Sun man witnesses brutal Rio slums 'clean-up' ahead of next year's World Cup tournament
THE thick-set Brazilian cop insists on finishing his deep-fried dough and chicken snack before proudly showing me the pictures on his camera phone.
The military police officer — on patrol in Rio’s gang-infested Bateau Mouche favela, or shanty town — plainly has a strong stomach.
The first stark image of policing Rio-style is shocking enough.
A youth in patterned shorts and a pink T-shirt lies dead in a pool of congealed and darkened blood.
The cop, who doesn’t want to be identified, is quick to point to a discarded sub-machine gun at the lifeless young man’s feet.
A “soldier” for a drug lord, the cop insisted. A case of shoot or be shot. But not at his hand, the officer adds of the recent gunfight.
In the next grisly picture, a dark-haired man’s cheekbone is blown away, revealing a grotesque, gaping wound of splintered bone, sinew and flesh. It seems to have been blasted with an assault rifle at close range.
It takes the third “trophy” picture before I wave away the grinning cop, nauseated. A human brain is splattered on the pavement in a mush of blue and red, as if someone has dropped a large jelly from a first-floor window.
Warzone ... Military policemen Daniel Pinheiro and Marcello Salles in Bateau Mouche
LEE THOMPSON
The grisly slideshow — a testimony to the bloody carnage of the drug wars in these poverty-blighted favelas — is something you might expect from the robbers rather than the cops.
Yet these Rio police officers are tasked with cleaning up the slums before next year’s World Cup and the 2016 Olympics. In addition, they face another problem — millions of citizens taking to streets in violent protests over poverty, corruption and the cost of holding the sporting events.
Further into the favela — just nine miles from the Maracana Stadium where English football fans are dreaming they’ll see their team in the World Cup final — we meet another policeman, Sergeant Daniel Pinheiro.
“It’s good against evil,” he says, pointing to the graffiti tag — “CV” — sprayed on to a nearby shack.
The brutal Comando Vermelho, or Red Command, are Rio’s largest gang of drug dealers. Armed to the teeth with assault rifles and even anti-aircraft guns, they strut around the slums like an alternative army.
Dad-of-two Daniel, 44, mops his brow with the back of his hand and wipes the sweat on his grubby sleeve.
“The CV have better weapons than us but they are not brave warriors,” he says. “They are cowards.” The shaven-headed cop adds: “We never go into the favelas aiming to kill anybody. We only kill the bandits when they attack us.”
These favelas are drenched in blood. From January 2010 to June 2012, 1,590 people were killed by policemen in Rio.
Last month at least eight people from the Complexo da Maré favela, on the main road to Rio’s international airport, were killed in a police operation. A police officer also died.
Anti-violence campaigner Patricia de Oliveira, 39, tells me: “Someone having a criminal record doesn’t justify the police murdering them.
“Brazil doesn’t have the death penalty but the police can kill without one. A police officer having a picture of a dead suspect on their mobile phone is disgusting.”
With Brazil preparing to host the world’s two biggest sporting events, the authorities are taking on favela drug gangs in a process known as “pacification”. More than 30 communities have so far been “pacified”, with 70 more to come before the Olympics begin.
Favelas are retaken by SWAT-like police units or the actual military, before daily policing is handed to community forces, who try to stop the gangs regaining their stranglehold.
Fearsome ... ex-gang member Diego da Silva Santos had gun battles with police
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