Carnival of death

Rio de Janeiro, that Brazilian city where samba rises from the favelas, still shimmers. It is where sequined dancers and drumbeats blur into joy during Carnaval, and where Christ the Redeemer, in statue, stretches His arms over the bay, embracing both sinners and saints.

From afar, Rio looks alive, vibrant, and whole. But this week, the streets beneath His outstretched hands ran with blood. At least 132 people were dead, their bodies lined up beneath the same sun that shone on the parade floats.

Brazil’s “war on narcoterrorism,” as Rio’s right-wing governor Claudio Castro calls it, unfolded like theater, except the actors were real and so were the corpses.

Mothers found their sons decapitated; others lying burned in the forest. “They slit my son’s throat and hung his head from a tree,” one grieving mother told Agence France-Presse.

Castro hailed the raid as a “success.” Above it all, Christ, thirty meters of silent stone, watched another Rio spectacle, a carnival of the dead.

Up for reelection next year, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva condemned the carnage, calling for “coordinated work that strikes at the backbone of drug trafficking without putting police or civilians at risk.”

Lula’s appeal came too late, drowned out by helicopters and the applause of hardliners.

Brazil’s right-wing lawmakers, encouraged by the bloodletting, are now pushing to classify Rio’s gangs as “terrorist organizations,” a label governments often use when they want to resort to impunity.

But beyond the outrage lies another view, one not entirely without reason.

For years, Rio’s favelas have been ruled by drug syndicates acting as parallel governments, with their own taxes, courts, and guns. The raid was not only a police operation but also a violent attempt by the state to reclaim the authority it had long lost.

This is the crux of modern governance in much of the developing world. When lawlessness hardens into chaos, the state eventually reverts to its oldest instinct — survival.

Order comes before freedom, and in societies besieged by violence and crime, people often choose security first, no matter the cost. The liberal idea that crime is purely a social problem has lost its hold. Citizens who have watched institutions rot no longer have patience for restraint.

Across the Global South, governments are shifting from welfare to warfare, driven by populations that demand protection more than rights. Even in the United States, a similar reflex has emerged under Donald Trump’s rhetoric of border control and “law and order.”

There is no endorsing brutality, but there’s no denying the potency of fear as a political force for change, bloody as it may be, that when people no longer trust justice to keep them safe, they turn to force that will.

The Philippines danced to the same tune during the Duterte administration, of restoring order, of making the streets safe again, at the cost of impunity rearing its ugly head.

Brazil’s tragedy is both a warning and a reflection. Once a government learns to kill without consequence, it seldom unlearns it. But neither can a nation survive under syndicates that enforce their own laws.

So Rio’s raid becomes the question of our time: what kind of order are we willing to accept?

Between chaos and control, justice and vengeance, the line grows thinner each time we cheer for decisive, albeit deadly, state actions.