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Beyond Olympic glow, a vicious drug war rages in Rio

RIO DE JANEIRO >> Fans were lining up to watch an American beach volleyball duo square off against Mexico on the alluring sands of Copacabana Beach.

But across town, far from the Olympic excitement, the crackling of gunbattles echoed through the colossal favelas that envelop Rio de Janeiro’s hillsides.

As soon as he heard the bullets whizzing by early Tuesday, Richard Conceicao Dias, 9, knew what to do.

“I lied down on the floor, hugging my mom,” said Richard, who lives in a one-room home in the sprawling Complexo do Alemao group of favelas with his mother and his three sisters. “She told me, ‘Get away from the window, close your eyes, dream about something nice.’”

Much of Rio is reveling in the excitement of the Olympics. Well-heeled partygoers are quaffing caipirinhas alongside supermodels and astronauts at lavish soirees hosted by sponsors such as Omega, the Swiss watch manufacturer. Thousands of soldiers are patrolling Rio’s upscale seaside districts to ease fears of muggings and other crime.

But in the shadow of the Olympics, a slow-burning war between drug gangs and the nation’s security forces is taking place. As the casualties mount in the favela where Richard lives with his family, the Games seem — to them and thousands of others in some of Rio’s poorest communities — like they are taking place in some distant city.

In a flare-up of fighting over the last week, more than 200 police officers stormed into Alemao’s labyrinth of alleyways. Calling their operation Germania, the European region of warring tribes that was once largely subdued by the Roman Empire, the police fatally shot two men, while a top counternarcotics official was wounded.

Some of the 70,000 people who live in Alemao, outside the gaze of the television crews focusing on Rio’s wonders, nurtured hopes of a calm as the Summer Games got underway. But then came the gunfire on Tuesday, followed by more battles on Wednesday morning and an outpouring of desperation and rage.

“We live worse than those pretty horses used to compete in the Olympic Games,” said Jucileia Silva, 35, Richard’s mother, referring to the equestrian competition that took place Tuesday morning, around the time she and her family dove to the floor to escape gunfire.

Security experts who track gunfights in Rio de Janeiro have documented dozens of such episodes in favelas such as Alemao since the Olympics started last week, raising questions about the huge security operation. In one episode on Wednesday, soldiers from the federal security force deployed in Rio for the Olympics came under fire in the Vila do Joao favela. At least two were wounded, including one who was shot in the head.

Before the Olympics, Mario Andrada, the spokesman for the Rio Games organizing committee, had boasted that Rio would be “the safest city in the world” at this time.

On Wednesday, after the latest violence, he defended those remarks.

“An athlete doesn’t regret saying he’ll win before a game,” Andrada told reporters.

In 2009, when Rio de Janeiro won its bid to host the Olympics, the authorities envisioned their self-described “pacification” of Alemao and other favelas as a crucial factor in their plan to resurrect Rio’s fortunes. Soldiers in tanks rolled into Alemao in 2010, accompanied by police officers who began building a network of outposts.

For a while, it seemed to work.

As the violence subsided, the authorities constructed a stunning aerial tramway network, connecting Alemao’s densely populated hillsides. Directors scouted filming locations in Alemao for scenes in soap operas. A new pub that served craft beers lured outsiders curious for a glimpse into an area that had long been viewed as off-limits.

But by 2014, the gangs were aggressively clawing back at the police. One of these is the Red Command, which traces its origins to the 1970s, when imprisoned leftist militants banded together with common criminals. The gang built on long-standing ties with Colombian cocaine suppliers to exert considerable sway across Alemao and other areas of Rio de Janeiro.

The devilishly complex struggle for control of many favelas — the largely poor areas that often emerged as squatter settlements in Rio — is still grinding on, security experts say. The Red Command is clashing not only with the police, but also with other gangs and with militias — paramilitary groups largely made up of both active-duty and retired police officers.

The result is a dystopian stew of perpetual tit-for-tat conflict.

“Rio is presaging the new wave of conflicts we’ll see around the world,” said Robert Muggah, the research director at Instituto Igarape, a research group in Brazil that focuses on security issues. He emphasized the protracted nature of the city’s drug wars, the high casualty rates in certain areas and the repeated deployment of security forces that quells — but, at times, reignites — the violence.

“The bullet entered my shoulder and exited through my back,” Felipe Curi, a police official, said after being wounded during the fighting last week. “God in heaven was looking out for me.”

For the families caught in the crossfire, all the talk about Olympic legacies in Rio seems insulting.

The gunbattles halted the iconic tramway in Alemao yet again this week, stranding people on their way to work. In the past month, authorities have interrupted the service at least nine times because of gunfire. In one episode, a mother taking her children to school used her cellphone to film them hovering in fear inside a suspended cable car.

Two people, a police officer and a resident, were reported wounded in the aftermath of gunfights Wednesday morning in Alemao. In another case raising concerns about violence during the Games, witnesses said that gunfire shattered the windows of a bus carrying journalists Tuesday night.

A reporter on the bus, Sherryl Michaelson, who is a retired U.S. Air Force captain, said she had heard the distinct sound of a gun being fired. Still, authorities determined that the damage resulted from a rock that was thrown at the bus.

The new police stations in Alemao, once lauded as a sign that Rio was on the mend, now function like an archipelago of besieged security outposts in a sea where the drug gangs are resurgent. Even during the Olympics, when peace was supposed to prevail in Rio, Alemao’s residents are finding ways to describe the sense of war that persists around them.

Jose Franklin da Silveira, an author of cordel ballads that draw on the rhyming poetry recited by troubadours in Brazil’s backlands, wrote seven pages of verse titled “the Olympics in Alemao.”

The poem, which sells for about $1.50 in the favelas, describes the perplexed reactions of Josimar, a boy who confuses the fireworks from the opening ceremony with the gunfire that still plagues Alemao.

As he jumps from one rooftop to another, Josimar displays an athletic prowess that will never be harnessed outside Alemao. Instead, the boy’s skills lure the attention of gang leaders who are eager to recruit him.

“In my stories, I write about our biggest fear,” said Silveira, 56. “It’s the fear of stepping outside our homes.”

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