(Rio de Janeiro) Brazilian diplomacy apologized on Friday after a forceful intervention by police officers who pointed their weapons at black teenagers who happened to be the sons of diplomats from Gabon, Burkina Faso and Canada.
The incident took place Thursday evening, around 7 p.m. local time (6 p.m. Eastern time), in the affluent Ipanema neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro.
Surveillance video footage circulating on social media shows police officers getting out of a vehicle and pointing guns at a group of four teenagers – three black and one white – outside a building.
At least two of them were pinned against a wall to be searched, with their legs and arms spread. The officers left the scene a few minutes later.
Julie-Pascale Moudouté, wife of Gabon’s ambassador to Brazil, strongly condemned the incident. “How could they point their guns at the heads of 13-year-olds?” she told TV Globo.
“We have confidence in Brazilian justice, but we want justice to be done,” she added.
According to Brazilian media, the three black teenagers, who live in Brasilia, were on holiday in Rio and were accompanied by two young white Brazilians. They were approached by the police after they had just walked one of the Brazilian teenagers home.
Rhaiana Rondon, the mother of the other white teenager, called the officers’ intervention “disproportionate” and “racist.”
“Three of the four teenagers are black! They were victims of violence, a gun pointed at their heads, without understanding anything,” she wrote on the social network X.
“I never thought the police would be the biggest threat. It’s sad, painful and traumatic,” she said.
The day after the incident, the ambassadors of Gabon and Burkina Faso were received on Friday at the headquarters of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Brasilia, where they received “formal apologies”, the ministry explained in a statement.
The Rio military police explained in another statement that the agents involved in this intervention were “equipped with body cameras”, whose “images will be analyzed to determine if excesses were committed.”
According to statistics, black people are by far the most targeted by the Rio police, who are regularly accused of racism.