TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/030590/0305270.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 7.3 KB | 158 lines

                                                                                TRAVEL, Page 54

So You Think Your City's Got Crime?


Rio de Janeiro offers fun in the sun, but a rising tide of
lawlessness has brought fear to the festive atmosphere

By NANCY GIBBS -- Reported by John Maier/Rio de Janeiro


    If honor is to be found among thieves, "Kavera" is a young
man of some principle. "We only attack men," says the mugger,
22. "Never Brazilians, never old people and women." It is after
midnight in Rio de Janeiro, and his gang of street thieves is
eyeing potential targets. "Women yell too much and become
hysterical," Kavera explains, "and old people can suffer heart
attacks, and we don't want to kill anybody." He is willing to
make exceptions, though. The last man he killed was a beggar
who was trying to rape a three-year-old homeless girl. "Luiz
poured gasoline on him," says Kavera, pointing to a 16-year-old
friend, "and I lit the match."

    These are busy times for Rio's thieves, at whose hands the
lusty Brazilian city is suffering a public relations disaster.
As the tourism season reaches its peak with the pre-Lenten
Mardi Gras festival, the number of crimes committed against
foreigners has risen so high that officials have predicted the
most lawless Carnival in 25 years. Many tour operators are
dropping Rio from their itineraries, and group sales from the
U.S. could be down as much as 60% compared with 1988. Hotels
that used to be 90% occupied at Carnival time are now only half
full.

    It is hard to sell fun in the sun with statistics this grim:
homicides in Rio jumped from 2,200 in 1987 to more than 2,800
last year; an average of 100 cars were stolen every day; in
just 24 hours ten people were shot through the head. Armed
robbers even began holding up funeral services and processions
in Rio's cemeteries, and last Christmas several churches
scheduled their midnight Masses several hours early to reduce
the risk of robberies. The city's largest electronics company
temporarily stopped delivering goods because its trucks had
been robbed so often.

    A single gang like Kavera's claims to hit as many as 30
tourists a day during the peak season, when the sidewalks and
beaches are plump with prey. Kavera happily recalls the cameras
lying on towels, the bags left unattended. "Tourists can be so
stupid," he muses. In January, 26 guests, including Americans,
Danes, Austrians and Spaniards, went on a hunger strike at a
Copacabana hotel to protest the management's refusal to
reimburse them for valuables stolen from 50 of the hotel's 94
safes. "There is no question that crime in Rio, especially
violent crime, is increasing," says a U.S. diplomat who has
been investigating the issue for the past two years, "and we
know that a lot of incidents are not being reported."

    The reasons for the lawlessness are many, but the root cause
is appalling poverty, rubbing raw against conspicuous wealth.
The city is broken in half by a mountain range. The Zona Norte
is dense, poor and desperately violent. The Zona Sul is laced
with fancy apartments, fringed with world-class beaches, home
to the rich and the tourists. In between, atop the granite peak
of Corcovado, stands the symbol of Rio, a towering statue of
Christ, his arms outstretched like a beleaguered mediator
trying to keep two street fighters apart.

    The north, called the Baixada Flumi nense, is one of the
most violent stretches of urban blight in the world. Its
streets are besieged, its laws ignored, its people embattled
and its children exploited. An annual inflation rate of 1,765%
aggravates the huge gap between rich and poor. "Children learn
to steal because they are hungry," says human rights lawyer
Fernando Rodrigues. "If the problems of the distribution of
wealth and the elimination of hunger are not solved, there is
no way one can expect to reduce the violence in the streets."

    At least six people are murdered in the north of Rio every
day. If the killer is not a known criminal, he could be a
policeman; local shopkeepers hire moonlighting cops to hunt
down robbers or deadbeat customers. "Merchants will make up a
list of people to be killed and give it to the death squads,"
says Rodrigues. "The official statistics don't include all the
killings because people are afraid to report them, since they
know that the police are part of the death squads." Many are
afraid to go out at night.

    Though most tourists will never see the Baixada, they will
feel its effect -- for the fear of crime colors the character
of the entire city. Women avoid wearing necklaces and earrings.
Drivers run red lights at night, lest they be held up at
gunpoint while stopped. Some cars are equipped with a hidden
button that cuts off the gas line, so that a thief can travel
only a few blocks before the engine stalls. In the absence of
reliable police patrols, neighborhoods band together to hire
private armed guards who demand identification from visitors.
"There is more fear now than ever before," say sociology
professor Luis Garcia de Sousa at the Pontifical Catholic
University. "People live with this fear daily, so it has become
part of their lives, their culture, like the climate here."

    Police Chief Helio Saboya reckons that if his 12,000-member
force were twice its size, he might be able to make a dent in
the crime. But in a country grappling with a foreign debt of
$112.4 billion,  the budgets for local services are going
nowhere but down. The policemen themselves, who know they are
undervalued, lacking respect and easily corrupted, earn on
average about $100 a month. "When you have a family and you're
risking your life on the job, that's not much at all," says a
young officer. His fellow patrolmen all have other jobs -- as
mechanics or security guards or butchers. One source of extra
income is shaking down the thieves: for a share of the
plunder, the police will agree to look the other way.

    Not only is there temptation to break the law; there is no
incentive to enforce it. Policemen know killers may do little
prison time. "When you arrest a person, they know who stuck
them in jail," says a 29-year-old officer in Ipanema, "and when
they get out, they'll come to get you. I have a wife and
daughter, and I'm not going to let that happen to me or them."

    Tourism officials like to point out that as bad as the crime
wave is, it should not trouble foreign visitors if they avoid
the worst neighborhoods. "The biggest problem with these
reports is the false impression they leave," says Trajano
Ribeiro, president of Rio's tourist agency. "When a report
comes out saying 50 people were killed in a weekend, the image
is that 50 people were gunned down on the beach."

    Without a major public relations campaign to reverse the
impression that Rio is the Wild West, the steady stream of
foreign visitors is not likely to resume -- even though,
according to Ribeiro, only about 1 in 100 tourists will be the
victim of a crime. Last year, after 528 people were murdered
in April alone, President Jose Sarney sought to compare Rio's
plight favorably with another land's ten-year civil war. "It's
not possible that they are killing more people in Rio than in
the unfortunate, cruel and unjust civil war in Lebanon," said
Sarney. Perhaps. But no one ever claimed Beirut was a Carnival.