| | |  Americas & Beyond | October 2009 
Violence in the Newest Olympic City Rattles Brazil
 Alexei Barrionuevo - New York Times
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October 21, 2009
| | Police officers swarmed into a section of Rio de Janeiro on Sunday, a day after drug traffickers there shot down a police helicopter, killing three officers on board. (Ricardo Moraes/Reuters) | |
Rio de Janeiro — Just over two weeks ago, this striking city landed the 2016 Olympic Games, the first ever in South America, setting off a sweaty, impromptu beach party that lasted most of the weekend. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil sobbed with happiness. Rio’s residents glowed with pride.
Then over the weekend, in a chilling outburst of violence, drug traffickers wielding what the police say they believe was a large-caliber weapon shot down a police helicopter just one mile from Maracana stadium, where the opening and closing ceremonies of the Olympics will be held and the World Cup final will be played two years before the Olympics.
Suddenly, the celebration has been overwhelmed by hand-wringing that Rio’s chronic drug violence, its Achilles’ heel, is being laid bare before the world, and at a particularly inopportune time. Brazilian leaders are touring the world, searching for the investors needed to pay for the billions of dollars in infrastructure required for the events.
The images of the downed police helicopter “really shocked Brazilians, and now everyone is worried about what will happen with the Games,” said Nadine Matos, 21, who works at a hair salon a block from Copacabana Beach. “We need to tell the world where we stand so that people outside Brazil understand what measures we are taking and are not so worried when planning to come down here.”
For years, the police essentially abandoned the shantytowns, or favelas, that ring the city’s wealthier neighborhoods, following a policy that resembled containment more than enforcement. That allowed drug traffickers to create strongholds where violence is pervasive. And as the downing of the helicopter illustrated, the police have not done enough to slow the flow of weapons into the favelas.
“We never hid our problems during the candidacy process,” Rio’s mayor, Eduardo Paes, said in London, where he was on the first leg of a trip in search of investors for the public works projects. “We always said to people that we were still facing problems. We still have a lot to do, we have a long road ahead of us and what happened this weekend showed that.”
This year the government has tried a community policing approach to stemming the violence and cracking down on the traffickers in dozens of shantytowns, where about a third of Rio’s six million residents live. But the effort involves only five favelas so far, and the weekend of mayhem has set off a new round of debate here about whether the more militaristic strategy that has long prevailed has been useful.
The police said the weekend’s violence started after a trafficker in prison ordered his followers to invade a rival’s territory. The attack set off clashes between the police and drug bandits in several favelas, leaving at least 26 people dead, including three policemen and three bystanders.
At least one member of the International Olympic Committee, which highlighted Rio’s security challenges as its chief concern before the vote on Oct. 2, was quick to point out that Rio was not the only city to endure violence after winning an Olympic vote. In 2005, a day after London was awarded the 2012 Games, terrorists set off bombs on London’s trains and buses, leaving 56 dead and about 700 wounded.
With Brazil’s television talk shows and newspapers filled with commentary about the effect of the violence on Rio’s image, city and state leaders are suddenly being forced to defend their Olympic bid all over again.
“We want to get to 2016 with a Rio de Janeiro in peace before, during and after the Games,” Sérgio Cabral, Rio’s governor, said over the weekend.
The awarding of the Olympics has been viewed here as a crowning achievement for the country and a personal triumph for Mr. da Silva. But on Monday, he also found himself having to promise to provide additional money from the federal government in the next few months to beef up security in Rio.
“I need to clean the filth that drug traffickers impose on Brazil,” he said.
Rio has one of the world’s highest murder rates, with 4,631 homicides in the metropolitan area last year; that number represented a decline from 5,143 murders in 2006, government figures show. There were 523 murders in New York City last year.
With the community policing effort, police officers try to establish a more permanent presence within the shantytowns. That differs from the prevailing approach for more than a decade, in which the police guarded the entrances to the favelas and ventured in only for select operations that often turned into deadly gun battles with traffickers.
Though the community policing effort has so far been limited, law enforcement experts said they were encouraged.
“For the first time the police are not coming into the favelas shooting, and then leaving only to draw the hatred and scorn of the residents,” said Silvia Ramos, the coordinator of the Centro de Estudos de Segurança e Cidadania at the University of Cândido Mendes in Rio.
Other analysts said they believed that the new approach needed to be accompanied by new housing and the building of avenues in the favelas to enable police cars to move in and out with ease.
The weekend mayhem began when a gang members from Morro São João, backed up by about 200 men from other favelas, invaded the nearby Morro dos Macacos neighborhood, in the northern zone of Rio.
The police waited for daylight before moving in to avoid civilian casualties, José Mariano Beltrame, Rio’s secretary of public security, told reporters.
As officers moved in, gang members opened fire on a police helicopter, causing it to explode and crash. Three of the six officers on board were killed.
Organizers of the Olympic bid promised the I.O.C. that Rio would improve its police forces by 2012 with additional training, technology and resources.
Law enforcement experts are hoping that will mean that the Olympics will leave a legacy of improved policing in Rio.
“Now the cost of security will be very high, but it will be worth it,” said Rodrigo Pimentel, a former police captain in the special operations unit of Rio’s Military Police. “Let’s be honest. One more helicopter that falls down in Rio de Janeiro or another slum invasion could seriously raise the chances of the Olympics and World Cup pulling out of Brazil.”
Myrna Domit contributed reporting from Miami.
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