SUA VIDA COMO AGENTE DO BOPE NO DIA 28 DE OUTUBRO DE 2025

Level 1: The call You are 31 years old. Sergeant of the BOP. 8 years of corporation. 4 inside the Special Operations Battalion. The skull on the cap is not a jewelry, it is a contract. You know what you signed when you entered. At dawn from October 27 to 28, 2025, your cell phone rings at 2:40 in the morning. Battalion number:

You answer before the second knock because you learned that the battalion's night shift doesn't wait for the second knock. Voice of the squad: "General concentration at 4 o'clock. Full equipment." You don't ask why. That's not how it works. You wear the uniform in the dark so you don't wake your wife. She wakes up anyway. She's by your side in bed looking at you getting ready without saying anything. You've done that before. You know when to ask and you know when to be silent.

Level 2: Briefing

4:15 am, BOP's yard. You've never seen that yard so full. It's not just BOP. There's civil police, conventional military police, shock battalion. 2,500 agents in total. For an operation of this size, you know the target is not small.

The commander climbs the improvised lever. Speak fast. Operation "Contention": Objective: To contain the advance of the Red Command in the German and Penha complexes. 100 prison sentences. 26 communities. Focus on the faction leaders. Main target: Edgar Alves de Andrade, the DOCA, one of the chiefs of the C.V. in Rio.

You listen and process: 100 mandates, 26 communities, two interconnected complexes that add up to more than 100,000 inhabitants, terrain you know, hills you've already traveled, a closed forest between Alemão and Penha that the CV has used as a escape route for years.

The BOP is on the top of the hill. That's the term the commander uses. You and your team enter the hill and close the north exit of the hill while the conventional PM pushes down. You take the map, study for 15 minutes. Memorize the entry points, the extraction routes, the medical support points. At 5:30 in the morning, the buses depart.

Level 3: Entrance 5:59 am: You descend from the armored base at the German complex. It's still dark, but the sky starts to light up in the east. You hear a shot before hearing any command. The C.V. already knows that the operation has arrived. Communication explodes on the radio. Multiple points of simultaneous contact. The conventional PM is already engaged in at least five different fronts at low level.

You are ordered to advance to the forest area at the top of the hill with your team of 8 agents. You start climbing.

The forest between the German and the Penha is dense, closed, with trails that only those who know know where they lead. You know some, you see you know all. When you get to the first high position, the city down there is already at war. You see smoke in at least three different points. There was a helicopter flying over, constant communication, shooting coming from directions that you can't locate accurately.

You position your team. Close the north exit of the forest. Wait. The plan is simple. The PM pushes down, the CV runs away through the forest. You are on top waiting. Simple on paper. Level 4: The Forest. 7:30 am. First fugitive entry through the forest. Not one, not two. Groups of four, five armed men trying to break the perimeter from above. Rifles, pistols, at least one with a grenade.

You and your team engage. Confrontation on closed ground. Visibility of 10 meters in some points, less in others. The shot that passes on your right rips the tree half a meter from you. You throw yourself, reposition yourself, respond. The radio doesn't stop. Request for reinforcement here, doctor there, position compromised in sector 2. You hear the name of your teammate from another team being called on the radio in a tone you recognize. Emergency tone.

you don't have time to ask what happened. Your team holds the perimeter for 2 hours and 40 minutes of intermittent confrontation. The forest is full of people trying to get out. Some manage to break through other points, most don't. At 9:15 you receive information on the radio that will stay with you for the rest of the day.

Two BOP sergeants were shot in the German forest area. Clayton Serafim Gonçalves, 42 years old. Eber Carvalho da Fonseca, 39 years old. Both from his battalion. Clayton you knew by name and face. You played futsal with him in an internal tournament three months ago. They didn't resist. You get the information, take a deep breath, don't say anything. Your team is watching you. You make the signal to continue, and continue.

Level 5: The Hill. 11:30 AM. You've been at the top of the hill for more than 5 hours. The operation is in progress throughout the two complexes. The radio brings increasing numbers of confrontations, of prisoners, of casualties. You don't have total numbers. You don't want to have total numbers now, because numbers take your focus away, and you need the focus.

