In spite of all the locks, gates, doormen, and intercoms, the many faiths and the countless superstitions that thrived in Rio under the tolerant gaze of its Cristo, there were moments when the population’s vulnerability to violence was put hideously on display. It was during a visit in Christmas of 2006 that this fear became palpable to me, and I learned what it meant to live in a city under siege. The events of that year also laid the foundations for the conflict that would tear up Rio’s streets years later.
By then, I was working with the Associated Press in California. After my usual San Francisco–Miami–Rio hopscotch, I headed to the city’s bus terminal for the last leg of my personal pilgrimage: the eleven-hour bus trip to Uberaba, in Minas Gerais, where my grandparents still lived and the family gathered.
During peak holiday season Rio’s squat, heavy-browed bus terminal funneled more than eighty thousand travelers into tens of thousands of buses destined to rumble over the back roads of this continent-sized country. Entire families of migrants who’d sought work in Rio camped out on the hard, bolted-down seats, surrounded by bags filled to bursting. This was their once-a-year trip home.
I got to Uberaba just in time for the big family dinner. In my grandmother’s cramped house everyone squeezed thigh to thigh on the saggy leatherette couches, the fan overhead doing its best against the pressure-cooker heat of summer and too many relatives flushed with sweet wine. There was talk of the troubles in Rio—another dispute between police and gangsters. Armed men had shot up several police departments; a street vendor and her six-year-old had died from being at the wrong place at the wrong time. I was busy soaking up the syrupy comforts of my grandmother’s house—the candied fruit, homemade doce-de-leite, coffee that was three parts sugar, and I deliberately pushed Rio’s ugliness out of my mind.
On the morning of the twenty-eighth I flipped on the television and the worst of it came pouring in: a bus taking holiday travelers between the states of Espírito Santo and São Paulo was stopped as it cut through the city of Rio on its main artery, Avenida Brasil. A band of a dozen armed men drenched it in gasoline and set it on fire—without letting the passengers out. What I saw that Thursday morning was the aftermath: seven charred bodies removed from the blackened metal frame, relatives crying, their holiday cut short by unforeseen terror of the most gruesome sort. Cops had gone looking for the suspects in Alemão and other favelas nearby.
There was no note or pronouncement from traffickers or from authorities, nothing that helped the terrified population understand. The governor had another three days on the job and was going to make a quiet exit. She had no comments. The new governor, Sérgio Cabral, would take office only on January 1, 2007.
All told, gang offensives and police raids during those last few days of December 2006 left nineteen dead, and the impression that no matter who happened to be sitting in Guanabara Palace, the seat of state government, Rio was defenseless in the hands of its criminal networks and inept police. These travelers had died right after Christmas, on Rio’s main thoroughfare. Before the holiday was over, many thousands would make that same trip, including my family and me. There was no protection, no bars on the window, no dogs at the gate, no amount of touching the little medal of the Virgin of Aparecida that calmed the anguish we all felt.
This pall hung over the inauguration of the new governor a few days later. Governor Cabral had a doughy face, from which hung cheeks and a double chin that seemed to belong on a larger frame. These features dwarfed his small mouth and turned his eyes, when he smiled, into dark pinpricks in the mobile flesh. He’d run his campaign on the promise of putting more cops on the streets, investing in intelligence, returning Rio to its citizens. At the inauguration, Cabral spoke of law and order, promising revenge for these latest acts of terror: “These criminals, these cowards will get a response.”
One of his first acts was to appoint a new “top cop”—the head of state security. This was one of the most influential positions in the state, and the governor’s decision was unusual. Within the Brazilian government, choice positions are often used to reward political operators for their service; they come with juicy salaries, off-the-books perks, and the right to fill lower echelons with supporters. This turned many public service departments into Christmas trees of nepotism, each branch hung heavy with friends, connections, and cronies. But the man Cabral picked to lead the state security department was no politician; few outside elite law enforcement circles had heard of José Mariano Beltrame before he was tapped for the job.
