Police with automatic rifles slung around their necks stood behind an armoured car near the entrance of the Salgueiro favela, a half-hour drive from Rio across the Guanabara Bay.
Nearby, Joelma Milanes, 38, cried as she recalled the night last November when she and her husband found her son Márcio Sabino, 21, lying dead with several others after a police and army operation.
The army told the Guardian its special forces battalion – Brazil’s equivalent of the US Navy Seals – participated in the operation which left seven dead, but denied they fired the shots.
“The people who should be protecting us are killing us,” Milanes said. “They do what they want. There won’t be justice.”
Such concerns have intensified since 16 February, when President Michel Temer declared a “federal intervention” in Rio de Janeiro state, putting a general in charge of its police forces, prisons and security.
On Monday, Temer announced the creation of a new extraordinary ministry of public security and appointed another general, Joaquim Silva e Luna, as minister of defence.
Since Temer sanctioned a new law last October, investigations into civilian deaths during police actions by the armed forces have been handled by military courts and prosecutors. But Human Rights Watch says the army is stonewalling an investigation into the Salgueiro massacre, whose death toll rose to eight after a victim died in hospital.
And while the “federal intervention” has the support of Rio’s middle and upper classes – spooked by rising crime – poorer Brazilians like Milanes, who works in garbage recycling, are apprehensive.
Source :- theguardian
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