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Favela War - Witzel : Necropolitics and Snipers 2019-2020

In January 2019, Wilson Witzel assumed the governorship of Rio de Janeiro after riding a wave of far-right sentiment and law-and-order rhetoric to an unexpected electoral victory. A former federal judge and naval officer with minimal political experience, Witzel had campaigned on an explicitly violent platform aligned with President Jair Bolsonaro's policies. During his campaign, Witzel promised to authorize police to aim for the heads of suspected drug dealers, declared he would "slaughter" criminals, and proposed using helicopter-borne snipers to shoot anyone carrying a rifle even if they were not actively firing. He vowed to treat drug traffickers as terrorists and suggested that Rio would "dig graves" for criminals under his administration. This rhetoric of extermination found favor with voters exhausted by violence and insecurity, but it horrified human rights organizations who warned that such policies amounted to endorsing summary executions and would disproportionately target young Black men in poor communities.

Witzel swiftly transformed his campaign promises into policy. In his first months in office, the new governor authorized unprecedented use of police helicopters as firing platforms over favelas. The armored helicopters, nicknamed "caveirão voador" or "flying skull" by residents, were deployed eighty-six times during his first year in office, more than two hundred percent increase over 2017. Thirty-eight percent of these flights occurred in the North Zone, particularly over Complexo da Maré and Pedreira, while twenty-five percent targeted the West Zone. In May 2019, Witzel personally appeared in a video filmed from inside a police helicopter during an operation in Angra dos Reis, with officers firing downward at the community below. He later tweeted the footage, describing the operation triumphantly. When asked about the legality of using snipers from helicopters, Witzel responded that police officers would decide whether to shoot suspects in the head or another part of the body, dismissing concerns about misidentification by claiming that trained snipers would not shoot someone holding an umbrella or hand drill.

The human cost of Witzel's policies was immediate and severe. Police in Rio killed seven hundred and thirty-one people in the first five months of 2019 alone, nearly five killings per day, marking almost a twenty percent increase compared to the same period in 2018. The full year of 2019 saw police kill over eighteen hundred people in the state of Rio de Janeiro, the highest number since record-keeping began in 2003. Witzel dismissed the soaring death toll as "normal" and stated that it would likely continue to rise during his tenure, characterizing the surge as a consequence of his policy of "confronting terrorists." When pressed about the increasing lethality, the governor said he felt no concern about the rising body count and that criminals were "testing the limits" of police and government. Nearly eighty percent of those killed were Black or brown, reflecting the structural racism embedded in Rio's security apparatus. Favela residents described a climate of terror where nowhere felt safe, with the threat of death coming not just from street-level confrontations but from above, making it impossible to predict or avoid violence.

Witzel's approach exemplified what scholars termed "necropolitics," the sovereign power to dictate who lives and who dies. The governor appeared in photographs wearing BOPE special forces uniforms while firing sniper rifles, staged performative displays of force including a choreographed descent from a helicopter with fists pumping after police killed a mentally unstable bus hijacker, and constantly livestreamed his operations to social media followers. He suggested firing a missile at the City of God favela to fight drug cartels, defended police entering favela homes without warrants, and promised to expand the prison system with ten new penitentiaries despite prisons already being severely overcrowded. The governor's rhetoric dehumanized favela residents, treating entire communities as enemy territory where the normal constraints of law enforcement did not apply. His policies received implicit and sometimes explicit support from President Bolsonaro, whose Justice Minister Sergio Moro proposed anti-crime legislation that would enable police to shoot anyone who made them "feel afraid," potentially legalizing the genocide against Afro-Brazilian youth on a national scale.