Capturing the scale of Rio’s deadly police raids

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By Ricardo Moraes

RIO DE JANEIRO (Reuters) -By Tuesday night, the official death toll from police raids against Rio de Janeiro’s oldest gang had climbed to 64 bodies at the city’s police morgue, already by far the most lethal operation in Brazilian history.

But as dawn broke on Wednesday, the true scale of the carnage became clear.

In drone images by Reuters photographer Ricardo Moraes, at first it may not be obvious to viewers what they are looking at. They see roofs, a busy urban street, and something running down the middle of the road.

Then it becomes clear that those are dead bodies, dozens of them, some covered in sheets and some exposed, half-dressed. They are not in a warzone or a muddy mass grave but on a commercial street, surrounded by crowds and cars and power lines. The juxtaposition between what looks like battlefield carnage and the bustling urban scene is jarring.

After Tuesday’s raids, residents of the Penha neighborhood had set out overnight in search of missing relatives and neighbors.

As they found corpses scattered in the forested hills above their homes, the citizen search teams began ferrying the bodies in pickup trucks down to the entrance of the Vila Cruzeiro favela, one of the hundreds of poor, informal settlements laced through Rio’s hilly landscape.

When Moraes arrived at Vila Cruzeiro that morning, he found that the recovered bodies had been lined up along Estrada Jose Rucas, a busy street where locals shop and children play soccer.

On one side of the road, relatives of the fallen had gathered to mourn. On the other side, stunned neighbors looked on in disbelief.

A woman started shouting and pulling back a large tarp to reveal nearly half the bodies stripped down to their shorts or underwear. Bloody bedsheets covered the rest.

After photographing scenes of the mourners up close, Moraes decided there was only one angle to capture the scale of the killing.

He had never flown a drone in a favela before.

“Usually, it’s very dangerous to use a drone there,” Moraes said. “It’s seen as a threat, both by the drug gangs and the police.”

Following a quick conversation in which the head of a local community group agreed to him flying his drone, it was soon whirring overhead.

“I don’t like using a drone most of the time. Often you lose feeling and immediacy,” he said. “But this time was the opposite. There was no better way to show what had happened.”

From street level, his camera foregrounded some bodies and blurred others, as the row of corpses faded into the distance.

From above, the framing is flat, giving each body, each life, the same weight, Moraes said.

By the end of the day, the death toll had nearly doubled.

As authorities started collecting bodies from one end of the block, pickup trucks kept arriving at the other end, adding corpses to the line.

“The death toll was already twice what we had ever seen before. And then suddenly it was over 100,” said Moraes, who has been covering violence in Rio’s favelas for more than two decades.

Rio Governor Claudio Castro said after the raids that those killed in the operation were criminals, other than four fallen police officers. State police said the raids were planned for months and that many deaths had been expected.

The smell in the street was overpowering. Moraes could not stay for long.

When he returned later in the day, the bodies were gone. Street cleaners were working to scrub away the stench.

(Reporting and photography by Ricardo Moraes; Writing by Brad Haynes; Editing by Rosalba O’Brien)