Rio de Janeiro, October 29, 2025.– The police operation carried out on October 28, 2025 in the Alemão and Penha complexes, in Rio de Janeiro, with 64 people officially confirmed dead[1], was deemed the deadliest in the history of the state, surpassing in scale the Jacarezinho Massacre (2021), which resulted in 28 deaths and was, until then, the most violent action in the capital of Rio de Janeiro. The real number of victims may be even higher, with reports of locals collecting about 60 additional bodies (mostly of black people) that were not initially accounted for in the official toll.

Public security experts already classify the event as “the largest massacre in the history of Rio” and “something completely unprecedented,” which highlights the failure of a public security model based on violent confrontation. This episode is part of a tragic historical pattern of lethal violence in police operations in Brazil, which includes massacres such as those in Vigário Geral (1993, with 21 deaths) and Baixada Fluminense (2005, with 29 deaths), repeating cycles of brutality and impunity that victimize mostly young black people and residents of the peripheries.

Rio de Janeiro, in particular, has been the site of daily police operations and the impact on the city reaches all people, indiscriminately. However, it affects much more intensely the people living in the peripheries – mostly black, women and children – who are forced to cope with multiple forms of violence. The State does not have a plan to combat this violence;  the State itself is seen being one of the main protagonists in the generation of violence and deaths.

Brazil has frequently received visits from experts from the UN and other multilateral mechanisms. These experts have issued concrete reports and recommendations, which indicate ways to combat violence and, at the same time, to establish structuring public policies that, in the medium and long term, can change this scenario of ongoing civil war.

The report issued by the International Mechanism of Independent Experts for the Advancement of Racial Equality and Justice in Law Enforcement – EMLER, in October 2024, highlighted that “police culture and a public security policy based on repression, violence, and hypertoxic masculinity. In the context of police operations that seek to eliminate the public enemy (criminals), people of African descent are often unfairly associated with criminality or as collateral damage operations. The Mechanism has observed symptomatic and widespread erosion and a profound lack of trust of people of African descent in police forces, especially among marginalized communities, mainly due to historical and ongoing police violence, which creates a sense of systemic oppression aggravated by long-standing impunity for these acts.”[2]

The numbers of the operation in the Alemão and Penha complexes show – and evidence – a mistaken policy that, over the last 20 years, has proven to be inefficient in the fight against crime and has generated many deaths, indiscriminately. The EMLER mechanism also considers that a human rights-based approach to policing should be part of the strategy to reverse these gaps. A human rights-based approach to policing is a comprehensive, systematic, and institutional approach to law enforcement that conforms to international human rights standards and practices and that promotes policy and action analysis through the tripartite obligations to respect, protect, and fulfill.

Another highlight of the report is the fact that the numbers and circumstances in which people are murdered by the police in Brazil are alarming. In the last ten years, 54,175 people have been killed by police officers in the country, with more than 6,000 individuals killed every year (17 per day) in the last six years. Deaths caused by police increased significantly: from 2,212 in 2013 to 6,393 in 2023. The most recent data represents 13% of the total intentional violent deaths in the country. Of the 6,393 people killed by police in 2023, 99.3% were men; 6.7% were children between 12 and 17 years old; and 65% were young adults: 41% were between 18 and 24 years old and 23.5% between 25 and 29 years old.

There is no way to dissociate this state of violence from structural and systemic racism in Brazil. The excessive use of force, which leads to thousands of deaths every year, and excessive incarceration, which disproportionately affect people of African descent, are a consequence of systemic racism which, combined with the current policies of “war on crime”, results in a process of social cleansing that serves to exterminate sectors of society considered undesirable,  dangerous and criminal. This is a pervasive systemic issue that requires a systemic and comprehensive response.

The Institute on Race, Equality and Human Rights (Race and Equality) renounces the operation carried out by the government of the State of Rio de Janeiro on Tuesday (28), which has resulted, so far, in 64 confirmed deaths, and reinforces that the fight against organized crime must be rethought, as it has only served to generate panic and various human rights violations in favela territories,  strongly affecting the most vulnerable people, who find themselves hostages of this mistaken security policy.

[1] Bodies are left in a square in Complexo da Penha after an operation that left dozens dead in Rio. Image: Flávia Fróes/Video playback… – See more at https://noticias.uol.com.br/cotidiano/ultimas-noticias/2025/10/29/atualizacao-corpos-mortos-rio-de-janeiro.htm?cmpid=copiaecola

[2] Microsoft Word – A-HRC-57-71-Add-1-unofficial-Portuguese-version.docx