Editor’s note: The upcoming Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro is placing international attention on Brazil. In the second of three reports, Best Countries reports on the Games’ host city’s attempts to confront violence.
RIO DE JANEIRO — When army tanks opened the way for police to enter the Complexo do Alemão, one of Rio de Janeiro’s largest favelas, or poor communities, the whole city followed the event through the news, especially lifelong residents of the community like Denize da Silva.
Alemão had served as the headquarters for the city’s most powerful gang for decades. That November day in 2010, as law enforcement penetrated its maze of alleys for the first time in years and planted a Brazilian flag on its highest peak, da Silva’s disbelief gave way to surprise — even hope.
Maybe the public security program that was installing police bases in favelas across Rio — called Unidades de Polícia Pacificadora (UPP), or Pacification Police Units — would bring change to Alemão, where gun violence helped lower life expectancy to nine years below the city average.
“For the first time, I thought maybe we would get peace: peace to work, to send our kids to school,” says da Silva.
Despite the long-standing distrust residents had in government officials and their promises, Alemão after that police incursion became a symbol of the optimism and the changes sweeping the city as it looked forward to the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Summer Olympics. If change was possible there, it was possible for Rio.
Six years later, and just weeks before the Aug. 5 opening of the Olympic Games, Alemão has become a symbol of a different sort: This time, it stands for the crisis threatening the police program and for the escalating violence that once again engulfed the community and the city around it.
Shoot-outs rip through the routines of its residents every week; the services that were supposed to follow in the wake of the police never materialized as promised. And da Silva’s only son, 20-year-old moto-taxi driver Caio da Silva, was killed by a UPP police officer, shot in the back at close range. His death, and that of many others — residents, but also officers and traffickers — shattered Denize’s faith in the program and in Rio’s turnaround.
“It wasn’t supposed to be like this,” she says of the death, which a local court ruled was an accident. “The pacification was supposed to stop the shooting. Nothing changed, and I lost my Caio.”
For the Brazilian government, this reversal could not have come at a worse time. About 500,000 visitors are expected in Rio for the 2016 Olympics. The national economy is contracting for the second year in a row; the state is facing a budget crisis dire enough to shutter hospitals and send public school teachers on strike. Funding for public security has been slashed by one-third even as homicides went up by 15 percent, and robberies by 24 percent, from the first four months of 2015 to the same period this year.
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An unprecedented force of 85,000 law enforcement officers will patrol the city to guarantee safety during the Games, but it will not revive public confidence in the state’s safety apparatus, or the UPP program.
Despite the dire scenario today, many in Rio shared Da Silva’s view in 2010 that the police incursion could be a turning point for Alemão, and for the city — and with reason. The flagship public security program had already established 12 permanent bases in smaller favelas in its bid to reclaim gang territory and curtail the armed presence of traffickers. Officers charged with round-the-clock patrols would get to know their communities, and the residents would know them.
This familiarity was expected to change the antagonism that often marked relations between residents and police. Indeed, research showed the first police units not only reduced violent crime, they also reduced the number of killings committed by police.
The program’s initial success boosted the population’s trust. Soon, favela residents wanted a UPP in their own community, says André Rodrigues, a political scientist who has studied the program at ISER, a Rio-based think tank.
As early as 2010, politicians at the state and federal level seized on the security program’s powerful political capital. Soon, this very targeted policing program deployed in a handful of Rio’s nearly 1,000 favelas was being portrayed as the answer to all of the state’s complex public safety problems, even as a one-size-fits-all solution for cities around Brazil. As preparations for the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics began in earnest, the governor promised 40 UPP units would be in place before the sporting events. To experts, this put undue pressure on the experimental program.
“The UPP’s initial success was a double-edged sword: it was a great opportunity but also a chance for the government to shoot itself in the foot,” Rodrigues says.
