RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The president of Brazil, ultra-conservative Jair Bolsonaro, on Sunday, May 9, congratulated the police for their questionable operation last Thursday in a favela in Rio de Janeiro that left 28 dead, amid serious allegations of abuses by the law enforcement agents.
In his social network posts, the president refused to treat as “victims” the 27 purported criminals who died in the operation, making it the most lethal in the history of Rio de Janeiro, according to human rights organizations.
Bolsonaro also took advantage of the brutal event, in which a police inspector was also killed, to attack the press and leftist political forces.
“By treating as victims traffickers who steal, kill and destroy families, the press and the left equate them to the common, honest citizen who respects the laws and his fellow man,” said the head of state, in his first public statement on the matter. “This is a serious offense to the people who have long been hostage to criminality. Congratulations to the Civil Police of Rio de Janeiro!” he added on his official Twitter profile.
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The controversial leader defends using an iron fist against crime and has proposed that police officers who, in the exercise of their duties, kill criminals, should have statutory guarantees that they will not be held accountable, as he has stated on more than one occasion.
Bolsonaro did express his condolences to the relatives of the deceased Inspector André Leonardo de Mello, who, he said, “lost his life in combat against criminals” and “will be remembered for his courage.”
The police action in question lasted nine hours in the favela of Jacarezinho, in the northern zone of the Fluminense capital, and was, according to the police, aimed at combating the recruitment of minors by a gang of traffickers – even though all such gangs have been recruiting youths for decades.
Read also: Rio police operation – “One of the biggest rights violations I have ever seen,” says public defender
However, according to reports from neighbors and videos posted on social networks, during the operation, the agents invaded homes without judicial authorization, shot people who had surrendered, and confiscated the cell phones of witnesses.
On Friday, Brazil’s prosecutor general, Augusto Aras, asked the governor of Rio, Claudio Castro, and other authorities in the region to “clarify the circumstances” of the operation, given the multiple reports of abuses committed by the agents.
For his part, Justice Luiz Edson Fachin of the Brazilian Supreme Court affirmed that he had seen signs of “arbitrary executions” in videos he had analyzed.
Read also: Police operation causes “the biggest massacre in the history of Rio de Janeiro”
Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch condemned the events. At the same time, the United Nations (UN) Office for Human Rights denounced possible attempts by the security forces to prevent an independent investigation of what happened.
The Civil Police has denied all allegations of abuse and stated that it acted in a planned manner and under the prosecutor’s office’s supervision, even though it only notified the prosecutors three hours after the first incursion into the favela.