There are no words to describe the horror we feel at the massacre of more than 130 poor black youths killed by the Rio de Janeiro police, under the pretext of attacking drug trafficking.
It was an urban warfare operation in which the state government mobilised 2,500 military police armed for war, in addition to deploying armoured vehicles and helicopters to attack the Penha and Alemão favela complexes in the northern part of the city, an area with a high concentration of poor people. These are two favela complexes with more than 150,000 inhabitants and an extremely high population density.
The Rio government said there were 60 deaths, but the favela population brought more than 50 bodies that were not included in the official count to the squares, leaving doubts as to how many were killed. So far, the figure exceeds 120.
Reactions were swift, from human rights organisations to the United Nations, which said it was “horrified” by the massacre. Beyond the data, there are relevant facts.
The Palestinian genocide in Gaza is a mirror in which the oppressed peoples and individuals of the world must look at themselves. For those at the top, a period of indiscriminate hunting of the “surplus” population is beginning, because they are guaranteed impunity. Now, more than ever, we are all Gaza. It could be Quito, San Salvador, Rosario or Tegucigalpa; the Colombian Cauca or Wall Mapu; perhaps the mountains of Guerrero or the communities of Chiapas. Now we are all in the crosshairs of a capitalism that kills in order to accumulate more quickly.
They call them drug traffickers with the same insensitivity with which they refer to Palestinians, Mapuche or Mayans. These are just excuses. Arguments for the urban middle classes. But recent history tells us that they are creating laboratories for genocide.
In peaceful Ecuador, when the people defeated them in the 2019 uprising, they reacted by releasing criminals from prisons turned into extermination camps, where the media showed prisoners playing football with the head of a decapitated man.
In Cauca, open-pit mining and drug cultivation exacerbated paramilitary violence against the Nasa and Misak communities who resist and do not give in, turning the region into the most violent in an already violent country.
In Mapuche territory, both in Chile and Argentina, the powers that be decided that those who do not give in should be labelled “terrorists”, with the result that today there are more Mapuche prisoners than under the dictatorships of Pinochet and Videla.
In Mexico, everything is clear, so clear that the media and governments do not want us to see it, masking the violence with discourses that only reveal their complicity. The systematic violence in Guerrero and Chiapas should be cause for scandal.
In Rio de Janeiro, a sociologist often says that the drug trade is not a parallel state, but the state that actually exists. This includes all the governors of recent decades, with their entourage of mafia businessmen, deputies and councillors who make up a power inherited from the death squads of the military dictatorship.
Gaza places us in another place, facing other challenges. The first is to understand that death is the raison d’être of the capitalist system. The second is to understand that this system is made up of the right and the left, conservatives and progressives. The third is that we must organise ourselves to protect ourselves, because no one else will do it.
The world we knew is falling apart. Let us mourn those young people murdered in Rio, those bodies lying on the asphalt.
Let us transform our tears into rivers of indignation and torrents of rebellion.
Raúl Zibechi: Gaza is Rio de Janeiro. Gaza is the whole world
From Redes Libertarias (07/11/2025)
There are no words to describe the horror we feel at the massacre of more than 130 poor black youths killed by the Rio de Janeiro police, under the pretext of attacking drug trafficking.
It was an urban warfare operation in which the state government mobilised 2,500 military police armed for war, in addition to deploying armoured vehicles and helicopters to attack the Penha and Alemão favela complexes in the northern part of the city, an area with a high concentration of poor people. These are two favela complexes with more than 150,000 inhabitants and an extremely high population density.
The Rio government said there were 60 deaths, but the favela population brought more than 50 bodies that were not included in the official count to the squares, leaving doubts as to how many were killed. So far, the figure exceeds 120.
Reactions were swift, from human rights organisations to the United Nations, which said it was “horrified” by the massacre. Beyond the data, there are relevant facts.
The Palestinian genocide in Gaza is a mirror in which the oppressed peoples and individuals of the world must look at themselves. For those at the top, a period of indiscriminate hunting of the “surplus” population is beginning, because they are guaranteed impunity. Now, more than ever, we are all Gaza. It could be Quito, San Salvador, Rosario or Tegucigalpa; the Colombian Cauca or Wall Mapu; perhaps the mountains of Guerrero or the communities of Chiapas. Now we are all in the crosshairs of a capitalism that kills in order to accumulate more quickly.
They call them drug traffickers with the same insensitivity with which they refer to Palestinians, Mapuche or Mayans. These are just excuses. Arguments for the urban middle classes. But recent history tells us that they are creating laboratories for genocide.
In peaceful Ecuador, when the people defeated them in the 2019 uprising, they reacted by releasing criminals from prisons turned into extermination camps, where the media showed prisoners playing football with the head of a decapitated man.
In Cauca, open-pit mining and drug cultivation exacerbated paramilitary violence against the Nasa and Misak communities who resist and do not give in, turning the region into the most violent in an already violent country.
In Mapuche territory, both in Chile and Argentina, the powers that be decided that those who do not give in should be labelled “terrorists”, with the result that today there are more Mapuche prisoners than under the dictatorships of Pinochet and Videla.
In Mexico, everything is clear, so clear that the media and governments do not want us to see it, masking the violence with discourses that only reveal their complicity. The systematic violence in Guerrero and Chiapas should be cause for scandal.
In Rio de Janeiro, a sociologist often says that the drug trade is not a parallel state, but the state that actually exists. This includes all the governors of recent decades, with their entourage of mafia businessmen, deputies and councillors who make up a power inherited from the death squads of the military dictatorship.
Gaza places us in another place, facing other challenges. The first is to understand that death is the raison d’être of the capitalist system. The second is to understand that this system is made up of the right and the left, conservatives and progressives. The third is that we must organise ourselves to protect ourselves, because no one else will do it.
The world we knew is falling apart. Let us mourn those young people murdered in Rio, those bodies lying on the asphalt.
Let us transform our tears into rivers of indignation and torrents of rebellion.