This Tuesday, October 28th, Rio de Janeiro woke up to the shock of a massive police operation against the Comando Vermelho (Red Command) drug gang. A violent action coordinated by Governor Cláudio Castro (PL – Bolsonaro’s party) in the Complexo do Alemão and Penha, the largest communities in Rio de Janeiro, where 200,000 people reside. The operation was considered the deadliest in the history of Rio de Janeiro, surpassing the Carandiru massacre in 1992 in São Paulo.

The open warfare tactic against drug trafficking adopted by Cláudio Castro aims to achieve two objectives, neither of which is the improvement of the lives of the favela population or the public security of Rio de Janeiro. Given the weakening of Bolsonaro’s influence in recent times, after Eduardo Bolsonaro’s failed attempt to ask for Trump’s intervention in Brazil with tariff increases, which resulted in an improvement of Lula’s internal image and his approval for defending national sovereignty, and with Lula’s friendly meeting with Trump in Malaysia that ultimately buried Eduardo’s hysterical attempt to save his father – former president Bolsonaro – from prison, the Brazilian far-right is launching a new offensive, this time, violent and armed.

Considering that the US under Trump has adopted an offensive policy of a “war on drugs” in Latin America that aims at armed intervention in Venezuela and Colombia with the justification of combating drug trafficking, the genocidal racist necropolitics of the far-right comes into action to forge chaos and a situation of instability to circumvent the national sovereignty upheld by Lula and seek, in this supposed fight against drug trafficking, to obtain Trump’s support for armed intervention also in Brazilian territory, since fascist “nationalism” actually means submission to imperialist and colonialist interests. Castro went ahead with his violent plan and blamed the Lula government for not sending reinforcements, because the Lula government refuses to apply the GLO (Guarantee of Law and Order provided for in Article 142 of the Constitution) as it understands that the favelas should not be occupied by the Armed Forces and, therefore, the government must recognize the failure of the national security agencies and transfer security operations to the federal government, to the Armed Forces.

Lula already has experience in this type of scenario and knows the complexity that surrounds it, because in the case of the chaos of the January 8th coup attempt, Lula did not sign the GLO – advised by Janja, his wife – and prevented the coup planned by the Bolsonaro far-right, which even intended his assassination, from being consolidated.

There are allegations that Claudio Castro sent reports to the Trump administration demanding “support” against “narcoterrorism” – a term that does not exist in the Brazilian legal vocabulary to designate criminal factions, but which serves as a necessary motto to support an internal and international narrative that legitimizes the intervention of the White House with Trump, who has violated several international laws in his offensive against Venezuela and Colombia.

This clarifies the underlying objectives of this operation, since the favela is only the tip of the iceberg of organized crime, as demonstrated by the Hidden Carbon operation, publicly known in August, carried out by the Federal Police, with intelligence and planning, and without firing a single shot and without any deaths, managed to dismantle the criminal organization, and demonstrate that the core of organized crime is not in the favela, but in Faria Lima – the Brazilian financial and corporate center, and about which the Brazilian far-right has not commented.

It is not new that the favelas and peripheries of Rio de Janeiro constitute a laboratory of death technologies with the acquisition of military equipment of Israeli origin, including the Global Shield. It is no coincidence that there is a region in the Maré Complex called the Gaza Strip. This can be verified by the number of deaths in this massacre – 132 so far – which surpassed the number recorded on the same day in the Gaza Strip, which registered 104 deaths. Unfortunately, this does not surprise us because we are dealing with the same politics of death in the name of power and profit, the logic of capital in crisis that seeks to reorganize itself and uses the arms industry to expand, which converges with the objectives of the far right to foment fear and chaos, the main ingredients they use to rearticulate themselves.

For Claudio Castro (PL), who opposed the Public Security Constitutional Amendment Proposal sent by the federal government to Congress, through the Letter of Florianópolis signed by governors of the South and Southeast, there were only 4 victims – the police officers killed involved in the operation. This expresses how the far right, which is guided by Zionist Christianity – Claudio is Catholic and an ally of far-right evangelicals – considers the lives of the poor and Black people in the favelas disposable, reproducing with naturalness and without embarrassment, they embrace the structural racist legacy of slavery, to the detriment of their own interests, which are above all else, even resorting to terms from the time of the dictatorship to legitimize their actions: “Either join the fight against crime or disappear,” paraphrasing the motto of the dictatorship (1964-1985) – “Brazil, love it or leave it.”

Even while accusing President Lula of denying support and although admitting not having asked the government for support to carry out the operation, as confirmed by Ricardo Lewandowski – Minister of Justice, according to Claudio Castro (PL), the operation was a success and marks the “beginning of a great process in Brazil,” on the eve of an election year in Brazil, and while Lula has already stated that he will be a candidate, Bolsonaro will go to jail.

With this entire scenario in place, the question that arises is whether Trump will follow the path opened by the submissive and colonized Brazilian far-right, openly displayed with Claudio Castro’s operation, and place Brazil under suspicion, subject to investigation and possible intervention, as he has already been seeking to do to expand his sphere of power in Latin America. And, given this possibility, will the Brazilian left have the strength and organization to react beyond the electoral spectrum, which it hopes to achieve with Lula, and position itself in a practical way in the deepest terrain of politics and history?