Power battle sparks street war in Brazil's City of God*

Tom Phillips reports from the front line in Rio de Janeiro's favelas,
where the body count soars as paramilitaries and traffickers vie for
supremacy

Sunday February 11, 2007
The Observer

Night falls on the shadowy back alleys of Cidade Alta, and at the heart
of the favela Gilberto Martins and his men are preparing for war.

At the back of a small, smoke-filled bar, a middle-aged man sits alone
flicking through a thick wad of cash and occasionally fiddling with
three revolver magazines stacked on the table in front of him. Outside a
queue of teenage drug traffickers stare nervously down the road, with
M16 assault rifles slung across their chests and their fingers clasped
around the triggers.

It is just after 10pm in Cidade Alta, a rundown housing
estate-cum-shantytown on Rio's northern outskirts, and there is hardly a
resident in sight. The community is preparing for the invasion. This is
the front line of Rio de Janeiro's latest 'war on drugs' - a battle
between the drug traffickers and a growing army of paramilitary
vigilantes seeking to drive their enemies, literally, into the sea. The
shop shutters are down as the drug traffickers push out on to the
streets. Cidade Alta, a normally bustling community that is home to more
than 20,000 impoverished Brazilians, has been transformed into a ghost town.

Until recently Cidade Alta was best known for its fictional violence. It
was here, amid the sprawling mishmash of tower blocks and breezeblock
shacks, that the Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles shot much of his
Oscar-nominated film City of God, a tour through the violent underbelly
of gangland Rio. The favela is now at the centre of its own drama - an
explosive power dispute which could mark the beginning of a new cycle of
violence.

With names like the Men in Black and the Galacticos, Rio's
paramilitaries - now thought to control at least 92 of the city's
600-odd favelas - are a mysterious collective of off-duty police
officers, firemen, prison guards and other volunteers, disillusioned
with the city's growing lawlessness. Their aim, they say, is to drive
the drug traffickers out of the slums, slash crime levels and impose law
and order in a notoriously violent city. If the state cannot protect its
citizens, they say, we will. 'All we want is for our children not to
have to grow up seeing drugs and guns,' one militia leader said in a
recent interview with a Brazilian magazine.

By night on the eerie back streets of Cidade Alta such social advances
are hard to detect. Even in the darkness it is possible to make out
thick punctures in several of the buildings - the result of a recent gun
battle between paramilitaries and the traffickers from the Red Command
faction that control the favela and are led by Gilberto Martins, a drug
lord better known by his nickname 'Mineiro'.

Comparisons between Rio's death toll and that of official war zones are
common. Last year there were around 6,000 homicides here, many
drug-related. The city even now boasts its own website - Rio Body Count
- which models itself on the North American iraqbodycount.com and aims
to document rampant levels of homicide across Rio de Janeiro state. 'The
Brazilian government has made a big effort to say that Rio is a place of
beaches, beautiful bottoms [and] physical beauty,' its creator, Andre
Dahmer, told The Observer last week. '[But] there are areas in Rio de
Janeiro that are veritable war zones.'

Until recently the bloodshed in Rio was largely restricted to clashes
between police and rival drug gangs. Now heavily armed vigilante groups
are throwing a new factor into the equation. In Rio de Janeiro they are
called the milícia

It was early on Saturday when the milícia arrived in Cidade Alta.
According to locals, about 60 men, all dressed in black and many masked,
poured up the hillside into the heart of the community. They forced the
area's drug traffickers - members of the Red Command faction - to strip
to their underwear and parade through the favela before declaring the
shanty town paramilitary territory.

Two days after the milícia seized control of Cidade Alta, the
traffickers returned, expelling the Galacticos, as the paramilitaries
had dubbed themselves, and killing one. In all, seven men were killed in
the struggle for the district and eight injured, among them several
unarmed shanty dwellers.

