Police take shanty towns

RIO DE JANEIRO (AP):

More than 3,000 police and soldiers backed by armoured personnel carriers raced into Brazil's biggest slum before dawn yesterday, quickly gaining control of a shanty town ruled for decades by a heavily armed drug gang.

It was the most ambitious operation yet in an effort to increase security before Rio hosts the final matches of the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics.

Officials are counting on those events to signal Brazil's arrival as a global economic, political and cultural power.

"We're taking back this territory for the 100,000 citizens of Rocinha, people who have needed peace," said Sergio Cabral, governor of Rio de Janeiro state.

The action in Rocinha is part of a campaign to drive the drug gangs out of the city's slums, where the traffickers often rule unchallenged.

The city of Rio de Janeiro has more than 1,000 shanty towns where about one-third of its six million people live.

Gaining control

Authorities said it took just 90 minutes to seize control of Rocinha. Police simultaneously overran the neighbouring Vidigal slum, also previously dominated by the drug gang Friends of Friends.

Both slums sit between two of Rio's richest neighbourhoods, and Rocinha's ramshackle shacks climb a mountainside covered in Atlantic rain forest. Police methodically cleared alleys and streets on their way up steep, winding roads.

Huey helicopters continued to pound the air above, criss-crossing the hill and flying low over the jungle surrounding the slum, as police hunted down suspects who may have fled into the forest.

Residents peeked out their windows and stared as the massive armoured carriers blasted up streets. Rifle-toting officers from the BOPE police units, made famous by two 'Elite Squad' films, trained their weapons down narrow corridors.

Down a side alleyway, police discovered a house they said belonged to the Number Two gang leader, Sandro Luiz de Paula Amorim, known as 'Peixe,' who was captured by police a few days earlier as they circled Rocinha with roadblocks.

One resident applauded the police invasion. "Tell the world we're not all drug traffickers! We're working people and now they're coming to liberate us," a man yelled as police rolled by.