The crush of tourists that each year flood into Rio for Carnival is seen as easy pickings by the city's purse-snatchers and pickpockets, who refer to the visitors as "filet mignon."
As the five-day, pre-Lent bash started on Friday, a group of more ambitious thieves fled into the crowds after taking four prized paintings -- a Picasso, Dali, Matisse and Monet -- from a Rio art museum in a brazen heist.
Carnival revelry usually involves large crowds of people packed together -- a perfect opportunity for pickpockets.
"When we catch them [the thieves] they always say, `but they're so easy, so easy,"' said Ricardo Andreiolo, chief of the city's tourist police.
On Friday evening, gunmen took advantage of a Carnival street parade to rob a museum during visiting hours in the Santa Teresa district, in the hills above the city.
As a samba band performed on the street outside, they stole Pablo Picasso's The Dance, Salvador Dali's The Two Balconies, Matisse's Luxemburg Garden and Claude Monet's Marine.
The paintings were considered the most valuable pieces at the Chacara do Ceu museum, but their exact value was not immediately available, said Thais Isel, a spokeswoman with Rio's Public Safety Secretariat.
The assailants reportedly used grenades to threaten security guards and people inside the museum. They forced the guards to shut down the museum's security cameras, then fled while taking advantage of the droves of people outside following the Carnival band.
Museum director Vera de Alencar said the robbery appeared to have been orchestrated by specialists, probably from international gangs, the country's official Agencia Brasil news service reported.
More common are the pickpockets in Carnival crowds.
"We were in the middle of the crowd with everyone all pressed together, and it was all over very quickly. It was very professional. All I felt was my wallet leaving my pocket," said Marcelo Jandre de Moura, 28, who came from Araruama, a city 130km east of Rio, to see the Rolling Stones' free concert on Copacabana beach last Saturday.
Rio's reputation for street crime is so bad that many tourists feel getting robbed is a rite of passage. A popular T-shirt here reads: "I left my heart in Rio, and my watch and my camera and my wallet."
Rio is among the world's most violent cities, with an annual homicide rate of around 50 per 100,000 inhabitants. But the violence rarely spills out of the shantytowns and into the tourist districts.
"Others cities offer up the whole city for tourists, we only offer the tourist corridor, which is heavily policed. In this area crime is no worse than in any other large city," said Rio de Janeiro Mayor Cesar Maia.
In recent years, state officials have beefed up police patrols, created a special tourist police department and deployed cameras along popular beaches like Copacabana and Ipanema, where much of the petty thievery takes place.
Last year, tourism officials started distributing fliers warning visitors not to flaunt their cameras and expensive watches, to stay off of dark streets and away from the beach at night.
State Tourism Secretary Sergio Ricardo Almeida says the city's reputation for street crime is undeserved.
"I think there's paranoia in the national press and that contaminates the foreign press," Almeida said. "When a tourists gets robbed in Madrid, that doesn't make the papers."
Pointing to a recent incident where 33 British tourists were robbed at gunpoint after their bus was stopped on a major highway from the airport to downtown Rio, security consultant James Hunter says the problem is worse than government officials want to admit.
"As to the data that's available, it's just not trustworthy. Most tourists write off being ripped off as part of going to Rio and don't even report it," said Hunter, a managing partner of Merlin Risk Consultants, which does security consulting for large corporations across Brazil.
"The fact is that there is a high probability that if you come to Rio, at some point you will suffer a personal assault. They tend not to be serious, though. You lose your cash, your cell phone, your watch," he added. "So don't go out without anything you're not prepared to lose."
Many tourists seem ready to follow his advice.
"I've never been robbed, but I had a friend who lost everything on the beach," said Cameron May, a 35-year-old firefighter from Melbourne, Australia. "You have to know you can't take anything with you when you go to the beach."
Australians were downloading virtual private networks (VPNs) in droves, while one of the world’s largest porn distributors said it was blocking users from its platforms as the country yesterday rolled out sweeping online age restriction. Australia in December became the first country to impose a nationwide ban on teenagers using social media. A separate law now requires artificial intelligence (AI)-powered chatbot services to keep certain content — including pornography, extreme violence and self-harm and eating disorder material — from minors or face fines of up to A$49.5 million (US$34.6 million). The country also joined Britain, France and dozens of US states requiring
Hungarian authorities temporarily detained seven Ukrainian citizens and seized two armored cars carrying tens of millions of euros in cash across Hungary on suspicion of money laundering, officials said on Friday. The Ukrainians were released on Friday, following their detention on Thursday, but Hungarian officials held onto the cash, prompting Ukraine to accuse Hungary’s Russia-friendly government of illegally seizing the money. “We will not tolerate this state banditism,” Ukrainian Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrii Sybiha said. The seven detained Ukrainians were employees of the Ukrainian state-owned Oschadbank, who were traveling in the two armored cars that were carrying the money between Austria and
Kosovar President Vjosa Osmani on Friday after dissolving the Kosovar parliament said a snap election should be held as soon as possible to avoid another prolonged political crisis in the Balkan country at a time of global turmoil. Osmani said it is important for Kosovo to wrap up the upcoming election process and form functional institutions for political stability as the war rages in the Middle East. “Precisely because the geopolitical situation is that complex, it is important to finish this electoral process which is coming up,” she said. “It is very hard now to imagine what will happen next.” Kosovo, which declared
MORE BANS: Australia last year required sites to remove accounts held by under-16s, with a few countries pushing for similar action at an EU level and India considering its own ban Indonesia on Friday said it would ban social media access for children under 16, citing threats from online pornography, cyberbullying, online fraud and Internet addiction. “Accounts belonging to children under 16 on high-risk platforms will start to be deactivated, beginning with YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, X, Bigo Live and Roblox,” Indonesian Minister of Communications and Digital Meutya Hafid said. “The government is stepping in so that parents no longer have to fight alone against the giants of the algorithm. Implementation will begin on March 28, 2026,” she said. The social media ban would be introduced in stages “until all platforms fulfill their
RSS