Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

Some policemen moonlighted in private militias, protection organizations within favelas and slums that were hard to distinguish from the gangs they theoretically controlled; Moriconi referred to the “promiscuous relationship between police and crime.” In 2008, Philip Alston, the United Nations special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary, or arbitrary executions, said, “A remarkable number of police lead double lives. While on duty, they fight the drug gangs, but on their days off, they work as foot soldiers of organized crime.” In 2008, 1 in every 23 people arrested by Rio de Janeiro’s police force was killed by police or by others in custody before making it to trial—a striking statistic considering that the ratio for the United States is 1 in 37,000.

Luiz Eduardo Soares served briefly as national secretary of public security under President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, commonly known as Lula, who ruled from 2003 to 2010. Soares instituted a program to enter poor areas with respect. “We were there offering a public service, not invading,” he told me. But policing is a local issue, and it was hard to change problematic procedures and attitudes with a national policy. “When you give a policeman discretionary authority to kill, you’re also giving him authority to sell life,” Soares said. “He can say to the suspect, ‘I can kill you. That won’t cost me anything. But I can also not kill you. How much would you give me?’ ” It does not take long for such behavior to become organized. Favela residents armed themselves heavily. Innocent people were injured and killed in the cross fire, and life expectancy was short. In the Zona Sul, street crime became ubiquitous. Upward of a thousand people a year were killed by police in Rio and São Paulo alone, a significantly higher number than that for the whole United States. The chief of special operations of the Rio police was indicted for corruption. “If you were poor, you were scared of the police; if you were rich, you were skeptical of them,” said Roberto Feith, Rio’s leading publisher.

Given the centrality of sports to the Brazilian psyche, it’s no surprise that the World Cup and the Olympics should have inspired Rio’s leadership to attempt a change. After decades of internecine quarreling among their administrations, the mayor of Rio, the governor of the state of Rio de Janeiro, and the federal government of Brazil began to work in sync. In 2008, Rio’s secretary of security, José Mariano Beltrame, introduced the UPP (Unidade de Polícia Pacificadora, or Pacifying Police Unit), a new force of younger, ostensibly uncorrupted officers under the aegis of the military police rather than of local bosses. “We need fresh, strong minds, not a Rambo,” said UPP commander Colonel José Carvalho at its start.

Since the program began, the favelas have been invaded one by one almost as acts of war. Beltrame announces his plan before entering each favela, giving drug dealers a chance to flee; his focus is on eliminating guns rather than on closing down contraband-distribution networks. He enters forcibly, using airpower, the army, and the marines. Once the rout is over, police establish a UPP Social, a sort of Marshall Plan intended to install or upgrade education, sanitary services, legal electricity and cable television, and job training. The police stay on to protect the citizens of the favelas, rather than to protect the residents of the Zona Sul from the favelas. Pre-Beltrame, the reactive police presence established sporadic dominion in response to particular acts of violence; now, the UPP aims to cultivate a proactive peace. Previous programs sought to bulldoze the favelas; current ones seek to reform them.

During the dictatorship of the sixties and seventies, police officers received a pay raise for every “enemy” they killed in the favelas. The new regime has turned that incentive on its head, declaring that even criminals have human rights. UPPs have been established in only sixty-eight of Rio’s eleven hundred favelas, but Beltrame started with some of the toughest ones and nearly three hundred thousand people are already living in pacified areas. Ultimately, the goal is for all the favelas to be neighborhoods within the city, rather than isolated entities. When I asked Beltrame how long it would take to pacify the rest of the favelas, he replied that the problem was finding enough honest police officers.