Tanta Guerra pra Nada

On 30 October, days after the largest police massacre in the history of a city infamous for them, which left at least 121 dead, President Lula approved a law to fight organised crime. He expressed sympathy, first, for four dead policemen, then for innocent residents and children murdered in the ‘mega-operation’ in the Complexo da Penha and the Complexo do Alemão, in the north of Rio de Janeiro. A photographer discovered the head of one young Comando Vermelho soldier, 19-year-old Yago Ravel Rodrigues Rosário, on a tree. He had no criminal record, but we know he was CV from his social media feeds. Police killed more people than the number of weapons recovered.

The operation, involving 2500 troops, was state not federal, under the command of Governor Cláudio Castro and his secretary of public security, Victor Santos, who announced in 2024 that something big was in the works. He promised to put CV on the run in Rio and, for now, he has. Attacked from all sides, an undetermined number of gang members were corralled on the forested hillside of the Serra da Misericórdia, where a line of shooters from an elite police unit mowed them down.

In 2011, after a similar operation the previous year, the roots reggae band Ponto de Equilíbrio sang: ‘I see on television/the troops invading the Complexo do Alemão/I read in the paper/the latest news of deadly wars … so much war for nothing/for nothing.’ (It rhymes in Portuguese.) CV, the target of the operation in 2010, under President Lula and Governor Sérgio de Oliveira Cabral Santos Filho, has remained in charge of Complexo do Alemão ever since, despite police operations in 2018 and 2022.

CV is larger, wealthier, better armed and more widespread throughout Brazil than it was fifteen years ago. Gang members from across the country were caught up in the police raid, which they tried to repel using drones loaded with explosives, among other weapons. Like the police, CV used full tactical gear, automatic rifles and pistols, moving in military formation. In Salvador (where I live), in alliance with local groups, CV controls the coastline and beaches from the lighthouse to the airport, and much else besides. In Manaus, CV affiliates took to the streets and closed a major arterial road in response to operations in Rio.

Public enemy number one, Edgard Alves de Andrade, alias ‘Doca’, thought to be in charge of CV operations in Penha, lives to fight another day, like the organisation as a whole. Argentina and Paraguay have reinforced their borders against fugitives, though this is unlikely to help, since CV already has a presence in both countries, as well as Bolivia. It remains to be seen who will run the the Complexo da Penha and Complexo do Alemão, since the government has minimal presence or legitimacy there, regardless of how residents feel about CV. Perhaps the narco-militias that run western Rio, with ties to the Bolsonaro clan, will move in.

More likely, CV will retain control. In which case the bloodshed will have been in vain, even if polls show that 70 per cent of Brazilians support it, and want more such operations (in Rio’s favelas, the figure was 87.6 per cent). ‘So much war for nothing.’ Except it is not for nothing: money, power, territory, votes, money laundering and campaign finance are at stake. This is how Brazil has worked since at least the 1970s. There are no political solutions on offer: only endless shootouts between cops and robbers, with the robbers losing most battles yet winning the war.

The massacre came close on the heels of Lula’s meeting with Trump, where, in addition to tariffs and trade, the two undoubtedly discussed security, and the issue of designating the PCC and CV as ‘terrorist’ organisations, as Javier Milei has now done to please the US president. Nine months ago Trump applied the label to Tren de Aragua, Venezuela’s diasporic prison gang, and argued that President Nicolás Maduro stood at the head of it. (He has hinted that he might do the same with Colombia’s multiple armed groups, claiming that President Gustavo Petro is in charge of them.)

‘Anti-terrorist’ legislation to combat the CV and the much larger, wealthier PCC was introduced into Brazilian Congress on 31 October. The head of public security in São Paulo stepped down from his post to work on it.

Cláudio Castro has brought a range of conservative governors together – some of them presidential hopefuls, including São Paulo’s Tarcísio de Freitas, Ronaldo Caiado from Goiás and Romeu Zema in Minas Gerais. Presumably they will work parallel to, rather than in concert with, the federal government, until the anti-terrorist law is approved.

If he wants to win in 2026, Lula will need public security policies that differ from his competitors’. The issue could become the wedge that opens the door to a comeback for pro-Trump, far-right politics in Brazil, after the fall of Bolsonaro and his allies in the military (likely under house arrest for the duration). It’s a bad sign that Lula’s chief of staff is Rui Costa, the governor of Bahia from 2015 to 2022, where every year the police murder more people than they do in the whole of the US.

For anything to change, large-scale rallies and demonstrations across the country, like the ones that took place on 31 October, will need to be followed by more sustained street mobilisation and further steps towards building a mass movement for new public security policies. If not, the police massacres and extra-judicial killings will continue.