A CORE police special forces officer searches for fugitives in Rio de Janeiro's Complexo do Alemao favela on May 13, 2014.(Mario Tama/Getty Images)
Analysis
Editor's Note: This essay is drawn from the personal notes and recollections of Stratfor's Renato Whitaker, who currently lives and studies in Rio de Janeiro.
The boisterous man from one of the leased rooms in the house where I live bellowed for all to hear, "There's a shootout in State Hill!" OK, I thought, another shootout somewhere around here, but where? "They shut down Plaza Shopping!" Ah, well then, I know exactly where that is.
Here's a quick breakdown of some terminology: The term "periphery" is used here in Brazil as a sort of social-geographic buzzword. It sometimes denotes the disenfranchised people who live "in the periphery" of society. Often it is used as a synonym for favelas -- or slums -- and the people who live in them. These favelas can sometimes literally be on the periphery of a city, particularly in Sao Paulo. But in the state of Rio de Janeiro, which is perched on the border of the Brazilian escarpment, the favelas are more often than not perched on hills that jut out from the sea level of the city streets, particularly in Rio itself. Here, when one says morro, or hill, the term is usually synonymous with favela.
In this case, the Morro do Estado is a large favela community that sits right in the central business district of Niteroi, the city across the bay from Rio de Janeiro. Right next to the favela is also Niteroi's biggest shopping mall, Plaza Shopping. And right next to that is the Valonguinho campus of the Federal Fluminense University.
A few months ago I was staying at an inn near the area. Being ever paranoid about personal security, I asked the manager, "It's safe to go through there, right?" I was referring to a main road that connects the neighborhood I was in directly to the university, skirting right past State Hill. "Oh, yeah," he said, "you can walk down it no problem, you know. Just be careful at night." Indeed, since then I have often walked down the street without incident. After reports of the shootout, however, Twitter was buzzing about police cars speeding down the road to the entrance of the favela.
"They're saying that there's a shootout in State Hill, next to Valonguinho," I said on a chat page. Immediately one of my friends replied: "I'm stuck here in the student directory. I was meeting with my supervisor when a firefight broke out, lots of police sirens too." It was one of the liveliest Internet discussions I have ever created; people kept reaching out to each other, passing out tidbits of information and generally expressing worry, fear or disgust. A female colleague who lived nearby recounted how she was hearing helicopters overhead and the sound of shooting. A dinner that was to happen nearby was canceled; some stated they wouldn't go to class tomorrow; others reached out for status updates on whoever was around the area.
It didn't help anyone's nerves that it was Saint George's day, a popular holiday in Rio. Cheap, mass consumed fireworks exploded around the city. One's ear gets accustomed to telling their varieties apart. The popular go-to rocket, for instance, has a very distinct noise: a sudden burst of rapid fire staccato all at once, a half-second pause, and then a final pop about an octave lower. They are used either in celebration (such as a football victory) or by drug peddlers in favelas to indicate the arrival of new drugs to buyers or to warn of approaching police. Now, however, far off, there was the occasional bang I could not entirely discard as being that of a firearm.
Since the start of the police pacification program in Rio, drug gangs have been increasingly pushed out, either to more distant favelas in the city, or farther out to the favelas of neighboring cities. Particularly badly hit is another "across the water" municipality, Sao Goncalo, where another colleague told me she still occasionally sees traffickers out in the streets patrolling with rifles. The exodus of drug traffickers has also hit Niteroi, though the pacification program has begun here too.
That didn't stop a fierce, one-hour shootout in Morro do Cavalao, another favela near Niteroi. This time, police chased after a wave of armed thieves who withdrew up the hill and returned fire. This occurred after another similar chase a few weeks back that ended with an explosive device being thrown at a police barracks. Although it did not detonate, the bomb squad had to come and destroy it. Indeed, throughout my time here, the occasional gunshot will sound out from the nearby hill every other week, sometimes in a two-way conversation, sometimes in a unidirectional finality.
Even in certain areas that have been "pacified" by the police the situation is not what it seems. The general tout of the Unidade de Policia Pacificadora, or UPP, programs is that security forces announce their incursion into a favela, giving drug dealers enough time to leave and avoid confrontation, and then establish police barracks so that no crime would ever occur ever again, period. However, in large favelas like Mare and Complexo do Alemao, traffickers have remained behind in more remote areas and have increasingly fought back. Just the other week, the army had to be deployed to Mare in order to reinforce police action in the community.
When insecurity spills over from the periphery to the "center" of these cities, it is not always the result of organized criminality. Increasingly there have been instances of poor favela residents gathering around main roads, closing them off and burning detritus and vehicles, particularly buses. These protests typically result from the death of a member of the community, killed -- or believed to have been killed -- by police action. Occasionally, poor public service is also an aggravating factor. Just the other night, one such protest closed down streets and damaged power infrastructure, causing localized blackouts near my parents' apartment.
The burning of buses is an old tactic of drug gangs, a symbol of their discontent over some public measure. It has now become a sort of trope for these favela protests. Burning buses is costly, inconvenient, headline-worthy and, therefore, the perfect manifestation of a favela's anger. Then again, there is a discontent that runs deeper than the death of a family member or the lack of running water. The anger of the favela-dwellers is the result of generations of systematic exclusion from the affluent "center," which stretches back even before the implementation of slavery in Brazil.
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Among the people I speak to from middle- or upper-class backgrounds, there is a definite sense that the overall situation is beginning to degrade. Not necessarily in security alone, but in matters like the ongoing and unfinished construction projects for things like stadiums, transport infrastructure or other big works that were meant to be concluded in time for the World Cup, but will most likely only be completed long after the fact. Pessimism over the state of the country is practically a national pastime. "Imagina na Copa, or, "Imagine how it's going to be in the World Cup," has been something of a go-to motto in the last few years, especially when the news of anything going wrong emerges. A shootout? Another violent protest? Horrible traffic jams from half-finished transit reforms? Muggings? Inflation? Police brutality? Corruption? Imagina na Copa.
No one I know is excited for this World Cup. At least not in the way I've noted in previous soccer games, where pessimism had more to do with our team's bad performance than the fear that something big would go wrong at home. Already international news organizations are publish biting reports about the slow pace of reforms, the slow rate of construction and, of course, the incidents of violence that have been occurring.
Rather soon after it started, the fighting in State Hill stopped. My trapped comrade made his way back home, from where he posted rumors that there would be police incursions the following day into favelas across the city. The current acting state governor, Luiz Fernando Pezao, subsequently announced paramilitary police enforcement to Niteroi after the Cavalao shootout. Everyone on the chat was antsy about seeing how the situation would develop the following morning.
"The World Cup is going to be a war, bro," my boisterous neighbor chuckled loudly from his room.
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