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Today, Brazilians are reeling from the deadliest police operation in the country's history.

The massacre that happened here, organized by Governor Claudio Castro, is something with no precedent in our history.

Does this deadly raid mark a turning point for state violence in Brazil?

I'm Natasha del Toro and this is a take Hi.

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Brazilians say they've never seen a police operation like this one.

Last Wednesday in the Penya neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro started hearing the sounds of pops at around four in the morning.

Many said they thought they were hearing fireworks, but when the popping sounds didn't stop, they got scared.

It was one of the largest police operations ever carried out in real targeting the Red Command, Brazil's second largest criminal organization.

When news broke of corpses piling in the street.

After the raid, local reporter Mattias Gimota rushed into what's known as a favela, a poor neighborhood in Brazil.

Me and Michael iag Leonardo Cuellu.

We were there the scene first, helping the victims, families and friends to find the bodies and where they beloved ones were since they had no information if they were arrested, kill or anything like that.

Several hours after the raid, Matteas and local residents made a shocking discovery.

The death toll was even higher than originally reported, with bodies hidden in the local forests.

We went to the woods of the favela to find out where was these bodies that were not accountant and the official numbers, and they are really dance woods with difficulty to get access.

A lot of bodies needed a lot of manpower to be able to get from one place to another, and with the help of residents the leadership of the community was able to put them on the ground of the lowest part of the favela, side by side without clothes, so everybody could see the marks that didn'ified people.

It was a really sad place to be a lot of women crying over the beloved ones.

To understand what the strait means for the country, we spoke to Cecilia Oliveda.

She's the co founder of the publication The Intercept Brazil and the founder of the Crossfire Institute, the largest open database on armed violence in Latin America.

I want to start out with the motivation for this raid.

The governor of the state of Rio de Janeiro, Claude Orcastro, dubbed the operation a complete success.

There is a real desire for this to become the beginning of something new, of a new era.

As I mentioned, this is what the DPF brings us today, moving us forward or backward.

We are already aware of the critical aspects, but moving forward we can truly transform this into great actions.

So in his view, this all went really well.

Now can you tell us about what caused the governor and the police force to conduct this operation.

So what we have seen after this major operation is that very Leo has actually changed for who lives here, who walks here and this operation the main reason that the governor said is that they won't get the major drug dealer in the region called Doka.

And they have also one hundred people that they were looking for.

But the thing is they didn't get Bakka and they didn't get all the hundred people that they were looking for.

They get some people and they kill some people that were not on the investigation.

So, yeah, if you have the mission to get this guy, get the people that you were looking for and release the population of their rule, they just failed.

And the guy that you're talking about is the head of this gang.

One of them.

This is the interesting thing about Red Command because it's not like the PCC, the gang that are most famous and has more business around the world.

PCC you have like a very strict it organogram, but Red Command it's more like a joint ventry with people that command a lot of favelas, so you have more leaders to deal with.

Yeah, I want to talk about Red Command.

I understand that this group has been gaining ground across Brazil, but especially in Rio where it originated.

Tell me about this group and how they've evolved and strengthened over the years.

So the Red Command was born in the seventies and they keep growing since then.

At that time they were just based in a few favelas in Reo, but they kept growing around Reo, and today you can see Red Command around Latin America and this kind of expansion.

It's because we don't have policies that can look at the group dealers and the war on drugs, get war on as a complex subject.

They think like it's just a small group and a small city and we can just erase them, and we can see that they cannot.

Right.

Well, let's talk about the victims of this police raid.

At least one hundred and twenty people died in the operation, four of whom were police officers, but Favella residents and the Public Defender's Office are saying that these numbers could actually be much much higher.

Now, we saw some of the grim pictures that have come out of corpses that were lined up on the street in the favela, and it looked like a war zone.

You know, what do we know about the people who died during this operation and were they all members of the Red Command.

That's the thing that we don't know all the names.

We don't have all the names.

Who are these people, if they are criminals, whether the role and the gang, we don't know about that.

But one thing that we can make sure is that we have more victims that the dead ones, because we have all the people in Pavelas that were affected, like the lives just stopped and not of just them.

