Those of us who understand that “the enemy is elsewhere”, as José Padilha puts it in his most recent film, cannot believe the farce that the media and the dominant power structure of Rio de Janeiro want to put over on us.
To think that the several crime-fighting operations that have taken place in greater Rio de Janeiro in the past few days should be seen as a war between good, represented by the public security forces, and evil, personified by the drug traffickers, is to ignore the fact that not even the fictional version presented in the film Tropa de Elite 2 manages to sustain that version of events.