State Violence and the Institutionalisation of Extermination: The Rio de Janeiro Massacre as a Symptom of the Failure of the Brazilian State
- alessandracuppini
- 4 hours ago
- 12 min read
Prof. Dr. Kristal Moreira Gouveia
Kristal is a Professor of Legal History, Legal Hermeneutics, and Legal Philosophy at Centro Universitário Paraíso (UniFAP, Brazil). She holds a PhD and a Master’s in Law from the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC), specialising in Theory and History of Law, as well as a Bachelor’s degree in Law with a specialisation in Public Law from UniFAP.
Introduction
Operation Contenção, launched on 28 October 2025 in the Alemão and Penha complexes of Rio de Janeiro, marked one of the deadliest episodes in Brazil’s recent history. More than 130 people were killed in a police action that, officially, sought to execute arrest warrants against members of Comando Vermelho, one of the country’s largest criminal factions. The episode reignited an old, and still unresolved, debate on the nature of violence in Brazil and on the State’s role in reproducing, under the pretext of combating it, the very practices it claims to suppress. This text aims to analyse the operation in light of the structural complexity that sustains urban violence, understanding it not as an isolated event but as an expression of a historical mechanism that intertwines the power of criminal factions with the lethality of the State itself.
The central hypothesis is that the tragedy in Rio de Janeiro does not stem merely from operational failures or individual misconduct, but from a structural model of violence management that permeates State institutions and the formal market, normalising death as a tool of social control and displacing from public debate the multiple faces of organised crime that extend far beyond the favelas. From this perspective, the landmark rulings of the Federal Supreme Court (in ADPFs 635 and 347) and the condemnation of Brazil by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in the case Favela Nova Brasília v. Brazil do not represent mere legal responses to specific violations: they are symptoms of the same institutional collapse that this text seeks to expose. The State, far from being a mere observer, acts as an agent of its own violence, reinforcing the mechanisms that perpetuate it whenever it reacts repressively — but not preventively — to the sociopolitical dynamics from which it arises. I therefore argue that the Brazilian State not only fails to contain the violence perpetrated by criminal organisations but feeds it, in a cycle of self-reinforcement marked by the normalisation of death as public policy and by the marginalisation of vulnerable populations (particularly favela residents) who are re-victimised within this context of double lethality.
The text is organised into six sections. The first examines urban inequality and the emergence of parallel systems of governance in the favelas. The second discusses the transition from the rhetoric of the “war on drugs” to the necropolitical rationality shaping public security policies. The third analyses the legal landmarks that have recognised the structural violation of rights in Brazil (ADPF 635, ADPF 347, and Favela Nova Brasília). The fourth reconstructs the facts and implications of Operation Contenção. The fifth explores the interconnection between violence and the formal economy, as exemplified by Operation Hidden Carbon, highlighting alternative approaches to tackling organised crime and how they are strategically erased from mainstream public discourse. Finally, the conclusion proposes paths for public policy and institutional accountability, suggesting that as long as the State insists on governing through death, it will continue to fail to protect the life it claims to represent.
The following sections explore how this structural logic materialises in the urban, legal, and political dimensions of Brazil’s crisis — from the geography of inequality to the institutional responses that have failed to contain it.
Urban Inequality and Parallel Governance
In the eyes of the world, Rio de Janeiro functions as the cultural capital and postcard of Brazil. With its crystal-clear waters, lush hills, and vibrant artistic and cultural life, the city attracts millions of tourists each year. It sells the image of a beautiful, free, charismatic, and magnetic country.
The reality of those who live in Rio or know its intricacies, however, is quite different. The city’s geographical layout is characterised by extreme contrasts: natural and artificial borders divide, side by side, upscale neighbourhoods and favelas, offering an acute portrait of the inequalities that structure Brazilian urban space.
This inequality, which is not only economic, reveals itself most clearly in the way the State relates to its citizens. On one side stands the standard citizen — the inhabitant of the formal city, whose life is defined by legality, stable employment, and formal housing, and for whom the State appears as protector and guarantor of order. On the other side is the marginalised citizen — the resident of the favela, racialised and economically vulnerable, whose existence unfolds in territories historically neglected by public institutions and subjected to the de facto authority of criminal organisations. For this citizen, the State manifests itself not through protection but through absence and violence, leaving entire communities to navigate survival under the dual rule of abandonment and coercion, at the margins of legality.
Not only in Rio, but across Brazil, the violence inherent to this duality can be read in the geography of spaces. In the favelas, criminal factions impose their own regime through force and fear. Everyday gestures can carry fatal consequences: a hand sign mistaken for the symbol of a rival group, or an innocent social media post interpreted as an act of affiliation, may be enough to provoke execution. Likewise, a wrong turn on a narrow street can mean crossing an invisible frontier between the “city space” and the “forbidden territory”. These borders are not marked on any map, yet they dictate who may live and who must die. Unwritten rules govern movement and access to services, establishing an order in the favelas outside formal legality.
