FEAR AND HEAT
As tension mounted in the city in November 2010, I celebrated my birthday with my family. It was the first time in decades we’d been together on that day. In a retro-hipster restaurant of the sort that was popping up to cater to Cariocas’ recent affluence, we arranged ourselves on vintage Formica chairs, picked out the wine, and ordered a half dozen tiny dishes with French names.
Like everyone in Rio, my family was following the play-by-play on the news as closely as they followed the prime-time soap operas. We discussed my younger sister’s pregnancy—she’d just had the last ultrasound before birth—but the attacks in the streets dominated our evening. Something as simple as driving to a restaurant for dinner was a risk. My mother fretted; everyone’s nerves were frayed. We ordered more wine.
Walking from the restaurant to the subway station after dinner, I saw television sets blaring the news from nearly every corner bar. Shirtless men at the rickety plastic tables leaned back from their beers to offer a stream of commentary. I stopped to listen. It didn’t take much prompting for Cariocas who were sick of living with violence to advocate violence as a solution.
Kill them all, one of them said. Bandido bom é bandido morto—a good criminal is a dead criminal.
With each day that passed, fear and heat rose in tandem. The attacks escalated.
Gangsters on motorcycles zigzagged through traffic, ambushing cars, setting them on fire, and spreading panic in working-class suburbs, upscale residential neighborhoods, near the state government headquarters. In one confrontation, an air force sergeant scrambled out of his vehicle just in time to escape a grenade on the Linha Vermelha, the highway to the airport.
Out of a lifelong habit, I hung on to the news, looking to commentators and talk shows for the information and insights that could help me make sense of the chaos. I also got to work. This violence had meaning, and if I couldn’t decipher it, there were people who could. I talked to anyone who would speak to me: taxi drivers, university researchers, cops who wouldn’t give their names, local crime reporters who chain-smoked on the patio of the police headquarters, waiting for press conferences that were always hours late. That was where I first heard that the Red Command was still pulling strings from within the maximum-security pen. In spite of the expensive safety precautions, the gang’s chain of command was unbroken.
What exactly the gangsters were planning, and how law enforcement would react, no one knew—not until those last days in November, when this simmering conflict exploded and forced those vying for control of Rio’s favelas into actions no cop, gangster, reporter, or academic could have foreseen.
TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 23
Rio’s top law enforcement brass filed into Beltrame’s wood-paneled office at 5 p.m. sharp. Intelligence reports had confirmed what many of them suspected: the Red Command was behind the attacks. The UPP program and the transfer of gang leaders to the south were getting in the way of the gang’s business. Prison officials had apprehended letters from the bosses behind bars to their soldiers in Alemão and Vila Cruzeiro, a favela physically connected to the complex. Their orders were to zoar tudo, to ravage the city.
The consensus that evening was that the state security apparatus had to come down hard, and soon. Mário Sérgio walked out with plans to stage aggressive overnight raids in nearly thirty CV-controlled favelas.
After the meeting, Beltrame called a press conference. It was time to break his long string of “no comments” and speak plainly. He spoke to us, journalists, and through us, seeking to reassure the Cariocas who were cowering at home, and the Brazilians who were following the conflict, aware of how much was riding on Rio. It was an uncharacteristically forceful speech; the sober head of security almost raised his voice to make his point clear: no matter the threat, the state would not back down.
“Anyone who crosses the path of the UPPs will be plowed under,” Beltrame said, eyes focused steadily on the cameras.
Later that night, the gangs also made a statement of sorts. It came as a scrawled note left on a burning bus in Vicente de Carvalho, a north-side neighborhood: “If the UPPs continue, there will be no World Cup and no Olympics.”
The author was unknown; there was no signature and no one was caught in the attack. But it didn’t matter whether or not it was authentic. The threat it spelled out was implicit in the daily tally of burning vehicles. It confirmed what Beltrame had said: these strikes were meant to disrupt the state, to call into question the new security policy, and to destroy the vision of a secure new Rio.
Reports of deaths and injuries from the overnight favela incursions trickled in as Beltrame slowly sipped his morning chimarrão, the piping hot, bitter tea he drank from a gourd, according to southern Brazil tradition. He’d given the previous day’s intelligence report much thought. When his cell phone rang just before 8 a.m. with a call from the governor, the head of security was ready: “We are going into Vila Cruzeiro.”
