2023-10-09 14:46:00
The government of the Brazilian state of Rio de Janeiro deployed a thousand police officers in at least three favelas of the city on Monday, in a vast operation against organized crime, authorities reported.
“A thousand agents from the security forces of Rio de Janeiro today begin a major crime-fighting operation in the Complexo da Maré, Vila Cruzeiro and Cidade de Deus,” the local government reported on the social network X, formerly Twitter.
These three neighborhoods, located in the north and west of Rio, are considered strongholds of the Comando Vermelho (CV), the largest drug trafficking organization in Rio.
“We want to attack this criminal faction that is trying to expand its territory and generating conflict with other criminal organizations,” said the secretary of the Civil Police of the State of Rio, Renato Torres, in a press conference in the morning.
At this time, no deaths or injuries have been reported.
In recent weeks, Rio has recorded several episodes of violence that have shaken the city, such as shootings, a bus robbery with the use of a homemade grenade, and the execution of three doctors in the wealthy Barra da Tijuca neighborhood.
The authorities suspect that the doctors, who were visiting Rio to participate in a congress, were murdered by “error” in the midst of a dispute between drug traffickers and parapolice militias in the western region.
Aerial images recently shown by TV Globo showed traffickers in Maré training war tactics, armed with rifles, in a sports center near a school area.
In response, the government of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva announced a national plan to confront criminal organizations, in coordination with state authorities, for which it intends to invest 900 million reais (about 180 million dollars) in the next three years.
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