“From now on I want US$2 per gas canister. If you don’t pay ...!”
The crackling voice on the police intercept picked up in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, did not need to complete the sentence.
However, this time the threat was not from the drug gangs that have long plagued local slums, but one of several squads of corrupt police, known as milicias, that are tightening their grip over much of the city.
The milicias, made up largely of off-duty firefighters, police and prison guards, have emerged as a new mafia and seized control of more than 100 of the city’s 250 largest shantytowns, according to a report published this month by Paulo Storani, a former military police special forces commander.
By way of comparison, the Brazilian city’s largest drug cartel, the Commando Vermelho, controls just 55, it said.
“The milicias exist in Rio and they have not ceased to advance since 2000,” said Marcelo Freixo, a state government deputy from Rio who chaired a parliamentary commission of inquiry into the groups in 2008.
“The only organized crime in Rio comes from the milicias,” said the veteran leftwing politician, who has received death threats since heading the commission and been defended by Amnesty International.
“The drug traffickers of the shantytowns represent the crime of poverty. I’ve never seen a toothless, uneducated mafioso,” he said.
The milicias have lately taken center stage following the release early last month of the film Elite Squad 2, the sequel to a popular movie about drug traffickers. The latest installment has already been seen by nearly 10 million Brazilians, setting a box office record.
Long seen as a “lesser evil” compared to the drug cartels, the milicias are descended from the paramilitary death squads that hunted down opponents of Brazil’s military dictatorship from 1964 to 1985 and more recent groups that targeted street kids in the slums.
Their rise began in December 2006 when they swept into several shantytowns in the western part of the city to drive out drug cartels.
“The milicias came in and offered their so-called protection to the residents in exchange for a ‘security tax,’ but then they took over gas distribution, the minibus service and cable TV,” Freixo says. “They are found in neighborhoods where the state is absent.”
Such activities have in recent years become more profitable than drugs. In the Rio das Pedras shantytown, a local milicia made US$2.5 million a month in 2008 from the minibus service alone, the parliamentary report said.
The gangs still bill themselves as the good guys — the most well-known calling itself the “League of Justice” and emblazoning its members’ houses with the Batman symbol. However, they have harshly resisted outside scrutiny. In May 2008 a milicia in the Batan shantytown captured and tortured three investigative journalists. They were released two weeks later after being ordered to keep quiet.
“The milicias also have a finger in politics,” said Freixo, whose report listed about 200 members who had been involved in campaigns.
After the release of the report several milicia leaders were arrested, including three members of the city council and a regional deputy. However, Freixo, who won re-election last month, said the local government was unlikely to back a larger crackdown.
“It lacks the political will to combat the milicias because they get a lot of people elected,” Freixo said.
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