Brazil’s most deadly police raid

In interviews with community leaders, lawyers, security specialists and bereaved relatives, the Guardian pieces together how an operation targeting a criminal gang left 122 people dead last October

Juliana Conceição startled awake as the first shots of an infamous day were fired in the Complexo da Penha, the labyrinthine Rio favela where she was born and raised.

It was 4.30am on 28 October. Thousands of police had surrounded the community’s barricaded entrances and were preparing to swarm up its streets on foot and in black armoured personnel carriers with firing ports and bullet-cracked ballistic windows.

Clouds of smoke fouled the dawn air as drug traffickers torched tyres and cars and opened fire from above.

“It was like the shooting was inside our house … like we were in the middle of a war,” said Conceição, who sheltered indoors as her neighbourhood became a battleground.

By nightfall, the father of her six children, Ronaldo Julião da Silva, would lie dead in a nearby alley – one of 122 people killed in the deadliest police operation in Brazilian history. Five of the victims were police.

“It happened just down here,” Conceição said 10 days after the 17-hour raid, as she led the way down the passageway where her ex-husband was found, his skull and hand shredded by gunfire.

She carried a yellow certificate attributing Silva’s death – a day after his 46th birthday – to “cerebral and cardiac laceration [caused by] perforating blunt force”.

The bricklayer’s place of death was given as Saint Luke Square, the plaza at the foot of the favela where scores of bodies were dumped after police withdrew. But his life actually ended half a mile away, as he tried to reach his home on the favela’s southern rim. “My dad wasn’t a crook. My dad was a worker,” said his 20-year-old daughter, Ana Beatriz, wiping tears from her eyes.

Three months after the carnage of 28 October, many questions remain about Operation Containment, an incursion police chiefs and rightwing politicians celebrated as a historic blow to one of Brazil’s biggest organised crime groups – the Rio-born Red Command drug faction – but which activists, security experts, and even Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, have called a futile massacre.

In more than two dozen interviews with community leaders, lawyers, security specialists and bereaved relatives, the Guardian pieced together the story of the bloodiest day in Rio’s modern history.

The investigation found that:

 Of the 117 non-police fatalities, at least one person was not involved in crime, despite official claims that all those killed were traffickers.

 The list of 100 arrest warrants justifying the operation featured none of the names of those 117 people.

 In a sign of the Red Command’s rapid spread around Brazil, the majority of those killed were from regions outside Rio such as the Amazon states of Amazonas and Pará, the north-east and midwest.

 Police refused to disclose the race of those killed but relatives, journalists and sources with knowledge of the forensic investigation said the vast majority were black, reinforcing research showing police violence disproportionately affects Afro-Brazilians.

Tracking ‘the Bear’

When Lt Kelly Patricia Camara da Silva, a 30-year-old member of a specialist high-risk military police unit called the Shock Battalion, woke at 3am on 28 October she had no idea she was about to face the most dangerous undertaking of her three-year career.

After 60 days of planning and a year’s investigation, police were preparing to launch a massive assault on the Complexo da Penha, which along with the neighbouring Complexo do Alemão, is considered the Red Command’s “national headquarters”.

One hundred arrest warrants had been issued, but the prime target was the local drug boss Edgar Alves de Andrade, AKA “the Bear”.

Police estimated the area was guarded by 800-1,000 traffickers armed with automatic rifles, explosives and grenade-launching drones. To outnumber them, 2,500 officers would be deployed – at least twice as many as in past operations.

Silva was the only woman commanding a unit that day and her seven-strong team was among the first groups to enter the Complexo da Penha at about 5am. Their task was climbing the favela’s steep, narrow alleyways to contain armed resistance so colleagues could follow and make arrests.

“The higher you go, the riskier it gets,” said Silva, whose target was Vila Cruzeiro, one of 13 communities forming the complex. “These favelas are on hillsides so when we’re at the bottom, we can’t see anything – but [the traffickers] have a full view of us from above.”

Barricades blocked almost every route. Where armoured vehicles could no longer advance, police continued on foot.

As Silva’s team progressed past murals honouring fallen Red Command members, many of the Bear’s foot soldiers melted into the bush above the community, apparently hoping to flee to safety in Alemão by crossing the Serra da Misericórdia, the Hill of Mercy, a vast rocky massif covered in Atlantic rainforest.

At about 6.50am, dozens of heavily armed criminals wearing black or camouflage outfits almost identical to police uniforms were filmed climbing a concrete staircase into a scrubland area known as Vacaria that is part of the Hill of Mercy. Most of them would never be seen alive again.

‘We’re surrounded!’

At around the same time, Erivelton Vidal Correia, a community leader, took advantage of a lull in the shooting and rushed to Vila Cruzeiro’s neighbourhood association near Saint Luke Square.

Outside, huddles of women – the mothers, sisters and partners of men involved in the local drug trade – had gathered seeking news. As the battle raged, Correia served coffee and comforted the women as their phones filled with WhatsApp messages from their besieged loved ones: We’re surrounded! We’re trapped! The police are here! See if you can come and find us!