These territories are primarily dominated by criminal organisations (a category that includes both criminal factions and militias), groups whose main criminal activity is drug trafficking and that exert economic, political, and social control over communities. Law No. 12,850/2013, by redefining the concept of criminal organisation, describes the structure of these factions in an almost literal way:
A criminal organisation is considered to be an association of four or more people that is structurally ordered and characterised by the division of tasks, even informally, to obtain, directly or indirectly, an advantage of any nature, through the practice of criminal offences whose maximum sentences are greater than four years, or that are of a transnational nature.
In the development of criminal activity (including trafficking and cargo theft), self-institutionalised power structures are formed. In practice, these organisations reproduce, on a parallel scale, the state's logic of power: they have their own hierarchies, designated functions, and normative systems. They incorporate children and adolescents, form cadres, establish rules of conduct, curfew times, punishments and territorial jurisdictions. The communities under its dominion live under a de facto legal system, in which the formal State is absent – and, when present, it is almost always manifested by violence.
The populations that inhabit these regions are, for the most part, economically vulnerable and racialised. They have become a symbol of the stigma of extreme marginalisation: men, women and children who are born in the midst of violence and have no formal outlets for legality. Although favelas are mainly composed of citizens who engage in legal activities, for many, the path of crime presents itself as a “natural” alternative: born and raised in a context of violence and lack of adequate public services, this population suffers the consequences of state neglect. Films such as City of God convey this reality emblematically, depicting a daily life in which state abandonment and armed control overlap.
In these territories, the State is not only absent: it violates. Police operations are marked by summary executions, home invasions, property destruction and sexualized violence, practices that are not new. The stigma on favela populations anaesthetises society in the face of these violations: when the victims are poor and black, state violence is tolerated, naturalised, and even celebrated. This normalisation of violence prepares the ground for a broader political rationale, one in which the State itself governs through death while claiming to defend life.
From “War on Crime” to Necropolitics: The State’s Role and Landmarks ADPF 635 and Favela Nova Brasília v. Brazil
The official discourse of public security legitimises extermination under the argument of the “war on crime” and “war on drugs”. In reality, what is observed is the functioning of a necropolitical rationality — a mode of governance, as theorised by Achille Mbembe, in which the State exercises power through the administration of death, deciding who deserves to live and who may die. It is not, therefore, a question of functional failure, but of the effectiveness of a policy of death that reproduces colonial and racial hierarchies within the democratic State.
In response to this scenario, the Federal Supreme Court, through ADPF 635 (Constitutional Action - ADPF of the Favelas of Rio de Janeiro), ruled in 2020 and reaffirmed in 2022, that determined measures to control police operations, such as the mandatory use of body cameras and transparency, were necessary. The Court recognised the structural violation of fundamental rights and the need to reconfigure public security policy in the light of human dignity and international human rights treaties. This understanding dialogues with ADPF 347, which found the state of affairs in the Brazilian prison system unconstitutional, revealing a pattern of institutional failure that extends from prison to the peripheries. The constitutional actions acknowledge a systematic and endemic process of state abandonment in relation to the population living in favelas and within the prison system. The situation is not new. It had already been brought before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, which condemned the Brazilian State in 2017 in the case “Favela Nova Brasília vs. Brazil”, a case concerning two massacres that occurred in 1994 and 1995 during police operations in Rio de Janeiro, resulting in the deaths of 26 people and the sexual assault of three women (two of whom were minors).
Despite the Supreme Court's paradigmatic decisions, the IACHR's decision, and successive warnings from human rights organisations, the necropolitical logic persisted as a daily practice. The full consequences of this logic became evident in 2025, when Operation Contenção exposed, in its most brutal form, the continuity between policy and extermination.
The 28th of October 2025 Operation: Facts and Implications
On October 28, 2025, Brazil witnessed possibly the largest police massacre in its history. About 2,500 agents of the security forces of Rio de Janeiro were mobilised in the so-called “Operation Containment”, aimed at serving 100 arrest warrants in the complexes of Alemão and Penha, in the North Zone. The balance: more than 130 dead — almost all residents of the communities — and four police officers. The operation, officially aimed at combating the Red Command (Comando Vermelho, the second largest criminal organisation in Brazil), resulted in summary executions, disappearances and destruction of homes and local businesses.
The episode was described as a massacre. Police violence, which is not unknown in the daily life of Rio de Janeiro, surpassed all previous events by proportion, but it did not expose an isolated fact. The event revealed more than an operational failure: it exposed the trivialization of extermination as a state policy.
