The Guns of BOPE

With the 2014 World Cup in full swing down in Brazil I thought it would be a good oppurtinity to talk about the various firearms used by the elite police force known as BOPE, or Batalhão de Operações Policiais Especiais in Portuguese. (Edit, the Rio Olympics are now taking place). They’re a 400 man strong special forces unit of the Military Police of the state of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. BOPE members have extensive urban warfare training and experience and are equipped with much more fire power than average Rio street cops. When a gang battle goes down in a favela, they send in BOPE. Need to clean up the image of Rio before the World Cup, send in BOPE.

If you haven’t already seen it, the Elite Squad movies (Tropa de Elite) are all about the badassery that is BOPE, as well as the rampant corruption in Brazil. I highly recommend them. Both Elite Squad Part One and Elite Squad Part Two are available on Amazon. I believe you can stream them on Amazon Prime as well. Anyways, back to BOPE.

To the left is a picture that shows their typical loadout, via the DailyMail. They typically wear a kevlar helmet, body armor, a rifle, stun and frag grenades, a Taurus PT92 pistol and Wotan combat knife. As for their significant roles and duties below is a list taken from the BOPE Wiki page.

– Break barricades constructed by drug dealers
– Shoot to kill at any criminal threatening both civilian or member life
– Exterminate drug trafficking criminal factions and all of its members
– Extract police officers or civilians injured in confrontations and combats
– Rescuing officers and citizens captured by criminals or endangered by gunfire
– Serve high-risk arrest warrants
– Hostage rescue
– Stabilizing situations involving high-risk suicidal subjects
– Suppress prison riots at any cause
– Support civil police in combats of any kind
– Providing superior assault firepower in certain situations
– Armed patrols around the favelas
– Special missions in swamps or mountainous terrains such as reconnaissance, planning and infiltration
– Engage in combat serving state sovereignty
– Crime suppression to minimum
– Resolving high-risk situations with a minimum loss of life, injury, or property damage
– Engage strongly armed criminal factions

Guns of BOPE

M16 Rifle

M4 Carbine

FN FAL

FN Para FAL

IMBEL MD97

AR10 Super SASS Rifle

H&K PSG1 Rifle

H&K G3 Rifle

Benelli M3 Shotgun

H&K MP5

FN P90

H&K 21 Machine Gun

Taurus PT92