Brazil - Fight in the favelas
Aug 2nd 2007 | RIO DE JANEIRO
From The Economist print edition
Rio cracks down on crime. But the police are at least half the problem
Sending the pigs inTHE bomb squad has packed up. Most of the 25,000-strong force of federal troops and state police, replete with riot gear and sniffer dogs, has returned to normal duties. For the last two weeks of July the Pan American games turned Rio de Janeiro into one of the world's most closely guarded places. Elsewhere, the suffocating security might make locals nervous. But Cariocas, as Rio's residents are known, rejoiced as the usual hectic pace of murder, assault and car theft slowed. They worry about what might happen now that the athletes have gone home.
Every governor of Rio for the past 20 years has vowed to stamp out violent crime, only to see the body count rise. With 40 murders per 100,000 residents, greater Rio de Janeiro is nearly three times as dangerous as São Paulo. Between 2000 and 2006 the city of Rio averaged one murder every 3½ hours, according to police statistics. One study, by the Organisation of Ibero-American States for Science and Culture, found that young men aged between 15 and 24 die each year at a rate of 101 per 100,000 in the city—a startling figure for a country not at war.
Sérgio Cabral, who took over as the governor of Rio state on January 1st, seems rather more determined than his predecessors to match promises with action. In the run-up to the games, he ordered the state police, backed by a federal task-force, to invade the Complexo do Alemão, a sprawling slum on the city's outskirts said to be the centre of drug trafficking.
The incursion was bloody. To date, 44 people have been killed there, 19 of them in a single battle in June. Human-rights advocates say that the police shot several victims in the back, typically a sign of execution. And yet many Cariocas approved. Singled out at a concert hall on a recent evening, the state secretary of public safety, José Beltrame, who masterminded the police raid, was given a hero's ovation.
Time and again the police have “liberated” the slums that cling to the hillsides only for the criminals to return when the heat is off. Residents of the Complexo do Alemão say the traffickers are already back in business after dark, plying their wares and wielding their guns in the Grota, the slum's main thoroughfare.
This time will be different, officials claim. Hours after the games closed, the city police raided half-a-dozen favelas (shantytowns). Brazil's president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, announced that 75% of the police cars, helicopters and surveillance gear deployed last month will remain in Rio. He has also promised federal money to improve the poorest neighbourhoods. Cariocas, Mr Cabral says, will have to “get used to the stress of war”.
So may other parts of Brazil. Nationally, murders increased by more than 5% a year between 1980 and 2004, according to a recent study by the Institute of Applied Economic Research, a government think-tank. The institute concluded that criminal violence costs Brazil more than 5% of GDP, taking into account both the cost of private security measures and lost income.
Even so, Rio stands out. Years of official lassitude, inefficiency and outright corruption have slowly poisoned the city's law-enforcement. Many scholars trace the malady back a century when police began to take a cut from the wildly popular illegal lottery called the jogo de bicho. The bicheiros, as the numbers mafia was called, came out of the shadows once a year to sponsor Rio's carnival, laundering their profits and reputations. In time, the bicheiros were replaced by deadlier drug traffickers, who inherited the police's tolerance.
Brazil's forgiving labour code, which makes it difficult to fire public servants, has not helped. State officials have repeatedly purged police ranks only to see the corrupt reinstated by court order. Equally unhelpful has been the Cariocas' soft spot for populist leaders who have handed over plum law-enforcement posts to cronies. Meanwhile, the state police are the second-worst-paid in the country.
So it is not surprising that the police's performance is so poor. The number of arrests in the state fell by 37% between 2002 and 2006. Forensics are shoddy: examining evidence can take up to three months. Only 3% of murder suspects are ever brought to trial, says Luiz Eduardo Soares, a former state official.
As well as being incompetent, the Rio police are among the most brutal in the world. Last year more than 1,000 people in the state died at their hands, a 250% rise over 2002. “More than intervention by police, Rio needs intervention into its police force,” says José Vicente da Silva, a retired police colonel. Whether or not Mr Cabral has the stomach for that is not clear. But for a few days last month, Cariocas had a rare glimpse of what a safe city might be like.
fonte:
http://www.economist.com/world/la/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9597408