All the city was just quiet for at least two days, so we don't have all the buzzes around, We don't have subway, we didn't have even the international airport was closed, so all the city was closed.

Basically in the aftermath of the raid, is that everything shut down?

Yes, everything during the raid and after that.

So does that mean people knew that it was gonna happen or if this was a surprise.

It was a surprise.

Don't us spread very fast?

But this one the police cops were killed, and this means that the raid is gonna be badly, more deadly that usual is because here we have a concept that we called revenged raid.

That's when you kill a cop, so they're going to enter and killed more civilians to revenge.

The colleague, what was your reaction when you heard that the raid had taken place and that they had killed so many people?

And the first time when I saw the news about this and it was twenty people.

Twenty it's basically a common number.

So yeah, I didn't doubt when I saw twenty, but I remember reading a news that was saying fifty four, and my first reaction was, no, this is wrong.

I'm sure that they just misspelled the number.

It's wrong, but no, which was not wrong.

And then they double that.

More with Cecilia after the break.

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So Cecilia raised are not entirely unusual in Brazil.

From what I understand, they do happen, but this one was something that was really large and scale.

That's the part that was really different about this one, right, And you're saying that that's in part because the police were taking revenge on them because they had killed police officers.

But they still don't even know if all the people that were killed were members of this gang.

I mean, human rights organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have criticized this operation for for its brutality.

In your view, was this rate more than just the standard operation?

Oh I have I have no doubt about that.

Uh.

For us to understand what's happening, we we need to remember that next year its election year, so we are going to vote for president but also for governors, and Real is in dispute now.

So when we think about this operation and remember that this operation, they said that this was planned for a full year with access to intelligence data.

And yeah, the targets were captured.

So that raised serious question about the coordination, but also about the purpose because it starts looks less like focusing person and action and more like uh, demonstration of something that plays well politically and change very literal on the ground.

Our governor here in Real, he is politically very weak, but he has to do something because he has to put his mark on his governor and also try to make someone align to him to win the next election.

So some officials even suggested that those killed were criminals just based on appearance or locations they look like and they were there before any any investigations.

So this kind of assumption reinforces dangerous biases about who lives there, who are really involved in this situation.

I'm curious Cecilia.

What has been the public reaction to all of this within Brazil.

We have large by the population saying yes, I agree they have to kill more, but this population also say that I'm not feeling safer, So it's it's tricky to understand.

You have to go deeper because the population is really tired of the situation.

The gangs are getting bigger, stronger, and richer.

I was talking with friends that lives in favela or used to live or have families there, and one thing that they were saying about this kind of opinion that people that lives in favela have that they have the feeling that we know that they are bad people and we don't want to be related to them.

So it's fine if you just get rid of them because we are not like them.

But they also know that, yeah, we have seen this so many times for so many years, and it doesn't work.

So yeah, I can totally understand people that say I'm hired, we need to be free of the situation, and I totally understand.

I mean, and again, just this image of having corpses lined in the street, you know, and mothers crying over bodies like this is really this is very shocking.

One of the things that surprised me was a video on Instagram of a pastor condemning the raids.

And what was surprising was that this pastor is a Borsonarita right, a tough on crime kind of guy.

And in the video he talks about members of his church being killed in this raid although they're not even affiliated, and saying that they're not even affiliated with the Red Command.

I know that four boys died yesterday that never carried rifles but are being counted as if they were criminals.

And who knows and who will know who are criminals and who aren't criminals?

I mean, what does that tell you about the moment?

This guy he is a congressman or Tony Japaula, He is a congress a congressman, but also a pastor, and he is a pastor in real and his church it's very close to Complex Dolement, so people that lives there go to his church.

So that's why he was telling that, I know these people, I know that not everybody it's a criminal.

So he was telling us that in his church has at least four months that has lost his children in this massacre, and their children was not criminals, but they were there.

So yeah, it makes us think that who are these hundred people because we don't have all the information about them yet.

And speaking about the reaction of this raid, I mean, I understand there have been protests in Brazil over the weekend.

It's a very sad scene, you know, to see our acquaintance is thrown away like dead animals, a massacre that they call an operation, but it's not an operation.

This is inhumane for the community, for the children who are growing up to see this.

In real Specifically, the people that were trying to go to the protests, they were being stopped by the police.

