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Weekly Report - 27 March 2014 (WR-14-12)

BRAZIL: Rio calls in the army to boost pacification

Bounded by the highways of the Avenida Brasil to the west, and the Linha Vermelha to the east, the Complexo do Maré sits between the two main roads into and out of the city of Rio de Janeiro. Getting to or from the international airport at Galeão requires passing the sprawling favela complex, with its 144,000 residents. As such it remains a strategic location that the state government has long been promising to pacify. Earlier this week, it began the process, bolstering the local police force with personnel from the federal armed forces.

The decision to occupy the Complexo do Maré followed a meeting between President Dilma Rousseff and the governor of Rio state, Sergio Cabral. Cabral travelled to Brasília last week in order to request federal assistance in the wake of an upsurge of violence against a number of police pacification units (UPPs). Over the course of the night of 20 March, four UPPs were attacked by criminal gangs in Manguinhos, Arará/Mandela, Camarista Méier and Complexo do Alemão.

The Complexo de Manguinhos UPP suffered the most severe damage during the March 20 attacks. Two UPP vehicles and five support bases were burned, and three military police officers were shot, including the UPP commander.

“Organised crime groups are using these cowardly attacks to try [...] to destabilise the police presence in these communities, creating panic and unrest in the communities and causing casualties among the military and the civil police,” Cabral said at a press conference after meeting President Rousseff. “We have no problem asking federal forces for support. The state must show its strength, its unity and its ability to triumph over organised crime.”

Cabral added that the homicide rate in the pacified areas has fallen by more than 65% since the UPPs arrived, and that it was crucial the programme be sustained. “Criminals want this policy to fail,” Cabral said. “But most of society wants this policy to be successful and to become a government-wide policy.”

Following the meeting with Rousseff, all of the city’s UPPs have received reinforcements and the military police began the occupation this past weekend. Personnel from the armed forces, comprising troops from the civil, military and federal police units – and the armed forces (army, navy and air force) have been deployed to the favelas indefinitely.

Since the 2008 installation of the first UPP, in Santa Marta, 11 UPP police officers have been killed, including four in the past two months. The actions against the UPPs have been increasing in intensity since the beginning of February, when soldier Alda Rafael Castilho was fatally shot in front of the UPP in Parque Proletariado.

To date, 36 slum areas in Rio de Janeiro have been pacified with more than 9,000 police patrolling neighbourhoods where 1.5m people live. Initial success in evicting the gangs was applauded, but the police operations have been criticised for merely displacing crime to other slums.

An estimated 600,000 foreign football fans will arrive in Brazil for the World Cup in June. Seven games will be played in Rio, including the tournament’s final on 13 July, in the legendary Maracaná stadium located a few miles from the Manguinhos slums.

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