DRUG TRAFFICKERS in Rio de Janeiro forced down a police helicopter on Saturday, killing two officers on board during one of the worst outbreaks of gang-related violence in the city in several years.
Brazilian authorities said 2,000 police operatives were yesterdayhunting for the drug traffickers behind a sudden outbreak of violence which has so far claimed at least 14 lives.
The disturbances came just two weeks after Rio was awarded the right to host the 2016 Olympic Games, for which the city had to overcome fears about violence in the stunning but troubled seaside metropolis to beat bids from Chicago, Madrid and Tokyo.
The helicopter crash-landed after the pilot was shot at while monitoring clashes between rival drug gangs in the north of the city.
The pilot and three other officers managed to get out of the wreckage, but it quickly caught fire, killing two other officers.
Police helicopters have before come under fire in Rio from gang members, but this is the first time one was brought down.
Confrontation between two rival gangs left at least another 10 people dead as gang members fought running battles with each other and police and set fire to over 10 buses throughout the region.
Shooting continued into the early hours of yesterday.
Police said the violence started when gang members from the Morro do São João shanty town attempted to invade and take over the neighbouring slum of Morro dos Macacos in the early hours of Saturday, leading to gun battles that lasted well into Saturday.
By Saturday evening the authorities suspended police leave and ordered 4,500 extra officers on to the streets in order to prevent further clashes. “At this time, who has control of Morro [dos Macacos] is the police. We are not motivated by revenge, but this will not finish here,” said Jose Mariano Beltrame, Rio’s security secretary.
Each year several thousand people are killed in the city’s drug wars which pitch gangs from the city’s shanty towns – known as favelas – against each other and police, with the city’s most vulnerable residents caught in the crossfire.
In 2006, in the worst outbreak of violence in Brazil in recent decades, police in the state of São Paulo went on the rampage, killing hundreds of innocent civilians in poor neighbourhoods in revenge for attacks by a prison gang that left dozens of police officers dead.
Almost a third of Rio’s population of six million lives in hundreds of favelas scattered throughout the city. Most of these slums are controlled by drug-trafficking gangs with names such as the Red Commando, Third Command and the Friends-of-Friends, a lot of whose foot-soldiers are gun-toting teenagers. In Saturday’s disturbances the Red Commando was attempting to seize the Morro de Macacos drug trade from the rival Friends-of-Friends gang.
These gangs control much of the distribution of the city’s cocaine.
Brazil is the world’s second biggest consumer of the drug after the US.