The government has also changed its strategy since then. The last time, police went into the favelas (shantytowns) all guns blazing; killed residents (not all of whom were gangsters); and pulled out weeks or months later once the status quo was restored. But Rio has now developed a public-security policy, and gained the political will to see it through. One at a time, thirteen favelas have been endowed with “Pacification Police Units” (UPPs), a permanent community-policing presence that can stop drug dealers from toting heavy weapons and terrorising residents. The plan is to reach 40 slums by 2014. Once public order is securely restored, health-care, community centres and so on will follow—and eventually, it is hoped, there will be no space left in which the bad guys can operate..
Rio is in some ways an incredibly gorgeous city: great beaches, startling mountains and some lovely, if shabby, architecture. But it brings to mind a face that is beautiful until its owner smiles, revealing teeth that are rotten stumps. Wherever you are, you can look up at the hills and see the favelas, home to hundreds of thousands of people living in unalleviated poverty, ill health, and lacking legal protection. Up there, in the hills, the state has ceded control to drug traffickers and militias made up of off-duty and retired police officers. Up there, teenagers sporting machine guns patrol the streets and carry out gut-wrenchingly sadistic murders, and no one is punished. But rather than looking at what is right in front of them, for decades the authorities and many of the better-off have simply averted their eyes.
How come Rio ended up like this? It has never had an effective police force, says Elizabeth Süssekind, a criminologist at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio. Its police are underpaid and receive little training, and until recently were pretty much armed and then left to their own devices. They could torture and kill within prisons, or carry out revenge attacks inside the favelas with complete impunity, and had neither the organisational structure nor the know-how to do much else. Such folk were easy to corrupt, and throughout the 20th century gangs running the Jogo de Bicho (Animal Game), an immensely popular, lucrative, and formally illegal lottery, provided the money to do so. When Rio became a major transit point for cocaine trafficking to Europe in the 70s and 80s, a fallen police force accommodated these new criminals too.
Julia Michaels, an American writer and journalist who has lived in Rio for many years, points out another consequence of the weak, corrupt state: an emphasis on personal relationships to the exclusion of almost everything else. Brazilians naturally focus on friends and family, she thinks, and there is a very weak idea of the common good. And Brazilians’ famous optimism may play a part too: someone who always thinks everything will turn out fine is less likely to push for much-needed change. When I ask the taxi driver who brings me up to the Complexo do Alemão, the scene of the recent action, what he thought of the week’s events, he says that he believes “good always triumphs over evil”, despite much evidence to the contrary in Rio in recent years.
A consequence of the focus on friends and family is a surprising heartlessness towards everyone else. Professor Süssekind says that some of her neighbours expressed disappointment that the police had not just gone into Alemão and “killed them all”. Another person asked her, Marie Antoinette-like, why “those people” were living “up there” anyway. On my flight to Rio from São Paulo, where I live, the woman next to me said, very firmly, that Rio was fighting a “civil war” and that of course the armed forces would end up shooting innocent bystanders; it simply could not be helped. For such people, what is happening is not an inexcusably belated attempt to extend the protections and privileges of citizenship to the poor, but the punishment of poverty itself as a crime.
But this is an old story, and there is a new one being told in Rio now. I heard it today at one of the entrances to Alemão when I asked Marco, a member of a state police special-forces unit, how things were going today. He said nothing of war or victory, instead simply calling the situation “calm”, and the residents “receptive” and free to come and go as they pleased. Renê, a 17-year-old resident of Complexo do Alemao, went from 2,000 followers on Twitter to 22,000 during the last week, as people from Rio and beyond followed his updates on what was happening. Ms Michaels told me of a teacher she met in a school on the edge of the now-pacified Borel favela, who explained that before, she was not meant to look out the window, or point out the sights to visitors. Now she can look wherever she wants.
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