More than 1,400 police officers and Brazilian marines rolled into a massive complex of slums near Rio de Janeiro’s international airport before dawn in the latest security push ahead of this year’s World Cup.
Not a shot was fired as the Mare complex of 15 slums became the latest impoverished area to see security forces invade in an effort to push out heavily armed drug gangs that have ruled Rio’s shantytowns for decades.
In the coming days, army soldiers will begin patrolling the virtually treeless, flat area of about two square miles in northern Rio that hugs the main road to the airport and is home to about 130,000 people.
Security forces will eventually set up permanent posts in Mare as part of the “pacification” programme that began in 2008 and is meant to secure Rio ahead of the World Cup and also the 2016 summer Olympics.
Police have installed 37 such posts in recent years in an area covering 1.5million people.
Sunday’s operation comes at a critical time for the security effort. In recent months, gangs have brazenly attacked police outposts in other shantytowns on orders from imprisoned gang leaders who want to stymie the spread of “pacified” slums.
Other residents, most of whom were too afraid of both the police and the gangs to give their names, had mixed feelings.
Over the arc of the five-year-old “pacification” programme, shoot-outs in the affected slums are unquestionably down. But many residents complain of heavy-handed police tactics.
More than 20 police who patrolled in Rio’s largest slum, Rocinha, are facing charges for the torture, disappearance and presumed death of a slum resident there, whom they were questioning in an effort to find caches of drugs and guns in the community.
Additionally, residents say that after police set up permanent posts in slums, the state is not following up with strong social programmes that would improve their lives.