Rio police notch major win in war on drug gangs

Police and soldiers charged into Rio's most dangerous slum at daybreak local time yesterday, seizing the bastion of the city's biggest drug gang in a battle to make the seaside metropolis safe for the Olympics and soccer's World Cup.

Black-clad officers poured into the Alemao slum complex amid heavy gunfire, with helicopters flying low overhead. But the officers met less resistance than expected and they declared victory two hours later, even if many gang members still remained inside.

A Brazilian flag was raised at the shantytown's highest point.

It was the biggest victory yet in a two-year effort to drive drug gangs from their strongholds in the hundreds of shantytowns, many draped across the hills around Rio's beaches, a crusade driven in part by the need to make foreign visitors feel secure for the final matches of the 2014 World Cup and for the 2016 Olympics that are meant to be showpieces of Brazil's emergence as growing world force.

Rio de Janeiro Governor Sergio Cabral said the campaign against gangs will go on.

"We will continue to conquer more territories and give peace to our citizens and the foreign visitors who come here," he told Globo TV.

Officials have already imposed order on more than a dozen other former gang strongholds, even encouraging tourism along streets once echoing with gunfire.

The gangs, feeling threatened, reacted violently, mounting mass robberies of motorists on key highways, burning more than 100 buses and cars and shooting up police outposts.

The Government counter-attacked with hundreds of soldiers and thousands of police in armoured vehicles, first driving the gangsters from the Vila Cruzeiro slum on Friday, then neighbouring Alemao - their most ambitious target yet.

At least 36 people, mostly suspected drug traffickers, have died in the gang violence and resulting police raids in the past week.

Officials earlier warned that as many as 600 gang members were holed up in Alemao, a district of around 85,000 people, but they made only a handful of arrests, including a few of the slum's reputed top gang leaders.

Police said they think at least 200 gangsters remain hidden in the slum, and warned that sporadic shootouts were likely in the coming days. At least one suspected trafficker was killed in the invasion and at least two people were injured.

"We won," said Mario Sergio Duarte, head of Rio state's military police. "We brought freedom to the residents of Alemao."

Inside the slum, large piles of rubbish littered a main dirt road that ran with raw sewage. The iron gates of storefronts were drawn, their surfaces pocked with bullet holes. Spent rifle casings littered streets. Slum residents, under siege for days, took advantage of the break to restock food supplies.

Old women, young boys and teenagers leaned against the edges of their squat shacks quietly surveying the new scene, but often hustled inside when a police contingent walked by.

Some residents said the Government had had a negligible presence in the area for at least a decade and feared it would not last.

"The gangs will be back. I have no doubt they escaped and will return after the police leave," said a young pregnant woman, whispering and declining to give her name for fear of gangs and of the police standing guard a few metres away.

"How big a police post will they need to secure this whole place? I don't think they can do it."

Francisco Antonio Xavier, a 34-year-old cook who lives in the slum with his wife and two young children, was more optimistic.

"I always hoped, I always knew they would come," he said of the police. "It's going to be a calmer place to live. Everybody is loving this. From today onward life is going to get better."

Police and soldiers, too, were in a jubilant mood, hugging one another and enjoying the applause and shouts of praise from people driving past.

"There is no doubt that Rio residents have reason to celebrate today," said police inspector Rodrigo Oliveira. "The complex was seen as a fortress for drug traffickers and in less than two hours we took control."

- AP