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RIO DE JANEIRO: Hundreds of police on Monday hunted criminals who shot down a helicopter over Rio slums as officials tried to convince the world they can quell rampant violence before the 2016 Olympics.
Around 1,700 officers were deployed in northern Rio de Janeiro, scene of weekend clashes between drug gangs and police that left 17 people dead according to police, or 21 according to some media.
Three of those killed were policemen in the helicopter brought down on Saturday as it surveyed a turf war between rival gangs in the Morro dos Macacos slum.
Two of those officers died when the police chopper crashed and exploded into a fireball. The third died on Monday of severe burns sustained.
The pilot and the two other officers in the aircraft survived, though one remains in a serious condition.
The attack on the helicopter triggered a massive ground confrontation between police and gangs on Saturday and Sunday that left 14 residents dead.
Police said most were suspected gang members, though at least three appeared to be innocent civilians caught in the crossfire.
President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, speaking on a visit to Sao Paulo, on Monday condemned the violence and said he offered Rio state governor Sergio Cabral "any help he needs, including the National Guard."
The president, who led Brazil's efforts to secure the 2016 Olympics for Rio in a ceremony on October 2, said his government was working to tamp the endemic violence in the city's slums and "clean the dirt" marring Rio's international image.
The scale of the challenge, however, is immense.
Around a third of Rio's population of six million live in the 1,000 slums nestled in the coastal city. Known as favelas, the shantytowns in some cases abut the popular tourist beach areas of Ipanema and Copacabana.
Violence is rife in Rio, with 6,000 homicides recorded last year. Muggings are extremely common.
Frequent clashes between police and slum gangs intensified since mid-2007, when Governor Cabral declared war on the criminals.
Both sides are heavily armed, with the drug gangs which have turned many of the favelas into no-go areas for police stockpiling heavy-calibre weapons, some of which can even be used to penetrate armoured vehicles or down aircraft.
The head of Rio's security secretariat, Jose Mariano Beltrame, said it was believed a big ".38- or .50-caliber" automatic gun brought down the police helicopter on Saturday, though tests were being carried out to verify that.
Nine similarly fearsome weapons have already been seized this year in slum raids.
"The firepower of Rio's drug dealers is frightening," Dilson Ferreira Anaide, head of Rio state's military officers' association, told AFP.
"The bandits now have weapons capable of shooting down small planes; that's really serious. This is the first time, in Rio and in Brazil, that they've brought down a helicopter," he said.
Brazil's long, largely unpatrolled borders meant it was relatively easy for the gangs to procure arms and drugs, he explained.
Prison was also proving to be no deterrent to organised criminals. Many are controlled, at least in part, by gangs that ensure lines of communication between incarcerated chiefs and their underlings.
The turf war that started the weekend violence in Rio was believed to have been ignited by a drug kingpin being held in a maximum-security facility in southern Brazil who tried to take over a rival gang's territory, according to police sources cited in media reports.
The situation has long been known, but increasing international scrutiny, brought on by Brazil's hosting of the football World Cup in five years and then the Olympics two years later, is making authorities uncomfortable.
The weekend violence in Rio "is terrible for the image of a city that is to welcome the World Cup in 2014 and the Olympics in 2016," Ferreira Anaide acknowledged. - AFP/de
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