Feature: Rio battles gangs for Carnival

www.upi.com By Bradley Brooks UPI Business Correspondent From the Business & Economics Desk Published 2/28/2003 4:09 PM

RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil, Feb. 28 (UPI) -- Drug gangs have incinerated 55 city buses since Monday, detonated a small bomb on the famed Ipanema beach, strafed businesses with bullets, and generally terrorized this city in the days just before Carnival.

One might expect this to have a devastating effect on this city's ability to bring in the 500,000 tourists it is hoping to attract to the everything-goes festival for which it is best known.

But despite making international headlines for what amounts to a full-scale war between the drug gangs and police, Carnival 2003 looks like it will be as packed as ever, with no hotel vacancies in sight.

"We've always had violence and we've always had Carnival, and it hasn't stopped tourists before," said Margareth Belsito, who runs a tourism agency in Copacabana and oversees the rental of 98 apartments -- all booked this year.

"We were more worried about what a war with Iraq would do to tourism."

Despite the confidence that the show will go on, Brazil's federal government sent 3,000 army and navy troops to patrol the streets of Rio de Janeiro, which they began doing at mid-day Friday.

The troops will remain in the city until at least Wednesday, once Carnival is complete.

The citizens of Rio de Janeiro "cannot remain hostages of organized crime," President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said Thursday in announcing that he was sending in the troops.

About 10 people have been killed in the shootouts between the gangs and police this week. The drug gangs often force businesses in the city to shut down for the day, as a show of force to the government.

Businesses that don't comply with the order are at times riddled with bullets, as a few supermarkets have been this week.

Belsito pointed out that historically the drug gangs, which control the favelas -- or, slums -- in this city of six million have allowed Carnival to proceed without interruption.

In fact, the drug lords have been known to be quite benevolent when it comes to financially supporting the various samba schools, whose garrulous costumes and floats are the highlight of the events.

But, many fear, this year may be different.

The recent violence in Rio has largely been sparked by the decision to transfer the city's most notorious drug lord from a prison in Rio de Janeiro to one in neighboring Sao Paulo state, where he cannot communicate with his lieutenants.

Luiz Fernando da Costa, the leader of the Red Command gang who is better known as Fernandinho Beira-Mar, or Seaside Freddie, was moved because officials had gotten word that he was set to order a series of attacks to be carried out during Carnival.

"We're going to take all these traffickers out of Rio, those who have participated in this wave of attacks," Josias Quintal, secretary of public security for Rio de Janeiro, said of the incarcerated drug lords. "We're going to send them far away."

For their part, business leaders in Rio de Janeiro -- who lost about $15 million in commerce this past Monday when they were forced to shut their doors by the traffickers -- want to see the police occupy the slums where the drug gangs are based.

Leaders of the biggest business groups are also planning to unveil in the week following Carnival a plan that combines police action with social advances for the slums, all in the hopes of diminishing the pull the drug gangs have in employing impoverished youth.

Bill Hinchberger, the editor of BrazilMax, a Web site aimed at the gringo audience in Brazil, said he hadn't heard of anyone not coming to Carnival because of the violence.

"People abroad are following this, especially since the violence is happing on the eve of Carnival," he said.

Which is, most likely, the reason it is having little effect on the crescendo of Rio's tourism season, he said.

"Once somebody has bought their ticket -- the cheapest is $700 -- they've made hotel reservations, they've bought a ticket to the parade, they've invested a lot of money in this already," Hinchberger said.

"To go and cancel the thing is going to be a big decision for them. I'm sure there are cases of people doing that. But I don't think there is a rush to cancel trips."

Rio de Janeiro's state-run tourism office, Riotur -- which, certainly, has every reason to paint the best picture it can of Carnival -- said everything is going as planned for the event.

"There are very few hotel vacancies, Rio is full," said a representative with the state-run travel agency Riotur who asked that her name not be used. "Tourists aren't us anything about the violence, they only ask about Carnival."

Josephine Smith, a 21-year-old tourist from Sweden who spent the previous six months in Bolivia, said she was concerned about the violence.

"For the first time in my life, I've decided to take an organized tour," she said. "I know a lot of people in Sweden who are going to Asia rather than South America, as it's too dangerous."