About 1,200 police officers were deployed to Rio de Janeiro’s working-class Jacarezinho neighborhood early on Wednesday, marking the start of a state effort seeking to “reclaim territory,” authorities said.
It remains unclear how the program is to differ from a prior initiative along similar lines.
The operation, which began at dawn, is part of an effort to increase police presence and improve services in at least two favelas, Jacarezinho and Muzema, Rio de Janeiro Governor Claudio Castro said.
Photo: Reuters
More details are to be released tomorrow, Castro wrote on social media.
“We have started a great process of transformation for the communities in the state of Rio [de Janeiro]. We spent months developing a program that changes the lives of the population, bringing dignity and opportunity,” Castro said.
“The operations today are just the start of that change that goes well beyond security,” he added.
In videos posted on Twitter by Rio de Janeiro police, officers with rifles at the ready could be seen cautiously entering the streets of the vast favela, where the city’s deadliest raid took place in May last year, killing 28 people and injuring several others.
By Wednesday afternoon, dozens of individuals had been arrested, police said, but there were no reports of violent confrontations.
Violence in Rio de Janeiro’s metropolitan region has gone down. Official data shows that homicides between January and November last year were nearly 8 percent lower than during the same period in 2020, with nearly 2,000 deaths.
However, Rio de Janeiro’s police have historically resorted to storming favelas and engaging in shoot-outs as a means of disrupting criminal organizations.
For years, officers have faced repeated accusations of summarily executing suspects. Some residents of Jacarezinho alleged that executions took place during the raid in May last year.
“There was no planning,” said Daniel Cerqueira, a security analyst at the Brazilian Forum for Public Security, referring to a police campaign in 2008. “Each community has its peculiarities. To find the right remedy and dosage for each one of them, you have to have a picture of the social and criminal reality of that place, and then start planning.”
Antonio Carlos Ferreira Gabriel, who twice led the residents’ association in Jacarezinho, shared his misgivings about fresh promises to not just intensify policing, but also improve public services.
“For god’s sake, we don’t want 1,200 police officers like we’re seeing today,” he said. “We want 1,200 social, cultural, sports, health and economic projects. That’s what we need.”
ANGER: A video shared online showed residents in a neighborhood confronting the national security minister, attempting to drag her toward floodwaters Argentina’s port city of Bahia Blanca has been “destroyed” after being pummeled by a year’s worth of rain in a matter of hours, killing 13 and driving hundreds from their homes, authorities said on Saturday. Two young girls — reportedly aged four and one — were missing after possibly being swept away by floodwaters in the wake of Friday’s storm. The deluge left hospital rooms underwater, turned neighborhoods into islands and cut electricity to swaths of the city. Argentine Minister of National Security Patricia Bullrich said Bahia Blanca was “destroyed.” The death toll rose to 13 on Saturday, up from 10 on Friday, authorities
Two daughters of an Argentine mountaineer who died on an icy peak 40 years ago have retrieved his backpack from the spot — finding camera film inside that allowed them a glimpse of some of his final experiences. Guillermo Vieiro was 44 when he died in 1985 — as did his climbing partner — while descending Argentina’s Tupungato lava dome, one of the highest peaks in the Americas. Last year, his backpack was spotted on a slope by mountaineer Gabriela Cavallaro, who examined it and contacted Vieiro’s daughters Guadalupe, 40, and Azul, 44. Last month, the three set out with four other guides
Local officials from Russia’s ruling party have caused controversy by presenting mothers of soldiers killed in Ukraine with gifts of meat grinders, an appliance widely used to describe Russia’s brutal tactics on the front line. The United Russia party in the northern Murmansk region posted photographs on social media showing officials smiling as they visited bereaved mothers with gifts of flowers and boxed meat grinders for International Women’s Day on Saturday, which is widely celebrated in Russia. The post included a message thanking the “dear moms” for their “strength of spirit and the love you put into bringing up your sons.” It
‘LIMITING MYSELF’: New Zealand’s foreign minister said that the omments by Phil Goff were ‘disappointing’ and made the diplomat’s position in the UK ‘untenable’ New Zealand’s most senior envoy to the UK has lost his job over remarks he made about US President Donald Trump at an event in London this week, New Zealand Minister of Foreign Affairs Winston Peters said yesterday. Phil Goff, who is New Zealand’s High Commissioner to the UK, made the comments at an event held by international affairs think tank Chatham House in London on Tuesday. Goff asked a question from the audience of the guest speaker, Finnish Minister of Foreign Affairs Elina Valtonen, in which he said he had been re-reading a famous speech by former British prime minister Winston
RSS