A picture and its story: The despair of a Rio widow, in a city struggling with violence

Juliana, who says she is four months pregnant, reacts in front of the body of her husband Davi Barboza, who was shot in Sao Carlos, during a police operation after heavy confrontations between drug gangs, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, August 27, 2020. "I want to ask whoever is in that life to get out," Juliana said. "Think of your family because it's very difficult for us. I don't know how I'm going to go back home and not see him anymore." REUTERS/Ricardo Moraes/File Photo

RIO DE JANEIRO (Reuters) - 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.