Residents now believe that revenge will not be long in coming. Brazilian
press reports suggest that the vigilante group is recruiting a larger
force to launch a second offensive on Cidade Alta. So while the favela's
drug bosses silently stockpile weapons to help resist a second
paramilitary attack, the local people stay nervously indoors.

Sitting in his small air-conditioned office inside Rio's Legislative
Assembly, Marcelo Freixo looks a worried man, with thick blue bags under
both eyes. The newly elected state deputy and veteran human rights
activist says he fears the expansion of Rio's militia could 'create a
whole new scenario of violence' in Rio, similar to the growth of
right-wing paramilitaries in Colombia.

'This is very serious,' he says. 'It is starting to get very close to
the situation in Colombia.' Freixo compares the militias to mafia-style
organisations, seeking to create their own 'parallel states' within Rio
to make money. 'Militias are criminal groups. They dominate territory,
they take control of the sale of gas, of local transport networks, and
they charge for security,' he says. 'And on top of that they kill people
who position themselves against them.'

After a series of recent clashes between traffickers and militia in
which several innocent bystanders were killed, Freixo requested a
parliamentary inquiry into the groups. Yet he is pessimistic about the
chances of such an investigation being approved. There are too many
political interests at stake, he says, suggesting that many high-profile
politicians in Rio are somehow connected to the militias, which are
becoming, he argues, a 'criminal wing of the state'.

'The militia is about the absence of the state,' he said. 'It solves
nothing - it is a symptom of war. They are substituting for the state.
This is the start of what you could call a war.'

As Rio's paramilitaries grow in stature and gain more public exposure,
the authorities are beginning to speak out against them. Rio's governor,
Sergio Cabral, admitted last week that the continued presence of such
groups would be 'the end of the world' for his city. 'We will not
tolerate it... In Bogota paramilitary groups were accepted by
communities and today there are numerous problems because of this. We
cannot tolerate a parallel state, whether it is that of the drug
traffickers or the militias.'

Yet with the newspapers filled with graphic reports of violence and
around 20 per cent of the population living in slums ruled by ruthless
drug lords, many view the vigilantes as a lesser of two evils - despite
reports of the gruesome ways paramilitaries are said to have disposed of
their enemies, dismembering them and throwing them into the Atlantic.

Several leading politicians have even offered thinly disguised support
to the militia. In a recent interview with the Jornal do Brasil
newspaper, Rio's mayor, Cesar Maia, said that 'compared to drug
trafficking anything is better'.

'I don't think this persecution is fair,' state deputy Flavio Bolsonaro
told Rio's Assembly last week. 'Should we condemn the policemen who are
there trying to exorcise from the middle of their families criminals who
will never be rehabilitated? One cannot simply stigmatise the militias,'
he argued. 'There are a series of benefits in this.'

One thing is certain: Rio's traffickers have been thrown on to the back
foot by the paramilitary surge, at least temporarily. 'There were more
of them and they had better guns,' one drug trafficker recently expelled
from a favela in western Rio by the Men in Black told The Observer.
'What could we do? We fled.'

It is now just after 2am and the Bar do Pretinho, a cramped shack at the
heart of Cidade Alta, is filled with a handful of heavily inebriated men
and two scantily clad young girls. It is the only place still open in
the favela - even the 24-hour evangelical churches have shut up shop,
fearful of new confrontations.

The edgy silence is broken only by the warm gusts of wind that sweep
across the dusty square and the roar of motorcycle engines as the Red
Command's heavily armed 'night watch' swings by to check everything is
under control. 'This shit is crazy,' says one resident, a former drug
trafficker, leaning against the bar with a plastic cup of beer in his
hand. He speaks quietly and quickly and glances constantly out into the
street.

'They [the militia] are just waiting for the dust to settle in the media
and they'll be back. And if they do come back, I'll pick up a gun,
too... If they try and invade my community, I'll kill them. They come
here and mess with the residents: what am I gonna do?'