The war on Rio's gangs | Hotspots

it is a battle between the government and the gangs I tell you every day this year more than five people have been killed it's bonkers I'd never been to Rio before it's famous through time because of this sort of almost as as glamorous feel about it looks absolutely amazing Rio is a really cool place you know it's everything that you imagine it's gonna be it's beautiful you have that iconic curved Beach [Music] the people are very warm very friendly there's just a real relaxed very chilled out kind of kind of vibe especially along and on the beaches all you need to do is sort of look up and around you and you see some of the more famous landmarks that Rios known for its football its people on the beaches and then partying evening it's an amazing atmosphere there and really sensation to look at really quite amazingly beautiful and at the same time like bang up against all these beautiful apartments and hotels literally next door and these huge favelas which are extreme poverty extremely violent and dangerous places if you wander into them even as you're driving in from the airport you're passing favelas you cannot miss the poverty as soon as you arrive it is absolutely everywhere so you have this huge glamour but also it's surrounded by people who are living in abject poverty [Music] and huge numbers of them right now there are over a thousand favelas in Rio de Janeiro from a distance the favelas look quite beautiful they're climbing up the hillside and visually they're really quite something to look at when you approach them though it becomes very clear that you're entering a very very different world indeed it's barricades down every Street yeah why they don't so the police cars can't get inside there they're favela it's not like you can just arrived at a favela and go inside can't just openly filming [Music] got a contact they are closed areas really nobody from the outside is welcome unless you have somebody with you who's from there so you can't just wander in to a favela what's happening in which what you do okay we had an excellent guide with us a young man who runs a project for kids in the favela and he showed us around because when with a guide it's fine everyone knows him if we haven't cleared it we wouldn't have got two steps I showed us little spots where you could see graffiti on the walls and art and so you got a sense of identity within that ravenna you're walking through very narrow alleyways and life is going on all around you as you're doing this life is just rustling it's loud it's noisy but there is a very dark undertone to the informal organization of the favelas it's a completely unique environment another dimensional motion [Music] right at the moment wrote some of the most expensive apartment blocks in Rio and yet across the highway the start of the most violent favela they deal an awful lot of cocaine out of that favela and that cocaine is bought by the people living in the rich apartments across the road the fighting between the gangs and the police there is almost continuous these are massive firefights a shooting incident in Rio is full-on warfare for sometimes days at a time you wouldn't imagine that in a city like Rio de Janeiro that you would see scenes which are basically like a frontline warzone equivalent to anything I've ever been involved in equivalent to anything I've ever witnessed in any of the hostile environments we've worked on around the world it is much nearer to being in a war zone than it is to being in a what you would expect a gangland fight with the police once you were in those neighborhoods you could very well have been in the alleyways of Mosul or Raqqa we're talking a little skirmish we're talking seven or eight hours of proper and fighting with heavy weapons and this is happening around neighborhoods where people are getting on with their daily life but the police claim they're using the force to defend themselves the problem being of course is that those bullets are going somewhere every day this year more than five people have been killed in Rio State by the police most of those killings happen here in the favelas that's five or six people per day killed by the police innocent people are getting caught up in the crossfire you get the impression that within those favelas life is cheap and it's happening a few hundred meters from a beach where rich people are enjoying their holiday to highlight that we thought footage of a police helicopter circling a favela and this is where you know families live in very very dense proximity to each other and this police helicopter was pouring automatic fire down onto the favela it's bonkers Rio is huge and as you might expect traffic can be absolutely terrible everyone uses driving apps but there's a difference here they use one that tells you where there's fighting taking place shootings between the police and the gangs in Portuguese it's OTT but it's it translates as where's the shooting sat-nav here tells you where not to go so you'll get caught up in a nasty it not how to get somewhere quickly but how to get there alive I mean it's best difficult to get your head round but this is a red brick you know it had various colors showing you know various parts that were active and there will be at least one to maybe half a dozen maybe a dozen shootings at that point in time he was a little bit surprised that we hadn't even heard of it before because surely you don't drive around a city without having things to tell you where the latest shooting is taking place it is a battle between the government and the gangs with the police as a sort of proxy in the middle to carry out the government's about we've