It didn’t take long for , the most lethal in Brazil’s history, to be seen as a political fact. The governor of , , soon stood in front of the cameras to celebrate the supposed success of the police raid on the Penha and Alemão complexes, in the north of the capital of Rio de Janeiro, which resulted in 121 deaths and 113 prisoners.
Right-wing leaders immediately reacted to the episode that occurred on Tuesday (24). A group of governors met twice with Castro. Together, they announced the call to combat organized crime. With less than a year to go before the elections, Operation Containment could attract, according to public security experts, votes to the conservative camp.
It is, in short, a repositioning of the right, he was convicted of an attempted coup d’état. Despite popular support, the case revives the imagination of Rio de Janeiro as a bloody resort.
“Killing has high electoral profitability. Why do those exposed to death vote for the killer? The greater the fear, the greater the desire for an immediate solution”, says Jacqueline Muniz, professor of public security at UFF (Universidade Federal Fluminense).
“For three decades, the city has used the war against crime to win the election. It was political marketing, chloroquine for security and should, yes, strengthen Bolsonarism for next year.”
The operation, against , ended with four police officers dead and did not arrest Edgar Alves de Andrade, known as Doca, head of the criminal faction.
For Muniz, the ambush was ineffective and did not follow the rules of police doctrine. But history is abundant in showing the correspondence between bellicose speech and good electoral performance, a political strategy almost always summarized in catchphrases.
In the 1990s, José Guilherme Godinho, known as Sivuca, was elected state deputy for Rio de Janeiro under the motto “a good criminal is a dead criminal”. Three decades earlier, he had been a member of the Scuderie Le Cocq, an extermination group that gave rise to the militias.
In 2018, , then in the PSC, won the election for the Government of Rio with public safety as a priority. He summarized his project to combat crime by saying that the police should “aim for the head and… fire”. In the same year, Bolsonaro campaigned for the Presidency based on militarist discourse and started using the slogan “CPF cancelled”.
The stance, therefore, does not only please Rio de Janeiro voters. In São Paulo, Colonel Ubiratan, in 1992, became a state deputy, with the number at the polls being the number of people killed in the massacre: 111.
Frederico Castelo Branco, researcher at the USP Studies Center, says that Operation Containment resonates with society’s punitive approach. Not by chance, a Datafolha survey showed that 57% of Rio residents approved the action.
“It is an opportunity for the Bolsonaro camp to rearticulate itself, resuming relevance in the political debate, with Bolsonaro condemned and Lula in a positive moment”, he says. In 2026, Castro is tipped for the Senate, and other right-wing governors could be candidates for the Senate.
Coordinator of Geni (Group for the Study of New Illegalisms), at UFF, Carolina Grillo agrees with the assessment of the rearticulation of the right, now no longer around the figure of the former president, and also criticizes the government’s stance. “It was a timid stance, without condemning what happened,” he states. “Lula was very cautious when speaking out about the action.”
In the context of the union of right-wing governors, a counterpoint to the PT member emerged from the beginning. Planalto reacted, releasing a video to highlight the importance of combating organized crime with intelligence. Last year, security was considered a priority for voters in Rio and São Paulo, Datafolha showed.
Author of the book “Surviving in Adversity: Market and Forms of Life”, social scientist Daniel Hirata says that the issue should remain high in the next election, even more so after the episode in Rio. He says that control of territories should deserve reflection from candidates, especially because the one proposed by the government is unable to offer practical answers to the problem.
It remains to be seen, after all, what are the roots of popular adherence to lethal operations, in addition to the feeling of helplessness. “Institutional violence has always been mobilized to have political returns. The middle classes support brutality because there is racism and classism,” says Hirata. Other factors cited by experts are the echoes of slavery and dictatorship.
Imaginary of Rio de Janeiro
If violence gives back to political figures, the damage is palpable for cities. More than causing damage to tourism and the economy, the mega-operation had repercussions on the imagination of the country’s former capital. The images of the bodies in the , resurrected the memory of the city hostage to crime, a majority perception in the 1990s.
According to Antonio Herculano Lopes, who researches Rio culture, the city’s image goes through cyclical crises. What remains, however, is the brutality, which, according to Lopes, regulates the relationships of some social segments. In his view, there are two ways to deal with violence: by sublimation or by justice.
The first case refers to the creation of symbolic representations on the topic, which explains the incorporation of violence into the city’s cultural landscape. It is a defense mechanism to deal with the internalization of brutality, and indifference to egregious crimes often also works as a defense.
The second case is related to the desire for brutal governments, considering crime to be out of control. An operation that kills more than a hundred people makes the desire rekindle. “A large part of the middle class wants to stay away from the favelas and poverty, with the desire to use the monopoly of violence”, says Lopes.