Drones fly over your position, not yours, those of the C.V. They use drones to map where the police teams are and to launch hand-made bombs. You already knew that at the briefing. Knowing and seeing are different things.

You see the drone before you hear it. Small, civilian, modified. It goes over 30 meters high. You tell the team. Everyone covers. The engine falls 15 meters to the left of your position. The explosion is low. More noise than destructive power. But it's an explosion. Your right ear is zooming for 20 minutes.

At noon, the operation starts to change phase. The conventional PM pushed everything it could up. The forest is full. You are in the center of an operation that is bigger than anything you've ever participated in. Bigger than Vila Cruzeiro in 2022. Bigger than Jacarezinho in 2021. You feel the size as it happens.

At 13:00, you are ordered to move into the forest and make a sweep. You move on. Level 6: The Sweep. What you find in the forest, you will not forget. You will not forget not because it is the first time you see death. You are 8 years old, you have already seen death. You will not forget because the scale is different. The quantity is different.

The forest between the German and the pine that you are watering has a body in each clearing, in each trail it leaves enough to run. You don't count while you walk. You register the position, check if there is active risk, move on to the next point. This is the protocol. You follow the protocol because if you stop to process what you are seeing, you can't keep walking. At 3 p.m. the watering of your area is complete.

You leave the woods by the North Point, where you entered in the morning. You sit on the edge of a rock, take off your helmet and drink water. Your youngest teammate, 24 years old, 2 years of age, sits next to you. He doesn't say anything for 5 minutes. Then he asks: "Is it always like this?" You think before you answer.

Think about Clayton. Think about the forest. Think about the eight years that brought you to that stone on that hill. You answer: No.

Why not? That day is different from everything that came before, and you know it will be different from everything that comes after too. Level 7: The descent. 17:30. You go down the hill. The city down there is different. Smoke in several places, buses crossed at crossroads that you see from up there, blocked roads.

The chaos that the CV triggered in retaliation spread throughout the North and beyond. You arrive at the support base. The first official number you hear: 64 confirmed dead by that time. Four policemen among them. Two from the BOP: Clayton and Heber.

You eat something that you don't know what it was. You taste dust and salt. Your uniform is dirty with red soil from the woods. Your boots are heavy. At 18:00 you are ordered to remain in readiness at the base. Operation still active at the complex points.

You sit on the wooden bench of the support base, radio on your lap, waiting. At 7 p.m., your personal cell phone vibrates in your pocket. You took it off the silent to see if your wife was sending a message. She sent it at 2 p.m. I saw it in the newspaper. Call me when you can. You type. I'm fine. Later.

Don't send anything else because it hasn't arrived yet. Level 8: At night. 22:40. You get home. Your wife is awake in the living room with the TV on in the newspaper. She gets up when you come in. Look at your uniform, at your face, at your hands. Don't ask anything. Open your arms. You accept the hug and stand there for a while that you can't measure.

You take a shower. The water that comes out of you is dark, from land and forest. You stay under the shower for longer than necessary. Leave the hot water to drain. You sit on the bedside. Your 4-year-old son is sleeping in the room next door. You hear his breathing through the monitor that your wife left on. Tomorrow the newspapers will call the day of October 28, 2025, of many things.

the most lethal operation in the history of Brazil, murder, success, failure, each one will call for something depending on where they are sitting. You don't know how to call yet. You were inside, not outside. And who is inside doesn't have the angle of who is outside.

You have the angle of the forest, the shooting, the radio, the stone where he sat at 3pm, the 24-year-old teammate who asked if it was always like that. What do you know? Cleiton Serafim Gonçalves was 42 years old and played futsal too badly for the goalkeeper position, but he grumbled when he took the goal as if it were the funniest thing in the world.

Heber Carvalho da Fonseca was 39 years old and had a 7-year-old daughter. You don't know her name. You think you should know. October 29th will be in a few hours. There will be more. There will be bodies being found in the woods in the morning. There will be numbers going up. There will be questions that will not have a clean answer.

You don't know anything about it yet. You're sitting on the edge of bed at 23:00 on a Tuesday with the sound of your son breathing on the monitor and the weight of a day that didn't happen in a day. You lie down, close your eyes. The nidus in the right ear haven't passed yet. You sleep because the body couldn't stand to wake up anymore. Not because the head left.