So it's very hard to understand how this can work, Like how can the families protest against them because it's their right, it's their kids, their father, the siblings, so yeah, they have the right to protest against them, but.

They basically were not allowed to but they were being stopped.

Wow.

Yeah.

Now, Cecilia, you're the co founder of the Crossfire Institute, which is a project attracts instances of armed violence across Brazil.

And I know that you've been reporting on crime and drug trafficking for many years, and you wrote for the Intercept that despite how frequent this and violent things are, nothing really changes.

And you've been saying that during this interview.

Do you think that this latest police operation is going to change anything.

It's not, and in factly is not changing because this weekend we have more actions from Red commands around the city trying to take the control for other areas.

So it's like you cannot erase our organization that is national, just making a very specific neighborhood as example.

So yeah, it didn't work.

It's not working, and it will not work if you are thinking just about this way and ignoring like the finational part, the political part, the corruption part didn't work.

It's not working, and they possibly killed innocent people in the process of conducting this rate is what it sounds like.

Brazil is a democracy which you can't just go out and execute a bunch of people.

So Cecily, Yeah, what's the right way in your view to fight organized crime without violating people's human rights.

We have a gigantic operation in St.

Paul that was targeting the financial heart of PCC and they get a lot of people arrest and they get even the financial operation arrested, and this with not a single shot.

So yeah, we can see that there is a way to do this.

But something that we usually ignore when we are finding against this organization is that we are always targeting the leader and the soldiers, but we are forgetting the main that it's the the national engineer that makes these kind of gangs get more space, more areas, more and get more lucrative year by year.

So this is the thing that we have to focus on.

This operation show us for the first time that recommand throwing granades against the police using drums.

The guy that built this drone to red commands it was a military guy.

So you have to look at corruption because the Fabila is not producing guns, the Fabila is not producing drones, and the Fabila is not producing drugs.

So how these things gets there You need to count and someone.

You need to corrupt someone to get all, you need to fight the police.

So basically the military forces the police all that people that are corrupt giving everything to this drug dealer to find against the police.

So yeah, we have to talk about corruption if we want to begin to see things working.

So it's interesting you're saying that when they did this operation again the financial heart of this gang, and when they did that, they didn't.

There was no bloodshed.

They did not go in and kill a bunch of people online their bodies in the streets.

But when it comes to going into the favela, they did.

They go in and there was a lot of bloodshed, a lot of violence.

And you're saying that it doesn't work and it doesn't have to be this way.

Yes, this operation that I mentioned against the PCC in San Paulo, this operation was targeting the financial art and even target digital banks because when we talk about oh, recommend it's indispension.

So we have to contain the gangs, of course, but for them to expand, they need money.

So if you want to avoid the expansion, you need to get the money because it's no way that you can avoid them to grow.

And that's the way that they did in San paul Right, So yeah, we can see that there's ways to avoid the expansion the lucrative business and the growth of the gangs, and so.

Let's sort of favelas for a moment.

In many ways, they become synonymous with people's images of Brazil and of Rio.

I'm thinking of movies like City of God and Elite Squad, which were massively popular overseas, and they paint a pretty bleak picture of what life is like in these favelas, Cecilia, what do you think it's missed in how the media covers these communities.

Oh, this is a good question because something that we are noticing here with this raid is that the mainstream it's very aligned with the government and the police, so they are using a very specific language and show the raid as a show and a show that was a success, but the facts are saying it was not a success because the objectives like uh, get the doctor, the big drug dealer and clean the area, this was not accomplished, so it was not a success.

You know, there's this stereotype of the favelas of being all violent and poor, and they are you know, it's there's some truth, but also there's a lot of life there and there's these are neighborhoods where people live right.

Yes, I was watching the news when that happened and they got a lot of interviews with people that lives in favela and were trying to get to the work or get to the school, and everybody was walking because we didn't have bus, metro, subway, we didn't have anything, so people were walking like alter to go to where they need to be or come back to.

Home because this was everything was shut down.

Yeah, everything.

So people are saying like, I'm just a worker.

I have nothing to do with that, and I can't just live my life normally because I cannot go to school, I cannot go to work, I cannot I cannot do anything