By Rafael Pereira, from the leadership of Revolución Socialista.

Yesterday, October 28, the Day of the Public Servant in Brazil, was shamefully marked by a massacre, the biggest ever recorded so far in the history of Rio de Janeiro. The execution systematically operated by the armed wing of the bourgeois state, under the command of Governor Cláudio Castro (PL), counted on the force of the military and civil police in a bloodbath in the morro, taking the lives of at least 130 people (estimated number because there are still more people killed and that the community itself is collecting).

The lethal brutality, which massacres daily in the favelas and peripheries of the whole country, shows again its worst face in the complexes of Alemão and Penha, in the North Zone of the capital of the state of Fluminense, with the tiredly repeated justification of the “fight against drug trafficking”.
The “Mega Operations” and the “War on Drugs” are provably the most efficient instruments to advance the genocidal project of structural racism, which kills the black, impoverished and favela population without any space for justice, because in capitalism, in the alleys and corridors, there is no justice for the working class!

This type of massacre in the communities has already proved absolutely useless in the confrontation of the so-called criminal factions, not going beyond a demonstration of power of the police that kills the most in the world, because it is known that the militias that finance and buy their drugs to consume in luxury condominiums and offices, have members integrating the police, justice, parliaments and large financial market centers. For the demilitarization of the police and armies!

In addition to the deaths of more than 120 victims, possibly underreported and not yet identified in the alleged clashes, the attack continues with more than 80 prisoners. Without any verification that they are in fact criminals, as is being widely disseminated and reinforced by the hegemonic media, this moralistic discourse has in the public faith of the police, in the armored military system of society and in the absence of the use of technologies such as body cameras, the perfect argument to act with impunity, just like the army of the genocidal State of Israel in its dungeons and colonies in the Palestinian territory. Even if they were “guilty”, capital punishment or death penalty is not legalized in the country. Enough massacres and mass incarcerations!

With an eye on the electoral race, Cláudio Castro is betting on armed violence and moral panic, fed by the police news, with a tenebrous legacy of four of the six biggest massacres in the history of Rio de Janeiro. Today the state is the third in which the police kill the most in absolute numbers in the country, behind only Bahia, governed by Jerônimo Rodrigues (PT), and São Paulo, governed by Tarcísio de Freitas (Republicans).

• We must denounce the massacres and demand the demilitarization of the Police, Fire Brigades and Armed Forces: for the construction of a national force at the service of the working class and the impoverished people, with democratically elected and revocable commanders.
• Full state power under working-class control can only be achieved through the disintegration of the armed power of the capitalist state, its military apparatus and its replacement by a government of workers councils and workers militia.