The despair of a Rio widow, in a city struggling of violence!

[Gerald]

For Ricardo Moraes, a veteran photographer who for 11 years has documented for Reuters life in Rio de Janeiro's often dangerous cinderblock slums known as "favelas", work began at about 6 a.m. on Thursday, when he heard a radio report of a hostage situation in Sao Carlos, a sprawling tangle of hillside homes near the city center.

The images he would capture - a young woman, kneeling over her husband's body, overcome with grief and surrounded by heavily armed police - ultimately would appear on the front pages of Brazil's two largest newspapers. They resonated in a city fed up with violence, where residents say shootouts among aggressive criminal gangs and a notoriously deadly police force are common.

Police officers take up position.

The incident culminating in the photographs began when a man who police later identified as a drug trafficker took a family of three hostage in an apartment building.

He surrendered but hours later police exchanged gunfire with other suspects near the lobby, and the fighting quickly spilled into the surrounding area.

Then another family was taken hostage in a house nearby, by another heavily armed group. As negotiations with police ensued, female relatives of the drug gang gathered nearby.

But one of them was missing.

https://widerimage.reuters.com/story...-with-violence

More links https://widerimage.reuters.com/story...-then-vanished

A life in excruciating pain for families and relatives.