[Source: Reuters]

The governor of Rio de Janeiro has touted the deadliest police raid in Brazilian history as a success, but none of the 117 people killed by police were among the 69 suspects named by prosecutors in the complaint providing the basis for the raid.

Only five of those named in the criminal complaint were arrested that day and none were senior leaders of the notorious Comando Vermelho gang, according to a Reuters review of the full police report on the operation shared with the Brazilian Supreme Court.

The raid, known as Operation Containment, left 121 people dead, including four police officers and two teenagers, and 99 suspects were taken into custody.

The raid also failed to arrest or kill senior figures in the Comando Vermelho gang that investigators say is headquartered in the neighborhoods the police raided. The main leader of the gang, Edgar Alves de Andrade, known as Doca, remains at large.

One mid-level gang leader was detained without a shot fired, according to the police report, reviewed exclusively by Reuters.

The findings challenge the official account of the raid, carried out in two densely-populated working-class neighborhoods known as favelas on the north side of the state capital. After the operation, local residents lined up dozens of dead bodies in the streets.

The raid, which came a week before world leaders began arriving for the United Nations climate summit COP30, has pitted leftist President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who called it disastrous, against conservatives who say it is a model to fight organized crime.

While Lula’s administration has backed police operations aimed at disrupting organized crime financing, rivals on the right like Rio Governor Claudio Castro argue for aggressive raids to seize weapons and arrest or kill gang members, despite the high human cost.

Rio’s public safety secretary, Victor dos Santos, who oversees the police, confirmed to Reuters that the government’s goal in the raid was to arrest the men who had been charged. But, he added, “it wasn’t very easy to look for 69 people among the 280,000” who live in the favelas that were targeted by the raid.

Although 19 of the men killed had no prior criminal record, according to documents in the investigation, Santos said he was 100% certain that they were criminals.

He argued that the number of people killed and arrested showed that “the picture is a lot worse than what the investigation showed.” He said other raids are planned for the coming months in the favelas of Rio.

Still, the initial results of the raid fueled criticism from the families of the victims, as well as human rights advocates, that police killed indiscriminately instead of pursuing clear objectives based on long-running investigations into the Comando Vermelho gang, one of the largest and most violent in Brazil.

The police “detain them, execute them and it’s all good, because they know there is no law here,” said Samuel Peçanha, whose 14-year-old son Michel was killed during the raid. “In Brazil, that’s normal.”

Though Peçanha said his son Michel, one of the teenagers, was part of the gang, he still had hopes of convincing him to take a different path.

“He was still a child,” he said. “Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get him out.”

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