One of those looking for her child was Tauã Brito, a 36-year-old salesperson, whose 20-year-old son, Wellington Brito Santos, was hiding in the forest.

Brito had raised Santos with help from her grandmother. “I’m a black woman from the favela struggling to raise her kids,” she said. “I always tried to do my best … within my financial situation.”

But four years ago Santos joined the gang – and it was he who warned his mother of the police’s arrival. “The operation has started,” he texted her at 4.45am.

Ten minutes later she replied, urging him to pray and remember Psalm 91. “Surely he will save you from the fowler’s snare and from the deadly pestilence,” it says. “He will cover you with his feathers, and under his wings you will find refuge.”

“Yes Mum,” Santos wrote back.

Soon after, Santos was one of the traffickers filmed climbing the staircase towards Vacaria. “You need to get it together,” his mother texted as he hid in the scrub. “I know mum,” he replied at 7.23am.

“It feels like I’m going to have a heart attack, Wellington. You don’t need this,” she went on, suggesting they leave the favela and start afresh. “I want to turn 21,” he said.

The last message Brito received came an hour later, at 8.22am. “I’m OK. Stay calm Mum,” Santos said.

“I’m praying non-stop,” she answered. There was no reply.

The wall

As they took flight across the Hill of Mercy, Wellington and his companions didn’t know there was no way out.

Under the cover of darkness, dozens of officers from the elite military police unit Bope – whose troops are called “skulls” for their dagger-pierced skull insignia – had climbed the mountain from the other side.

Wearing fluorescent green armbands to distinguish themselves from the traffickers, they took up position at the summit hoping to solve a problem they had faced in dozens of previous operations: whenever police entered Alemão or Penha, the traffickers would simply flee through the forest to other side.

Previously, police commanders had judged occupying the Hill of Mercy too risky. That day, for the first time, they decided to change tactics.

As planned, Sgt Jorge Martins’s team reached the hilltop at dawn to form “a wall”. “But sometimes things don’t always go the way we imagine,” he said.

As clusters of traffickers and police did battle on different parts of the mount, the situation began to spiral out of control.

At about 8.20am, a member of the dog unit was shot in the leg near a cluster of shacks known as the Promised Land.

An hour later, a group of civil police officers were attacked as they chased a group of traffickers into Vacaria. One officer was shot in the hand. A second in the belly. A third in the head.

The Bope team abandoned their positions to rescue their colleagues. “When we got there, that’s when things really started to heat up,” Martins said.

From then on, “it stopped being an operation to execute warrants and became a full-scale rescue mission”, the Bope commander, Lt Col Marcelo Corbage, later told the public prosecutor’s office.

‘Welcome to the jungle’

Not far away, Silva’s team had reached part of the favela called Cabaré, just outside the forest, which investigators believed housed one of the Bear’s main strongholds – a place they called his “lair”.

In a sign “the lair” was nearby, Silva spotted a mural showing a rifle-toting bear in a bulletproof vest and the warning: “Welcome to the jungle.” She took a selfie. “We knew it was a very hot area, that something could happen there.”

At about 9.40am it did. Word reached Silva’s team that a resident had been taken hostage by 26 traffickers who had stormed her home. Police shot one man dead and Silva began negotiating with the rest, even though her team was badly outnumbered – 14 officers versus 25 criminals. “I don’t think they really understood what was happening … If they’d realised they might have an advantage, the situation could have changed.”

Fearing execution, the men forced the homeowner to record their surrender. “You can come out, you’re not going to die … no one’s going to shoot,” an officer claimed as a cameraman filmed the scene. One by one, shirtless young men emerged and were arrested.

Chaos in the woods

But up on the Hill of Mercy, the gunfire never stopped. “You hear the shots, try to locate them, but then fire comes from the other side and, even with training, you get disoriented and can’t process it,” said Martins.

At 4pm, his team ran into a group of traffickers as they advanced through the forest. Martins was struck in the calf and a colleague in the leg. “I thought: ‘If I got hit, the guy can see me.’ So I threw myself down a slope with my colleague and we rolled … It was a serious wound but I thought: ‘I’m not going to die from this one,’” he said.

Both men were eventually rescued by an armoured ambulance and survived but two other Bope officers died from gunshot wounds. Three civil police officers also died while 14 police officers were injured. Never before in Rio had so many police been killed or wounded in a single operation. Most were hit on the Hill of Mercy – as were the vast majority of civilians killed.

A source close to the investigation questioned police claims that all those killed in the forest died resisting arrest. “If what the police say is true – that they were dealing with criminals who knew the area extremely well, who were hidden and entrenched – how is it possible that … despite the considerable number of officers killed, the number of dead criminals is so disproportionately higher?” they asked.

The source could not rule out a story circulating in the favela that, after rescuing their wounded and retrieving their dead, police killed every trafficker they could find on the hill as an act of revenge. The police vehemently deny this account.