Perhaps taking a cue from recent events in Turkey, moments ago Reuters reported that Brazil’s federal police began an anti-terrorism operation early Thursday, just over two weeks before the Olympics start in Rio de Janeiro, a justice ministry source told Reuters.
The source said that federal police had arrested members of a group that was preparing acts of terrorism. It was unclear where the operation was taking place or what the specifics of the operation were.
Curiously this takes place just day after the NYT reported that a delegation of U.S. activists from the Black Lives Matter movement, who were on a 4 day visit to Rio, warned that the Rio de Janeiro Olympic Games could prove deadly for the city’s poor black people. The American activists were on a four-day visit to Rio aimed at highlighting the risks posed by the giant Olympic security apparatus in a country where a United Nations report has concluded law enforcement officers are responsible for a “significant portion” of the nearly 60,000 annual violent deaths.
During the Aug. 5-21 games, some 85,000 soldiers and police will be on patrol in a bid to secure this notoriously dangerous city for the 10,000 athletes and the 350,000 to 500,000 foreigner spectators expected to flood in for the games. That’s roughly twice the security contingent at the 2012 Summer Games in London.
But while the mammoth security apparatus may help insulate foreign visitors from the armed muggings, carjackings and drug gang shootouts that are a regular part of life in Rio, the U.S. activists and their local counterparts warned that the increased police presence could result in a spike in police killings.
“We are learning about Olympic construction costs, and dirty water and Zika and crime, but I want the world to know about the horror that is the police killing citizens as part of Olympic preparations,” said Elizabeth Martin, a Massachusetts woman whose nephew Joseph was shot to death in 2007 by an off-duty police officer while celebrating his 30th birthday in Rio.
“It’s important that we stand with each other because we know this violence is connected,” said Daunasia Yancey, a Black Lives Matter activist from Boston. “Anti-black violence is global and our resistance is global.”
Perhaps the two events are related, or perhaps Brazil is merely already setting the stage for having a convenient scapegoat if the olympics, for which the country is woefully unprepared, end which in a worst case scenario, may even result in casualties.
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