Rio Residents Feel Army Has Cut Crime : Brazil: Troops have taken little action. Some fear violence if soldiers confront drug dealers.

No massive arrests have been made, not a shot has been fired, but already residents here have begun to feel a modicum of relief in the early stages of an unprecedented effort by the army to roll back the crime wave that has plagued Brazil’s most famous city for more than a decade.

Since the army took control of state and city law enforcement last week, drug traffickers who lord over the city’s poor communities have begun to lie low.

Petty thieves and bandits who prey on the more affluent have begun to disappear from city streets, and for the first time in a long while, slum residents such as Joan Dark, a 23-year-old maid, can sit peacefully outside their homes without worrying about being shot.

“It’s like a life of leisure here now,” said Dark, who sat with friends outside her Cachoeirinho shantytown home, just around the corner from a military outpost. “Before, it was hell. Shootings every night. People getting hit by stray bullets. The children couldn’t play outside.”

It was the same sentiment miles away in the Jacarezinho shantytown, the base community for the Red Command crime gang.

“We are living now as if we left the fire and entered paradise,” said Antonio Fernades Alvez inside his secondhand shop there. “God help us that it works out.”

The army took control of Rio’s 12,000 law enforcement officers under an agreement between President Itamar Franco and Rio Gov. Nilo Batista. Federal officials hope that they can do what the notoriously corrupt, abusive local authorities did not--return this city to its citizens.

Violence in Rio--a city of 10 million where more than 23 people are murdered daily and gun battles between police and bandits have regularly closed schools--has sent the city on a slide over the last decade. Since 1988, tourism dollars have dropped by $800 million annually. Of Brazil’s 35 largest banks, only one is still based in Rio. Hundreds of the nation’s largest private businesses have left the state in the last decade.

The army, so far and at least symbolically, is winning the war against drug traffickers and robbery gangs by taking barely any action. Troops have set up only one visible post, complete with sandbags and armed soldiers, outside the Marcilio Dias Naval Hospital.

There, gunfire from drug traffickers from two warring favelas , or slums, used to rain down nightly upon the hospital, with bullets sometimes penetrating patient rooms and even the nursery.

“It’s much calmer,” said Luiz Nasimento, 45, a nurse for 20 years at the facility. “The shooting used to be constant, but now it’s stopped.”

A few army tanks and heavy trucks have been seen transporting personnel and materiel along the Niteroi Bridge leading into the city from northern Brazil.

But there have been few other visible signs of army activity, and the early rounds of the army’s offensive has largely been waged not in the streets but through the media. Newspapers and nightly newscasts have breathlessly carried reports of impending action.

Early on, army officials said they had targeted about 150 drug lords for immediate action.

They later said they had the names of 300 corrupt, ranking police officials who will be dismissed and possibly jailed soon. Eight top police officials, who had already been singled out by prosecutors, resigned on Friday.

Army officials had said that helicopters had been scrutinizing the shantytown strongholds of drug lords and that generals had mapped out attack routes.

But later, army officials said they had ruled out storming the hills on which most of the city’s 400 shantytowns are nestled.

Instead, they said, they had mapped out plans for “major action,” the nature of which will become apparent once it was under way. Finally, Justice Minister Alexandre Dupeyrat said the target date for the maneuvers had been moved up to occur before the state’s election Tuesday.

Nothing apparently has happened yet, but the dire talk has had an effect: Many drug traffickers are reportedly scurrying out of the city to the adjacent states of Minas Gerais and Espirito Santo, to wait out the army siege.

In two poor communities this week, other drug traffickers left small, symbolic caches of shotguns, machine guns and automatic pistols on the steps of community centers. These were accompanied by notes, saying they want no part of a confrontation with the army.

And just days after the army moved in, a drug trafficker was shot by fellow drug lords. His bullet-riddled body was found stuffed into the back of a stolen car after he sent a note to the army daring generals to invade his territory in the Nova Brasilia shantytown.

“The drug dealers are trying to keep a low profile,” said Fernando Reddalo, 24, of Vigario Geral shantytown, where 21 people were killed by masked police officers last year. “They don’t respect the police, but they respect the army.”

The random violence that has plagued Rio has abated, but it has hardly disappeared. On separate days early this week, a mother and daughter were wounded by stray bullets, and a 43-year-old maid was fatally wounded by an errant round as she prepared to board a bus.

Still, residents across Rio report a lessening of tensions and fear since the army took over.

“It’s different, you can feel it, and for me, there is a great a sense of satisfaction in them being here,” said Ralph Salgueirro, 46, a real estate agent.

Now, Brazilians--who lived for more than two decades under a military dictatorship--are anxiously awaiting the army’s next move.

“I’m afraid that a lot of innocent people are going to get killed if they invade,” said Dalva Ameval, 48, who was visiting her father at the naval hospital.

Claudio Fialho, public relations manager for the Copacabana Palace Hotel, said she is concerned about talk of keeping the army in the city through next year.

“We had a military government, and it was a bad experience,” Fialho said.

But many people, who for years have endured the terror inflicted by drug wars and who are most likely to be in the way of bullets if any shooting starts between troops and traffickers, say they want action soon.

“The army has got to invade and kill them all,” said Silvera Olveira, 23, whose 7-year-old son was shot in the foot by a stray bullet. “If they don’t, they’ll just come back when (the army) leaves. Just kill them all so we can live in peace.”