THE ROVING EYE Brazil’s street war not for resale abroad
By Pepe Escobar
As much as their attention may be focused on the stinging cold-war battle being
fought by the two Koreas, Pentagon analysts have got to be paying close
attention to what's going on in the steamy slums of Rio de Janeiro. After all,
this is revealing itself to be an unprecedented tropical remix of the
Pentagon's long - infinite - war applied to global urban poverty.
First, let's take a look at the chronology. A week ago, two major Rio
narco-trafficking gangs - the Red Command and Friends of Friends - launched a
series of urban terror attacks, burning cars and buses and hitting police
stations; the whole thing was
orchestrated by some of their leaders locked up in an out-of-state
maximum-security prison, basically in reaction to a 2008 government program
that so far has established police pacification units (UPPs) in 13 of Rio's
1,000 favelas (shanty towns).
Unlike in previous instances, the Rio police response was swift - maximum force
in the streets. Then the federal highway patrol stepped up its operations, the
central government sent marines and then army units, and the federal police
also got into the fray. An essential measure has been to transfer gang leaders
to an even more remote maximum-security facility near the Amazon rainforest,
3,500 kilometers from Rio.
Last Thursday, a 200-strong contingent of the no-nonsense Special Operations
Batallion (BOPE) - a sort of Brazilian SWAT - took the Vila Cruzeiro slum,
while at least 300 hardcore hoodlums left on foot and on motorbikes for the
nearby, sprawling, hilly Alemao shanty-town complex, as big as 10 Rio
neighborhoods, with a population of 400,000.
Police/military units started surrounding the complex - while a deadline given
for the narco-traffickers to "surrender with arms in the air by sunset" expired
on Friday (those few who did were convinced by their families and by Christian
priests). Finally, on Sunday morning, came the go-ahead to swarm into the
Alemao, which was conquered in less than two hours by 2,600 police and
soldiers, using tanks and marine-corps armed personnel carriers, and supported
by helicopters.
In a distant echo of American surges in Pashtun lands, BOPE specialists have
realistically admitted that they have encountered far less resistance over the
hills than expected. They are now firmly established literally at the top of a
hill - with a strategic view of all surrounding areas; a Brazilian flag is now
flying on the spot, symbolizing the state retaking what until now was lawless
territory.
At least 200 narco-traffickers may still be hiding in family homes, keeping
civilians as human shields. The police/military have vowed to search each of
the 30,000 homes in the slum complex - with each team assigned its own
perimeter. An immense amount of drugs - including at least 40 tons of hash and
200 kilos of cocaine - and loads of weapons have been seized, with lots more to
come.
Tropical COIN
Pentagon analysts will immediately recognize this as no-holds-barred MOUT -
Military Operations on Urbanized Terrain - territory. And experts at the Santa
Monica-based Rand Corporation - which helped to set the strategy for the
Vietnam war in the 1960s - may mistake this shanty-town complex in Rio for a
"liberated zone in urban shanty towns" when it was in fact, until now, a
deserted-by-state-power zone. Anyway, the Rand gang would obviously be thinking
about Baghdad's Sadr City, where Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army made life hell
for the American occupier. (No wonder Sadr City's squalid main boulevard was
called Vietnam Street.)
Most of all, US military strategists won't fail to recognize that what has just
taken place in Rio illustrates what the Journal of the Army War College
"prophesized" years ago; that "the future of warfare lies in the streets,
sewers, high-rise buildings and sprawl of houses that form the broken cities of
the world".
Quite a few police/military specialists in Rio are in fact stressing that this
is a never-before-seen urban operation, not even in Iraq (and certainly not in
Gaza, where an occupying army may use the same tactics against a cowed,
slum-style population). Some Brazilian army units may have used their
experience as part of the United Nations peacekeeping force in Haiti - but
still they never had to clear a slum in Port-au-Prince.
The takeover of the Vila Cruzeiro slum and the Alemao slum complex also rank as
classic David Petraeus-style counter-insurgency (COIN) - as in "take, clear,
hold and build". "Take" has been fast as lightning; "clear" may take days if
not weeks; "hold" has been solemnly promised by state and federal authorities;
but "build" is a much more complex and long-term proposition.
