In a Rio de Janeiro favela, a little boy wore a T-shirt stained with red paint mimicking the blood spilled this week in Brazil's deadliest-ever police operation.

He held up a sign reading: "Children should be able to play, the favela wants to live in peace."

The boy was one of hundreds of people who marched Friday through the streets of Vila Cruzeiro, one of the Rio favelas where the raids claimed over 120 lives in an hours-long crackdown just three days earlier.

Favelas are low-income and crowded neighborhoods that are often built on steep hillsides in Brazil.

"Tuesday was the day of horror. What we saw here was a massacre," said Ana Maria Pereira, 18, a resident of the neighborhood that is home mainly to Black and mixed-race people, and whose narrow alleys are overhung by tangles of

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