Vanessa Sales’s face crumples as soon as she starts speaking about her only child.
Agatha, aged eight, was shot dead by police in Rio de Janeiro in September as she sat next to her grandmother on a bus.
“She had started a piggy bank, with my husband, to save money to move out of the favela,” Mrs Sales, 32, told the Telegraph. “She died before the piggy bank was full.”
At least 21 children between eight and 12-years-old have been struck by stray bullets this year, as police wage war on the gangs in the favelas. Six of those children have died.
These young victims are part of a wider surge of police violence playing out under President Jair Bolsonaro and the hardline state governor, Wilson Witzel,…
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