#news #Rio de Janeiro Violence Rises

Deaths Mount as Police Battle Gangs in Slums; Worry Over Olympics, World Cup

By JOHN LYONS

Reuters

Police took position in Vila Cruzeiro slum in Rio de Janeiro on Thursday. It was a fifth day of violence, marked by car burnings and shootings.

SÃO PAULO, Brazil—Armored personnel carriers on loan from the Brazilian military rumbled through the streets of Rio de Janeiro as police with assault rifles battled heavily armed gangs for a fifth day, raising concerns about the seaside city's ability to keep visitors safe when it hosts soccer's 2014 World Cup and the 2016 summer Olympic Games.

Authorities said the death toll had hit at least 23 since Sunday night, including a teenage girl hit by a stray bullet, as live television carried scenes of paramilitary police shooting their way deeper into the hillside shantytowns that form a backdrop to the beaches of the famous tourist destination.

The wave of violence began Sunday night, when groups of armed men began setting vehicles ablaze, in many cases after stopping them on roadways and clearing out the occupants.

Rio Police Fight Slum Violence

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Reuters

A policeman checks suspects at Jacarezinho slum.

It isn't clear why gangs picked Sunday to launch the wave of car burnings. Rio de Janeiro Gov. Sergio Cabral has described the attacks as a retaliation by gangs against a two-year-old government effort to rid the city's slums, known as favelas, of crime bosses that have long held sway there—a key part of Mr. Cabral's plan to reduce crime in Rio, which has one of the world's highest murder rates.

Under it, squads of new peacekeeping police have been deployed in the favelas, re-establishing government rule in areas where crime bosses had controlled many aspects of daily life—including who was allowed to enter the neighborhoods past checkpoints manned by gun-toting youths in surf shorts and flip flops.

A burned-out car was found with a sign declaring "no Olympics" as long as the peacekeeping police are in place, a local newspaper reported. State authorities responded by deploying heavily armed paramilitary police units to battle the gangs.

"They aren't going to intimidate us," said Mr. Cabral in a radio interview this week. "We are going to continue with the work of pacifying the different communities."

Rio officials have said various gangs came together to intimidate authorities into scaling back their neighborhood peacekeeping initiative. The officials suspect jailed gang leaders of ordering the attacks from behind bars. On Wednesday, security officials requested transfers of several jailed gang members to a maximum security federal prison thousands of miles away in the Amazon.

On Thursday, much of the violence was concentrated in the Vila Cruzeiro, a shantytown north of the Rio that is a haven for the gangs believed to have orchestrated the attacks.

More than 100 elite paramilitary police backed by armored cars similar to those used by the U.S. in the Vietnam war rolled into Vila Cruzeiro in the early afternoon, occasionally met by gunfire, local news organizations reported.

The violence is exposing the dark side of a city famous for its annual carnival celebrations. While such outbreaks of violence aren't new in Rio—in August an armed group took over one of the city's luxury hotels—preparations for the Olympics and World Cup have put new urgency on efforts to rein in crime.

Rio's favelas are often close to the city's wealthier neighborhoods, but exist in a world apart from the version of the city most tourists know. Though crimes like muggings and robberies are a big problem throughout the city, many of the murders and other crimes directly related to gangs and their control of the city's drugs trade are mostly confined to the slums.

In October, gang members shot down a police helicopter as it hovered over one of the city's shantytowns.

Write to John Lyons at john.lyons@wsj.com

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