Category: World Service
Date: 11.11.2005
Printable version
Rio de Janeiro is probably best known as a Brazillian holiday destination offering everything from a world-famous carnival to the beaches of Copacabana. But the city also sees police shoot dead nearly a thousand people every year amid allegations of rogue officers operating 'death squads'.
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Reporter Angus Stickler visited Rio to find the truth behind the claims - focussing on the massacre of 29 people in the suburbs of the city last March.
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His disturbing report - Rio's Deadly Police - is part of the 91Èȱ¬ World Service Assignment series and is broadcast on 24 November.
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It reveals the horrors of a 'dirty war' - between Rio's military-style police and criminal gangs - in which ordinary people are caught in the cross-fire.
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The programme's producer, Andy Denwood, says: "The massacre victims were innocent people - gunned down apparently at random. According to the authorities, the perpetrators were off-duty policemen - although the men arrested have yet to be tried.
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"The terrible event evokes memories of the massacres of street children and others in Rio in 1993. Then, as now, public opinion at home and abroad was outraged.
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"Reporter Angus Stickler was tasked with digging deeper into the murky world of police death squads, to discover what lay behind the March massacre, and why the authorities in Rio seem powerless to halt the relentlessly rising tide of police killings, currently running at nearly 1,000 a year.
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"The authorities insist that the police merely shoot people who shoot at them - mainly members of the powerful drug cartels who control the Rio slums.
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"But police reformers are unconvinced. They speak of a 'curtain of silence' which prevents rogue police being properly investigated and punished.
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"Assignment's challenge was to find a policeman - or ex-policeman - who would break this silence to talk about the culture of crime and violence which taints Rio's police.
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"Intensive on-the-ground research led us to a small seaside café where we met ex-Rio cop, 'Gordino'.
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"His criminal exploits while still a serving policeman - as a dealer in both seized drugs and police weapons - would have seen him serving a long prison sentence in many countries. In Rio, he was finally been expelled from the police service.
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"'Gordino's' testimony supported the evidence of a recent survey of bodies in the Rio morgue, which suggested most of those killed by police had been shot repeatedly, often in the head, and at close range.
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"A former police ombudsman, Professor Julita Lemgruber, told Assignment that this suggested that perhaps 60 per cent of fatal police shootings in Rio were in fact summary executions, rather than the result of gun battles with drug gangs.
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"Rio's top detective - Chief Alvaro Lins - told Stickler that the March massacre had been intended as a brutal warning to reform-minded police of what would happen if they tried to dismantle police-operated protection rackets and death squads. The authorities insist they will not be intimidated, and that the guilty will be punished.
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"But Stickler found such claims rang hollow with the people of the Rio slums - the favelas. Of the many police tried for massacres back in 1993, only two now remained in custody, and they fear that the same will happen again."
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Angus Stickler added: "For me, the challenge of making this programme was trying to persuade police in Rio to talk about the culture of violence, and looking for first-hand evidence of the police death squads. There clearly are some police officers who are trying to tackle entrenched corruption, but what will stay with me longest will be the determination of ordinary people in the slums to achieve justice for the innocent victims of violence.
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"The levels of violence are truly shocking - and many people seem to accept it as a normal part of life. Politicians would look almost aghast when I suggested that an annual toll of 1,000 people shot dead by the police was an unacceptable level of violence.
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"The contrasts between rich and poor in Rio are as striking as any I've encountered. On the one hand you have the affluence of the city centre and the beach areas of the city - on the other the grinding poverty of the favelas, the slums. The two worlds exist within a few hundred metres of each other."
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Transmission details
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Assignment: Rio's Deadly Police - 24 November at 9.04am, 1.06pm and 7.06pm. Repeated on 26 November at 1.06pm.
(Times in GMT for Europe).
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