Fourteen-year-old João Pedro was playing at his cousin’s home in the favela complex of Salgueiro — in São Gonçalo, a low-income municipality on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro — when a bullet hit him in the stomach during a police operation in the favela. Cops stormed the house and carried his body into a helicopter, without giving any information to — or getting authorization from — any member of the boy’s family. His whereabouts would only be known by his father, 40-year-old informal worker Nelson Pinto, 17 long hours later. But it would be too late. João Pedro’s dead...