As Beltrame told it later, he knew this could be ugly. Rio state police had occupied favelas and installed a dozen UPPs, but never like this, in the middle of a live confrontation with gangsters. And Vila Cruzeiro wasn’t just any favela. It was a redoubt of the Red Command, the main bunker beyond Alemão. Law enforcement hadn’t been inside for more than a quick hit since 2007. The movimento, the movement, as the drug traffic was sometimes called, had spent the last few years fortifying its defenses. They’d be ready with turrets to shelter snipers, spiked metal barricades to protect access roads, and vats of oil and gasoline to pour down the steep pathways, plus years of stockpiled ammunition.
“We had no time to prepare, but we had no choice,” he said. “We either put an officer on each corner of the city, or we went in and occupied Vila Cruzeiro.”
The invasion would have to happen immediately. At noon, Beltrame headed to the Guanabara Palace, a cream-colored wedding cake of a building that is the seat of state government. He was meeting his chief of police, Mário Sérgio, and Governor Cabral for lunch. After the meal, they adjoined to a meeting room with supporting staff to plan their next steps. They had to consider strategy, such as how to broach a territory defended by men who knew each alley and who could count on the help of a population too scared or complicit to refuse. Now that Rio was under extra scrutiny by the national and international media, they also had to deal with prickly ethical questions of the sort Rio’s police didn’t often stop to ponder: How would such a high-risk operation appear to the population, to journalists? What was the acceptable cost in lives?
The only option not on the table was defeat at the gangsters’ hands.
“If we failed, it would be seen as a failure of our entire security program,” Beltrame said.
There was one more serious impediment to taking Vila Cruzeiro. Even with all of Rio’s officers mobilized and with the Federal Highway Police lending support, law enforcement simply didn’t have the manpower or the equipment to invade and hold the favela. Even the caveirões, the BOPE’s black armored vehicles with skulls emblazoned on their sides, had weaknesses. Their tires could be shredded by bullets and would skid on the oil-slicked roads. The officials discussed this as they got up and walked out. The men were already standing by the door when the governor turned to Mário Sérgio with a question:
“What about the armed forces? The navy, for example. Would their tanks work?”
Tanks would cinch the deal, Mário Sérgio said; they had caterpillar tracks, revolving turrets, and steel bellies big enough for more than a dozen officers. The navy’s weaponry included the M-113, which was being used by the U.S. Army in Iraq. Cabral called the justice minister right away. The go-ahead came that afternoon: the navy would back the operation with equipment and logistics.
Local news outlets were covering the conflict round-the-clock. This latest bulletin ignited discussions all over town.
A taxi driver named Bira drove me around often in those weeks when I was reporting on Alemão. He is a hulking man, with hands that cover half the steering wheel, and he took a hard-line stance against the traffickers.
“The government has to come down on these guys, break their back,” he said, pounding a meaty fist on the wheel for emphasis.
No one could anticipate the cost of taking Vila Cruzeiro or the likelihood that it would work. Every housewife in line at the market and every suited-up businessman in the subway had an opinion. Mostly, they agreed with Bira, the cabdriver: authorities were raising the stakes, but they couldn’t afford to lose this round.
Before going to sleep that night, I checked for an update. Over the past twenty-four hours, twenty-eight buses, vans, and cars had gone up in flames. Five passengers were injured in fires; one driver was killed for refusing to stop at an ambush. The stench of burning rubber wafted through the streets, a constant, acrid reminder of the pervading threat. In their raids, police had seized rifles, shotguns, submachine guns, grenades, homemade explosives, and a lot of gasoline.
They’d also killed fifteen suspects.
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 25
The day dawned long and hot. I woke with the sunrise and dressed in a hurry, eyes on the news: a fleet of flatbed trucks had rolled down Avenida Brasil overnight with the military-grade armament promised by the justice minister. A crowd clapped and cheered as three M-113s maneuvered. The state had never prepared to take on the gang in this way.
Watching the tanks brought back my family’s last few days in Iraq, when we hid under the stairs while shock waves from bomb blasts punched in the windows. I’d left with the faces of the neighbor’s children in my mind. They’d climbed onto their front gate to see us go.
“They can’t leave,” my mother had said. “This is their country.”
Rio was not Basra by any stretch, but the sight of men with assault weapons and tanks rolling down residential streets brought back the same nauseous, dry-mouthed anguish I’d felt as a kid. I went over to the balcony of the hotel room and slid open the glass door to let in the ocean breeze. To the left, Cristo rose on Corcovado mountain’s blue-green shoulders, his stark white face blank and unreadable in the bright morning glare. Even the day’s first breath was heavy and humid. In spite of the warmth, a shiver ran down my spine.
Behind me, the voice of the morning news anchor updated the stats: There had been another fourteen attacks overnight. They’d left six buses, a truck, motorcycles, and five passenger cars in flames. There were now more than seventeen thousand police on duty. Searches for suspects and weapons continued in favelas across town.