Beltrame stood out in other ways. Rio is a place where tempers and voices rise quickly, where gestures are broad and faces expressive. He was as unreadable as the sheriff in an old western, with a trim runner’s build, slate-blue eyes behind wire-framed glasses, and a habit of listening more than he talked. Furthermore, he owed no favors to the entrenched network of local cops; he’d come from the federal police, a better-paid and less corrupt force than that of the state. There he’d helped standardize investigations, introduced computer-based data analysis, and spent years pursuing organized crime on a national level.
In 2003, he’d relocated to Rio to establish a federal police intelligence center. During the next three years, Beltrame furthered his reputation for sobriety and dedication to the job by sleeping alongside his team within the gray Federal Police barracks, and never missing Sunday mass. These years also gave him a chance to study the city, to learn of the historic rifts between the neglected working-class suburbs in the north; the south, with its touristy beaches and trendy restaurants; and the fast-growing west side, with its gated communities and malls. He learned how drug traffic operated within the hills and saw up close law enforcement’s own deficiencies, from decrepit equipment—patrol cars with bald tires, their hoods held down with wire—to their corruption and the involvement of certain factions of the force with organized crime.
Now this man with an avowed aversion to journalists, who’d built a career under the radar, scrupulously avoiding the public eye, had been given the state’s most high-profile security job just as Rio was about to face unprecedented scrutiny. He took office in January 2007; within seven months the state would host its biggest international spectacle to date, the Pan-American Games. The opening ceremony was July 13. Construction of venues was running perilously late and ten times over budget. The police also had a lot of work to do. The federal government had sent funds to set up command centers and buy new patrol cars and communication equipment. This would be Brazil’s test run on the world stage. It was up to Rio to get it right, and Rio was in Beltrame’s hands.
One of his first decisions was to transfer imprisoned gang members to the far south of the country. Beltrame knew the attacks over the holidays had been ordered by CV leaders from within Rio’s prisons. He was determined to break that chain of communication. Catanduvas Federal Penitentiary, in the southern state of Paraná, had been built on the mold of U.S. maximum security pens. It was just six months old, with 200 cameras and 208 individual cells. Red Command bosses would spend their next four months there in solitary confinement.
Then he turned to the sprawling complex of Alemão. In spite of the gang leaders’ transfer—or maybe in revenge for it—gunmen had taken down two officers, tearing them up with thirty bullets in early May. Police went looking for the shooters and the conflict festered, devolving into daily gun battles that would leave more than two dozen dead. When there were arrests, officers would exhibit the handcuffed traficantes like trophies, their heads hanging low in front of the seized weapons and the drugs: piles of marijuana pressed into bricks, neatly tagged baggies of cocaine, rows of pistols and machine guns.
Still, the gang’s firepower seemed endless. Then intelligence brought news: the Red Command had received a shipment of fifteen thousand cartridges and a load of new semi-automatic weapons. It was stored in an armory in Grota, deep within the complex.
With just weeks to go until the Pan-American Games, Beltrame ha
d a potential disaster in his hands. Alemão was close to the highway leading to the international airport. The athletes, tourists, and journalists who would descend on Rio would all travel along that route.
“What was this ammunition for?” Beltrame asked when he told me this story, years later. We were in his hardwood-paneled office; an old-fashioned windup clock that he’d brought from his hometown in the rural south of Brazil chimed as if in response.
Beltrame had read the attacks as a demonstration of the gang’s clout. In his estimation, the only way to fight it was with bigger firepower of his own.
“The equipment was in there,” he said. “Either we took the risk and went in to get it, or we hid under the table to see what would happen.”
Beltrame made his choice. On June 27, 2007, just sixteen days before the Pan-American Games’ opening ceremony, 1,350 heavily armed police gathered at 5 a.m. at the base of the complex. Four hours later they stormed in with armored vehicles, helicopters, machine guns, and hand grenades, sights focused on Grota. They exploded into Alemão with a show of force the city had never seen.
