11-Jan-2012 - In Parts of Brazil, Militias Operate Outside the Law

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“I rushed outside after hearing the shots,” said her son, Mike Chagas, 20, a college student. “No one should ever have the experience of seeing their own mother shot to death on their doorstep. “I knew immediately that she had been killed because of her work,” he said. Hours before she was gunned down, Judge Acioli had issued arrest warrants for three police officers accused of killing an unarmed 18-year-old man in a favela, or slum, part of a group of officers being investigated for forming an extermination squad. The same three men would later be arrested in connection with her murder, along with eight others in the police force. Their testimony in court here, describing in chilling detail how they tracked Judge Acioli and plotted for months to kill her, has revealed a disturbing aspect of Rio de Janeiro’s newly assertive security policies, a cornerstone of its efforts to secure the city before playing host to the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Summer Olympics. Officials have been lauded for reclaiming lawless areas from drug traffickers in various favelas across a sprawling metropolitan area with 11.8 million residents. But the image of a city on the mend has been undermined by the actions of its own security forces, particularly the spreading militias composed largely of active-duty and retired police officers, prison guards and soldiers. These groups function like a criminal offshoot of the state. According to judicial investigations, they extort protection money from residents, operate unlicensed public transportation, charge commissions on real estate deals, mete out punishment to those who cross them and, most alarming, carry out extrajudicial killings. Alba Zaluar, an anthropologist at State University of Rio de Janeiro who studies public security, sees the militias occupying a paramilitary role by going well beyond the line of lawful policing. Their power is expanding, according to research she oversees, with 45 percent of Rio’s favelas under the control of militias in 2010, up from 12 percent in 2005. “They’re invading, watching over, buying favelas from traffickers,” Ms. Zaluar said. While the militias have cheap NFL jerseys recently expanded with vigor, their sway in various parts of Rio, especially on the city’s western fringe, is not new. Originally called “polícia mineira,” a nod to the aggressive policing tactics in Minas Gerais, a state bordering Rio, militias have operated in Rio for three decades. A 2008 legislative investigation of Rio’s militias led to the arrests of several officials tied to the groups, including legislators, councilmen and senior police officers. The Rio militias, together with death squads formed by police in neighboring São Paulo, have been responsible for hundreds of murders each year and impunity in these cases remained the norm, according to a 2009 Human Rights Watch report. Rio officials, including Fábio Galvão, the state’s under secretary of intelligence, say they are well aware of the problem, contending that after militias grew in the middle of the last decade, so did the number of arrests of suspected militia members, from just 5 such arrests in 2006 to 250 in 2009 and 143 in 2010. But Mr. Galvão said that combating the problem was made more challenging by the growth of the militias and the ability of jailed militia leaders to coordinate activities NBA jerseys from behind bars. Mr. Galvão said that the big expansion of the militias occurred about six years ago, before high-profile episodes like the killing of Judge Acioli got media attention. “A monster was growing,” he said. “When they started to fight back, it was already a big business.” In recent months, signs have emerged that the militias are expanding beyond their bastion in Rio. A report in the newspaper O Globo described how militias had spread to 11 of Brazil’s 26 states, often initially winning over slum residents by killing drug traffickers before imposing their own methods of coercion and control. Mr. Galvão, the intelligence official, echoing scholars who study the militias, said that while homicides tended to decline in areas under militia control, other crimes, like beatings and rapes, often increased. The use of torture by militias was detailed in a harrowing account in 2011 by Nilton Claudino, a former photographer for a Rio newspaper who was discovered with a reporter by a militia group while they were on an undercover assignment in Jardim Batan, a Rio favela.

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