Clashes in Rio Slum Spur Plea for Help

Hit by one of the worst confrontations in months between police and drug traffickers in this seaside city, local authorities appealed to the federal government and Brazilian army Wednesday for help containing violence that has left at least 12 people dead and thousands of residents cowering inside their homes.

Scores of state police officers continued to occupy Rocinha, Rio’s largest shantytown, in a crackdown on rival drug runners that began Friday. In an operation that resembled a military invasion, heavily armed officers swarmed in and helicopters swooped down on the hillside slum to strike at two competing factions of the same gang battling for supremacy over the lucrative cocaine trade.

Several of the casualties in the ensuing shootouts were residents caught in the crossfire. One of the dead was a well-known skateboarding star whom drug traffickers allegedly tortured and killed because they believed he had informed on them.

Thousands of children have stayed home from school over the last few days on the orders of parents too scared to go to work or even venture outside to buy food. Loss of a day’s wages is especially difficult for many of the shantytown dwellers, who often perform low-paid work that better-off Brazilians disdain.

The secretary of security for Rio de Janeiro state, Anthony Garotinho, traveled Wednesday to the national capital, Brasilia, to consult with federal Justice Minister Marcio Thomaz Bastos about sending in troops to restore calm and prevent flare-ups once the operation is over.

Garotinho had asked Tuesday for 4,000 soldiers to reinforce police in Rocinha and other slums in Rio until the end of the year. Granting the request would put troops on the streets again barely 14 months after they were called in to quash a wave of gang-related crime before the city’s famed Carnaval celebrations.

But it was unclear whether the federal government would deploy troops this time, especially after their performance in Rio last year was widely criticized. Bastos said the armed forces were not “at the beck and call of state authorities” and that they would be deployed only in extraordinary circumstances.

The current upsurge of violence here and the scale of the police response have underscored the extent to which drug rings reign in Rio’s favelas, or shantytowns. Under constant fire, the police have abandoned many of these neighborhoods, and gangs such as the Red Command rule whole communities.

Residents increasingly see themselves as caught up in a war they neither want nor support, a sense of siege exemplified by Sunday’s large headline in the Jornal do Brasil: “Iraq is here.”

The showdown in Rocinha, home to 150,000 people, is somewhat unusual because it is one of the more placid slums and because the warring drug dealers belong to factions within the Red Command rather than to rival gangs.

Armed conflict began when authorities released alleged drug kingpin Eduino Eustaquio de Araujo Filho, known as “Dudu,” from prison to let him visit his family for Easter. He promptly mustered his henchmen and launched a raid on Rocinha from the neighboring slum of Vidigal. His goal was to take over popular drug-distribution points, through which dealers haul in as much as $3.5 million a week by some estimates.

As violence escalated, state police dispatched 1,200 officers, setting up checkpoints in Rocinha’s narrow alleys while residents locked themselves inside their homes or fled.

At least two residents have been killed by stray bullets. Most chilling, perhaps, was the slaying Friday of noted skateboarder Wellington da Silva. Drug dealers apparently beat him to death before a crowd as a warning.

Although things appeared to have calmed down during the day Wednesday, tension shot up with the late-afternoon announcement that Luciano Barbosa da Silva, the rival whom Dudu was trying to displace, had been shot and killed by police.

Times staff writer Paula Gobbi contributed to this report.