By Samidoun – Oct 30, 2025
Since yesterday (October 28), the scenes witnessed across Rio de Janeiro’s city have exposed the true face of the military-police state led by the fascist and militia-linked Cláudio Castro (PL). With no evacuation orders or protection for residents, the Military Police of Rio de Janeiro (PMERJ) stormed into the communities, shooting indiscriminately — without caring who they hit.
Before our eyes, real scenes of war unfolded in the city center and its surroundings: hijacked buses, barricades blocking main roads, police invading residents’ homes, tanks and rifles scattered everywhere. The result: more than 100 people killed — the largest massacre in the country’s history.
As Masar Badil, the Palestinian Alternative Revolutionary Path Movement and Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network, and as a movement rooted in Palestine, we carry a political responsibility to denounce military and colonial violence everywhere. In the Brazilian case specifically, there are direct links to the Zionist project of death. “Israel” turns occupied Palestine into a laboratory for testing military technology, while the Brazilian state purchases this “battle-tested technology” to “pacify” the favelas. The cry of a mother in Rafah echoes in the screams of the mothers in Penha (Rio de Janeiro), who woke to find the bloodied bodies of their children lying in Praça São Lucas.
Masar Badil, the Palestinian Alternative Revolutionary Path Movement and Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network declares its full solidarity with every family victimized by Brazilian state violence, and with every resident of the favelas and neighborhoods destroyed by police operations. The aim of these operations has never been security or peace — it is to instill fear and moral panic that later fuel the agenda of the fascist far right.
In a global context of escalating class struggle — with renewed U.S. imperialist offensives across Latin America and the Middle East — the so-called “war on drugs” is, in truth, a war on the poor, and a central tool to legitimize this political project that hides behind the rhetoric of “fighting crime.”
Brazil: At Least 60 Dead in Rio de Janeiro Police Operation Against Gang
Since the colonial and imperial periods, the militarization of the police in Brazil has been built on the idea of an “internal enemy.” In the past, it was about controlling enslaved peoples, then repressing popular cultures. Today, the “enemy” is the young, Black, and poor population, under the pretext of “combating drug trafficking.” The discourse changes, the slogans shift — but the practice remains the same: domination, repression, and social extermination of the poor and the Black.
In Rio de Janeiro’s recent history, none of this is new. Always on the eve of elections, large-scale massacres are carried out — stacking Black bodies to win the votes of conservative white electorates, reinforcing the narrative that poor and Black people are the “internal enemy” to be crushed.
In both Brazil and Palestine, aggression, imprisonment, and the systematic killing of youth are designed to subjugate the people and prevent the rise of any popular revolutionary alternative.
We will not bow down!
We will not be silent!
Our destiny is one — our enemy is one — and resistance is our path to liberation.
(Samidoun)
