Tragedy by Twitter: A Death in Rio
Twitter is an interesting thing. The whole world can have access to an event, as I did with this one, courtesy of a tweet made today by the one time Public Security Secretary of Rio de Janeiro, Luiz Eduardo Soares. His tweet said “lamentable, summary execution, practice of the Rio police”, with a link to a Youtube clip. The existence of the clip itself is a tragedy. A sniper and a spotter (police according to Luiz Eduardo’s tweet) follow three armed youths as they make their rounds in Fallet, a community a stone’s throw from the trendy Santa Teresa district, a bohemian area that is hugely popular with gringo tourists. The sniper talks, takes aim, there is a shot, one of the youths falls. I thought hard about whether to post this. It’s not nice. But it explains a lot. It was uploaded 5 days ago and has already had 75,000+ views. Anyone interested in the context of life for the millions who live and work in Rio’s more than 1000 favelas could watch this. Anyone who is disturbed by violence should not. [Note: A day after posting this the clip was removed and a police investigation was announced]