‘Instead of doctors, they send police to kill us’: locked-down Rio faces deadly raids

Published in The Guardian

With Dandara Tinoco

Maria Diva do Nascimento was worried as she set off for her job at one of Rio de Janeiro’s biggest hospitals wearing a face mask she hoped would keep her alive. It had been two days since she had heard from her son Allyson, a 20-year-old drug trafficker whose job made social isolation impossible.

Nascimento knew the risks of Covid-19 well: four days earlier it had killed a friend and fellow security guard at the hospital. More than half of her co-workers had been infected. But when the 42-year-old reached work on Friday, she received news of another, even more immediate threat to her child.

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