Feminism and M-16s: transforming macho policing in Rio

Female drugs unit members on the frontline of battles with gangs in slums.

Fabiane Santos de Mello says she wanted to be in the police since she was five.

A police helicopter rattles through the skies over Rio, black-clad snipers poised at either side.

Below, in the Morro da Mineira shanty town, locals scatter for cover, shop-fronts clatter noisily shut and nearly 200 rifle-toting police operatives begin sprinting up the steep hillside, among them Inspector Santos de Mello, a member of the anti-weapons and explosives unit, better known as DRAE.

It is mid-afternoon in northern Rio and another normal day on the adrenaline-filled frontline of Brazil’s war on drugs has just begun.

Normal, that is, apart from one small detail. Inspector Santos de Mello, one of the officers leading the charge, is a woman, part of a growing team of female police officers on the frontline of Rio’s drug conflict, and an unlikely flag bearer for Brazil’s feminist cause.

“I wanted to be a cop since I was five. That was all I ever wanted,” said de Mello, a 32-year-old gym enthusiast tasked with cracking down on Rio’s drug traffickers with her silver Ruger assault rifle and 40mm Taurus pistol. De Mello’s unit regularly engages in battles with heavily armed drug traffickers and its officers are often pictured in the local press dragging bodies out of the favelas in bloodied duvets.

In a country where policing has long been considered men’s work, the frontline of Rio’s drug war – a world of blood, sweat and bullets that must rank among the most macho on earth – is an unlikely setting for a feminist revolution.

But Brazilian women are making inroads into this male-dominated profession, not just policing Rio’s mean streets but also occupying some of the highest ranks in the corporation.

“Maybe I’ll be the last ever male police chief. Who knows?” Allan Turnowski, the head of Rio’s civil police, told the Guardian, only half-joking, after a record 10 female officers were sworn into some of the highest posts in his organisation, including head of intelligence.

Among the women rising to the top of Rio’s civil police is Marcia Beck, a 35-year-old mother of one who became DRAE’s new police chief in April and describes herself as “a wife, a house-wife and a mother, like any woman”. A day after taking over, she joked to her officers: “I am going to paint everything pink and with little yellow flowers and buy a packet of Powerpuff Girls stickers to put on all the rifles.”

Beck said: “Nobody has said anything but I’m sure they must be thinking: ‘[A woman?] Really?'”

“It is a career that is traditionally dominated by men but we women are changing this reality,” said Beck, who sees the growing presence of women as one step towards changing the police’s image as a violent and feared force. A study released last year by the Iuperj research institute said that only 6.9% of the population trusted Rio’s military police while the civil police had the confidence of just 9.2%. “We are imposing ourselves in all areas – in health, in security, in the press,” said Walna Vieira, 46, a member of Rio’s anti-cargo theft unit who embarks on weekly incursions into Rio’s slums armed with an M-16 assault rifle and her unlikely nickname of “Maezona” or “Big Momma.”

Vieira was the first civil policewoman to receive a bravery award following a six-hour shootout in Coreia, one of Rio’s most notorious and heavily armed slums, in which one of her colleagues was killed as well as a four-year-old child and 10 drug alleged drug traffickers.

Brazil’s female revolution is not just restricted to Rio’s police force, with the number of women occupying high-ranking positions in big business, medicine and diplomacy also on the rise.

While female politicians remain a minority in Brazil’s capital Brasilia – only 10 of Brazil’s 81 senators are women – female voices are also gaining space in politics.

In 2002 Brazil broke with tradition, electing Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva as its first working-class president. Next year South America’s largest nation may get the chance to elect its first female president in the form of Dilma Rousseff, a former leftwing guerilla who is currently Lula’s chief of staff and is his choice of successor.

With the sun slipping behind the mountains of western Rio, Inspetora de Mello was inching down a tight-alleyway with her male colleagues, scanning each house for possible targets.

In one shack, deep inside the labyrinthine slum, her team found a weeping child whose parents had left her at home alone while they worked.

Terrified by the arrival of armed police officers, the girl wept. De Mello lowered her Ruger and stroked the girl’s face to comfort her.

“Policing is always going to be a violent thing. It’s not delicate,” said Beck, Inspector de Mello’s chief at DRAE. “If all you see is male police with rifles on operations it makes it even more violent. [But] if you put a few women on the front line people realise police are not just violent.”

At the foot of the favela hundreds of police operatives had gathered to celebrate the day’s haul; nearly 50kg of pure cocaine, which they had found buried in the surrounding rainforest.

De Mello, one of the newest members of DRAE, was also jubilant. “I enjoy operations. When we don’t have them I feel unmotivated. Today I feel professionally satisfied.”

The discrimination against Rio’s female cops continued, however. “Every day I hear [jokes about being a woman]. Today they said, go and put on your bikini for your interview.

“It isn’t easy. Sometimes it is pretty intolerable. But we have to get over it. We have to pretend we don’t hear it. Otherwise I’d be fighting all the time with them.”