Street-to-street fighting raged for the next seven hours. Beltrame was drawing a line: “We needed to take control.”
As the day ended and the shooting wound down, the favela disgorged its wounded. The list of the injured was long and undiscriminating: Wesley Glauco da Silva, seventeen; Arlete dos Santos, forty-eight; Ivo da Silva, seventeen; Edvan Mariano de Souza, thirty-two; Carlos Henrique Matias Vitoriano, thirteen; Larissa Andrade da Silva, twelve; Karen Cristina Baptista Borges, twenty. The Getúlio Vargas State Hospital had become a national reference for treating bullet wounds because of its proximity to Alemão, though even its doctors had not seen a day like this one. By 4:30 p.m., armored cars started to ferry down the dead, among them boys as young as thirteen.
All told, nineteen people died in Alemão and nearby favelas that day. Autopsy reports would later show many of the bodies bore signs of execution: five had been shot at close range; eleven had been shot in the back, and two while lying flat on the ground.
Human rights organizations denounced the massacre in the hills. Philip Alston, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial Executions, put it simply: “Murder is not an acceptable or effective crime-control technique.”
Much of the population and the Brazilian media supported the action, in spite of the bloodshed. They were weary of gun battles and stray bullets, and shrugged off these deaths as the unfortunate collateral damage of Rio’s War.
Rio’s police also counted the offensive as a success. The load of seized weapons was impressive: fifty units of paste explosives with detonating devices, and a stash of rifles, submachine guns, pistols, mortars, a rocket launcher with its ammo, and two .30-caliber antiaircraft machine guns. More important to Beltrame was the point that his officers made: no community was beyond the grasp of Rio’s police. They had pushed deep into Alemão, reaching areas they hadn’t set eyes on in more than five years.
Right before the Pan-American Games, eight thousand soldiers from the National Force and the Federal Police flooded Rio to help out with any lingering security concerns. Altogether this made for a tense, but uneventful, July. The head of National Public Security, Luiz Fernando Corrêa, told a reporter afterward that in his estimation, the Games had been pulled off splendidly.
“The feeling of safety was great,” he said.
Two months later, on September 13, 2007, Rio submitted its official bid for the 2016 Olympics. In the following month, Brazil was awarded the World Cup. The final would be played in Rio.
The Pan-American Games went smoothly, but statistics for that year provide an X-ray of a police force out of control. In twelve months, uniformed officers on the job killed 1,330 people in the state of Rio; that’s 3.6 people per day, every single day, according to their own records. Most of those deaths, 902, happened within the city of Rio.
The events of 2007 raised essential questions for Rio. When authorities spoke of making the city safe—safe for the 2014 World Cup, for the 2016 Olympics—whose safety were they talking about? How would it be enforced, and at what cost?
Once the Pan-American Games were over, Rio’s security chief could look ahead. Beltrame would have to do better than the bloodbath of 2007 if he intended to bring a broad, sustainable sense of safety to Rio. The state would have to shed the image of a drug-ridden gangland perpetually torn between murderous police and well-armed traffickers. For that, he said, he had to end this war—not win it, as his predecessors had vouched, but end it.
It’s hard to pinpoint just when the idea of reclaiming territory from gangs was first raised, Beltrame said. The idea was discussed among his staff during their long, informal lunches. It also drew on the knowledge he gathered while living in the federal police barracks, chatting with other cops and analyzing the gangsters’ methods. It even owed something to the 2007 invasion of Alemão, which had been violent and short-lived, but had shown that it was possible to break into the Red Command’s turf, he said.
Ticking off his points on his fingers, he laid out his reasoning: Take their guns, take their drugs, and they buy more. Arrest one gang member and there are others to take his place. But if you take their territory, the gangsters become vulnerable. It was within the favelas that they ran their business, stashed their weapons, and lived beyond the reach of law enforcement. Break their hold on these communities and they’d wither.
