On 28 October 2025, 2,500 armed police entered Complexo do Alemão and Complexo da Penha in Rio de Janeiro, targeting the Comando Vermelho drug faction. At least 121 people were killed, making it the deadliest police operation in Brazil’s history.
Rio de Janeiro governor Cláudio Castro called the operation a success and described the four police officers killed as its “only real victims.” But the high death toll drew intense criticism from residents, human-rights groups and security specialists, with many calling for investigations into the “massacre.” As one activist expressed during protests, “Everyone’s blood is red. The only difference is that we live in a favela.”
On the anniversary of this tragedy, we reflect on how struggles over violence in cities like Rio are also struggles over representation. The social media age has given residents new opportunities to contest official narratives in real time. Our recent article, based on research on the ‘pacification’ of Rio’s favelas, calls this the “dilemma of representation.” Making violence visible can shine a light on what people are actually experiencing, yet it can also reinforce damaging stereotypes about the places in which that violence occurs. This creates difficult choices for those trying to build peace.
Pacification in Rio de Janeiro
Despite a rich social and cultural life, Rio’s favelas have long been portrayed as spaces of crime and disorder, with these harmful representations in turn legitimizing heavily militarized state interventions.
The Pacifying Police Unit (UPP) program was a major policy of this kind. Launched in 2008, permanent police units were installed inside selected favelas, with the intention of “retaking territories” from drug gangs. Complexo do Alemão – already widely represented through violence – became a flagship site for the policy, especially following its televised military occupation in 2010.
In the months that followed, a growing gap emerged between an official narrative heralding the police’s ‘victory’, and the reality of ongoing confrontations between police and traffickers. Two organizations, Coletivo Papo Reto and Barraco#55, show two different ways of navigating these competing realities to build peace in Complexo.
Making Violence Visible
Local organization Coletivo Papo Reto (“the Straight Talk Collective”) deployed social media tools to document police behavior and confrontations, treating their mobile phones as “weapons of defense and protection.” When 10-year-old Eduardo was shot by police, Papo Reto members filmed and photographed the scene, helping preserve evidence that contributed to a forensic investigation.
Yet, amid growing national and international attention and the receipt of several prizes for their reports, members also spoke of the risk of allowing violence to define Complexo. Resisting these tropes, co-founder Raull Santiago described the favela as “a place with a lot of power and amazing ideas—a space of resistance for poor and black families.”
Community journalist René Silva captured the contradiction even more directly, saying, “It’s sad to know that we are being remembered for this violence, but at the same time we’re sharing information that the mainstream media isn’t showing!”
In this way, Papo Reto sought to broaden how Complexo was understood, while continuing to make violence visible through social media. In contrast, Barraco#55 approached the same dilemma by directing attention elsewhere.
Showing Another Side of Complexo
Barraco#55 grew from a collaboration between a Complexo resident and an international student who arrived during the early years of pacification. Eventually the pair established a community-based arts and research space where residents and visitors could meet and spend time together.
During fieldwork, one author lived at Barraco#55 and joined O Som do Barraco, a collective of local musicians that rehearsed and performed around Rio. This allowed guests to experience Complexo beyond the conflict narrative, thus contributing to a vision of inclusive tourism grounded in cultural exchange and designed to have a “positive impact on the community.”
This approach also had limits, however. Visitors lacked the local knowledge required and used by residents to assess rapidly changing risks. An extended period of intensified violence made it even more difficult to host outsiders safely. As co-founder Mariles explained to us, “The pacification has forced us to think of other activities, because we cannot rely on accommodation here. It’s just too insecure.”
Barraco#55 members thus eventually abandoned their guest program and shifted activities elsewhere in Rio, as violence associated with the UPP period ultimately constrained the representational possibilities available to them.
Beyond Rio
In 2019, Rio state legislators passed a bill marking the official end of the UPP program. Yet the 2025 operation showed that the representational conflict that became so salient during pacification has not disappeared. While state authorities continue to portray exceptional uses of force as evidence of restored control, residents and activists work to make the harms of those interventions visible while also advancing alternative visions of peace.
A first lesson from this experience concerns mega-events, which intensify decisions about what should be made visible to a global audience. Rio’s ‘pacification’ took place against the backdrop of the World Cup and Olympics, creating intense pressure to both manage insecurity and present the city as secure, orderly and tourist-friendly. In Los Angeles, which is set to host the 2028 Olympics, nearly 6,000 unhoused people live within a mile of venues, placing them directly in the path of measures designed to remove visible signs of urban hardship, while potentially worsening the conditions that produce them.
A second lesson concerns identity. Decisions about what to make visible and what to withhold ultimately determine how peace interventions are assessed, but also how communities themselves are understood and understand themselves in turn. In places like Complexo do Alemão, negative representations can harden identities around violence, danger and disorder, even when residents are actively producing very different accounts.
Finally, there is a lesson for peace journalism. As a PNN piece earlier this year puts it, journalism has the power to “create space for dialogue” and “humanize those on different sides”, reminding us that “those small choices ripple outward.” Our work in Rio suggests that this also requires journalists to look for the contradictions within competing narratives, to ask what each version leaves out, and to consider the consequences when one representation dominates.
Keywords: Brazil, Favelas, Complexo de Alemao, police, violence, peace, conflict, conflict resolution, rio de janeiro, police brutality
Sarah Vogelsanger is a researcher and creative writer based in London. She has contributed to research at SOAS University, the University of Zurich, and ETH Zurich. Her research is based in feminist geopolitics, focusing on gender, violence and politics. Her passion for participatory methodologies, including action and art-based research, challenges previous conceptualisations on violence and peace approaches which invisibilise everyday lived experiences. She has published her work in journals including Gender, Place and Culture and City & Society, and contributed to the podcast network New Books Network, which is available on Spotify and Apple Music. Her creative writing has been showcased at various events in London and Zurich.
Henry Staples is a political geographer and Rights Lab Research Fellow with the Leverhulme Centre for Research on Slavery in War, a collaborative center between the University of Nottingham and King's College London. His focus in the Leverhulme Centre is on governance and interventions, with a particular interest in understanding how cities shape violent coercion during and after conflict. He holds a PhD from the University of Sheffield and has conducted research in Brazil, Colombia, South Africa and the UK on topics including peacebuilding, crisis response and urban identities.
