Surfing in wartime

Most Thursday afternoons, I walk the mile from my apartment to Botafogo to the cute little music studio that I rent for practice. It's a nice walk through a bustling, peaceful neighborhood full of little shops and sidewalk vendors. When I'm done I walk back home, past all "my" sidewalk vendors: the popcorn man, the woman who sells candies, the guy with the wheelbarrow full of fruit, the woman selling the home-made clothes. I walk past the newstand, the juice bar, the tiny police booth.

This Thursday, though, I decided to take a little break from practicing and go to my friend Katrina's surf camp for a couple days. It is in southern Rio, in the beach neighborhood of Recreio. She'd told me which three buses could get me there from central Rio: the 175, the 179, or the S-20. So I packed up my stuff and headed out to the big avenue where all the buses run. Brazilian bus drivers regard all bus stops as highly optional, and so I sat for over an hour trying to flag down one of the elusive S-20s, which kept cleverly zipping by in the third lane over. I was almost lulled into a daze by Rio's magnificent, endless fleets of buses, which endlessly rumbled by, in clumps of four and five, like small herds of elephants. I missed two 175's and stupidly let a perfectly catchable, slow-moving 179 get past me too, but finally got the next S-20 and began the long rattly ride to the south.

While I'd been sitting there at the bus stop, waiting for the bus, traficantes (drug traffickers and their mercenary armies) pulled up in front of that little Botafogo police station a mile down the same street, and started an intense firefight, trying to kill the policeman in the tiny police booth. (He was shot in the arm but survived.) All the street vendors and pedestrians bolted in all directions. The woman who sells the sweets was caught right in the thick of the firefight. She threw herself on top of her 6-year-old son. She was shot several times in the back and died almost immediately, but her body slowed the bullets enough so that only one bullet hit the kid, and it did not kill him. Another street vendor grabbed the wounded child and hauled him out of there, while he was crying "My mom fainted! Please don't let her die!" He is in the hospital now, still asking for his mother, and still has not been told that his mother is dead.

(If I had been following my usual Thursday routine, I would have been walking exactly there at about that time. But instead, all I saw were some police cars with lights flashing, as my S-20 bus speeded past Botafogo on its way south.)

Earlier that morning, to the north, 20 armed traficantes stopped a bus at random on the Avenida Brasil highway, where I travel by bus several time a week to the great samba escola Mocidade. It was a bus from Rio to Sao Paulo, full of sleepy travelers who had spent Christmas in Rio with their families and were headed back home to Sao Paulo. (I've taken that bus in the other direction, from Sao Paulo to Rio.) The traficantes threw gasoline inside and set it on fire. The bus exploded in flames almost instantly. Passengers flung themselves from the windows, but many were burned badly, including a professional model who was burned over 40% of her body and whose face is now completely destroyed. Seven people were not quick enough. A couple who had fallen asleep next to each other; a few people who could not get their windows open. They were "carbonized", as the newspapers say here. It looks like, judging from the horrible pictures I just saw, they just had time to crawl out of their seats and into the aisle.

Similar attacks were occurring all over the city. Five other police stations were attacked. Ten other buses were burned, though on most of the others the traficantes allowed the passengers to disembark first, since the attacks were, in theory, primarily targeted at the police. It was all a "protest" by the Red Command, an Mafia-like organized network of the gangs of traficantes that control most of the city slums. They are angry about the recent trend of "militias" that have recently been expelling the traficantes by force from many favelas. The militias are informal assemblages of angry citizens and off-duty policemen, and they have appeared in over 80 favelas (Rio's hillside slums) to date, mostly in the last few years.

The Red Command does not like the militias, and wished to send a message to the new state administration, which takes office on January 1st.

Several of the Rio newspapers just listed huge numbers on the front page today:

18-32-7-11-8-6

which stood for:
18 dead (most of them policemen)
32 wounded (actually, now it's 40)
7 burned alive
11 buses burned (now 13, if I've counted right)
8 cars burned
6 police stations attacked with grenades, bombs and gunfire.

