Fort Rio: Where the Rich Are Prisoners of Their Fears

The escape route from the city center leads past the faded beachfront glories of Copacabana and Ipanema, past the Rocinha slum with its 250,000 inhabitants, to a coastal landscape shaped by Brazil’s architecture of fear.

Rio’s outlying Barra da Tijuca neighborhood is a thickening forest of condominium towers with names such as New Ipanema, complete with self-enclosed shopping and recreation areas, even their own schools. The condominiums are fortresses: high walls, sentry boxes, internal checkpoints, computerized camera and alarm systems, and private security forces with guns, dogs and motorcycles.

Residents of Barra da Tijuca venture warily into an outside world that they see as hostile. An Israeli-trained bodyguard escorts a billionaire’s young son to the movies; an executive carries an Uzi submachine gun in his sports car because his name turned up on a kidnap target list.

Crime in Rio and other Brazilian cities has forced the well-to-do into a hyperinsulated existence that sometimes resembles urban science fiction and makes Los Angeles look tame. Amid economic recession, a $2-billion-a-year security industry thrives in Brazil. More than 100,000 private security guards work in Rio alone, half of them for semiclandestine firms that fill the city with motley armies-for-hire. Anticrime defenses account for an estimated 20% of the monthly fees paid at exclusive condominium complexes and walled communities.

And instead of striving for an open and inviting style accentuating the city’s tropical beauty, architects are influenced by the same forces as those permeating daily life: violence and fear.

“It is all bars, walls with broken glass on top. If there are flowers, they have thorns for a defensive effect,” said Roberto Gianotti, an architect who has survived a home invasion and the kidnapping of his daughter. “An isolated house is poison on the market. Security is the top priority, the great challenge, of every project. You can’t work freely. Security defines everything.”

Gianotti’s business partner, Luis Carlos Aguiar, added: “We are going back to the Middle Ages. We are hiding behind walls.”

The fortification of Rio is not unique. Sociologists here see parallels to the Los Angeles of “armed response” security patrols, gated communities, and chasms between rich and poor. But Brazil represents an extreme case of a divergence dividing the hemisphere: While the United States is enjoying historic declines in crime rates, violent crime has become an urgent concern in Latin America.

More Than Double the Homicide Rate in L.A.

Brazil has one of the worst homicide rates in the hemisphere. In 1996, the city of Rio recorded 53.3 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants, compared with about 20 per 100,000 in Los Angeles (the rate dropped to an estimated 11.2 per 100,000 in Los Angeles last year). Rio has been shaken by periodic flare-ups of all-out warfare between gangsters who rule hilltop slums and police who often are overwhelmed, brutal and corrupt.

The annual number of homicides in Rio de Janeiro state dropped slightly from a 1995 peak of 13,257 to 12,190 in 1997--roughly the yearly average for the decade. Although kidnappings also appear to have declined, the wealthy and middle class still feel very much at risk. Common thugs choose victims at random for “lightning abductions” that last a few hours, and professional gangs finance drug trafficking with large ransom payments.

In an ongoing case in central Brazil, kidnappers of a popular country music duo’s paraplegic brother are demanding $5 million for his safe return.

There has been a resulting boom in self-defense classes and gun sales, Rottweilers and bulletproof vehicles--the number of such cars in Rio and Sao Paulo tripled last year, according to the newspaper O Estado de Sao Paulo. More and more Brazilians avoid public spaces and conventional homes in favor of closed streets and controlled environments such as Ocean Front, a complex in Barra da Tijuca with a surveillance system designed by IBM Brazil, and the similarly futuristic Alphaville, a development in suburban Sao Paulo.

None other than President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, a sociologist and big-city enthusiast, lamented this exodus from urban centers in a book of interviews published last year.

“It is a penitentiary existence,” said Cardoso. “The rich in Brazil are prisoners of themselves. . . . I hope that, in the future, the ‘Alphavilleans’ will realize that it is better not to live in such an isolated manner.”

The dangers make for a sad paradox, especially in Rio. In contrast to societies whose rage and violence are almost palpable, the physical beauty and easy charm of the city and its people create a deceptively benign impression.