Down in the lobby, I swallowed some coffee and scanned O Globo. The paper had dedicated pages to its coverage, all of them under the all-caps heading a guerra do rio, “Rio’s War.” This bellicose language permeated the reporting. There were maps that indicated the sites of “battles.” Articles referred to police as “combatants” and to the lanes of Vila Cruzeiro as “the front.” Favela residents were “civilians.” Again, this incongruous talk of war. When had a densely populated neighborhood become “the front”?
But there was no time for the paper, or breakfast. Bira was already waiting. Once out of Ipanema’s drowsy streets, we headed to Vila Cruzeiro along an eerily quiet highway. I don’t remember seeing a single bus that morning as we approached the favela, although they usually choked Rio’s thoroughfares on weekday mornings. Later I’d confirm that about 115 bus lines had canceled service.
On the way, we listened to the news. About ten public schools and an untold number of preschools were closed. There were around twelve thousand kids out of class. The population in favelas was young—younger than in the city as a whole. On quiet days, the lanes thronged with children. As far as I knew, no one had evacuated the families. Then again, I’d never covered something like this before. Maybe it was pro forma, a step not worth announcing, and I’d missed it.
I turned to the driver. “Did anyone tell parents to get their kids out? Have you heard anything about where families are supposed to go?” I asked.
He looked at me through the rearview mirror, the muscles in his forehead bunched above his heavy brow line. “What? No, no one said anything about kids.”
Bira dropped me off in Penha, the working-class neighborhood that bordered Vila Cruzeiro and Alemão, as close as he could to the slope where modest two- or three-story buildings met the favela. Nearly five hundred officers and elite BOPE troops, plus some three hundred federal officers, were already milling about.
Flora, my colleague on AP’s video side, was there in a bulletproof vest and boots, pulling equipment from the trunk of another taxi. Silvia, the veteran photo editor, and Felipe, a lanky twenty-five-year-old photographer who’d just started with the AP that year, had been there since before dawn. More than the print reporters, it was the photographers who tracked the action. By the end of the day, their bulletproof vests would be so soaked with sweat they’d lay them on the sun-baked car hoods to dry.
I looked around. Madness. I’d been in Rio for less than three weeks and was not equipped for what looked like urban combat. I had no vest and my thick-soled hiking boots were in my luggage, which would remain tangled in red tape at the port for six months. I wore the first thing I’d pulled out of my carry-on that morning—a bright green dress and purple sandals that made me look like an absurd parakeet among the camo of tanks, the black of BOPE.
My chest felt tight, shortening each breath. It wasn’t fear; it was the sense of being so clearly out of place. This gang, this favela, this operation, these were things I’d read about or discussed in a handful of interviews. I’d rushed to Vila Cruzeiro because it was my job to be there, to watch whatever happened, gather information, write it up. It wasn’t until I saw the police cars pull up bristling with artillery—the cops stuck the long black snouts of their weapons out the windows—that I realized how unprepared I was, how absurd in my highlighter colors and with my reporter’s notebook. I would not head up the hill, that much was clear. Beyond that, I didn’t even know where to position myself when the shooting started. I looked around: What here could stop a rifle bullet? A car? A brick wall?
I stayed busy filling my notepad with quotes. The conversations were clipped. There was an anguished mother cowering with two children under an awning, crying to whoever would listen, “What am I going to do? I can’t go to work, I can’t go home.” There was a sixty-five-year-old retiree who gestured angrily at the tank outside his front door, saying, “This is no way to live!” A police officer no older than twenty-five was twitching for action. “We’re going to flush them out,” he said.
The warmth that was such a benediction in the beachfront south of the city turned vicious in these northern suburbs that stretched far from the open ocean and Cristo’s embrace. The sun was an angry white eye glaring down from the sky. The heat weighed down my shoulders and rose in waves from the pavement, pressing against the skin. Sweat gathered in the small of my back and smudged the blue ink of my pen as I wrote.
Just past noon, the taut stillness finally broke with the clattering of tanks rolling uphill and the roar of police helicopters. Short staccato pops of machine gun fire greeted them. The sudden burst of movement and the explosions sent adrenaline flushing through my system; after a tense wait of nearly five hours, any action felt like a release. Conversations broke into a garbled stream of voices, noise. Interviews were useless now. I took refuge inside Getúlio Vargas Hospital and stared out the windows with other reporters, nurses, staff, watching and waiting.