This is actually still minor in comparison to the 998 dead in Sao Paulo earlier this year in another police-traficantes war, also instigated by the Red Command. The Red Command seems now to have swung their attention to Rio.

The major wave of attacks seems to be over, but small-scale attacks are still happening. Another bus was burned today in Nilopolis (where I was last week to see Beija-Flor); there was another firefight in Duque de Caxias (where I go every week to see Grande Rio); another bus burned in Cantagalo, right between Copacabana and Ipanema (where I go several times a week). Most of Rio's 48 bus companies shut down this morning. Without any announcements about it - the buses simply vanished off the streets, like frightened animals. They are slowly reappearing now.

The military police are now occupying 23 favelas, including every favela near Copacabana and Ipanema (Rocinha, Vidigal, etc.), and also many more distant ones such as the "City of God" (the favela made famous from the movie of the same name). Though this may sound like an improvement, the police are widely considered to be not much better than the traficantes. They have a reputation of corruption, viciousness, brutality and greed. They always have the right to shoot to kill here in Rio, and they use it liberally. Any police occupation of a favela usually leads to a miserable cycle of further violence and counter-retaliations.

The new governer, who does not actual take control till January 1st, insists that Rio's traditional massive New Year's party will go on as planned. He is considering calling in the Brazilian Army to help patrol the Copacanaba and Ipanema New Year's parties. Actually, the traficantes traditionally target police stations, buses, banks, and cars on the major highways - but not tourists per se. Small blessing, but it's something.

There was a similar war in 2002 when the traficantes tried to take over the entire city. Nana, my German friend, told me about how, in 2002, her bus to the Mocidade escola drove straight through a firefight. Bullets went right through her window, just missing her. Yet she continued taking the bus to Mocidade.

As for me... I had no idea any of this was happening, and neither did the bus driver on my S-20 bus. We rattled our way south, yesterday afternoon. I didn't know exactly where I was going, and I showed my little page of scrawled directions to the woman sitting next to me, the ticket taker, and the bus driver, all of whom studied it with intense interest for several minutes. Later they very carefully deposited me at the correct bus stop, and the bus driver carefully performed an elaborate and very helpful pantomime about where exactly I should walk next, accompanied by a chorus from the other participants, in Portuguese, of "the bus has to TURN HERE... but YOU... keep WALKING STRAIGHT.... ONE MORE BLOCK.... then you TURN RIGHT!" They were so kind and helpful. As Brazilians generally are. I walked where they'd said, found Katrina's lovely hostel, and spent all day bodyboarding in the beautiful Recreio beach, and all day today surfing. Then today I bought some newspapers.

It's strange, learning Portuguese. First I learn the simple words and phrases, like "jump" and "window" and "next to" and "many" and "throw" and "two", from Portuguese textbooks that have harmless sentences like:

"The cat JUMPED onto the table."
"Please open the WINDOW, Mr. Jones."
"The book is NEXT TO the pencil."
"There were MANY people at the movie theater."
"THROW me the ball!"
"I would like to buy TWO ice creams."

Then I run across the same words in the news, in these eyewitness statements (from O Globo and O Dia):


Quem nao PULOU pela JANELA foi engolido pelo fogo.
- "Whoever didn't JUMP out of the WINDOW was swallowed by fire."

Me arrastei ate um canteiro e fiquei duas horas esperando ajuda, AO LADO DE pessaos ensanguentadas e queimadas.
- "I dragged myself to a garden and waited two hours for help, NEXT TO bloody and burned people."

Nao havia como nos alcancar porque eram MUITOS tiros.
- "There was no way to reach us because there were MANY gunshots."

Ela gritou para o filho se abaixar e SE JOGOU sobre ele, para tentar protege-lo.
- "She screamed for her son to get down, and THREW HERSELF on him, to try to protect him."

Ela ainda suspirou DUAS vezes e morreu.
- "She just breathed TWO times and died."