Even as he recounts firsthand brushes with terror, architect Gianotti retains the cheeriness of the Carioca, as a native of Rio is known. He has lived in Barra da Tijuca for 32 years, since long before the community’s construction boom of the 1990s. The neighborhood’s population has jumped by more than 30,000 in five years, and most of the new homes are in condominium complexes.

Gianotti’s three-story apartment house, with its large and easily scaled terrace and minimal external protections, was designed in a more innocent era. Four years ago, a gang of robbers broke in. Gianotti awoke to see a masked intruder holding a gun to his wife’s mouth.

“I made a gentleman’s agreement with the robbers,” he recalled. “I told them I would help them get anything they wanted out of the apartment as fast as possible as long as they did not hurt my wife and daughter.”

The family survived the two-hour ordeal without injuries. But two years later, Gianotti’s daughter was kidnapped along with her boyfriend, the son of a wealthy businessman. The kidnappers belonged to one of the rings that terrorize the elite here, meticulously gathering intelligence on potential targets, infiltrating their household staffs and cultivating corrupt allies among police.

After a nightmarish 12 days of negotiation and a $700,000 ransom payment, the pair were released.

Remarkably, Gianotti’s misfortunes have not turned him into a vengeful vigilante. He refrains from overprotecting his daughter; instead, he suffers in silence until she comes home at night. He blames Brazil’s woes on the “incompetence of the state,” which has allowed organized crime to establish “parallel states” in desperate slums known as favelas.

“Violence is the fruit of hunger,” he said.

Children Cut Off From Reality

Like President Cardoso, Gianotti worries about the retreat of the middle and upper classes to artificial outposts of privilege. The lawns and athletic fields of Barra da Tijuca provide a healthy, seemingly idyllic existence for children, he said, but the place also cuts them off from reality.

“In that sense, it is a hard place to raise kids,” he said. “It makes them distorted young people. They never leave. They grow up thinking life is beaches, shopping malls, beautiful girls. And they don’t know the first thing about getting around the city.”

The ubiquitous presence of security forces and private bodyguards, many of them disreputable, also troubles Gianotti and other Brazilians. In addition to 60,000 officers fielded by the 173 legally registered security firms in Rio, unregistered companies illegally deploy at least another 60,000, according to a security association, putting another army of potential outlaws on the streets.

So-called clandestine guards were involved in 100 crimes in 1997, said Ademir Ribeiro of the Assn. of Security Companies of Rio de Janeiro.

“A rising number of individuals are sometimes criminals who use heavy weapons,” Ribeiro said. “So criminals are being hired to protect property. Because of this, illegal security has become a public safety problem.”

The co-founder of Hercules Security considers himself part of the solution. Amaury Paiva has the bulked-up physique of a former concert bouncer and bodyguard for politicians and visiting luminaries such as singer Julio Iglesias and model Claudia Schiffer. He formed the company four years ago with an ex-police officer. Their 415-plus officers patrol apartment houses, shopping malls and an amusement park in addition to guarding the owners of a chain of clothing boutiques.

Despite the money that the Brazilian elite spends surrounding itself with fortifications and technological defenses, the human factor remains key, Paiva said.

“Today, you have infrared devices, cameras the size of a button, but the big worry is well-trained men,” said Paiva, who plans to attend a security seminar in Israel next summer. “Just as police are involved with drug traffickers, there is corruption in security companies. We have to guard the guards. We have to work very hard on recruitment, psychological testing, periodic checks on our people.”

Brazilians Insist Crime Is Declining

The bright future of the security sector does not necessarily bode well for public safety. But in the same way many U.S. cities have managed to reverse crime rates that once seemed overwhelming, Brazilians insist, their society can do the same. They cite statistics suggesting that violence, though alarming, has begun to decline.

And although many in Rio have been industriously walling themselves off from fear, the city’s many internal borders can be crossed. The recent New Year’s celebration in Copacabana was almost impeccably peaceful. More than a million revelers of all socioeconomic classes thronged the beaches for a fireworks show and all-night street party, taking a respite together from a life of steel bars and high walls.