The one promoted last week by the governor was his fourth since 2021, when he took charge of the state of . Called Containment, it had the same purpose and followed the same script as the previous ones, differing only in the multiplication of corpses that it left exposed.
In all of them, weapons and ammunition were seized, arrests were made — and many people died: 28 people in Favela do Jacarezinho, in May 2021; between 23 and 25 in Vila Cruzeiro, in the same month of the following year; 19 in July 2022, in Complexo do Alemão. There is not the slightest indication that these deaths served to reduce the control of organized crime over those territories. This will be the likely result of the operation that has now cost the lives of more than a hundred people in Complexo do Alemão.
Two weeks earlier —and without fanfare—, the government of Rio Grande do Norte, with support from Senasp (National Secretariat of Public Security), from the Ministry of Justice, carried out Operation Safe Territory, in the west zone of Natal. Without a shot being fired, weapons and drugs were seized, as well as arrests. Now, a set of services will be installed in the area designed to guarantee residents basic civil rights: conflict mediation and access to justice; delivery of personal documentation; assistance to women and children victims of; land regularization; improving the environment, with lighting and garbage collection; assistance to young people at risk; permanent policing. In short, everything that can be done within the scope of the Justice system and public security.
Thus, in the same month, we saw two opposing concepts for tackling the control of organized crime in urban areas where the poor live. One of them resorts to brute force, to a bloody spectacle, which gives votes and normalizes barbarity. The other relies on intergovernmental coordination; in mobilizing reliable information systems; in the knowledge accumulated by public security personnel and specialists.
On another front, Operation Hidden Carbon also appears to be based on this rational strategy to combat criminal organizations. It is necessarily multidimensional, just like the activities of the mafias.
From the examples of Safe Territory and Hidden Carbon it should not be inferred that armed confrontation can always be avoided. Violence, which cannot be refused in the face of organizations equipped with heavy weapons, cannot be the first and only resource of the democratic State nor can it be exercised without clear protocols.
What such examples seem to indicate is the possible beginning of an effective and civilized alternative policy for combating organized crime. This is a construction of great complexity as it requires changes in the laws and behavior of political leaders and large public bureaucracies — the police, the Public Ministry and the judicial and penitentiary system. It is not written that it shall prosper. Because, in addition to everything else, it requires clarity from leaders to separate it from the electoral dispute and political courage to win over the majority that today applauds the bankrupt security policy of the extreme right.
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