In March of this year, the Police Station for the Protection of Children and Adolescents and other security departments carried out one of the most lethal operations ever executed in Brazil even when the Supreme Court had forbidden this sort of thing during the pandemic.

It was propped up by the assumption that there were some thugs corrupting kids and teenagers. They arrested three of the thirty-one suspects of this felony and killed three others. In the end, twenty-nine people were murdered by the police and a number of citizens were hurt and traumatized.

Back in the day, I saw a photo of a fifteen-year-old boy wielding an AK-47 in one of the most violent communities from São Paulo, Jacarezinho. If you make a superficial analysis of this image, you can point to him being the root of the violence in Brazilian favelas. However, if you really want to dive deep into the core of this issue, you’ve got to answer a few questions.

First, how on earth this wretched bloke could get an over-twenty-thousand-reais’ worth gun?

Second, once you’re aware that the drugs are not made inside the favela, how does it just appear there?

If violence and fear are derived from the weapons and drug sale, but neither one nor other are made in the communities, but smuggled from other countries. And you should agree with me that the only ones who are rich enough to do that are not living in the favelas.

So, getting down to business, if the responsible people for providing the tools of violence to the thugs are not living in the communities, how come there isn’t a single one mass shooting in the luxurious condominiums where they live?

Apparently, in Brazil, the police don’t bear down on you if you are a former senator and you’re caught with tons of cocaine in a helicopter or if you are the president’s neighbor and have more weapons than the amount that was found during the whole operation in Jacarezinho.

Am I so out of my mind if I assume that being poor is the real crime in Brazil?