He Fought the Law and . . .

A cold spring rain blows through the high-rise canyons, making Luiz Eduardo Soares feel even farther from Rio de Janeiro.

Shoulders hunched in his leather jacket, the bearded 46-year-old Brazilian walks the streets hunting for an apartment, rebuilding his life in the anonymity of exile. After 15 months leading Brazil’s most ambitious attempt at police reform in memory, he once again has time to read, write and reflect.

Soares remains first and foremost a scholar, despite his explosive accusations against fellow police officials in Rio and his harrowing clandestine departure from Brazil in March. He has written eight books and has degrees in anthropology, sociology, political science and philosophy.

When he recounts his odyssey of death threats, wiretapped phones and 30 bodyguards protecting him from his own officers, he sounds like a philosopher-cop. He quotes Holocaust survivor and novelist Primo Levi on “the terror of uncertainty” to explain why some inhabitants of Rio’s slums prefer drug lords to marauding police. He describes the nightmarish station-house bureaucracy like this: “If [German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich] Hegel had been a Brazilian policeman, he would have never achieved synthesis. He would still be lost in the endless labyrinth of procedures.”

Like many left-leaning Brazilian intellectuals, Soares has dedicated his talents to questions of crime and justice. In a region where violence and impunity are endemic, the political challenge is reforming renegade police forces whose power poses a threat to democracy much as the Latin American militaries of decades past did.

“When we talk about changing the police, we are talking about the future of democracy itself,” Soares said in a recent interview in a restaurant in Manhattan.

In late 1998, Gov. Anthony Garotinho, a charismatic young politician with presidential aspirations, made Soares his point man on justice issues in the state of Rio de Janeiro. Soares was to deliver on Garotinho’s major campaign promise: a law enforcement policy that would be progressive and aggressive.

The moment seemed right: a popular politician, a top-notch brain trust, a crime rate that had dipped enough to open a window for change.

In a sadly familiar denouement, however, Soares now accuses the governor of allying himself with a gangster cabal of police commanders known as “the Rotten Bunch.” The governor, who denies the allegations, fired Soares as state public security coordinator in March.

“At first, Garotinho wanted to support the reforms as a whole,” Soares said. “But then he realized the best thing would be to have all the projects in place but not go forward on them to avoid confrontations with the police. His obsession was to be the next president. Everything would have to be subordinate to the electoral timetable for 2003.”

If that is true, the governor joined the ranks of politicians in other Brazilian states who have capitulated to threats, police strikes and rebellions, and even police-induced crime waves. Although Brazil is a healthy democracy in many respects, the seeming omnipotence of police forces in such political clashes shows that the power of civilian leaders has alarming limits.

“The police in any given state have the power to destabilize, to bring the state government to its knees,” said independent human rights advocate James Cavallaro, until recently the representative of Human Rights Watch in Brazil. “It’s a form of a coup.”

Debate Where Once There Was None

Nonetheless, Cavallaro and others say, Soares pushed the issue to the forefront of the political debate.

“He had an incredible year because he created an agenda for police which was not there before in terms of very concrete institutional changes,” said Rubem Cesar Fernandes, a sociologist who founded the influential Viva Rio civic coalition with Soares seven years ago.

The repercussions continue. A special state commission is investigating the charges Soares filed in March against top commanders, including current chief Rafik Louzada.

Among the alleged crimes: “selling” lucrative police districts to aspiring commanders, taking payoffs from all-powerful drug and gambling mafias, releasing criminals in exchange for bribes, and wiretapping. Numerous officers have been charged, disciplined or investigated in several ongoing probes of the investigative, or “civil,” police, which in Brazil is separate from the uniformed patrol force.

In a toughly worded editorial in April, the Jornal do Brasil newspaper called for the chief’s ouster, declaring, “The governor . . . keeps a man in command of the police about whom doubts are accumulating.”

Nonetheless, Gov. Garotinho stands by Chief Louzada. The governor insists that the cleanup has not suffered since Soares’ departure. While giving his former aide credit for designing the reforms, Garotinho says Soares was an inexperienced administrator who was not up to the massive task of transforming police culture.