There are reasons to believe that this COIN Brazilian-style might work where
the American version was not exactly successful in either Baghdad or the Sunni
triangle or in southern Afghanistan. The swift, massive, coordinated show of
force did destabilize organized crime; the element of surprise was key.
Moreover, perhaps for the first time ever in Rio, this police/military invasion
of a slum was not regarded as the action of an occupying army - but as the
state affirming its will and empowering law-abiding citizens.
The sight of tanks in the streets finally sold the whole operation to a tired,
jaded public - not only the society at large, but especially the slum dwellers
themselves. And the sight of once powerful drug lords scurrying around like
cockroaches demystified their power. Thus the Mao Zedong "fish among the sea"
element deserted the narco-traffickers; unlike the Taliban in Pashtun lands
they simply could not count on local popular support, or at least the
Mafia-style "law of silence" they imposed. Even the narco-traffickers' own
families advised them to surrender (those who didn't may be trying to escape
through the sewage system).
The background
It took the Brazilian state at least four decades to muster the necessary
political will for this massive offensive, coupled with ample police/military
coordination and widespread support of public opinion, to rout what is one of
the three top Rio narco-gangs.
But this is only the beginning.
The nexus between crime and politics in Brazil for a long time intertwined
police, the judiciary, the executive, the legislature, private enterprise and
criminals around the same rackets. It's what has been described as "the
Brazilian delinquent state". Ringleaders - including mayors, senators, judges,
police and district attorneys - made much more serious money than, for
instance, the favela-based drug rings.
This process started during the 1960s military dictatorships in Latin America,
which stimulated an organized crime boom by creating the institutional
framework for criminal freedom. Under Cold War logic - courtesy of the Pentagon
- the priority of the dictatorships was internal repression.
"Micro-criminality" was deemed irrelevant. The result of at least two decades
of negligence was catastrophic. Police were left with no investigative
capacity.
Social anarchy, unstable governments and an absurdly high concentration of
wealth were the hallmarks of the neo-liberal, post-dictatorship era. Crime
flourished not only in Brazil but all across South America, with Colombia
setting up powerful, regional mafias. In Italy, the legendary Mani Pulite
(Clean Hands) operation became the paradigm for the repression of mafia
activities under the framework of a democracy. In Brazil, as usual, things were
and remain much more complicated.
The military dictatorship ended in 1984; that was the same year that a
hurricane of blow started sweeping through sensuous, tropical Rio - that is,
Brazilian/Colombian narco-traffickers unloading pure cocaine at ridiculous
prices into an incipient consumer market. The explosion of demand led to the
consolidation of a group called Red Command, extremely powerful in the Rio favelas
and associated with Colombian and Paraguayan narcotraficantes.
Then in the 1990s, globalization turbo-charged a remix with special effects -
courtesy of the Italian and Russian mafias, which for their part diversified
into kidnappings and weapons trafficking. In Colombia, the fragmentation of
drug cartels led to a proliferation of smaller groups, much harder to detect.
And the same happened in Brazil. The Red Command gang, for instance, gave birth
to a splinter group.
Now, with Brazil collectively engaged in a major drive to become an essential
global player, there seems to be a consensus that the time is right to start
tackling the big picture. It will be a long and winding road, full of
treacherous, slum-dwelling alleyways, before the 2014 Football World Cup and
the 2016 Summer Olympic Games - where Rio will be the superstar. So cleaning up
is a must.
This does not mean just sending in the tanks to take over a slum. What comes
afterwards is the real test; to purge the penal system of abysmal corruption;
to change legislation which in many ways protects criminals; to better patrol
the country's borders to minimize the non-stop flow of drugs and weapons; to
pay more decent salaries for police officers; to try to break the connections
between those hoodlums in the favelas and "invisible" higher-ups; to
invest in infrastructure and services for poor people; to stop stigmatizing
them just because they are poor; to invest heavily in education. Meanwhile, a
touch of MOUT will do no harm. But - Pentagon be warned - only because this is
no foreign occupation army.
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