2026-02-12
32 分钟This is The Guardian.
Today, Rio's bloodiest day.
That was a very strange day.
It was one of those days where you wake up with a start and you think,
oh my God, something's happened.
It's in that slight days.
I answered my phone and it was a photographer friend who,
to my surprise, was in Villa Cruzero, a favela in North Rio,
having received a tip in the middle of the night and said, Tom, you've got to get here now.
There are dozens and dozens of bodies being carried down from the hills.
So I jumped in the shower, had a cup of coffee,
and we drove in a convoy with the emergency lights flashing and drove very,
very slowly through the darkness into...
the main square of Villa Cruzera, which sits at the foot of the Mayor complex.
Tom Phillips, the Guardian's Latin America correspondent, has lived in Rio for years now.
And he's often reported on violent clashes between the police and the drug gangs that dominate the favelas.
But this day, last October, it was different.
Oh, my God, there's the bodies.
There's corpus helica, don't there?
And as I arrived I could hear the sound of engines and motorbikes and pick up trucks