The public reaction to the massacre revealed how deeply the event was embedded in Brazil’s broader landscape of both factual and symbolic violence. Faced with the news, society split between outrage and celebration. According to a survey conducted by AtlasIntel, 55.2% of the Brazilian population approves of Operation Contenção, while 42.3% disapprove. These figures reveal that, within popular common sense, there persists a belief that police lethality can suppress the violence associated with organised crime, even though, historically, this dynamic has proven ineffective. The segment that celebrated — aligned with a punitive discourse hostile to human rights — expressed a legitimate yet misdirected indignation: legitimate because the fear and insecurity experienced daily by the population are real, but misdirected because this anger turns against the most vulnerable, those who live and die under the same structural neglect that fuels the violence. Public insecurity and everyday fear thus feed a desire for retribution, while the media reinforces simplistic narratives that obscure the connections between violence, economic power, and the politics of exclusion.
To uncover these obscured connections, it is necessary to move beyond the visible frontlines of the favelas and examine the financial and political circuits that sustain organised crime at the institutional level.
Beyond the Favelas: Financial and Political Networks
The most persistent misconception in the social imagination is that organised crime is restricted to favelas and marginalised territories. In reality, the machinery of criminal power is sustained by complex economic structures and a web of connections that cross the state and the formal market. In August 2025, Operation Hidden Carbon, launched by the Federal Revenue Service in partnership with the Public Prosecutor's Office and police forces, revealed a money laundering and tax evasion network that moved around BRL 52 billion between 2020 and 2024 in the fuel sector, involving more than 350 targets in at least ten Brazilian states. The scheme used fintechs and investment funds to hide assets, and only one of these companies moved more than R$ 46 billion in four years, according to official reports. It is, according to the investigative bodies themselves, the largest operation against organised crime ever carried out in the country in terms of institutional cooperation and breadth.
The economic dimension of this operation dismantles the popular narrative that organised crime “begins and ends” in favelas. The factions that control urban territories are only the most visible tip of a system of power that includes businessmen, financial operators and public agents, articulating legal and illegal flows in a parallel economy that crosses the State itself. Armed violence in communities is, therefore, the most brutal symptom of a diffuse and socially legitimised criminal structure, which feeds on both the omission and participation of formal institutions. Crime, far from being a peripheral pathology, is an expression of the real economic order on which the Brazilian State is based.
The situation rekindles the debate on the effectiveness of different approaches to combating organised crime and the structures that finance it. When compared, Operation Contenção and Operation Hidden Carbon reveal two distinct strategies: one that perpetuates the cycle of violence, and another that targets the structures sustaining the complex web of connections that fund organised crime in the country. In this regard, the President of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, described Operation Contenção as “disastrous,” arguing that the fight against organised crime must be coordinated and aimed at striking its “backbone” — that is, the financial structures that extend beyond the favelas and expose the direct involvement of supposedly lawful institutions, as demonstrated by Operation Hidden Carbon. Nevertheless, this understanding remains far removed from the prevailing popular perception of the issue.
The persistence of this distorted perception exposes the deeper moral and political structures that allow violence to reproduce itself as a social norm.
Conclusion: Policy Paths and Accountability
What emerges from this trajectory is a portrait of a State trapped within its own cycle of violence — both its cause and its consequence. The public insecurity and violence that torments the population and the growing factions dominate parts of Brazil in a regime of fear. However, the complex power structure that feeds and facilitates this reality and integrates the economic and political sectors of the Brazilian upper echelons — that is, the country’s highest social and institutional strata — remains absent from the dishonest, simplistic image to which the popular media reduces the issue. The marginalisation of the vulnerable and racialised population, doubly victimised by extra-state and state violence, receives broad popular support, with the normalisation of extermination as a measure of “salvation” of the Brazilian people.
Expressions such as “cleaning” and “disposal” began to occupy the popular vocabulary, legitimising the genocide of racialised bodies under the pretext of restoring order. It is a discursive process of dehumanisation that converts extermination into a moral spectacle, anaesthetising society in the face of barbarism.
The cycle, however, is self-perpetuating. The First Capital Command (PCC), the most significant criminal faction in the country, today with more than 35,000 members, was born in 1993 as a direct reaction to the Carandiru Massacre, which was, until then, the deadliest police-perpetrated massacre. Now, the massacre in Complexo do Alemão repeats history in a new guise. The consequence of police violence has never been — and never will be — the reduction of crime. It reinforces the resentment, distrust and hatred of populations that have never known the State as a shelter. Bodies considered disposable are quickly replaced by gangs, with thousands of young people at their disposal, fueled by the feeling of revenge and indignation, renewing the cycle of violence, hatred and exclusion.
As long as the State insists on ruling by death, each new massacre will only reaffirm the failure of the citizenship project in Brazil. While structural changes are neglected, and the structures that feed criminality remain unchanged, barbarism, disguised as justice, will continue to be the most faithful face of what the Brazilian State historically is: a failed project, which, with selectivity and exclusion, proves incapable of protecting the life it claims to represent and achieving the objectives formally enshrined in its Constitution.
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