Pubdate: Sun, 02 Feb 2003 Source: Chicago Tribune (IL) Copyright: 2003 Chicago Tribune Company Contact: http://www.chicagotribune.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/82 Author: Patrice M. Jones DRUG LORDS DO WHAT OFFICIALS DON'T--CONTROL BRAZIL'S SLUMS New Leader Faces Battle On Reform RIO DE JANEIRO -- The killing usually starts after sunset or in wee hours of the morning, when gunfire turns a mass of decayed housing units in Complexo da Mare into a war zone. Drug traffickers from three factions are waging a daily fight for control of the slum. No one is safe--not the families who crouch fearfully in their homes, not even participants in an internationally respected youth program run by Rio activist Yvonne de Mello. De Mello and others who work in Brazil's slums lament that in big cities such as Rio and Sao Paulo, many communities that were long poor and violent face even more hardship as they are pulled under the command of brazen drug organizations. Drug dealers, not police or the government, now control large swaths of major cities. President Vows Crackdown Brazil's new president has vowed a crackdown, including a proposal for federal police intervention. Yet Brazil's expanding role in Latin America's drug trade, its rampant police corruption and traffickers' growing arsenal of firearms--sometimes wielded by boys of elementary school age--will make reforming slums an uphill battle, experts say. "Anyone who knows the ghettos of Rio knows that nothing can exist here if the drug dealers say 'no' to it," said de Mello, who for eight years has run a non-profit program to keep kids off the streets. "I have been told to shut down my center early in the day starting now because the war here in Mare is going to get worse," she said. "I see kids one day, and then I don't see them the next because people are getting killed. Children disappear, and their bodies disappear. The police don't want to know, and all the parents can do is grieve." In Rio alone, about 1.2 million people, 1 in 5 residents, live in slums and shantytowns commanded by drug traffickers, government officials say. The slums, called favelas, began to sprout more than a century ago all over the city, particularly scaling up Rio's impressive hillsides. Brazil's new president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, has promised that cleaning up violence-racked slums will be a priority in a nation where about 1 in 3 people live in poverty. "But the big problem for the favelas is the long absence of the state," said Sergio Magalhaes, Rio state's secretary for urban development, who in the 1990s pioneered a government pilot program aimed at improving city services in Rio's slums. "The favelas have been abandoned. The state, in many favelas, does not provide public services, such as police security, cleaning, electricity," he said. "The absence of the government means the one who controls the favelas are the ones with the biggest guns." Showing their growing power, Rio drug chiefs in recent months have routinely shut down public schools, hospitals and universities. Recently an unprecedented one-day shutdown of businesses was ordered in Rio's wealthy southern tourist area as traffickers' attempts to confront police and officials have escalated. Rio's drug trade also grabbed international headlines last year when a prominent trafficker murdered a top investigative journalist on assignment in a slum for Brazil's main television network. Da Silva's government recently announced that its first major initiative attacking problems in Brazil's ghettos will be a land-reform program that would allow community associations to give poor residents, who for years have built homes illegally on abandoned land, legal property titles. The legal titles are aimed at bolstering residents' potential to obtain loans and credit and increase their home values, as well as to boost self-esteem. Dismay Outweighs Hope But those who know Brazil's slums only shook their heads when they heard the news. Many experts, including Magalhaes, are concerned that the program will fail because the community associations that would be in charge of handing out titles often are under the control of traffickers and ultimately exist only with their blessing. In a poor hillside slum only a stone's throw from Rio's touristy Copacabana neighborhood, one resident told of a common scenario: A teenage "soldier" for a drug chief told her that he wanted to use the roof of her house as a lookout post and banned her from making home renovations. The resident had no choice except to comply. Defending the titling program, government officials say they already have had some success. The city of Rio, for example, will soon give 877 property titles in one small community. In Quinta do Caju, housing prices are expected to rise with the legal titles. But even in this close-knit community, graffiti-marked buildings announce that Rio's most powerful drug gang, Commando Vermelho, or the Red Command, reigns here. And in many places, the traffickers' power is absolute. Undeterred by poorly staffed police units, armed gunmen stand at the entryways of many slums and rule neighborhoods with the power of automatic weapons and the constant threat of death, as dramatically depicted in the movie "City of God," set in a fabled slum. Even in less violent ghettos, such as one of South America's largest, Rocinha, young boys sit with two-way radios to communicate the comings and goings of passersby to their drug bosses. Many non-profit groups aimed at helping youths complain that traffickers have banned them from slums. Deeply distrustful of outsiders, the traffickers even block city crews trying to repair or install electricity or telephone service. Luke Dowdney, a British researcher, concluded in a recent yearlong study that about 6,000 children serve as "soldiers" in Rio drug gangs. "We are not citizens, the inhabitants of the favelas," said Sebastiao Jose Filho, president of one of Rocinha's three community associations. "I can't go out and talk to officials because the drug dealers will think I am an informant. Outside here when I leave the favela, people see me as a drug dealer. But I am neither. I have no rights. "They say there will be a fight against the drug traffic," he said. "Never." Burgeoning Drug Trade Along with community distrust, another complicating factor for the government is Brazil's growing role in Latin America's drug trade. Once merely a transit route for drugs such as cocaine, Brazil now is a major consumer and production center as a drug war in Colombia has that nation's largest guerrilla army searching for new frontiers. Brazil's government recently reported that several cocaine processing labs have been found on the Brazilian side of the Brazil-Colombia border. Still, Claudia da Silva, a Rocinha resident whose home is crammed in a decaying collage of buildings on a hillside, is hopeful. Her roof does not keep out the rain, and the rats roam freely here, she said. But she believes President da Silva will change things and is praying to get a property title. "I voted for the president because he was once poor himself," she said. "He knows what it is like to feel how I feel." - --- MAP posted-by: Beth