Soldiers' shadows lie over deaths of young men in Rio favela

BRAZIL LETTER:THOUGH SHOCKINGLY brutal, the deaths in Rio de Janeiro of David Wilson Florêncio da Silva (24), Wellington Gonzaga Costa (19) and Marcos Paulo da Silva (17) would normally have gone largely unnoticed in Brazil, writes Tom Hennigan.

They were three young black men from one of the city's slums where young black men have met violent deaths in such shocking numbers for decades that Brazil has become largely inured to them.

The three came from the favela of Providência, which is controlled by the drug-trafficking gang known as the Red Commando, although their families insist they had nothing to do with the group.

On the night of June 14th, they were coming home from a dance hall when they fell into the hands of traffickers from the neighbouring slum of Mineira. This favela is controlled by the Friends of Friends, deadly rivals of the Red Commando. The three were brutally tortured, killed and dumped on waste ground.

So far, this is nothing more than a small snapshot of what passes for daily life in Rio's slums - but one crucial element in the case made these three particular deaths the centre of a scandal that has shocked Brazil.

The three men were delivered up to the Friends of Friends by soldiers patrolling the area. The troops had been stationed there since last December, supposedly to provide security to workers carrying out improvements in Providência as part of a federal project labelled Social Cement, which aims to improve the quality of housing and infrastructure in precarious neighbourhoods.

Soldiers had detained the three young men for allegedly showing "disrespect" to their authority and had taken them to their barracks. There, a captain ordered their release but a lieutenant disobeyed the order and decided to take the three to Mineira and hand them over to the Friends of Friends.

The lieutenant said he had wanted to give them a "shock".

Eleven soldiers are now under arrest as the case is investigated.

The case has developed into a constitutional crisis. Troops are only meant to be deployed among civilians in exceptional circumstances. A week after the murders and the arrest of the troops, a federal court ordered the army out of Providência.

The government appealed and won the right for the soldiers to stay, but only on the road where the works they were sent to protect were located.

However, although expressing horror at the soldiers' role in the Providência deaths, some commentators have asked if the exceptional circumstances necessary do in fact exist that would justify sending in the army - that Brazilians have just become so accustomed to the violence that it no longer seems exceptional.

Between January and April this year, the state of Rio de Janeiro experienced more than 2,000 murders, the majority in the greater Rio area. In 2007, there were 6,133 murders in a state with a population of about 15 million.

Opponents of deploying the army, including many senior officers, say doing so risks contaminating the military with the criminality with which they will inevitably come into contact.

This seems to have happened in the Providência case, with reports that soldiers seemed on friendly terms with the Friends of Friends gang members to whom they turned over the three prisoners.

The alternative, though, is not to deploy the army despite the bloodshed, and leave it to the police to handle. In Rio, this means a force long since contaminated by criminality and so violent and corrupt that many residents of the favelas fear the police more than the gangs that control their neighbourhoods.

In April alone, police in Rio state killed 144 people for the loss of just two men.

The deployment of the army does not seem to have been a systematic effort to compensate for police criminality and brutality. The works in Providência were eventually ordered to a halt by the country's electoral court, saying they were clearly designed to influence local elections later this year.

Though funded by the federal government, the Social Cement works have as their patron senator Marcelo Crivella, an evangelical politician running to become Rio's mayor in elections in October.

The politically well-organised evangelicals are particularly influential in Rio and Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has sought to court them in recent years after bitter enmity between his Workers' Party and the homegrown Pentecostal churches earlier in his political career.

Now questions are being asked about how it was that the army was deployed in the country's second city to provide security for works that many see as little more than blatant electioneering. Once the electoral court ordered a halt to the works, the minister of defence ordered the troops out.

Since then, dozens have been killed violently in the Marvellous City and their deaths have gone largely unnoticed.