At least 64 suspects and four police officers were killed in a large-scale anti-drug operation in the Brazilian city of Rio de Janeiro on Tuesday. TASR informs about it according to the reports of the AFP and Reuters agencies. The governor of the state of Rio de Janeiro, Claudio Castro, called the operation the largest in the country’s history. The aim of Operation Contenção (Suppression) was to arrest members of the criminal organization Comando Vermelho (CV), the local authorities said.
A police raid targeting a suspected drug network in the two favelas of Penha and Complexo do Alemão – was attended by 2500 policemen. The police also used two helicopters, 32 armored vehicles and 12 demolition machines to destroy the barricades in the narrow streets. In Rio, Brazil’s main tourist center, heavy-handed police operations are frequent, especially in poor and densely populated favelas, which are often controlled by criminal gangs.
“This is how the police in Rio deal with criminals: bombs dropped from drones. Such is the scale of the challenge we face. It’s not ordinary crime, it’s narco-terrorism,” Castro wrote in his post on the X platform under a video of a drone launching a missile. In 2024, around 700 people died in police raids in Rio.
