The drug gang leader jabs the muzzle of his rifle around as he talks.
Yes, Jogador says emphatically, Rio’s drug gangs are feeling threatened by the biggest police push against them in the city’s history, a Herculean effort to improve security before the 2016 Olympics. The heavily armed criminal gang he helps lead is being driven from long-held turf in the slums.
It’s what he says next that strikes at the heart of fears in the city: He says that Rio’s gangs are preparing for a return to the city’s most violent days.
PHOTO: EPA
“You take any animal and put it up against the wall,” he says, eyes ablaze. “Its last option is what? To attack.”
It’s hard to tell how much of what he says is bravado and how much is warning, but there is plenty of both.
“Rio de Janeiro is going to get really small,” says Jogador, who agreed to talk on condition he be identified by a nickname police would not know. “Rio de Janeiro is going to tremble.”
Rio is seeing violent days, just as Jogador, who spoke two weeks before the clashes, said it would.
Armed men have set up roadblocks in key areas letting loose rifle fire, tossing grenades. More than 100 cars and buses stopped in the dragnets have been set on fire.
Police responded by invading more than 20 slums, engaging traffickers in massive shootouts.
The scenes of urban warfare in Rio on the nightly news bring back memories of 2002, when drug gangs protesting the prison conditions of their incarcerated leaders shut down Rio, a city of 6 million people. They burned buses, sprayed government buildings with bullets and grenades, and sent foot soldiers out to warn businesses to close. Similar shutdowns went on for months.
Now the three major gangs are preparing for another fight, and according to Jogador, are ready to end their bloody rivalries and join forces against the police. Rio’s top security official and governor acknowledge that the battle is heating up — and that the gangs seem to be unifying.
“These are classic acts of terror, an effort to create and diffuse a sense of insecurity throughout the city,” said Paulo Storani, a security consultant who was a captain in an elite Rio unit sent in to clear slums. “The mass robberies, the burning of cars, these are just the beginning of a response by the drug gangs.”
The reason, security analysts say, is economics. For two years, police have invaded the slums and installed 13 permanent posts. The gangs are losing slums and the drug revenues they yield. The fear is that there is a tipping point when the gangs decide it costs less to fight the police than to give up the territory, and that this moment is at hand.
Since September, armed men have carried out scores of mass robberies of motorists. Few of the cars have been stolen. Instead, they are torched as vivid forms of protest, or motorists are ordered to hand over their keys, stranding the vehicles and clogging traffic.
The tension is growing as police prepare to go into the largest slums. One, the Alemao complex, surrounds a road that leads to the international airport. On Saturday, it was surrounded by police after officers invaded the neighboring Vila Cruzeiro slum and drove armed gangsters from there to Alemao. The other, Rocinha, is on the other side of the city, a sprawling mass of shacks on a route that will connect the main venues of the 2016 Olympics with the rest of the city.
Both are densely packed, creating a human shield for the gang leaders. They are also havens for drug production.
Jogador offers no details on whether the recent mass robberies and burning of cars are being ordered by drug gang bosses. He also does not deny it.
“I think the World Cup would be a lot more peaceful, the Olympics would be a lot more peaceful, if they stopped invading our slums,” he says. “If they come shooting in our community, where do we have to go? We’re going to come over to their side and then things will get difficult for them.”
But he also says he does not think the police will stop, and neither will the gangs.
“If they try to put a UPP here,” he says, “there will be a war.”
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