“It is not true that there is any kind of alliance with the so-called Rotten Bunch--our government has always, and he knows this, insisted on cleaning up the police,” Garotinho declared in his written responses to questions from The Times. “[Soares] did not have the patience to see the reforms become concrete.”

The governor’s popularity remains an impressive 71%, down from 78% in September. He is 40, a former champion chess player and a member of the evangelical Christian community, whose clout is growing in Brazil. His undeclared campaign for the presidency is progressing at full steam.

If he indeed runs for the office, however, his law enforcement woes are likely to receive renewed national attention. Critics say the governor and Soares failed to recognize that police corruption is integral to a profoundly corrupt political structure in the state of Rio, whose population is about 12.5 million.

“All this was an electoral facade, and Luiz Eduardo allowed himself to be the governor’s propaganda boy,” declared state legislator Helio Luz, a 25-year police veteran who was a reformist chief from 1995 to 1997. “The Rotten Bunch in the police is not autonomous. In reality, the Rotten Bunch is the Brazilian state itself.”

The problems of police in Brazil go back to the force’s 19th century origins as the palace guard of the emperor, Luz said. Its role ever since has been to protect the elite against the masses, he said.

Recently, the special commission announced it had not turned up evidence to implicate or exonerate the officials accused by Soares. The probe was extended for 120 days, but complaints that commissioners lack basic investigative powers have worsened fears of a whitewash in the making.

Although critics suggest Soares was a bookworm overwhelmed by gritty realities, the man whom the police called “Professor” comes off as both cerebral and streetwise. He has the engaging good humor of a Rio native, or Carioca. Only the weariness of his eyes and the relentless flow of his ideas hint at the obsessive battles he fought.

As a student in the 1970s, Soares was active in resistance against the military dictatorship. He says his scholarly epiphany came a few years ago when he studied with Stanford professor Richard Rorty, a noted philosopher.

Soares helped fellow academic Fernandes found Viva Rio in the bullet-riddled early ‘90s, bringing together intellectuals and civic leaders who wanted to save the city from lawlessness. They felt the political left could no longer either romanticize or ignore crime while yearning for enlightened economic policies that would bring peace to the streets.

The chemistry in early 1998 when Soares met Garotinho, then a candidate, was immediate. The two wrote a book on public safety that became the centerpiece of the campaign. It was clear from the start of the governor’s term that Soares was in charge of law enforcement matters, though he was officially subordinate to the top official in the secretariat of public safety. Soares said he and the governor talked on an almost daily basis.

Crime had declined when the new team took office in January of last year. Homicides had dropped 30% from their peak in 1994 but remained alarmingly high at 47 per 100,000 inhabitants--about five times the rate in Los Angeles.

The two police forces, which together total about 40,000 officers, had veered from attempted reform to old-fashioned militarism. The previous public safety chief, a retired army general, scoffed openly at human rights groups and paid his officers “bravery” bonuses for shooting suspects. Individual police knew a lot about the underworld, sometimes because they were in cahoots with crooks, but the institution was in dire need of information, analysis and intelligence-gathering.

The “culture of planning” that Soares introduced mixed common sense and ideas based on reforms around the world. Copying a breakthrough in New York City, he initiated regular meetings among commanders to analyze trends and map strategy. He poured resources into training, technology, internal affairs and unprecedented programs to protect women (headed by his wife, Barbara, also an academic), blacks, street children and gays.

Making Stations Less Threatening

A major innovation was the Delegacia Legal, or “Cool Police Station,” program. In Brazilian slang, legal also means “cool.” The idea was to make civil police stations professional and presentable and therefore less threatening.

Traditionally, a crime victim venturing into a station was likely to encounter a hostile, lethargic, perhaps even shirtless detective working at a typewriter in a sweaty cavern. The stations invariably echoed with the menacing clamor of crammed lockups functioning as miniature prisons.

Investigations often began a full week after a reported crime. To use Soares’ word, the 121 stations were an “archipelago” of isolated fiefdoms with their own arcane rules and procedures. Commanders were feudal barons who got rich negotiating the outcome of cases with suspects and jailhouse privileges with inmates, he says.

