The Making of the Penha Massacre
On October 28, Rio de Janeiro’s police besieged the Penha favela for 15 hours, killing at least 121 people in the city’s worst massacre. Brazil’s right is hailing it as an anti-crime victory while overlooking their own links to violent gangs.
(Fabio Teixeira / Anadolu via Getty Images)
The sun had only just begun to inch over Rio de Janeiro’s horizon when it began. On October 28, in the tangled shantytown of flimsy dwellings that cluster beneath a Baroque church in the Penha neighborhood, thousands of heavily armed police quietly assembled to carry out what would become the largest police massacre ever recorded in the state of Rio.
Residents of the Complexo do Alemão and the Complexo da Penha — two of the city’s most impoverished and embattled favelas and strongholds of the Red Command gang — were jolted awake by the whir of helicopters and armored vehicles, which provided cover for officers on foot rushing in from the northeast as other battalions closed in from the north and west. Over the next fifteen hours, state forces skirmished with alleged gang members, encircling them and driving them up a steep hill where additional officers — from a unit notorious for its brutality — waited with machine guns and sniper rifles.
Videos that circulated online stunned even those accustomed to the bloodshed of Rio police raids. Sandwiched between the two hills, the densely packed neighborhoods were lit by dozens of flaming vehicles that gangs had torched to slow the police advance. In one clip, officers unleash sustained bursts of fully automatic fire down a slope toward clusters of homes, tracers streaking through smoke. In another, residents crouch inside dwellings of hollow ceramic brick, quivering as rifle fire cracks nearby. Elsewhere, police film themselves clearing bullet-ridden houses like Marines moving through Fallujah.
By the time all 2,500 officers had swept through, they had killed over one hundred twenty people and sustained four casualties — surpassing the next most lethal Jacarezinho favela raid in May 2021, which resulted in twenty-eight deaths. That evening, Rio’s far-right governor, Cláudio Castro — of the same party as former president Jair Bolsonaro — quickly took credit for “Operation Containment,” allegedly launched to execute fifty-one arrest warrants and 145 search-and-seizure warrants issued by the state Criminal Court.
The official death toll began at sixty-four that night but quickly rose the next day as residents discovered dozens of corpses on the slopes of the southern hill and laid them in a line on blue tarps in the neighborhood’s center so their families could claim them. The next day, the state revised their estimate, admitting that 119 people had been killed. Among them was fourteen-year-old Michel Peçanha, whose father, a social worker, said he had started visiting the area with friends who liked to party there before drifting toward gang activity. According to other witnesses, some of the bodies were found with their hands tied behind their backs and wounds on their heads and torsos. One, a nineteen-year-old gang member named Yago Ravel, appeared to be found decapitated in a video taken by stunned locals.
Governor Castro called the raid an “absolute success” in the war against “narco-terrorists,” adopting a term deployed by Donald Trump to justify extrajudicial killings of Venezuelans suspected of drug trafficking. Insisting that the shootout — during which at least four civilians were severely injured — “wasn’t in a built-up area,” he claimed the operation dealt a “severe blow” to the Red Command, which has dominated Rio since the 1980s.
To the foreign observer, Castro’s raid — the latest in a string of operations carried out without coordination or support from President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s federal government — might appear a genuine attempt to strike a blow at organized crime. Much reporting indeed reinforces the spectacle of state forces confronting heavily armed “narcos,” flattening a complex landscape into a familiar hero-versus-villain script palatable to foreign audiences startled that large swaths of a global city remain under criminal control.
In reality, the raid was a work of political theater, with the bodies of young men of color — criminals, bystanders, and police alike — as involuntary actors. In a country tormented by the constant specter of violence, the well-documented massacre played out like reality television, offering the same cathartic release to millions scrolling through grisly footage.
Yet Castro’s narrative of success collapses under scrutiny. Police entered the favela with close to a hundred arrest warrants but ultimately carried out only about seventeen. And among the dead identified as criminals, many had other charges unrelated to those listed by the prosecutors and were retroactively deemed gang members; half of the dead had no outstanding warrants. Almost all the ringleaders of the Red Command, in any case, escaped unscathed. In the meantime, hundreds of bus lines were suspended, clinics closed, and the population was terrorized for more than fifteen hours.
In the days following the raid, the state government shifted course, with Secretary of Public Security Victor Santos even claiming that the focus of the raid was “never on arresting leaders.” Instead, officials claimed, its purpose was to contain the spread of the Red Command, which had been consolidating a continuous strip of influence connecting multiple favelas and using these corridors to move weapons, drugs, and personnel with relative freedom.
But such raids have historically done little to disrupt the Red Command, one of Brazil’s largest criminal networks, which extends across state and international borders. Killing foot soldiers — mostly young, impoverished men of color — will do little to dismantle the organization. In the clay-and-cinder-block labyrinth jungle of the favela, there will always be spaces in which to regroup, and the state’s neglect ensures a continual supply of young men angry, desperate, and forgotten. When the armored cars and coroners’ vans rumble away and the sidewalks are rinsed clean of blood, new bodies will step in to replace the old.
In truth, the Red Command’s durability stems from a calibrated system of political and police bribery, drug production, and — perhaps most crucially — money laundering, all involving men at the highest levels of Brazilian society. Yet when, last August, prosecutors revealed a $1.84 billion money laundering scheme that linked Brazil’s largest financial companies to its largest organized crime group, only five employees were arrested, and the press reaction was muted. The killing of scores of young, poor, mostly black men, by contrast, reliably provokes far greater public satisfaction in a country still wrestling with both violent crime and deep-seated racism.
