Military armored vehicles carried police into the heart of a gang stronghold, chasing gunmen into nearby shantytowns and setting the stage for what many people expect to be a bloody battle in Rio’s offensive to quell a surge of criminal violence.
Authorities didn’t say if police would immediately push into those slums, but said federal police would join the operation yesterday to help hold territory taken from the gangs.
At least 350 officers from Rio’s elite police unit and regular policemen were ferried to the top of the Vila Cruzeiro slum on Thursday in armored vehicles on loan from the nation’s navy.
PHOTO: AFP
By midafternoon, live aerial television footage showed dozens of heavily armed gangsters fleeing from the slum into a jungle area and then calmly walking into the nearby Alemao complex of more than a dozen shantytowns.
Police have long called Alemao one of the two strongest areas being targeted in a two-year-old aggressive policing program that has seen officers enter 13 slums and push out drug gangs that had maintained absolute rule in the areas for decades.
Security officials declined to say if they would enter Alemao yesterday — or if they would wait to invade the area sometime later within the next six months, as had earlier been planned.
Raids on gangs this week came in response to widespread violence that the criminals have allegedly inflicted since Sunday. More than 40 buses and cars have been burned on major roadways, motorists robbed en masse and police outposts shot up in the city that will host the final match of the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics.
At least 23 people have been killed in the clashes, most of them suspected drug gang members. Since late on Sunday, authorities have arrested more than 150 people in raids on nearly 30 shantytowns in the northern and western parts of Rio.
Brazil is trying to clean up the seaside city ahead of the World Cup and Olympics. Over the past two years, authorities have established permanent police posts in 13 slums as part of an effort to bring basic services to the communities and rid them of drug trafficking-related violence.
“We took from these people what has never before been taken — their territory, their safe harbor,” Rio state public safety director Jose Beltrame said. “It’s important to arrest them, but it’s more important to take their territory. If we don’t take their -territory, we can’t advance.”
Officials said Thursday’s push into the Vila Cruzeiro shantytown killed at least eight people and left one police officer wounded.
Police said they arrested 11 men and seized liters of gasoline and sticks of dynamite.
The marines driving the armored personnel carriers for the police for the most part did not engage in the fighting, security officials said. There no reports of the vehicles’ heavy weapons being used inside the slum.
Businesses in the neighborhood shut down during the operation and officials sent 12,000 students home from 10 schools and a daycare center in the region, the city’s education department said in a statement.
Several residents of the hillside community sat on the steps of shuttered storefronts, unable to go back home and unsure when their lives would return to normal.
Police had not released the identities of all those killed in five days of clashes, but spokesman Henrique de Lima Castro Saraiva acknowledged on Wednesday that some “bystanders would be affected” by the battles.
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