Rio police storm favela in dawn operation

AFP/Rio de JaneiroMore than 1,000 Brazilian police backed by armoured vehicles and helicopters occupied a favela near Rio de Janeiro’s international airport at dawn yesterday, just 74 days before the World Cup.The swiftly conducted operation was the latest attempt to drive drug gangs out of the notorious vast Mare shanty town, a haven for organised crime and one of the most dangerous places in the city.Large quantities of drugs and weapons were reportedly seized from the slum, located just a few kilometers from the airport and a potential route for tens of thousands of football fans flying in and out of the city, which will stage seven World Cup matches, including the July 13 final.A squadron belonging to the feared Special Police Operations Battalion, along with a dozen armoured vehicles, swarmed through the area in 15 minutes without facing resistance, while helicopters buzzed overhead.Brazilian authorities have recently stepped up efforts to quell violence in Rio as the World Cup looms closer.A huge slum “pacification” programme has been in place since 2008 aimed at making the city - which will also host the 2016 Olympics - safer. Prior to yesterday, Police Pacification Units (UPPs) had been installed in 174 Rio favelas, home to around 600,000 people. Yesterday they took the initiative to enter Mare.Police had their weapons trained on the rooftops, but apart from a few bars close to the entrance of Mare that remained open the labyrinth of narrow streets was empty and dark.Rio’s security secretariat said 1,180 officers were involved in the operation, backed by at least 14 armoured vehicles and four helicopters.In the operation, police seized “large quantities of drugs and weapons” that were hidden near the Olympic Village and a public school, said the GloboNews chain. According to the intelligence services, drug traffickers who left Mare - home to around 130,000 people from 16 clustered neighbourhoods - after the announcement last Monday of the imminent occupation could come back later, meaning authorities face a long-term battle to keep the volatile area under control.Later yesterday shops slowly began to open, but many residents in the favela were visibly irritated by the presence of security forces and journalists, an AFP reporter at the scene said. Few living there wanted to talk to the media.“Me, I think it’s fine, the state must be present everywhere in Rio,” a trucker called Jorge - he declined to give his full name - said. “Now it will depend on the police who move here because there are those among them who commit abuses.”After decades battling organised crime in the favelas, the poor communities surrounding the city, authorities had hoped the slum “pacification” programme had begun paying off, driving down crime. But this year, renewed violence has claimed the lives of eight police officers - four of them in “pacified” districts. Keeping a lid on crime has become key to Rio’s bid to turn the city into an international showcase for the World Cup and the Olympics in 2016, the first Olympiad in South America.The occupation of Mare by security forces will be similar to that carried out in 2010 in the Alemao network of favelas, home to about 300,000 people.Alemao was occupied a week after 35 people had died in bloody clashes between police and drug dealers. Rio state secretary for security affairs Jose Mariano Beltrame insisted last Monday that authorities “are not thinking about the World Cup so much as the citizens of Rio, of police gunned down in cowardly fashion” on the streets. “Our response to the traffickers is to occupy more territory, to make them lose more territory” and show the state is stronger than the dealers.