On a windy Sunday afternoon in Rio de Janeiro, supporters of President Jair Bolsonaro flocked to Copacabana beach. Decked out in yellow and green, they teemed into metro stations in the city’s southern zone, chanting the president’s moniker from the campaign season: “Legend! Legend! Legend!”
A 10-minute walk away, a smaller group of protesters crowded the shore along Ipanema beach, echoing a very different cry. “Stop killing us!,” they yelled. Numbering in the low thousands, favela activists and community organizers had gathered to protest lethal police action in the city’s slums.
While Rio is no stranger to police violence, 2019 has seen new levels of bloodshed amid violent campaign rhetoric and promises of ‘shoot-to-kill‘ policing from Governor Wilson Witzel. In 2018, Rio saw a record 1,538 people killed by security forces as a federally mandated military intervention placed police operations under the control of the armed forces. With 558 killed by police in the first four months of 2019, the number of people dying at the hands of the Rio police now stands at its highest level since records began.
Sunday’s protesters, many of whom had only recently lost family members at the hands of the police, blamed the governor.
“For Marielle [Franco], we asked who killed her and who ordered the killing,” yelled Sandra Mara, mother of Jean Rodrigo Aldrovande, a...
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