The toll from stray bullets that rain down on Rio from the city's steep hillside slums as police and drug gangs battle with automatic weapons has grown sharply, with one innocent bystander killed or wounded every day.
Businesses and schools in the line of fire have been shuttered. Thousands of children are staying home. Even air travel is affected -- domestic jet routes were diverted from Rio's downtown airport when shooting flared up in a slum near Copacabana beach that the planes had to fly over.
In the city's best neighborhoods, apartments facing the hillside slums can be worth 60 percent less than units in the same building that are less likely to be hit.
PHOTO: AP
Such concerns have become more urgent as the city prepares to welcome thousands of athletes for the Pan American Games next month.
Authorities plan to deploy 15,000 police to provide security during the games.
For the first time, the government has acknowledged the problem and has begun to track the toll from stray bullets in quarterly reports. It found they killed or wounded 87 people during the first three months of this year.
One of the latest victims, Ailton Lopes Moreira, was shot in the chest on Sunday on his way to the supermarket. It's likely no one will ever know who killed the 53-year-old engineer.
Police believe the bullet was fired from over a kilometer away, from a shantytown where 47 days of open warfare between police and drug traffickers have killed 23 people and wounded at least 67.
"I thought it was a heart attack. ... It was only when the ambulance came that I discovered he had been shot," said the victim's wife, Lucimere Negrao, 45. "It happened so quickly."
While only 19 of the 4,539 people killed by guns last year in Rio were hit by stray bullets, nearly 10 percent of the 2,098 people wounded by firearms were unintentional victims, according to the State Security Institute.
Most killings happen on the poor north side, a drab urban sprawl that extends for kilometers behind the mountaintop Christ the Redeemer statue, which looks down over the city's richer neighborhoods and white sand beaches.
But given the city's striking urban geography, nowhere is safe from the bullets. Hilltop shantytowns known as favelas tower above the best neighborhoods, and gleaming condominium towers rise up in clear sight of poor slums controlled by heavily armed drug gangs. At night, the bullets' red tracers light up the sky.
Rio's police kill about 1,000 civilians a year, virtually all classified as acts of self-defense. And they have a strong defender in Rio de Janeiro Governor Sergio Cabral, who insists on heavy weaponry to keep up the pressure until the gangs give up their territory.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) on Wednesday said that a new chip manufacturing technology called “A16” is to enter production in the second half of 2026, setting up a showdown with longtime rival Intel over who can make the fastest chips. TSMC, the world’s biggest contract manufacturer of advanced computing chips and a key supplier to Nvidia and Apple, announced the news at a conference in Santa Clara, California, where TSMC executives said that makers of artificial intelligence (AI) chips will likely be the first adopters of the technology rather than a smartphone maker. Analysts said that the technologies announced on
NO RECIPROCITY: Taipei has called for cross-strait group travel to resume fully, but Beijing is only allowing people from its Fujian Province to travel to Matsu, the MAC said The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) yesterday criticized an announcement by the Chinese Ministry of Culture and Tourism that it would lift a travel ban to Taiwan only for residents of China’s Fujian Province, saying that the policy does not meet the principles of reciprocity and openness. Chinese Deputy Minister of Culture and Tourism Rao Quan (饒權) yesterday morning told a delegation of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers in a meeting in Beijing that the ministry would first allow Fujian residents to visit Lienchiang County (Matsu), adding that they would be able to travel to Taiwan proper directly once express ferry
CALL FOR DIALOGUE: The president-elect urged Beijing to engage with Taiwan’s ‘democratically elected and legitimate government’ to promote peace President-elect William Lai (賴清德) yesterday named the new heads of security and cross-strait affairs to take office after his inauguration on May 20, including National Security Council (NSC) Secretary-General Wellington Koo (顧立雄) to be the new defense minister and former Taichung mayor Lin Chia-lung (林佳龍) as minister of foreign affairs. While Koo is to head the Ministry of National Defense and presidential aide Lin is to take over as minister of foreign affairs, Tsai Ming-yen (蔡明彥) would be retained as the nation’s intelligence chief, continuing to serve as director-general of the National Security Bureau, Lai told a news conference in Taipei. Koo,
MANAGING DIFFERENCES: In a meeting days after the US president signed a massive foreign aid bill, Antony Blinken raised concerns with the Chinese president about Taiwan US Secretary of State Antony Blinken yesterday met with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) and senior Chinese officials, stressing the importance of “responsibly managing” the differences between the US and China as the two sides butt heads over a number of contentious bilateral, regional and global issues, including Taiwan and the South China Sea. Talks between the two sides have increased over the past few months, even as differences have grown. Blinken said he raised concerns with Xi about Taiwan and the South China Sea, along with China’s support for Russia and its invasion of Ukraine, as well as other issues