The greatest massacre in Rio de Janeiro began 525 years ago. And it never ended.

A Manifesto by Yakuy Tupinambá

It was not an operation. It was a massacre. It was extermination. It was the continuation of the colonial project.

More than a hundred bodies fell in Rio de Janeiro.
The media calls them “suspects.”
I call them mine. Among those bodies are my relatives, my ancestors, my invisible brothers.

They speak of Black bodies — and yes, they are Black bodies.
But they forget they are also Indigenous bodies.
Bodies carrying the memory of the Tupinambá, the Guarani, the Pataxó — those who were burned alive, beheaded, erased from books, from maps, from the names of our avenues.

The greatest massacre in Rio de Janeiro did not happen yesterday.
It began 500 years ago. And it never ended.

The State keeps killing.
The media keeps lying.
Society keeps applauding.
And we keep burying our dead in silence — because even mourning is denied to us.

There is no funeral for those who do not exist in the national imagination.
There is no justice for those considered invaders on their own land.

I am Indigenous. I am urban. I am peripheral. I am a survivor.
And I will not accept that they call it an “operation.”

It was genocide.
It was structural racism armed to the teeth.
It was the echo of the colonial cry: “civilize or kill.”
And we chose to live. We chose to resist. We chose to scream.

Do not ask me for calm.
Do not ask me for balance.
Do not ask me for peace — because the peace you want is the peace of cemeteries.

I write with rage. I write with blood. I write with memory.

The media says drug trafficking is the enemy.
But who arms the traffickers?

Politics says the favela is violent.
But who abandoned the favela?

Society says Black and Indigenous youth are dangerous.
But who pushed them into the abyss?

They say the victims are only those representing the State who fell.
But what about the victims of the State — the Indigenous, Black, peripheral bodies that fall every day, without name, without mourning, without justice?

When the State starts calling victims “terrorists,”
is it really concerned with security —
or preparing the ground to deliver our lives, our lands, and our sovereignty to foreign interests that have never recognized us as people?

Yakuy Tupinambá is an Indigenous activist, writer, and thinker from the Tupinambá de Olivença community in Bahia, Brazil. A law graduate and founder of the Útero Amotara Zabelê — a decolonial school of Indigenous philosophy — she has become one of the most lucid voices denouncing the continuity of colonial violence in Brazil. Her work bridges ancestral memory and digital activism, using manifestos, performances, and cyber-writing to expose the structural genocide against Black and Indigenous peoples. Speaking from the intersections of urban periphery, Indigenous territory, and feminist resistance, Yakuy embodies what she calls “the living struggle of those who refuse to disappear.”