Beltrame started small, “eating porridge from the edge of the bowl,” as he described it, ever the country boy in spite of his years in Rio. The first favela successfully brought under the program was Santa Marta, a community atop a vertiginously steep hill that shares views of Cristo with the high-rises that surround it in the middle-class neighborhood of Botafogo.
Santa Marta was a prudent choice. It was Red Command territory, but internal divisions had left it without a local gang boss. It was also small, with just over ten thousand residents, and had only two entrances: one at the top and one at the bottom of the hill.II It only took about one hundred officers to take it over during a heavy downpour on November 19, 2008. Only after the police were in the favela did Beltrame call the governor and explain that this time, he intended for them to stay. That phone call, he said, was the first time he used the word “pacification.” The bases established within the favelas would be called Pacification Police Units—UPPs for short.
The UPP program piloted there was carefully orchestrated. Every step highlighted its difference over past approaches: the incursion was pulled off without the killing sprees of the past. Once the community was secure, a woman was appointed as commander—Captain Pricilla Azevedo. The 125 officers pulled into the round-the clock patrols were young, picked fresh from training before the soft rot of corruption set in. As the program spread, even the unit captains in charge of each operation were in their mid-thirties at most. Beltrame reasoned that older officers came steeped in the old ways; many still had paychecks fattened by the Wild West bonuses of the 1990s. If this new plan was going to work, the police force had to change, to leave behind the ideology of war that held favelas as enemy territory, and favela residents as necessarily suspect. That was as essential, and as difficult, as changing favela residents’ view of law enforcement.
The police would have to win the trust of the population, get involved, and ultimately, displace the gangster as the dono do morro, he said. In Santa Marta, a UPP post was built at the top of the hill, on the site of a day-care center that was never used by the community’s children because the Red Command had liked its strategic location and seized it. By building their base there, the cops physically occupied the former headquarters of the traficantes.
The solution, Beltrame said, had always been there. Others had just been too afraid to face it.
“We did what everyone knew we had to do: go to those places where the state couldn’t enter, and then stay. Cariocas knew this: taxi drivers k
new this, sociologists knew this, politicians knew. We just did it.”
To the public, he made it clear the new approach wasn’t intended to be another battle in Rio’s war. It was never intended to root out trafficking. The goal was less ambitious and therefore achievable: to rid each community of the heavily armed dealers who had long held sway, of open-air drug markets and the easy violence they spawned. Drug dealing still happened, as it happened anywhere else, but the permanent police presence broke the gang’s exclusive control of the area.
Tangible results came fast. Within a year of the UPP’s inauguration in Santa Marta, robberies and car thefts in the area were cut nearly in half, and there were no murders in the community. The boundaries of the favela, which had been impenetrable to anyone without gang authorization, were now porous. Cops could come in anytime. Anyone could: cable TV salespeople, garbage collectors, and technicians from the utility company.
The success at Santa Marta was trotted out whenever gringos needed proof that a new Rio was in the making. When Lula went to Copenhagen to defend Rio’s Olympic bid, Captain Pricilla Azevedo went along, representing the transformative potential of this new program. Beltrame promised to inaugurate forty UPPs by 2014, reclaiming territory for the state, and most significantly, doing it “without a shot, without spilling a drop of blood.”
This was when Beltrame pulled Mário Sérgio Duarte to his side. From beat cop Mário Sérgio had become elite police; by the time Beltrame was named head of state security, he’d been made leader of the elite battalion, BOPE. Since then, Mário Sérgio had moved over once more and was at the helm of a very different police institution—the Instituto de Segurança Pública, the Institute of Public Security, in charge of crime statistics. That was the position he held when Beltrame tapped him to be the 01, the head of Rio’s Military Police.III
Dancing With the Devil in the City of God: Rio De Janeiro on the Brink Page 5