The surge comes to Rio’s favelas
Tom Streithorst
Rio's Dona Marta favela has benefitted from a greater police presence
House prices in the Dona Marta favela overlooking Botafogo beach in Rio de Janiero have quadrupled in the past year. Part of the reason is Brazil’s booming economy, probably more is President Lula’s policy of Bolsa Familia (providing a cash safety net of cash to the poorest Brazilians) but mostly it is because Dona Marta was the first in a pilot programme to take back the favelas from the drug dealers.
For years, drug lords have ruled Rio’s hillside favelas. Large swaths of the city were free from government control. The police might stage a raid from time to time, but after a bit of bang bang, they would retreat back to their secure police stations, leaving the favelas to the gangs. It seemed the natural order of things, inevitable unchangeable. Perhaps the police could control the asphalt below, but the gangs would always rule the hillsides.
That seems to be changing. A year ago, the State Police of Rio de Janiero had a new idea. Instead of showy and ineffective raids, now they grab some land in the middle of a favela, use it to establish a police station and staff it with rookie police officers just out of the academy—officers new to the force and thus not implicated in its culture of corruption. Today, the police regularly patrol these favelas, both day and night. Consequently, crime has gone down and house prices have gone up.
If this strategy sounds familiar it is because it is pretty much what General Petraeus did in Iraq in 2007. For the first few years after the invasion, the US army would stage raids, use its massive firepower to kill or capture “bad guys”, and then go home to sleep on their large and secure bases. Petraeus’s insight was that control of an area required “boots on the ground”, that a raid followed by withdrawal did nothing but confirm the insurgents’ day-to-day domination of the neighbourhood.
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