Rio police are investigating a triple murder that took place on Thursday in an upscale Rio de Janeiro neighborhood. The fallout from the case has shed light on the escalating violence in the city’s West Zone.
Hours after the case began dominating headlines, the police found four suspects dead. The police investigate whether the suspects had been “tried” and sentenced to death by a court of criminals — as a way of avoiding police operations in areas dominated by organized crime. The Justice Minister, however, said “a democratic state can’t accept the law of the jungle” and promises that the “investigation will be carried out to its fullest.”
The leading assumption by investigators is that the three victims were murdered by mistake. Members of a criminal group linked to the Red Command cartel may have mixed up one of the victims for someone else — as he bore a physical resemblance to a member of a paramilitary urban mafia group, who recently left jail on conditional release.
Rio’s West Zone, where the crime occurred, has been a set of turf wars between drug gangs and the militias. In 2023, the number of shootings in the region increased by 55 percent compared to last year — according to the Fogo Cruzado Institute, a public safety-focused think tank. At least 448 shootings occurred in the region between January and October 5, 2022. The number rose to 693 this year.
“What happened is not an isolated case. Rio’s West Zone alone concentrated a third of the massacres in 2023. This data reveals something that we have been drawing attention to in that region for months: the severity of the conflicts involving territorial disputes between criminal groups,” said Carlos Nhanga, coordinator at the Fogo Cruzado Institute.
Disputes in the region exploded after the death of one of the leaders of the most powerful local militia in June 2021 — with his brother and a former ally beginning a feud for control over multiple neighborhoods. With the militia weakened, the Red Command made strides in the region.
Thursday’s triple murder was one of 38 massacres that occurred in Greater Rio de Janeiro in 2023 — which left 145 people dead, according to a survey by the Fogo Cruzado Institute. Thirteen of these massacres occurred in the West Zone of the capital, leaving 47 dead.
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