The bodies of the dead men lay in a single row, on the pavement of a square on the fringes of Rio de Janeiro.
Many were stripped down to their underwear, residents said, so that relatives could more easily identify them. Others were draped by bedsheets, shielded from the crowds and the cameras of journalists and passers-by.
Overnight, dozens of the corpses had been pulled out of a nearby wooded area, sharply raising the death toll of a large-scale police operation targeting drug gangs, and laying bare the sheer extent of the violence that had terrorized this low-income area just hours earlier and left many in Brazil stunned.
“More bodies kept coming,” said Rene Silva, a community leader from a neighborhood where the raids unfolded, estimating that volunteers had retrieved 50 to 60 bodies overnight. “Mothers, wives, children were there, crying.”
On Wednesday, it was still unclear exactly how many people were killed in the deadliest crackdown on organized crime in Rio’s violent history of confrontations between the police and gangs. Early estimates from the state’s public defender’s office placed the toll at 132 people, including four police officers.
The post Over 130 Killed in Bloody Crackdown on Drug Gangs in Rio de Janeiro appeared first on New York Times.
