The Guardian has just published the first in-depth media investigation of “Operation Containment”, an historic bloody raid on favelas in Rio de Janeiro targeting members of the criminal organisation Red Command. What followed was a massacre, mainly of Black people. I spoke to our South America correspondent, Tiago Rogero, about how it all spiralled out of control and revealed Brazil’s deep race and class fissures.
Tiago was reporting in Argentina when he heard the news of the massacre. His colleague Tom Phillips, the Guardian’s Latin America correspondent, was in Rio following events closely. “Operation Containment”, the most fatal police operation in Brazil’s history, launched just before dawn on 28 October and lasted 17 hours, killing 122 people in the Rio de Janeiro favela complexes of Penha and Alemão. Tiago’s heart and mind were in Rio, where he and many of his friends and family live. He felt “pretty anxious and worried” he told me, when news of the rising body count began to come through. He knew a lot of people from the two favelas and so was gripped with “a lot of bad feelings”.
