The scene is impressive, but it is still relatively common in some neighborhoods of the city of Rio de Janeiro: empty public buses crossed in the middle of the street in barricade mode, blocking traffic. It is the strategy that some armed criminals use to interrupt police operations and prevent agents from accessing the neighborhoods they control. This week, 14 buses have already been attacked, although there were no hostages or injuries. Neither arrested. In the background, the war for territorial control between organized crime groups.
On Wednesday, around noon, a group of armed men ordered nine buses to stop on the Itanhangá highway, which like so many other places in Rio is a kind of invisible wall: on one side, an exclusive golf course and luxury developments ; on the other, the Rio das Pedras favela, one of the most dangerous in the city and famous for being the cradle of the militia, the paramilitary movement that in recent years has rapidly expanded its dominions in the city.
The perpetrators of the hijacking of the vehicles, about whom little is known at the moment, ordered passengers and drivers at gunpoint to abandon them and kept the keys. The objective, to close the way to an operation by Bope, the feared Special Operations Battalion of the Military Police. Traffic was blocked for two hours until the buses could be removed.
“When the Bope enters, they carry out this type of retaliation, which generally indicates that the police approached a strategic objective,” Lieutenant Colonel Claudia Moraes, spokesperson for the Military Police, told the Globonews network. “When there is a reaction of that magnitude it is because they are trying to protect something,” he added. A similar incident was recorded on Thursday, with five other buses transformed into barriers: two again on the Itanhangá highway and another three in various points in the northern part of the city, dozens of kilometers away.
The companies that manage Rio’s public buses claim that so far this year, at least 97 buses have been attacked in this way, to be converted into barricades, another eight have been set on fire and some 1,760 vandalized. The damages exceed 22 million reais (almost four million dollars).
The main explanation behind the image of the barricaded buses is the battle for territorial control. The parallel power of organized crime already dominates 18% of the metropolitan region of Rio (almost 500 square kilometers between several cities), according to data from the New Illegalisms Group of the Fluminense Federal University (UFF). For decades there has been an open war between groups dedicated to drug trafficking (with the powerful Red Command as the clear protagonist) and the so-called militias, mafias formed by former agents of the security forces, famous for extorting neighbors in exchange for theoretical protection. against other criminals.
In this territorial war, the police are a stone guest and limit themselves to providing hot towels. The Military Police reported that the operation that took over this week’s first bus seizure (with nine vehicles) was intended to prevent the Red Command (CV) from taking control of Rio das Pedras, until now an impregnable bastion of the mafias. paramilitaries. Last year, the CV was the armed group that managed to spread its tentacles the most throughout the city. Given that eradicating organized crime from the territories it controls seems like an impossible mission, the police are now doing damage containment, trying, as in this case, to avoid peaks of instability and bloodbaths between rival groups. “Urban disorder is the rule in Rio de Janeiro, we cannot deny that,” the Secretary of Public Security of the Government of Rio, Victor Santos, said these days in a laconic tone.
Although Rio de Janeiro is not among the most dangerous states in Brazil, the region is experiencing a security crisis that ended up affecting the electoral campaign of the municipal elections, the first round of which was held on the 6th. The mayor, the centrist Eduardo Paes, re-elected with a large majority, accused Governor Cláudio Castro (Bolsonaro’s ally) of total incompetence, given that he is the one who has powers in matters of security.
The truth is that in recent years, the number of homicides and deaths caused by police has fallen significantly in the State of Rio, but other crimes that have a great impact on the perception of security (such as street robberies) have grown substantially. . Episodes like those with the barricades, with dozens of passengers having to get out of their bus at gunpoint, do not help to dispel the idea that, as the security official himself said, in Rio, chaos is the rule.