New hope for the other Gaza Strip?

The Olympics are coming, and, finally, the authorities in Rio de Janeiro are trying to clean up its poorest neighbourhoods, long ruled by violent drugs gangs

DESPITE SEVERAL decades working as a war reporter, documentary filmmaker Jon Blair was struck by the amount of heavy weapons he saw openly on display when he first visited the Gaza Strip.

Not the Gaza Strip sandwiched between Israel and Egypt, but the one tourists can see as they make their way in from Rio de Janeiro’s international airport. This Gaza Strip is a sprawl of favelas, as Brazil’s shantytowns are called, where violence has produced murder rates usually associated with war zones.

It is a world away from the sensuous party town that, under the gaze of its iconic Christ Redeemer statue, curves around spectacular beaches and mountains and is famous for the world’s biggest New Year’s Eve celebration and wildest carnival.

It is this other Rio that erupted in October, just two weeks after residents celebrated winning the right to host the 2016 Olympic Games.

An upsurge of gang violence left dozens dead including three officers when their police helicopter was shot down.

About a fifth of the 12 million residents of Brazil’s second biggest metropolis live in favelas. It is in these neighbourhoods that most of the city’s 4,500 murders each year take place, victims of a drug war between heavily armed gangs that run the favelas as if they were mini narco-states.

During its ineffectual efforts to combat the gangs last year the police killed another 1,000 people for the loss of just 20 officers.

In his shocking new documentary, Dancing with the Devil, Blair catches the terrible reality of this war. For the first time, gang members openly face the camera, telling their, rarely heard, side of the conflict.

The film finds they are not mafia kingpins with vast wealth, but young men trapped by their own violence in confined worlds where they know the likeliest escape is an early death. Coming from the poorest neighbourhoods, they have been caught up in an arms race against rivals and the police that long ago exploded into urban warfare, all in order to protect what are petty, local rackets.

“I have 100,000 reais [€40,000] in the trunk of my car but what is it worth when I cannot read or write,” says Tola, the third most sought after trafficker in Rio. “I was happier when I had nothing. It’s better to have bread with God than caviar with the devil.” Historians of Rio’s drug trade say cocaine was first brought into the city in large quantities in the 1970s by international traffickers looking for a transhipment point to lucrative markets in Europe. Rio criminals were often paid for their help in kind, giving birth to a local market.

Since then cocaine consumption has ballooned and the gangs have grown in strength largely thanks to decades of misguided policy by the authorities. “For 20 years public security policy has been totally wrong,” says Prof Silvia Ramos of the Centre for the Study of Security and Citizenship at Rio’s Cândido Mendes University.

“The occupation of poor neighbourhoods by armed groups was in a certain manner tolerated by the authorities or else combated in a completely ineffectual way with police just entering shooting, killing people and then withdrawing, leaving the gangs to resume their control. This has allowed them to put down roots so that now it is very difficult to remove them.” This official policy of neglecting favelas apart from when assaulting them also has a racial connotation that Brazilians are loath to admit. “For all Brazil’s claim to be an interracial coffee democracy the wealthy people are generally very light skinned and the people carrying guns in the favelas are not generally light skinned,” notes Blair.

The clearest consequence of the complete mismanagement of this decades-long crisis can be seen by looking at the city’s security map. Regions with the highest incidents of violence – where homicide rates reach those associated with low intensity war zones by United Nations metrics – are also those with almost no permanent police presence. Instead, Rio’s police stations are found in better off areas, where the murder rates are a world away from those in the shantytowns.

Now, finally, the authorities are trying to reverse this total neglect. In the last two years, Rio’s state government has ordered the police to permanently occupy four of the city’s 600 favelas.

Here, specially selected police officers maintain special Permanent Police Units. In the four communities occupied so far the police received warm acceptance from residents once they understood that this time they would be staying and not pulling out after they chased away the traffickers. The reduction in violence has been dramatic.

“This could be the light at the end of the tunnel,” says Ramos. One study says that to affect a similar dramatic reduction of violence across the whole city, at least 152 other Permanent Police Units are needed, at a cost of over €150 million per year.

In Brazil as elsewhere, there is little support for legalising drugs such as cocaine despite the fact that millions like to indulge in a bit of “dust” on a night out at the weekend. Reoccupying the favelas might mean Rio’s drug gangs no longer control slices of the city like militias in a war zone. But they are unlikely to disappear unless their customers do likewise.