Residents of Vila Cruzeiro gather bodies after more than 130 were killed in pre-dawn assault

Day had yet to break over Vila Cruzeiro but already dozens of corpses were splayed out along the favela’s main drag after more than 130 people were killed during the deadliest police operation in Rio’s history: grotesquely disfigured, blood-smeared bodies that had been dragged out of nearby forests and dumped on blue tarpaulins and black plastic sheets covering the street.

“I’ve brought 53 down myself … there must be another 12 or 15 up there in the bush,” said Erivelton Vidal Correia, the head of the local residents’ association, bleary-eyed from a sleepless night spent hauling bullet-riddled local men down from the hills.

Governor says city ‘at war’ after gunfights between troops and Red Command drug traffickers who reportedly used weaponised drones

At least 64 people have reportedly been killed in Rio’s worst-ever day of violence as more than 2,500 officers and special forces stormed an area of favelas near Rio’s international airport that is considered the headquarters of one of Brazil’s most powerful organised crime groups.

The predawn police raid – the deadliest in Rio’s history – sparked intense gunfights in and around Alemão and Penha favelas, which are home to an estimated 300,000 people.

In the 1800s, Luiz Gama defied fate to become Brazil’s first Black lawyer. Nearly a century and a half later, Portela’s parade puts his struggle center stage

Born in 1830 to a trafficked African woman who escaped enslavement and led uprisings, Luiz Gama defied fate and the Brazilian empire to become the country’s first Black lawyer and a leading abolitionist.

When he was 10 his father, a Portuguese nobleman, illegally sold him into slavery to pay off gambling debts. Gama regained his freedom as a young adult and having learnt to read, became a writer, intellectual and self-taught lawyer. He founded newspapers defending abolition and used the law to help free more than 500 enslaved people before Brazil finally abolished slavery in 1888, six years after he died.