With world watching, Rio focuses on security ahead of Cup

The police will invade 40 of the most violent slums in this city before the
2014 soccer World Cup being held in Brazil, with the goal of establishing a permanent policing presence in communities now controlled by well-armed drug gangs, Rio state officials say.

The plans include occupying Rocinha, one of the city’s largest and most fortified slums, in what crime experts here say could be a huge and bloody battle that could define the city’s efforts to squeeze out gangs that have plagued the city for three decades.

The campaign is an expansion of a police “pacification program” that began in late 2008. It comes as Brazilian officials are feeling the weight of international scrutiny after being chosen as the site of both the World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games.

INITIATIVE DETAILS

The police say the pacification program is meant to bring order to slums that overhang Rio’s wealthiest areas in the south and west of the city, where the bulk of the Olympic contests will be held. Heavily armed gangs control hundreds of neighborhoods in Rio and are largely responsible for the metropolitan region having one of the highest murder rates in the hemisphere, at 35 for every 100,000 residents.

Rio state officials say they are focusing their efforts on the slums where gangs have the most dangerous guns, which allow them to terrorize residents and repel police.

“These 40 slums that we have chosen are the arms, legs, trunk and brains of drug-trafficking in Rio de Janeiro,” said Dirceu Silviana, spokesman for the Secretariat of Public Security, which oversees the police in Rio. “But the primary objective is not the drug-trafficking, it’s to do away with weapons of war.”

Rio officials say they will eventually expand the program to 100 slums, but would not give a timetable. For the next four years, at least, the plan is to occupy an average of 10 communities a year.

Rio officials say that part of the campaign is trying to reduce police lethality and that officers who choose to work in the slums are being given special human-rights training and bonuses that nearly double the entry-level police salary of about $620 a month.

Since starting the program in November 2008, the Rio police have taken over nine communities totaling about 120,000 residents, officials said. That is just a small portion of the 600 or so slums that have serious problems with drug-trafficking and militias; the slums contain about one million people, Rio officials said.

The program involves placing a large police contingent in a slum area on a permanent basis to interact with residents and keep traffickers from reinvading and acting as a “parallel power,” said Sergio Cabral, the governor of Rio State.

Once they have occupied a slum, the police will handle security full-time, avoiding the need for Rio’s special elite squad to make often violent incursions into the slums to try to root out traffickers or contain invasions from rival factions.

So far, the “pacification” police have been installed in small neighborhoods, like Dona Marta, which has about 6,000 residents.

“The testimonials I have received from the people that have been freed from this parallel power are just incredible,” Cabral said. “`We are now free from terrorism,’ they tell me. `Finally, governor, I can sleep at night.”’

YET TO COME

Rio officials are adding 3,300 police officers this year, and at least 4,000 more in 2011 to Rio’s force of 45,000. Nearly all of the new officers will be employed as peacekeepers in the slums, Silviana said.