"Something is changing in Rio"

New Year's is over, and BOOM, suddenly everyone's focused on Carnaval. But there's something subtly different, something heavy in the air. I get little glimmers of it when I ask friends who have lived here for years what is going on in the escolas. I get evasive replies like "It's unstable right now" or "It's difficult." Or sometimes a flat "You have no idea. "I can't explain."

If you didn't know Rio at all, you wouldn't notice anything is wrong.

If you know Rio a little, you'd think "Gee, people seem to have brushed off that violence last week. It's all pretty much back to normal." - which is what I'd been thinking till today.

But if you know Rio very well, like the carioca friend that I talked with for three hours today, you think "Something is changing in Rio. Something bad is coming."

The question is: who controls the favelas? (the vast hillside ghettos and shantytowns of Rio.) Bicheiros, traficantes, militias? This is my picture of it now. I probably still don't understand it at all.

In the old days, it was the "bicheiros" - the guys who got rich off the "jogo de bicho" (animal game), a illegal street-corner lottery. (It got its name because was originally started by the owner of a small zoo and, ever after, used animal emblems instead of numbers.) The bicheiros, though illegal, were basically career businessmen, and they took care of their communities. They are the "local criminals" that you hear about who supported their local escolas financially. For example, Mocidade was funded for years and years by a loyal bicheiro; and Mocidade has struggled ever since that bicheiro died.

Next it was the traficantes - the drug traffickers. They were not always here; the traficante networks are only about 20 years old. The rise of the traficantes is the theme of the brilliant movie "Cidade de Deus". Watch it again and see how it traces the change in crime from petty street robberies in the 60's and 70's to massive, organized drug-running crime gangs in the 80's and 90's. The bicheiros slowly lost their power as the traficantes took over. (The "jogo de bicho" still exists, but is very small now.)

The traficantes did not usually explicitly support escolas the way the bicheiros had, and yet, somehow, a tradition arose in which the traficantes usually took care of their communities. They were in it for the long term, and the traficantes at the top became almost like career statesmen - governors of their favelas. They nurtured networks of middle-class customers from the richer communities outside the favelas. They were very protective of the favela itself, and kept it safe inside their territory boundaries. And, in turn, the community protected their local traficante. (I still remember the enormous crowds from Rocinha who attended the funeral of the top Rocinha traficante in 2005.)

The traficantes usually left the escolas alone, more or less. They didn't usually fund them very much, but neither did they threaten the escolas. And it was safe at the escolas. The career traficantes kept things stable.

My friend said "I'm not trying to say the traficantes are good. They are drug-runners and killers. But, they did keep things stable. I know a lot of them, and you have to understand, nobody wants to be a traficante; but they have NO choice. You cannot conceive of the life they are born into. They are born into this terrible world of favelas and traficantes and they don't even know there's anything else outside, and it's the only way they can get by. You cannot understand."

My friend spoke of having worked with a major traficante for several months recently. "He had a Nokia cell phone on one side of his belt and a hand grenade on the other side. He had this habit of waving the grenade around with one hand while he was talking, and at first I couldn't concentrate at all, with that grenade waving around! But after a while I just got used to it."

As more and more of the "elder statesmen" traficantes die or are taken in to prison, the traficantes have been getting younger and younger: "There are gangs of 17, 16, 15-year-olds now, running the drug trade: "They're kids. They don't understand anything. They don't take the long view. And they don't value anyone's life - because they don't value their own. They are just getting money for today. They don't care about the future; they know they have no future." As the favelas get more and more violent, the rich drug-users have become scared to go there. So the traficantes have started selling more to their own communities. And harder drugs; the drugs themselves have changed. Some favelas are now full of addicts; they didn't used to be.

And then we come to faction #3, the militias. This is the new player in town. The militias have really started taking over in the last four years. They are now in over 80 favelas in Rio. They are mostly former policemen, I am told now (not off-duty policemen, as I'd thought before). They move into a favela, kill or expel the traficantes, and then run a protection racket; they demand money from all local favela residents, and a percentage of business profits. You have to pay it, like it or not. Also, there is no drug use allowed at all. If you are caught using drugs by the militias, they will kill you.

The militias are the wild card, the unknown new element. Though I sort of admire their tough stance against the traficantes, their acknowledged brutality and their Mafia-like protection racket is more than a little creepy. And, what has happened now is that for the first time, the traficantes have a common enemy.

My friend said, "We in Rio, we have never seen the traficantes unite like this. Even the different faccoes [rival traficante networks] - like the Red Command and the Third Command, which have always been at war - they are banding together now. This is what feels scary. The traficantes are really up against the wall and they will fight a war if they have to, and the enemy that they are fighting is linked to the police, and linked to the state. So, they will attack the police, and they'll attack the state."

My overall impression is that, first, the sense of community is fragmenting in the favelas, and, second, what has until now been petty street crime is about to cross over into something else. Torching buses full of innocent civilians, as happened last week, and not even to steal something, but just to make a point, is not ordinary street crime. It's terrorism.

It is not as safe around the escolas now. There was just a firefight outside the quadra of Grande Rio; it used to be safe there. The last time I tried to go there with my friends Olivia & Tanit, we hit a sudden traffic jam and our driver swung rapidly off the highway onto an off-ramp before we got any closer; "It's an arrastao," said Olivia calmly - a roadblock of gangsters up ahead, attacking the stopped cars. Several people have told me of having seen guns inside the escola quadras. That didn't used to happen (or so I am told).

Tanit still plays in Grande Rio, but Olivia has made her promise to be very careful, and to not walk even a step outside the quadra.

I don't want idealize the Rio of a few years ago - because it was very violent and nasty then too. But I believe my friends when they tell me it is changing into something worse.

My friend said: "It is exactly like a cancer. A cancer that is killing someone who you love very much. This beautiful city that we love so much. And you try to help, try to act hopeful and cheerful and cheer the person up, the person who is dying of the cancer, try to help them and tell them it will all be all right. But you know, in your heart, that it is hopeless."