So You Think Your City's Got Crime?

By NANCY GIBBS

If honor is to be found among thieves, "Kavera" is a young man of some principle. "We only attack men," says the mugger, 22. "Never Brazilians, never old people and women." It is after midnight in Rio de Janeiro, and his gang of street thieves is eyeing potential targets. "Women yell too much and become hysterical," Kavera explains, "and old people can suffer heart attacks, and we don't want to kill anybody." He is willing to make exceptions, though. The last man he killed was a beggar who was trying to rape a three-year-old homeless girl. "Luiz poured gasoline on him," says Kavera, pointing to a 16-year-old friend, "and I lit the match."

These are busy times for Rio's thieves, at whose hands the lusty Brazilian city is suffering a public relations disaster. As the tourism season reaches its peak with the pre-Lenten Mardi Gras festival, the number of crimes committed against foreigners has risen so high that officials have predicted the most lawless Carnival in 25 years. Many tour operators are dropping Rio from their itineraries, and group sales from the U.S. could be down as much as 60% compared with 1988. Hotels that used to be 90% occupied at Carnival time are now only half full.

It is hard to sell fun in the sun with statistics this grim: homicides in Rio jumped from 2,200 in 1987 to more than 2,800 last year; an average of 100 cars were stolen every day; in just 24 hours ten people were shot through the head. Armed robbers even began holding up funeral services and processions in Rio's cemeteries, and last Christmas several churches scheduled their midnight Masses several hours early to reduce the risk of robberies. The city's largest electronics company temporarily stopped delivering goods because its trucks had been robbed so often.

A single gang like Kavera's claims to hit as many as 30 tourists a day during the peak season, when the sidewalks and beaches are plump with prey. Kavera happily recalls the cameras lying on towels, the bags left unattended. "Tourists can be so stupid," he muses. In January, 26 guests, including Americans, Danes, Austrians and Spaniards, went on a hunger strike at a Copacabana hotel to protest the management's refusal to reimburse them for valuables stolen from 50 of the hotel's 94 safes. "There is no question that crime in Rio, especially violent crime, is increasing," says a U.S. diplomat who has been investigating the issue for the past two years, "and we know that a lot of incidents are not being reported."

The reasons for the lawlessness are many, but the root cause is appalling poverty, rubbing raw against conspicuous wealth. The city is broken in half by a mountain range. The Zona Norte is dense, poor and desperately violent. The Zona Sul is laced with fancy apartments, fringed with world-class beaches, home to the rich and the tourists. In between, atop the granite peak of Corcovado, stands the symbol of Rio, a towering statue of Christ, his arms outstretched like a beleaguered mediator trying to keep two street fighters apart.

The north, called the Baixada Fluminense, is one of the most violent stretches of urban blight in the world. Its streets are besieged, its laws ignored, its people embattled and its children exploited. An annual inflation rate of 1,765% aggravates the huge gap between rich and poor. "Children learn to steal because they are hungry," says human rights lawyer Fernando Rodrigues. "If the problems of the distribution of wealth and the elimination of hunger are not solved, there is no way one can expect to reduce the violence in the streets."

At least six people are murdered in the north of Rio every day. If the killer is not a known criminal, he could be a policeman; local shopkeepers hire moonlighting cops to hunt down robbers or deadbeat customers. "Merchants will make up a list of people to be killed and give it to the death squads," says Rodrigues. "The official statistics don't include all the killings because people are afraid to report them, since they know that the police are part of the death squads." Many are afraid to go out at night.

Though most tourists will never see the Baixada, they will feel its effect -- for the fear of crime colors the character of the entire city. Women avoid wearing necklaces and earrings. Drivers run red lights at night, lest they be held up at gunpoint while stopped. Some cars are equipped with a hidden button that cuts off the gas line, so that a thief can travel only a few blocks before the engine stalls. In the absence of reliable police patrols, neighborhoods band together to hire private armed guards who demand identification from visitors. "There is more fear now than ever before," say sociology professor Luis Garcia de Sousa at the Pontifical Catholic University. "People live with this fear daily, so it has become part of their lives, their culture, like the climate here."

Police Chief Helio Saboya reckons that if his 12,000-member force were twice its size, he might be able to make a dent in the crime. But in a country grappling with a foreign debt of $112.4 billion, the budgets for local services are going nowhere but down. The policemen themselves, who know they are undervalued, lacking respect and easily corrupted, earn on average about $100 a month. "When you have a family and you're risking your life on the job, that's not much at all," says a young officer. His fellow patrolmen all have other jobs -- as mechanics or security guards or butchers. One source of extra income is shaking down the thieves: for a share of the plunder, the police will agree to look the other way.

Not only is there temptation to break the law; there is no incentive to enforce it. Policemen know killers may do little prison time. "When you arrest a person, they know who stuck them in jail," says a 29-year-old officer in Ipanema, "and when they get out, they'll come to get you. I have a wife and daughter, and I'm not going to let that happen to me or them."

Tourism officials like to point out that as bad as the crime wave is, it should not trouble foreign visitors if they avoid the worst neighborhoods. "The biggest problem with these reports is the false impression they leave," says Trajano Ribeiro, president of Rio's tourist agency. "When a report comes out saying 50 people were killed in a weekend, the image is that 50 people were gunned down on the beach."

Without a major public relations campaign to reverse the impression that Rio is the Wild West, the steady stream of foreign visitors is not likely to resume -- even though, according to Ribeiro, only about 1 in 100 tourists will be the victim of a crime. Last year, after 528 people were murdered in April alone, President Jose Sarney sought to compare Rio's plight favorably with another land's ten-year civil war. "It's not possible that they are killing more people in Rio than in the unfortunate, cruel and unjust civil war in Lebanon," said Sarney. Perhaps. But no one ever claimed Beirut was a Carnival.

With reporting by John Maier/Rio de Janeiro