WARNING: This video contains graphic content.
Police Massacres
The brutal actions of the police are not an exception
or the fault of supposedly unprepared officers,
but rather the exercise of the state's policy of death.
It's not possible for the police to exist
without there being violence against racialized, proletarianized,
and marginalized populations.
Just as it is not possible for there to be a state
that does not have its laws written in blood.
The police exist solely and exclusively to protect private property.
Not the “private property”, many quotes there,
of people who need to work to survive,
because they don't have any:
cell phones, homes, or any other objects
are personal belongings.
It is only private property as long as only a few enjoy it,
exploiting billions who desperately sell their labor.
To sustain itself,
this dynamic needs to keep a mass of people
under the threat of unemployment, hunger, and destitution,
pushing young black and poor people into crime,
used as cheap pawns by drug lords
and eliminated by the police
as if they were nothing more than disposable objects.
On October 28,
Rio de Janeiro was the stage of the largest massacre
since the supposed end of the dictatorship
and the beginning of redemocratization in 1985.
The so called “war on drugs” was the excuse used by the Special Police Operations Battalion (BOPE)
for a massive operation that ended in a massacre
in the Complexo do Alemão and Penha,
in the northern part of the Rio de Janeiro.
Officially, there were just over 60 deaths
and 81 arrests.
However, after the raid,
residents went out in search of missing family members
and found their bodies abandoned in the woods.
Some were decapitated, others stabbed,
revealing the extreme cruelty and torture carried out by BOPE.
According to some residents,
the young men who were murdered had surrendered to be arrested,
but the police decided to exterminate them anyway.
To date, 121 people are known to have been killed.
This number is well above that of the last major massacre in Rio de Janeiro,
which took place on May 6, 2021, in Jacarezinho,
leaving at least 29 dead.
On March 31, 2005,
another massacre of similar proportions
took place between the municipalities of Nova Iguaçu and Queimados,
in Baixada Fluminense,
resulting in 29 people dead and two wounded.
Massacres are not uncommon
in the territory dominated by the state of Rio de Janeiro,
but rather cyclical.
From the Acari massacre on July 26, 1990,
to this Tuesday's massacre,
there have been more than 100 massacres.
It is important to remember:
more than 100 massacres
after a supposed end of the military regime
and the beginning of redemocratization.
According to the report Chacinas Policiais (Police Massacres),
produced by the Study Group on New Illegalities
at Fluminense Federal University
between 2007 and 2021,
17,929 police raids were carried out in favelas
in the Rio de Janeiro Metropolitan Region,
of which 593 ended in massacres,
totaling 2,374 deaths.
All of these massacres were carried out by the cops,
with the only difference being that, in the 1990s,
many were still linked to death squads,
and from the 2000s onwards,
this began to happen more explicitly,
through police raids or Law and Order Enforcement (GLO) operations.
From 2010 onwards,
it has become usual for police operations to turn into massacres,
becoming almost synonyms.
The dictatorship, which is the dictatorship of Capital,
has not ended.
It continues to torture, rape, and murder
racialized and proletarianized populations
that are considered surplus in the logic of Capital.
Surplus populations that must be eliminated,
just as in Palestine.
“War on drugs,” “pacification,”
“war on terror”
are nothing more than euphemisms for extermination.
The brutal actions of the police are not exceptions.
Nor are they the result of a lack of training.
On the contrary,
the police are prepared to act and eliminate
according to the interests of Capital.
When our blood is no longer profitable,
it is spilled.
But pessimism has never been a guide to any struggle.
The residents of the affected areas,
who took the initiative to go after the bodies
of their murdered relatives
and hold protests,
should serve as our horizon:
only popular self-organization
and community self-defense
will be able to put an end to the dictatorship of Capital.