This Tuesday, October 28, 2025, an unprecedented anti-drug trafficking operation stormed the Penha and Alemão favela complexes—two bastions of terror in Rio de Janeiro’s north zone—leaving a devastating toll of 64 dead, including four brave law enforcement officers, and 81 detained.
Nearly 2,500 heavily armed police officers were mobilized, backed by 32 armored vehicles, two helicopters, and surveillance drones.
The forces responded to the escalating violence orchestrated by the Comando Vermelho (CV), Rio’s most dominant and brutal criminal faction, responsible for flooding the streets with drugs and death.
State Governor Cláudio Castro spared no words in describing the action as “the largest operation in Rio de Janeiro’s history” against the CV—an organization born in the 1970s inside Carioca prisons and which today controls much of the cocaine and marijuana trafficking in the region.
Hellbound and Down 