Rio Carnival security increased
www.theage.com.au Monday 3 March 2003, 08:05AM
Officials in Rio have promised to keep tens of thousands of police and soldiers on the streets to safeguard partygoers, performers and tourists enjoying Carnival from any replay of the violence that wracked Rio last week.
Thousands of extravagantly costumed people filled Brazil's famous Sambadrome, whirling to a frenetic samba beat under the summer sun, while military police patrolled the streets in an unprecedented show of security during Rio's world-famous party week.
"These patrols will be kept in place as long as necessary," Rio state Governor Rosinha Matheus said, warning that they would shoot anyone trying to reignite last week's gang violence.
"The drug traffickers are facing the police and risking death. If that's what they want, that's what they'll get. There will be armed conflict, and if someone has to die, so be it," she said in an interview published in the Jornal do Brasil's Sunday edition.
The security deployment is the biggest show of force Rio de Janeiro has seen since it hosted the Earth Summit in 1992, when 150 heads of state and government converged on the UN meeting.
President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva on Thursday gave the green light to send in 3000 army troops to try to ensure safe streets for the week of frenzied parties, which was being minded by 38,000 police officers.
Earlier in the week, gangs torched some 30 buses, threw homemade bombs at storefronts and forced several businesses and schools to close. Authorities said it was a coordinated bid to get a drug baron freed from a prison outside Rio, and a protest over prison conditions.
"The bandits were unsatisfied by the ending of privileges in prisons," Matheus said.
Near the Sambadrome, in downtown Rio, another kind of tension was palpable today -- the nerves of performers preparing for the final annual showdown. Over two nights, some 50,000 performers from 14 samba schools will parade before 65,000 spectators.
Parade themes this year include theatre, soccer, pirates and the history of blacks in Brazil. One group has taken on a particularly challenging theme -- organ donation.
Performers are strictly judged in 10 categories, including costumes, rhythm, and originality. A ripped costume, a loose sandal, the blocked wheel of a carriage -- even the smallest detail can cost a coveted victory in the samba showdown.
Leaders were holding last minute rehearsals and helpers were putting the finishing touches on the heavy headdresses of scantily clad models, dancers and actresses hoping to dominate the limelight.
Matheus urged participants and partygoers to forget fear and revel in the festivities.
"They wanted to shut down all business during the week. They didn't achieve that," she said of the instigators of last week's violence.
Asked if she was afraid, the governor replied: "Afraid? Me, no. Anyone could be attacked. If we are prisoners to fear, no one would do anything."