'Shoot Them in the Head'
World Cup Hosts Brazil and South Africa Crack Down on Crime
An orchid, a laptop and a Bible adorn the desk of Pricilla de Oliveira Azevedo. She is wearing the blue uniform of the military police, but there is no weapon visible in her small office. Her territory is the Favela Santa Marta, a hillside slum in the heart of the southern tourist zone of the Brazilian city of Rio de Janeiro. From the top of the hill, there is a magnificent view of Sugar Loaf Mountain, the statue of Christ the Redeemer and Copacabana beach.
Until the end of last year, the Comando Vermelho, or Red Command, the city's largest and oldest organized crime group, controlled Santa Marta, a favela with a population of about 10,000. The street leading up the hill begins behind a German school. Child soldiers working for the drug mafia used to stand guard at access points into the slum, wearing T-shirts and sandals, with Kalashnikovs slung over their shoulders and pistols stuck into the waistbands of their Bermuda shorts. Only a few steps away from a main thoroughfare, they sold cocaine, crack and marijuana.
Today Azevedo, 31, controls the neighborhood. She commands 120 police officers that now patrol the favela's narrow streets around the clock. The residents greet them politely and ask for their help with domestic violence or when a neighbor's music is too loud. There hasn't been a murder in the neighborhood in more than a year.
Azevedo runs Rio's first UPP, which stands for "Police Pacification Unit." These units are Rio's trump card for the 2014 Soccer World Cup and the 2016 Olympics.
Too Dangerous
The city's residents were ecstatic a month ago, when Rio de Janeiro won its bid for the Olympics, defeating competitors Chicago, Tokyo and Madrid, even more so than they were two years ago, when Brazil was selected to host the 2014 World Cup. Rio had been in the running for the games twice before, and now it had succeeded, bringing the Olympics to South America for the first time. Now, finally, beach volleyball will be played on the world's most famous beach, against a backdrop of sunshine, the ocean and palm trees.
But the euphoria had hardly subsided before the critics began speaking out in large numbers. Awarding the games to Rio, they said, was not an example of modern sports policy, but pure lunacy. The city, they argued, is much too dangerous.
It was the same story five-and-a-half years ago, when the International Federation of Association Football (FIFA) decided to hold the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. The country has one of the world's highest crime rates, with 200,319 murders committed in the last 10 years. One could praise FIFA's decision as a form of development aid, or one could simply call it negligent. To remove such doubts, Brazil and South Africa must now find ways to guarantee the safety of fans and tourists.
Rio de Janeiro, with its 6 million residents, is one of the world's most violent cities, a place where robberies, murders and kidnappings are routine. There were 5,717 murders last year in the state of Rio de Janeiro, which includes the city. Drug cartels control about 300 of the more than 700 favelas, and the drug bosses employ thousands of soldiers, some of them armed with bazookas.
Violent Standoff
The brutality with which rival gangs go about their business was in full evidence in mid-October once again in a favela called Morro dos Macacos, or Monkey Hill. Two warring drug gangs engaged in gun battles in the favela, and they even shot down a police helicopter with their submachine guns as it was trying to make an emergency landing on a nearby football field. At the end of the week-long standoff, at least 21 people had been killed.
The city now plans to have more than 60,000 police officers, including units like the one run by Captain Azevedo, patrolling the streets in time for the 2014 World Cup. There will be 1,000 cameras installed, from the beaches to the most important residential areas, to keep an eye on trouble spots. All police stations will be outfitted with computers, and the police, traffic authority and fire department will all be connected in a common computer network, something which has not been the case up until now.
The city also wants to buy two unmanned drones to keep watch over the favelas from the air. After the violence on Monkey Hill in October, Justice Minister Tarso Genro announced that the equivalent of €98 million ($145 million) had been earmarked for immediate action programs. "We want to permanently improve security in the city, not just for three or four weeks here and there," says José Mariano Beltrame, Rio's secretary of public security. He sounds confident.