DW Finds 100+ Rio Deaths, Misses Decades of 'Drug War' Futility
DW frames the latest massacre in Rio de Janeiro as just another 'major drug raid.' What they don't bother to tell you is how many of these 'raids' have killed how many people, year after year, with zero impact on drug flow or consumption. Since 2007, over 17,000 people have been killed by police in Rio state, the vast majority in favelas, often in operations justified by this very 'war on drugs.'
It's not a war on drugs; it's a war on the poor, consistently resulting in extrajudicial killings and a body count that makes the cartels look comparatively restrained. One might wonder at what point a 'major raid' that yields over 100 corpses yet fails to curb the drug trade becomes not a strategy, but pure, unadulterated state-sanctioned violence. The media dutifully reports the numbers, but
rarely the crushing indifference of authorities who keep repeating the same deadly script. How many more 'major drugs raids' until the body count is too high to ignore the policy's monumental failure?