Soares decided to overhaul the stations one by one; 40 model stations are scheduled to be completed by the end of this year. The 64 procedural manuals were condensed into six. Hardened inmates were transferred to new facilities. University students were hired as receptionists. Computer specialists designed a computer grid to connect stations and enable centralized monitoring of cases.

The uniformed police were generally receptive, Soares said, but the resistance in the civil police was immediate. The governor backed Soares in his first skirmish, dismissing a hostile public safety secretary in April last year.

Meanwhile, Rio experienced high-profile killings that Soares and his advisors suspected were part of a plot to sabotage them. The eight slayings appeared to be random, and some--such as a drive-by shooting outside a soccer game--seemed designed to cause an uproar. Proving a conspiracy, however, was difficult.

Soares, the father of two college-age daughters, also received telephone death threats. In August, Garotinho got a tip that a rogue police group was planning a campaign of bloodshed, with Soares and the governor as the top targets. Both men beefed up their security details.

The year-end crime statistics were mixed. Officer-involved shootings and bank robberies were down, crimes resulting in death had stayed about the same, and street robberies and auto thefts were up.

Overall, Soares felt vindicated because crime had not worsened dramatically amid the sometimes traumatic reorganization. And, he says, his team was more honest about statistics, junking a practice of manipulating numbers with categories such as “suspicious deaths.”

In December, however, the governor shocked Soares by appointing Louzada to run the civil police over his objections that the new chief was corrupt. The governor replied that the suspicions were unfounded and that the veteran detective had political support and a track record of results, Soares said.

Soares almost resigned, but “I thought it would be irresponsible to quit. There was so much work invested, so much hope in the society. I thought I could fight back. But from that moment on, the trust was gone with the governor.”

The definitive break came soon. Soares clashed publicly with Garotinho over a curious case in which a wealthy documentary filmmaker paid a youthful drug trafficker to abandon his violent ways and write a book about his life. The filmmaker had consulted with Soares and the public safety secretary, who both told him the arrangement was legal.

When the case became public, however, the police investigated the filmmaker for aiding a fugitive. The governor announced Soares’ dismissal on television--without telling him first.

“A law enforcement authority cannot be tolerant of crime,” Garotinho told The Times. He said Soares further defied him by taking allegations of police corruption directly to prosecutors “before talking to me or the security secretary.”

Former Chief Luz doesn’t think much of Soares’ performance or his allegations. But he also scoffs at the governor’s public justification for the firing, accusing Garotinho of trying to divert attention from allegations of corruption.

“The governor was vulnerable because there are strong indications that the [gambling mafias] are involved with the government,” Luz said. “To avoid becoming more vulnerable, he got rid of Luiz Eduardo.”

Garotinho denies the accusations, calling them “the discourse of political adversaries who have no proof.”

Meanwhile, Soares’ world closed in on him. His phones were tapped. His family was under constant surveillance. An aide was pulled over by civil police, provoking an armed confrontation with his bodyguards.

Soares feared both outright violence and an attempt to smear him or his family. He decided to move them to the United States. He left first, taking elaborate precautions to throw off his enemies: Without luggage, he took a domestic flight to Sao Paulo. Federal police officers dispatched by Brazil’s justice minister met him on the airport runway and guarded him until he boarded a flight to New York.

Ironically, Soares’ departure occurred decades after many of his friends and peers had gone into exile to escape Brazil’s military regime. And his version of exile could be worse: Top Brazilian officials and diplomats did their best to help him. The Ford Foundation has funded an academic post for him at the Vera Institute of Justice, and he will be a visiting scholar at Columbia University, where he will write a book about his experience.

Nonetheless, he and his family had to abandon their lives in Rio. His real-world sabbatical from academia was a searing lesson about how power works in his homeland.

“This is what the police do: They investigate political leaders in order to control them. They invert the hierarchy,” he said. “The only strategy is to confront these guys quickly, radically, deeply.

“The poor people need the police, who are the most concrete manifestation of the government. But if there is no change, the poor will ultimately prefer the despotism of the drug lords, even while hating them. Because at least the traffickers have a code--they have rules. The police do not have rules or codes.”