Three blocks away from the hospital, inside a metal pod that served as her commercial kitchen, Dona Nilza moved her ample body closer to the television that sat above her refrigerator. Her eyesight forced her to squint an arm’s length from the screen to follow as the police stormed Vila Cruzeiro.
It was from this tin-can space that she ran a van line—the extra-official transportation that served communities such as this one—and made lunch for the drivers.
A small plastic fan chopped at the air, swirling the steam around and stirring the tired pages of the Bible that always lay open behind the counter. On calmer mornings, neighborhood kids ran in for a kiss and some candy, calling out: Dona Niiiiilza! Dona Nilzaaaaa!
Not on that Thursday. The children were locked indoors, and Dona Nilza’s thoughts turned to her own child.
To the police, the conglomeration of favelas was a fortress bristling with enemy soldiers; to people like Dona Nilza it was home. These alleys now swarming with men in flak jackets were playgrounds for their kids. She’d brought up ten children in Alemão, all of them crammed into a narrow, three-story house where rooms had sprouted organically, one on top of the other, as the family grew. She’d reared them all on the money from the van line and the teachings of the Assembly of God evangelical church, then set them loose in the world to find their way.
They’d all chosen the straight-and-narrow path—all except Diego, her second youngest. She’d lost him to “the life,” as she put it, when he was a tall, spindly sixteen-year-old, timid for all his size. That was nine years ago. He’d be twenty-five now. He was up there, somewhere. This was why, when police and the army charged up the hill, she watched so closely.
“The bodies come down wrapped in sheets,” she said. “You can usually see the feet sticking out. That was my biggest fear: recognizing my son by his feet.”
That Thursday, she was also watching and waiting.
Once the shooting stopped, I walked out of the hospital. Across the street was one of the rickety wooden stalls that sold drinks and snacks—the convenience stores of communities like this one. I went over for some water. Nothing else was open. As I got closer, I noticed a man sitting on a short stool, taking deep drags on his cigarette. His hands shook and his outstretched leg was bandaged. His name was José Pereira, and he worked as an assistant at construction jobs. A stray bullet had lodged itself in his calf right around noon, when he tried to walk up to his shack in Chatuba, a favela bordering Vila Cruzeiro. After a cleanup at the hospital, he was released, the bullet still embedded in his leg.
It was nearly 3 p.m., and he was stuck there in a tank top and flip-flops, without money, without a phone to warn the wife who worked as a maid in the city and without a way to get back up the hill to the three kids who were home, waiting out the police invasion. Their school had been canceled for days.
I got him some water, offered my phone. He wanted Brazil’s searing white sugarcane rum, cachaça. The leg was throbbing now. I had nothing else to give him. His broad face was set in a mask of pain. Talking cracked his resolve; tears found a path among the furrows that lined his face. He was a migrant from the Northeast, and spoke with the broad vowels and the hard t’s and d’s that set their speech apart from the Cariocas’ soft, sibilant accent.
“They fight, but we’re the ones who suffer,” he said. He didn’t know who’d fired the shot, and he didn’t care who won. He wanted to be with his wife, his children, and to hold on to the job he had. “What am I going to do now, like this?” he said, gesturing at the bandaged leg.
When I looked back up at the hospital, I saw six people shuffling in, holding on to the edges of a bedsheet. They leaned outward to balance the weight of the body in the middle; blood pooled at the bottom and dripped through the thin cotton, leaving a trail of lustrous red droplets. The bundle was heaved onto a gurney and gone before I could see if it was a man or a woman, young or old.
I hung around, waiting for the end, hoping to learn what was going on in the hills above. The temperature hovered in the triple digits. Time acquired a jagged quality: it jumped when the dead or wounded were carried down, and then it stalled. I heard bursts of gunfire, dry popping sounds that no longer startled me, and the deeper rumble of explosions. Plumes of thick, black smoke unfurled from different points within the hills. Otherwise—nothing. No information. The wait was dull and nerve-racking at once.
A police officer of some rank strode into the hospital at a fast clip. I didn’t catch his title, but the cops stationed at the door made way for him as he passed. I caught him on his way out. I needed something concrete, numbers.
“How many people have been killed?” I asked.
None, he told me.
“None?” I asked. Again, that sense of bewilderment, of hearing but not understanding. “What about the bodies?”
“No one died,” he said again. “Just criminals.”
The officer turned his back on me and my half-formed questions. In the world I’d known, bodies such as the one I’d seen lugged down to the hospital would be named, their shooting investigated—maybe not fully or fairly, but investigated. Back in California, when transit police had shot an unarmed black man in the subway—Oscar Grant—there had been riots in Oakland. I’d helped cover them, had gone knocking on doors looking for the white officer who insisted he’d accidentally pulled out his gun instead of his Taser. In Rio, one man down in a favela—or a handful of them, or more, mostly black, sometimes white, always poor—didn’t even count. Just criminals.
