Seventy or eighty years ago, the workers of the Nova América textile factory could contemplate the barracks of immigrants from the Brazilian northeast that appeared like mushrooms on the Alemão mountain, a kilometer away. Now the factory is a shopping center and the mountain a city of slums. The Complexo do Alemão favela, with 180,000 inhabitants and the worst human development index in Rio, is the headquarters of the main criminal organization in the city, the Comando Vermelho (CV).
A group of 13 favelas in the marginalized northern area of Rio, Complexo do Alemão jumped to the front page of the media on July 18 when 400 military policemen supported by four helicopters and ten armored cars -known as skulls- carried out a punitive operation initiated after the death of a police agent at the hands of members of CV. It ended with a balance of 18 dead.
On the other side of the mountain, on May 22, the adjoining favela of Penha was the scene of another brutal operation, with 24 deaths. A year earlier, in Jacarezinho, 28 people died in another police-military raid.
Since conservative governor Cláudio Castro, a close ally of President Jair Bolsonaro, took over Rio state in May last year, 182 people have been killed by police in raids on favelas. Last year, the number of victims rose 8%, to 1,356 dead, despite falling in the rest of the country.
It does not seem like the best recipe for a governor to achieve re-election, and even less so if the main rival is Marcelo Freixo, a historic fighter for human rights in the favelas. After all, even downtown newspapers like O Globo describe the operations as chacinas (massacres). But Castro swept the polls earlier in the month, with more than 58% of the vote to Freixo's 27%. There will be no second round.
In the Nova América shopping center, before reaching Decathlon, McDonald's, Santander and the Body Shop, is the Sparta shooting club. It has a wide range of replica pistols and machine guns. Groups of young people shoot at targets in the form of human beings. "I don't like guns," says the young shop assistant. “But there are not many job offers here.”
Shooting clubs have grown like wildfire with Bolsonaro, who in a first presidential decree legalized the possession of firearms with hardly any restrictions. “It is quite obvious that this law has increased the weapons available to groups like Comando Vermelho,” says Carolina Grillo, a crime researcher at the Fluminense Federal University.
The legalization had the support of the military police not only because of ideological sympathy with Bolsonaro. There is another, more pragmatic reason: many firearms sold in Brazil come from the police themselves.
Arming the enemy “may seem like suicide at first glance”, reflects Bruno Paes Manso in the book La republica das militias. But "the rifles in the favelas serve to make the population and the rulers feel dependent on the police forces to defend them." This allows more money to end up being spent on security.
Castro has delivered. He took over the government after the corruption arrest of his predecessor, Wilson Witzel, who used to ride in police helicopters with a TV crew while machine-gunning mountain favelas. It seemed unimaginable to have an even more belligerent governor. But Castro has a larger budget than his predecessor after renegotiating the city's massive debt and privatizing the municipal water company. A lot of money has been spent on "helicopters and skull tanks," says Grillo.
The war against the "bandits" does not solve the crime problem. But "it has always given good electoral results," he adds.
Castro applauded the police action at Complexo do Alemão in July. Bolsonaro, whose motto is “Good bandit is dead bandit”, has taken advantage of the moment to blame the Federal Supreme Court for supposedly tying the hands of the police, preventing a final solution in the favelas.
In fact, there are many reasons to think that the military police are part of the problem. Not only does he do business selling weapons to traffickers, says Grillo, but "he collects bribes from traffickers and after a massacre, he can charge more." The profile of the dead and the frightened in the favelas is no surprise. 75% of the population of the Complexo do Alemão is black, and 63% earn less than the minimum wage of 1,200 reais - around 220 euros per month.
If the shopping center in the old Nova América factory is a symbol of the deindustrialization of Róo, the Complexo do Alemão cable car symbolizes the failure of alternatives. With six stations at the foot of the Alemão mountain, it had to be the emblem of the new city of services and tourism that would arrive after the World Cup (2014) and the Olympic Games (2016). Next to the first station, one of the Police Pacification Units (UPP) was opened, a community police strategy based on dialogue and public investment. Although to materialize it, it was necessary before another police invasion of Complexo do Alemão in 2010.
A decade later, the container that housed the UPP police officers looks like a tomb. Cable car cables are rusty. After the bankruptcy of the city in 2016, the UPPs were abandoned and the cable car closed. There are plans to reopen the cable car, although it remains to be seen if they are carried out.
Lula visited Complexo do Alemão on Wednesday as part of the Workers' Party (PT) plan to reverse the defeat it suffered in Rio in the first electoral round (47% against 43.7%). She correctly summed up the security problem: "Before the police arrive, education, health, culture and the improvement of the lives of the neighbors have to arrive." In Complexo do Alemão, Lula won by 108,769 votes to 93,513, a narrow margin in a context of rising votes for Bolsonaro. Even more surprising was the result in the gubernatorial elections. In the electoral district that includes Alemão and Penha, number 161, Cláudio Castro was the most voted candidate, with 43% of the votes.
