AUTHORITIES IN Rio de Janeiro say a new upsurge in violence in the city is being orchestrated by rival criminal factions who have united in opposition to police attempts to retake control of slums long controlled by drug gangs.
The trouble started on Sunday night. Since then shootings, bomb scares and a series of car and bus hijackings have caused chaos and fear across much of Brazil’s troubled second city, which is preparing to host the World Cup final in 2014 and the Olympic Games in 2016.
Many businesses in poorer neighbourhoods have closed early this week with evening rush hour on major downtown avenues resembling weekend traffic as people seek to get home early.
Drivers on the city’s main motorway have been carjacked by criminals who have set buses on fire after forcing commuters to get off them.
In the early hours of Tuesday three people were arrested after they placed two bombs under parked cars in the famous tourist neighbourhood of Copacabana, while a suspect package by a police post in the beachside neighbourhood of Ipanema closed roads and emptied streets yesterday.
Authorities have sought to regain the initiative by sending hundreds of heavily armed police backed by helicopters and armoured cars into a number of favelas, as Brazilian slums are known. At least 12 people have been killed since the violence started and police leave across the state has been cancelled until further notice.
Officials say intelligence indicates that two rival gangs are working together to orchestrate the violence. “We have perceived that there could be a link-up between the Comando Vermelho and the Amigos dos Amigos,” state security secretary José Mariano Beltrame told reporters on Tuesday, referring to two of the city’s three big drug gangs who control most of the city’s booming cocaine trade.
Previously, relations between the Comando Vermelho (Red Command) and its offshoot Amigos dos Amigos (Friends of Friends) had been poisonous and resulted in many bloody feuds and battles for control of slums across the city.
But leaders from the two gangs reportedly met at the weekend to agree on a wave of attacks in response to the state government’s policy of setting up new permanent police units in favelas controlled by heavily armed criminals.
These new units, currently present in 12 of Rio’s 600 favelas, have led to a dramatic drop in violence in the areas they have been installed.
They have also made it more difficult to deal drugs, thereby hitting traffickers’ income. Sergio Cabral, Rio’s governor, classified the attacks as “desperation by outlaws” and said they would not intimidate authorities who would pacify all the city’s slums by 2014.
The gangs are also believed to be retaliating at the transfer of several jailed leaders from state jails to the harsher federal prison system. In May 2006 a prison gang in São Paulo killed dozens of police and prison officials in retaliation for the holding of its leaders in solitary confinement.
In response the police ran amok and, according to a report by the state’s own human rights commission, summarily executed hundreds of young men in poor neighbourhoods.