Rio’s police killed hundreds every year. That much I knew. The law made no provisions for a death penalty, but somehow, having a rap sheet—being a bandido, a criminal, or just looking like someone’s idea of a bandido—was enough to earn you a trial, conviction, and execution all in the fraction of a second it took to pull a trigger.
I knew it, had known it from years of following Rio in the news. But to watch it happen, to note the officer’s shrug of the shoulder, to smell the dead and face the crackling anger of the living . . . all of it left me feeling queasy, off balance.
I turned my back and walked away from Vila Cruzeiro, toward the main road where the taxi drivers were waiting. I jumped into the cab and opened my laptop to write up the quotes I’d gathered and update the article published earlier. Deep into my work, I only realized the fighting was over when officers began to stream downhill and into the streets of Penha. A grinning BOPE officer gave me a thumbs-up. I stepped out of the car.
“Vila Cruzeiro is ours,” he said as he ambled past the cars, loose-limbed and shaky from the win and the spent adrenaline. Others were still searching door-to-door in the favela above. The owner of a storefront bar rolled up the metal grate he’d pulled down during the shooting. Now that the fighting was over, he was open for business. The cops crowded in for a drink. I joined them.
It was sometime past 6 p.m., nearly twelve hours since police started gathering at the foot of the hill. The officers jostled and elbowed their way to the counter, their exhilaration palpable. On the television hanging overhead, I saw details of the operation that had unfolded, matching images to what I’d heard. News helicopters had caught the moment police troops had broken into Vila Cruzeiro. In attempts to stop their entrance, the Red Command had strewn concrete blocks across the lanes and set fire to a delivery truck that blocked one of the main access roads, but the police had pushed in.
Then came the aerial images that would loop on TV over the next few days and define the siege: the gangsters who had been stoking fear in Rio for days were running for their lives. There were nearly two hundred of them; some carried rifles or backpacks, others were shirtless, in nothing more than shorts and flip-flops. A couple of them were clearly injured.
They fled up a dirt road flanked by forest that cut across a hilltop between the smaller Vila Cruzeiro and Alemão. The men were falling back into the complex. As these images streamed on the TV overhead, a cheer rose from the policemen.
One of the men on the run, reduced to a tiny pixelated figure on the screen, took a bullet, stumbled, and fell. This drew laughter from the cops, and shouts of “Perdeu, playboy! Perdeu!” This was bandido slang, the jeering refrain Cariocas often heard when they were held up for a wallet or a phone: You lose, playboy! You lose!
The officers’ reaction at the scenes left me confused at first. The gangsters were getting away. Didn’t the police want to finish the job, bring them to justice? But I’d missed the point. The traficantes who’d been invincible within these hills were scurrying for safety like cockroaches while the whole nation watched. These cops saw themselves as the front lines in a war; they found real satisfaction in watching their enemy humiliated.
“I’ve been police for twenty years, and I feel like I’m finally doing my job,” a heavyset BOPE officer with silver at his temples said.
I went back to work, wandering into the dusty streets of Penha for comments. Vila Cruzeiro was still off-limits, but this working-class neighborhood just beyond the favela’s borders bore much of the burden when there was fighting between gangsters and police. Their schools shut down, their businesses lost customers, and their buses and van lines stopped running, leaving them without transportation.
Every television I saw was tuned to the news, and every news channel was playing the same footage. The scenes sparked conversation everywhere, and left residents in a state of nervous excitement that was equal parts hope, disbelief, and fear. I stopped at a twenty-four-hour funeral home and watched the gangsters’ flight again while talking to the manager. He hadn’t dared take out his car in ten days. His kids had stopped going to school, and his employees weren’t showing up.
“We’ve been at their mercy for so long,” he said. “Sometimes it’s the police, sometimes it’s the traficantes.”
He paused, as if wondering how much to say.
“Now this,” he said, gesturing at the endlessly looping track of men running down the dirt path. “They’ve really stepped on the anthill this time.”
As I talked to other locals, I found that same caution tempering their glee. Tired as they were of the conflict, and eager as they might be to see it over, many could not believe that change would come so easily. They’d learned to conviver, to walk the fine line, coexisting with traficantes and a violent police force. They didn’t trust either side. The only peace they’d known in decades was the uneasy stillness of a standoff. To them, the images looping on TV brought a moment of exhilaration—the bandidos were on the run!—but left a deeper apprehension. What now, now that the balance they’d known was irrevocably upset?