RIO DE JANEIRO—The crackle and boom of automatic weapon fire greeted police as they entered Rio de Janeiro's Vila Cruzeiro slum, marking the start of an intense firefight with gangsters that lasted through the morning.
The police's armored cars, known as "big skulls" and studded by bullet marks, roared through the slum's streets as residents cowered behind walls and in doorways, their lives once again disrupted and endangered by Rio's drug war.
"It does scare me but I'm used to it," said 11-year-old Vito Ricardo, who was taking shelter in a doorway and said the firefight on Friday had kept him from going to school. Shortly afterward, a bullet slammed into a building nearby.
In just a few weeks, the image of the Brazilian city has lurched from scenes of joyful revelers on Copacabana beach soaking up the victorious bid to host the 2016 Olympics to ones of a city embroiled in a bloody war with itself.
Since suspected drug traffickers shot down a police helicopter last Saturday, killing three officers, police have launched their biggest offensive against the city's drug gangs in years. They invaded more than 10 slums, known as favelas, on some days last week.
The results have been depressingly familiar in a city where heavily armed cocaine gangs control hundreds of communities and where police shoot dead more than 1,000 people a year. Police say 42 people have died in the past week, including 35 suspected traffickers and four residents caught in cross-fire .
Rio was largely presented as a beach-side city of samba and fun in its Olympic campaign. Last week, pictures of a dead suspected trafficker stuffed into a shopping cart and a gang member provocatively waving a machine gun from a hillside slum have underlined how far that is from reality in much of the city of 6 million. Officials now are on the defensive.
The state secretary of security, Jose Beltrame, went as far as to say that the violence was "not in Rio de Janeiro", even though it occurred just a mile or so from the Maracana soccer stadium where the Olympics' opening ceremony is likely to be held.
Routine of Violence
Experts say profound changes in security and social policies will be needed to make Rio a significantly more peaceful city by 2016, including better trained and better paid police who work closely with communities rather than just shoot and leave. Many believe that will not happen, with efforts more likely to focus on a massive police and even military troop presence to ensure order during the games.
"Really, this is a routine," Luiz Eduardo Soares, a respected former national security secretary told Globo News last week. "We've had this policy of confrontation for three decades and it has only produced disasters."
He said the hostile relations between the police and slums would need to be redefined and stronger efforts made at the federal level to stem the flow of arms to Rio.
The gangs, with names like the Third Command and Friends of Friends, are often better armed than the police, complete with grenades and high-powered rifles.
State and police officials are regularly condemned by human rights groups for violent slum raids but say they face a uniquely difficult challenge against the entrenched gangs. In the past year, a new approach has emerged with the installation of "community police" forces in four slums and a target to expand the system to more than 40 favelas by 2012.
But Marcelo Freixo, a left-wing Rio state deputy, told Reuters he doubted the state would achieve this and that such schemes still failed to bring favelas the needed benefits .
"Community police is obviously better than entering shooting and killing but this doesn't stop it being an instrument of control," he said. "They need to bring jobs, health, education, and culture which the favelas have never had."
The week's violence showed that the policy of violent police invasions, often taken in retaliation against particular gangs and drug bosses, is still dominant.
The nearly 200 police who stormed the Vila Cruzeiro slum were looking for a leader of the Red Command gang believed to have initiated the violence last week.
But after hours of intense fire, they withdrew without making arrests. The only apparent result of the operation was two residents wounded and another killed in the cross-fire.
"The way they put the police in here, things will only get worse," said Edevan de Franca Azevedo, a 42-year-old car parts salesman taking cover from the shooting. "Everyone ends up losing."
