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San Jose Mercury News - CA, US
09 November 2006

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One of Rio de Janeiro's most d

Rio de Janeiro is a killing fi

RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil - To the residents of the Little Alligator slum in the heart of this city's violent northern neighborhoods, what happened to pizza delivery man Bruno Ribeiro de Macedo on a recent Friday afternoon could have befallen any of them.

After his 77-year-old father suffered a heart attack at home, the 19-year-old mounted his motorcycle in shorts and sandals and zoomed to the slum's entrance to find a taxi to take his father to a hospital.

Police officer Julio Cesar de Oliveira Lira, who was on patrol outside the slum, thought Ribeiro de Macedo was trying to rob the taxi and shot him in the head with a rifle. Ribeiro de Macedo died instantly, followed by his father minutes later.

The tragedy was one of hundreds of senseless killings that plague this violence-torn city every year, where police and powerful drug gangs are locked in a bloody battle for control of the slums and their lucrative drug sales.

The murdered man's sister, Celina Ribeiro de Macedo, said innocent residents are suffering the brunt of the street wars, especially the violence waged by police, who see anyone in a slum as a potential threat.

"They think we're all criminals, but there are good people who work here," she said. "Bruno was never involved in anything. He just delivered pizzas."

Police officers in Rio de Janeiro state, home to 16 million people, killed 608 people in confrontations in the first seven months of this year, government data show. By comparison, U.S. law enforcement "justifiably killed" 341 people all of last year, according to the FBI.

The numbers far surpass police killings in other Brazilian states and reflect what many call a virtual civil war in the city's sprawling slums, where a fifth of Rio's population lives and where gangs, not government authorities, rule.

Residents, outraged by the killings, have called for police reform. But those calls are countered by others demanding even tougher action, largely from middle-class Brazilians who want to stop crime from spilling into the city's nicer neighborhoods.

The issue was highlighted last year by a best-selling book written by two Rio de Janeiro police officers who detailed police use of torture and extra-judicial killings to combat slum crime.

U.S. film producers Bob and Harvey Weinstein are funding a movie adaptation of the book - an effort that fell victim to the city's turf wars last week when suspected gang members stole a van filled with modified weapons used in the movie's production.

Human rights activists blame the high number of police shootings on how the government perceives the crime problem and says fundamental reforms, such as a stronger community focus in police training and ending the use of military-style weapons, are needed. They point to studies showing two-thirds of people killed by state police were shot in the head or the back of the neck at close range, suggesting they were executed.

"This is the result of a public security policy calculated around the idea of war," said Marcelo Freixo, an activist who was elected last month to Rio's state legislature. "Every war has an enemy, and who's the enemy here? It's the poor who live on the hills where the slums are, and they're mainly black people who feel the repression."

Police officials have said Ribeiro de Macedo's killing likely resulted from a misunderstanding but tell a different story about this city's street wars.

In their eyes, the police are being slaughtered while trying to win back swaths of the city that have fallen under drug gang control. Only a military-style response can bring back order, they say, including fencing in the roughest slums and setting up guard posts to monitor drug traffic.

Government data show 144 state police officers died last year; officials said the majority of them were killed while off duty. Nationwide, 756 police officers died in 2004. By comparison, 55 U.S. law enforcement officers were murdered and 67 died in accidents last year, FBI data show.

The violence is happening against a backdrop of spiraling bloodshed in this country, home to 187 million people. About 50,000 nationwide are murdered each year - more than 130 per day. That outnumbers the death tolls in countries wracked by war, such as Lebanon or Iraq.

Since May, the massive prison gang the First Command of the Capital has repeatedly paralyzed Brazil's biggest state, Sao Paulo, with waves of bus burnings, assassinations and other violence that has claimed more than 150 lives.

Lt. Col. Mario Sergio de Brito Duarte, commander of Rio's special operations police battalion, said the drug gangs raised the stakes by fighting each other and police with automatic rifles, grenades and other military weapons.

The battalion has followed suit and entered slums in bulletproof, tank-like vehicles topped with turrets from which police officers can fire. On the street, the vehicle is known as the "caveirao," or big skull, inspired by the battalion's logo of a skull with a dagger and two pistols protruding from it.

"This is a war by means of the implements ... and by means of the conduct," De Brito Duarte said in the battalion's hilltop headquarters, which is protected by anti-tank barriers and sentries. "The groups, they comport themselves in a paramilitary way. They have supply lines, they have lines for evacuating the injured - rudimentary, but they have them."

A former gang member, who left the powerful Red Command faction in July and asked that his name not be used for fear of retaliation, said the gangs now have bullets that can pierce the caveirao's double layers of armor.

The 25-year-old said he'd joined the gang at age 12 after police searching for a suspect in his family's slum house beat him and his mother and forced his sister to strip in front of them.

"I was disgusted with the police, who I thought were there to protect me but were humiliating me in front of my family," he said.

News reports frequently accuse corrupt police of taking cuts from drug sales and even helping to transport weapons to gangs.

A resident of the Little Alligator slum, who would identify herself only as Nadia, said she'd seen police drive armored vehicles into her neighborhood early in the morning with guns blazing while warning people on loudspeakers to clear the way.

"Bruno was killed just outside the slum, so imagine what police do inside them?" she said. "They just kill indiscriminately."

Perhaps the most notorious of police abuse was the rampage last year that killed 29 bystanders outside of Rio. One officer, Carlos Jorge Carvalho, was sentenced to 543 years in prison in August for the massacre.

Some speculate that he and other police officers unleashed the bloodshed to protest anti-police corruption measures. Four officers are still awaiting judgment. One corporal who was accused of contributing to the planning of the massacre had been cooperating with investigators, but was found murdered last month.

Such abuses and more are the basis for the best-selling book "Elite of the Troop," which Andre Batista, a police captain who co-wrote the book, said is a fictionalized account of what he witnessed. Batista is facing possible discipline for writing about the police force without authorization.

"People think police are the monsters of society, but they're on the front lines in this battle of good versus evil," Batista said. "We don't let people normally see the conditions that brutalize people. This book talks about the price that people are paying."

The book describes special-operations members infiltrating hillside slums, executing people they suspect to be gang members and then slaying witnesses, all done with the tacit approval of superiors.

It also tells of police death squads, official corruption and even an aborted attempt to assassinate Rio de Janeiro's then-governor Leonel de Moura Brizola, who was clamping down on police.

"Whoever thinks the real world is only the visible powers, the written laws and money is fooling themselves," says the book's narrator. "The most important thing isn't spoken, written or recorded."

De Brito Duarte said the abuses Batista and slum residents described may have happened but not with his approval.

"We are not beings from another planet; we are people who come from the society that is here," he said. "And being of this category of human beings that exists on this earth, we are imperfect. Eventually we commit excesses, not institutionally, but as people."

Such distinctions were lost at the slain pizza deliverer's funeral the day after his death, where dozens of friends and neighbors mourned the tragedy with howls of grief and outrage as Ribeiro de Macedo and his father were sealed in adjacent crypts.

"His only gang was the gang of workers," said Antonio Carlos Santos Albano, a lawyer representing Ribeiro de Macedo's family. "But that's not important in these neighborhoods. Everyone is considered a criminal here."

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San Jose Mercury News - CA, US09 November 2006

Rio de Janeiro is a killing fi

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San Jose Mercury News - CA, US
09 November 2006