Lethal Force in Rio’s Favelas

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Documentary, Society & Culture

4.3 • 2.7K Ratings

🗓️ 29 August 2019

⏱️ 26 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Brazil’s party capital, Rio de Janeiro, is witnessing a killing spree. Nothing new there, you might think – it’s long suffered from violent crime. Yet in this case, it’s the police who stand accused of perpetrating much of the bloodshed. The city’s impoverished informal townships - known as favelas - are home to criminal gangs with whom security forces are doing battle on a daily basis, using armoured vehicles, high velocity firearms and even helicopter gunships. This year an average of five people have lost their lives every single day. Many of the dead are not even lawbreakers, but entirely innocent civilians. For Assignment, Hugo Bachega enters Rio’s favelas to meet those who believe the authorities are complicit in extra-judicial assassinations. But as he discovers, the police themselves are both afraid and ill-equipped for their task, while investigatory authorities freely admit that they are incapable of properly investigating suspected illegal killings. What’s more, plenty of people outside the favelas approve of the hardline police tactics, and sympathy for victims is qualified by the pervading fear of crime.

Reporter, Hugo Bachega Producer, Michael Gallagher

Image: A military policeman takes part in an operation at Cidade de Deus favela in Rio de Janeiro Credit: MAURO PIMENTEL/AFP/Getty Images

Transcript

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0:00.0	Why did they shoot him? Why did they shoot him? Why? Why? Why? Why?
0:19.0	Why? Why?
0:20.0	Why?
0:22.0	Why? What happened? A few of us can't. A few of us can't. A few of us can imagine having to ask the kind of questions that begin today's assignment
0:36.7	here on the BBC World Service.
0:39.7	Yet in Brazil's second bigger city, Rio de Janeiro, they're questions that trouble ordinary people like Andrea on a daily basis.
0:49.0	You think a lot of things, was it because he was black, that he was at the entrance to Favella?
0:59.0	And why shoot first before asking questions? They could have asked for his ID. That's what the documents for.
1:09.0	He always carried ID. He was a law-abiding citizen. Why did they shoot him?
1:17.0	The man who shot Andrea's husband, she says, was a police officer.
1:25.0	This is what policing sounds like in Rio today. In the cities impoverished shantytowns called favelas officers do daily battle
1:40.0	with criminal gangs using paramilitary tactics. It's proving to be a bloodbath.
1:49.7	In the first six months of this year, almost 900 people were killed in police operations across Rio,
1:57.0	the highest number of victims since records began.
2:00.0	Many victims are not even suspects. They're entirely innocent, children, teenagers, workers.
2:08.0	Andrea's husband, Jean-Hodrigo, was killed in May, just outside the centre where he taught Jiu-Jitsu to local youngsters.
2:15.6	I'm Hugo Bashiga and for today's assignment I'm in Rio to ask if the forces charged with protecting some of its poorest residents have a license to kill.
2:30.0	What did the police tell you about what happened to your husband?
2:37.0	Nothing.
2:40.0	Nothing.
2:41.0	At the time, not. Nothing. A thing, nada.
2:43.0	Nada.
	...

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