Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

Conservative forces had long averred that crime could be suppressed by escalating use of force; previous efforts in the favelas were essentially conquests, with the entire citizenry treated as enemy combatants, so extrajudicial killings were considered casualties of war. The more liberal perspective was that violence was the product of a flawed social structure and would evaporate only if injustice were redressed; that point of view generated limp social programs and a proliferation of NGOs. The right was troublingly violent, and the left, troublingly complacent. The genius of Beltrame’s agenda is that it satisfies both sides. The right is thrilled because crime is down; the left is thrilled because social justice is advanced. The rich are safer, and the poor are richer. Beltrame told me that he had fired a vast number of police for corruption, but he emphasized that the police were “only one element in the larger project of public security.” Soares said, “Half the regular police force is corrupt; another thirty-five percent are indifferent; and fifteen percent care about injustice. Now that fifteen percent are in ascendancy.”

The residents of the favelas were highly suspicious of members of this new police force who claimed their purpose was to serve rather than to oppress. Gradually, the favela dwellers have begun to say that they feel safe in their own homes. As the tension between residents and police has de-escalated, the police have come to feel safer, too, and some have voluntarily stopped carrying heavy guns. The police neutralize the geography by demolishing bunkers, patching gun holes, and removing gang-related graffiti. The first day after a pacification, the governor of the state of Rio de Janeiro arrives to tell residents that he’s got an eye on what’s happening to them. There are still drug dealers inside the favelas, but most people no longer bear arms, and the random violence that has taken so many lives has been radically diminished. Gangsters driven out of one favela have a hard time setting up shop in other gangsters’ territories. Many find themselves with nowhere to go but jail. Gang fighting among arms and drug interests—the Red Command and the Terceiro Command are the largest—no longer takes place on the streets of pacified favelas; the Red Command’s patrão (commander) complained, “It is fucking up our lives. It’s affecting our business badly.”

Beltrame told me that the primary issue was transit. “The state failed to provide the favelas with schools, electricity, water, sewage, or day care, or to enforce simple contracts such as alimony on grounds that they couldn’t go in there,” he said. “Once people can pass in and out of the favelas, all those services become obligations of the state.” He envisioned the UPP Social as the next logical step, one that had to be conceived differently from the forced pacification. “The troops that landed on Normandy did not rebuild Europe,” he said. “The UPP has ended a dark empire of the drug lords, a sort of dictatorship, and now the people can rebuild.” Ricardo Henriques, head of the UPP Social, said that people need a new kind of relationship to replace the one they’ve had with crime. “You need to construct a civil society,” he explained. Beltrame added that favela residents who used to aspire only to be big shots within their communities now had an infinity of other possibilities. “The UPP is opening curtains to a world outside that they didn’t know existed, much less that they could be part of,” he explained. “The police presence grants them the opportunity to transform their own lives, which they didn’t have before.”

Some of the people in the favelas contend that the pacification process is just more of the same terrifying violence—not so unlike conditions under the gangs and drug lords. When I met with Colonel Robson Rodrigues da Silva, who has implemented the primary UPP plan and formed the new police force, he said, “Of course, the first phase of pacification is repressive; we make many arrests. But the second phase is the opposite. We researched what the police and the favela population have in common, and as we are a Christian country, we figured out that the family is it. So the officers were taught always to build a good relationship with children.” In one neighborhood, police dispensed chocolate Easter eggs. In another, they have been teaching kids to fly kites—an especially potent symbol because children enlisted as lookouts used to warn gang members that the cops were coming by pulling their kites from the sky. The police have created sports competitions at which children from several favelas come together to play; each wears a T-shirt emblazoned with the name of his or her community. Before pacification, this would have been impossible; rival gangs would have killed one another.