Counterinsurgency used against gangs of Brazil

Washington Post:

From the school balcony, Marcos Cunha had an unobstructed view of Santa Marta, the Rio de Janeiro neighborhood that had been giving his fellow police officers so much trouble.

Looming above him was the rocky peak that police once rappelled down to raid the shantytown. At eye level sat the bullet-pocked Church of the Nazarene, where drug dealers had fired at oncoming police on another day. And spread below him were the clustered shacks and tangled wires of this largely ungoverned place on a hillside of the city.

"They probably thought we were going to leave like usual," Cunha said from the school, which has become the headquarters of Rio's latest experiment in urban policing. "But this time we're staying."

The police have regularly launched large operations in Brazil's favelas, or slums, in their battle against drug gangs over the years, but authorities say the occupation of Santa Marta, a relatively small, contained neighborhood, is part of a new approach, a pilot project for the future of crime fighting in this violent city. Brazilian police officers are attempting counterinsurgency tactics similar to those used by U.S. soldiers in Iraq -- setting up small bases occupied around the clock inside violent neighborhoods, developing intelligence by living among their adversaries, and using government funds to rebuild broken areas and generate goodwill.

"Santa Marta is like a laboratory for policing a conflict area," said Antônio Roberto Cesário de Sá, a senior official in the office of the public security secretary of Rio de Janeiro. "The idea is to rescue a territory that until now has belonged to a drug-dealing gang."

But this approach -- heavy police presence during peacetime in a major city -- has drawn intense criticism from those who say it is an abuse of power and curtails residents' freedom. In this and similar operations in other favelas in Rio, police have banned motorcycle-taxis -- a vehicle often used for distributing drugs. Residents say police have broken in doors and roughed people up, shut down neighborhood dance parties, cut off illegal TV and Internet connections, and imposed de facto curfews.

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"In the other communities, we don't have the manpower to get into the area, expel the drug dealers and keep the police there," Sá said. "We need to increase the number of police officers. The population of Rio is too big, the favelas are growing too fast."

Sá estimated that Rio de Janeiro state, which now has 38,000 policemen, needs 10,000 new officers to effectively combat crime in the city and replicate the Santa Marta-style operation in other, larger favelas. But whether that is a model that deserves replication remains in dispute.

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Brazil has a classic force to space problem and this is one attempt to address it. If it is successful it will probably spread. Fighting a criminal insurgency is not that different from fighting the terrorist in the Middle East. I has long advocated counterinsurgency training for Mexican officials fighting their own criminal insurgency.