Meanwhile, the complicity and corruption of the police have received little scrutiny, especially in international coverage. Last July, an investigation revealed that a Brazilian highway police officer had been trafficking weapons from Paraguay to Brazilian gangs and, despite being proven guilty, had still been promoted. In September, Rio state legislator Thiego Raimundo dos Santos Silva was arrested for selling weapons and securing political favors for the Red Command. But these two examples are only the most recent prominent cases.
Police Violence and the Urban Poor
In Rio and elsewhere, milícias (militias) made up of ex–police officers and military personnel first assembled in the 1990s as nongovernmental vigilante groups formed with the pretext of providing community protection from drug trafficking. Today they have evolved into sprawling organized-crime syndicates that compete with the facções (factions) for territory, profiting from extortion, monopolized local services, and even large-scale drug trafficking — while maintaining close ties to state actors and presenting themselves as protectors rather than criminals.
The oft-cited “militarization” of the gangs — a theme Castro exploits and sensationalist foreign coverage readily amplifies — should invite deeper scrutiny. How, after all, did these groups acquire military-grade rifles in the first place? The answer leads back to the corruption sustained by pervasive poverty and graft. Recent investigations revealed that a Navy service member had even trained Red Command members to deploy drone bombs against police, borrowing tactics from the war in Ukraine.
Clearly, then, Castro’s raid was more symbolic than strategic. “If killing solved anything, we’d be living in Switzerland,” Cecília Olliveira, executive director of the Rio-based Crossfire Institute, which tracks violence in Rio’s favelas, told me last Thursday. Olliveira’s organization, which since 2016 has been tracking violence, has found that police actions represent roughly half of all the shootings that affect the daily lives of Rio residents. “Those who truly pay the price and deal with the consequences are working people, business owners who had to shut down, the children who end up in the line of fire, and the families who lost police officers,” she said. “Operations like this impose incalculable costs on the population and virtually no effect on the faction.”
Looking at the major police raids into the favelas, one fact becomes impossible to ignore. “The three largest police massacres in Rio’s history happened under Cláudio Castro and in contexts close to electoral periods,” Olliveira noted. “This is not a coincidence; it is a pattern.” Castro’s operation indeed unfolded during a time at which Brazil’s far right has been locked in political crisis. The conviction and imprisonment of Bolsonaro, who was found guilty of plotting a coup against the government, decapitated the far right and sowed division among those believing the party should move on and others who pushed to fight for an amnesty or more radical action. The highly publicized slaughter successfully galvanized public anger over crime, allowing the Right — eager to rebuild momentum for the 2026 elections — to rally voters around a “tough-on-crime” stance and cast Lula’s government as complacent.
The strategy appears to have worked: polls suggest the raid boosted Castro’s approval by as much as ten points. Online, support flooded in for the police, while condemnation rained down on criminals and favela residents — whom many on the Right see as sympathetic to Lula. Some deny that police torture suspects; others celebrate extrajudicial killings despite Brazil’s lack of a death penalty. While there is surprising agreement among parts of the center left around public-security hardening, anger over police violence — especially in black and working-class communities — remains intense and widely expressed. Still, Castro’s effort, which even included a meeting with the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) in Washington seeking US involvement against the Red Command, has elevated his profile as a potential successor to Bolsonaro on the Right.
This surge of support has been reflected in much of the domestic and some international press, where coverage shaped by public anger over crime often echoes long-standing portrayals of favelas as lawless spaces — places where residents are presumed to be either gang members or their relatives and supporters. These narratives help legitimize violent, unsupervised police incursions that have unfolded for decades, from the Nova Brasília massacres of 1994–95 — when twenty-six people were killed and three women raped by officers, resulting in a 2017 Inter-American Court of Human Rights conviction — to the present.
Yet the histories that shape what appear to be lawless favelas are rarely acknowledged within and outside Brazil. The first favelas emerged in the 1890s, shortly after abolition, when sweeping urban reforms targeted and demolished the collective dwellings, or cortiços, of the urban poor of color. In their place rose European-inspired civic buildings and Rio’s wide boulevards, and virtually no low-income housing replaced them.
Neglected and discriminated against by the state, people of color — many of them former slaves — were left with no choice but to move farther out or construct improvised wooden shacks on sloping green hills surrounding Rio, the only place where the building code permitted their construction. From swampy valleys and steep slopes, they built their own communities, created their own systems of governance and developed their own cultures, including much of Brazil’s popular music. The state treated these settlements as illegal and temporary but continued to do nothing, as many wealthy leaders drew from rents an illegal and profitable revenue stream. In the 1950s, following massive rural-to-urban migration, they continued to expand and develop.
It was only in the 1970s that drug cartels began to take root in the favelas, not because residents welcomed them, but because the groups offered rudimentary services and a kind of governance in places abandoned by the state. For young men raised in favelas that overlook wealthier beachfront neighborhoods, criminal groups presented a path upward — and a means of redistributing to their own at the expense of the rich.
But, for all their association with the favelas, sprawling narco-gangs like the Red Command did not originate there. They were born far away, in the overcrowded, violent state prisons where scores of black men are sent each year. “An ordinary person imprisoned for something like robbery enters with no faction and leaves factionalized,” Olliveira explained. “Inside prison there is an order that demands protection and networks. You cannot make it alone. You do not survive.”
The violent images coming out of Rio make Operation Containment easy to sensationalize, obscuring the political architecture behind the spectacle. These eye-catching clashes between machine-gun-toting black teenagers and low-flying police helicopters mask the historical processes that created and sustain this landscape — not to mention the wealthy and well-connected men who profit from both fighting crime and keeping it alive.
“So the state creates its enemies, arms them, strengthens them, and then brings society to its knees before the monster it created and claims to be fighting,” Olliveira told me. “It is not.”