The cracks were evident early on. After the initial incursion into Alemão, the community had to be patrolled by soldiers until 2012 because there weren’t enough officers trained in community policing to do the job. The presence of soldiers, trained for combat and not daily patrolling, led to conflicts with residents, and charges of human-rights abuses. Nevertheless, the state pushed ahead, pushing the UPP program to Rocinha, Rio’s largest favela, before the end of that year.
By then, pacification officers in various communities were facing charges of corruption, violence against residents and other sins associated with the policing as usual in Rio. Less than a year after Rocinha received its security program, a bricklayer named Amarildo de Souza was brought to the UPP base for questioning. He was never seen again. Twelve officers were later convicted for their part in his torture, death and disappearance, wrecking public perception of the program.
Even as the search for the bricklayer’s body continued in the months preceding the 2014 World Cup, soldiers occupied Maré, a complex of 16 favelas. Other communities might be larger, but this one presented a bigger challenge to law enforcement concerned with the upcoming competitions because of its complexities — it was fought over by three drug-trading factions and a militia — and its location alongside the highway connecting the international airport to downtown. Maré’s UPP was promised for June 30, 2016, just a month before the opening of the Olympics.
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By early 2016, however, the schedule dictated by elections and sporting events had overstretched the program to a critical point, and the state budget had run out of resources. In March, the head of state security, José Mariano Beltrame, announced Maré’s UPP had to be postponed. Investments were reduced to practically zero by the budget cuts. The community will remain under a military occupation during the Olympics and beyond.
The consequences of the program’s deterioration are tragic. Confrontations between officers and traffickers became common again.
“We used to fall asleep to the sound of gunfire, and wake up to the sound of gunfire,” says René Silva, founder and editor-in-chief of the Voz da Comunidade, Alemão’s community newspaper. “It’s happening again now. Shootouts every day, children who can’t come home from school.”
Crimes ranging from petty theft to homicides began to climb again. Perhaps even more tragically, the cultural shift within the police that the program represented failed to take hold. The number of citizens dying at the hands of police, which had decreased from 855 in 2010 to a low of 416 in 2013, lurched back up to 644 by 2015.
That missed opportunity weighs heavily on Col. Robson Rodrigues Da Silva. He headed the UPP program in 2010, but stepped out in 2011 as the program gave in to “political demands and emotional appeals.” More than most, he knows that the cost of this failure to change police culture can be measured in bodies.
“We failed,” says Col. Robson, who has since left the police force to pursue a doctorate. “We needed a new paradigm, a strong shift that brought more training, new administration, better health care of the officers, new everything. It wasn’t going to happen magically. And we didn’t do that. We failed.”
The price of this failure is borne by all who live in Rio — including its officers. It still has its supporters, however, even among those who have good reason to resent it, like Maria Rosalina Castilho. She raised her three daughters in the rural outskirts of greater Rio, although it meant commuting four hours by bus to her cleaning jobs in the city center. She wanted to spare the girls from the violence, she said.
When her youngest, Alda, joined the UPP police, she worried but did not stop her. The 27-year-old was also studying psychology, the first in her family to attend college. She cared about people, Castilho says.
“It was in her, that work,” Castilho says. “She wanted to help. She believed in it.”
Alda was shot to death while on duty at her UPP base within Alemão — one of 98 Rio police officers killed in 2014. This year the statistics are even more grim: 61 officers have lost their lives in the first six months of 2016.
Castilho knows this. She misses her daughter every day, and thinks of the other mothers who lost their children, whether they shared her daughter’s blue uniform, which she still keeps, crisply ironed, or who, like da Silva’s son, stood on the other side of their guns. Her sadness runs deep and is all-encompassing. But she still stands by the program and by the change it represents. She has no choice, she says.
“This violence, it needs to end,” she says. “That was my daughter’s intention. I’ve lost her, but I haven’t lost that hope she instilled in me that things can be better for Alemão, for Rio.”
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Rio’s Tortured War Against Violence originally appeared on usnews.com