been trying to make contact with the drug factions can we go in no we've done gangs in all sorts of different countries you need to find somebody who has links to them and we did find a guy and he had to go into a period of negotiation with the game that he knew well you have to do a lot of conferencing that it is in their interest to talk to you to tell you about why it is that they're doing what they're doing it was about trust they had to see us they had to actually have a sense of who we were it was only a meet and greet you can watch what we do but you can't film it absolutely no cameras don't even think about it if we've done anything to take pictures where they said we couldn't it was made absolutely clear they were just killing us on the spot they kill for Outsiders on a regular basis who have come into the favela who shouldn't have they only wanted to meet at night because it's safest for them and so we we pulled up into this first area and it was actually an item er of one of their birthday parties they were absolutely high on drugs and alcohol and it was pretty scary cuz everyone's got a machine gun this is serious these guys aren't messing around the next day there was a police raid one member of the gang was killed we only found this out while going to meet them for a second time and I became very concerned at that moment we're all a little concerned that these guys might put two and two together and come up with five and think that we might have had something to do with it what happens if they say Vega arrived and then we had a raid hit us we sat down and we had long to chat a talk about it at a sort of cafe we wanted to make sure that they weren't in any way blaming us for the situation if we didn't go back in then they really would start thinking I have to say I still have my doubts oh I wasn't 100% sure on that whole different atmosphere when we got back the second time we were actually looking at a proper business proper gang we spent hours with him we could not film a frame honestly I could have shot a movie there it was incredible everywhere you looked the whole time I was standing there having my diplomatic beer with these guys and I was just thinking please let me shoot this please let me shoot it was just incredible but the consequences of doing something like that could end up in your death it was it was crazy one car pulled up and they opened the back door and I'm stacked on the back of it was cocaine which took up basically the whole backseat was about this high piles of it I've never seen anything like it after a couple of days of building a bit of relationship the drug gang agreed to speak to us on camera this is the first time we've been allowed some freely outside in the favela there's been a police raid here over the last few days and there's another one going on right now so it's it's pretty dangerous area always nervous you're nervous that the police could come in and there's a huge firefight you're nervous of then they might suddenly change on you there's no way to write me you have no idea where you are and you couldn't get out just couldn't get out we were told to go and wake down an alleyway we didn't know what to expect they're coming this way an old master and now old up I mean really tooled up I tell you they were in serious business mode when they came to meet us to talk on camera there was no messing around they look menacing and it's all the more menacing because you know these guys are the real deal I mean getting into gun fights with the police killing people it's something they do on a daily basis how many are in the group whether I say Amish it's really very serious business right a big business scene they need to make money what is your main business within okay you know they join a gang because it's a legitimate business you wrote a guy whose balaclava up carrying a machine gun who clearly would kill with impunity and yet he's making a point that actually it's just business it just happens to be a business that we find in in normal society unacceptable where in their society it's completely acceptable these guys were properly tooled up not just some old ak-47 really sophisticated machine gun the quality of their weaponry I mean it was up there it would have been some of the world's Special Forces would have been happy to have some of this kit there's no denying that these guys were a step up from your your average gangster there were much nearer to being a militia than it was to being with a crime gang whatever we perceive the crime gang to be they saw it almost as if they were soldiers if the police come in and try and affect their business or try and disrupt their way of life within the favela they believe they have every right to defend themselves they're the business they're the main guys and-and-and that came across in spades we realized actually here that the money man's the guy the accountant who runs the books for the drug deals so we get into the back of the car not quite sure what to expect I got and then have the most frank candid conversation with this guy it's your job made worse by the police perfectly open about how he conducts business the amount of money they bring in the scale of the operation he was bragging about anything he was just telling us what he does for a living and how it works and so you're in his car in the favela we can hear firing taking place because there's a ray just taking place up the road but they're totally relaxed and then they pulled out this massive wad of money and that was like two days takings he was meticulous the notes were wrapped in elastic bands they had very detailed notes on collection date collection times how much money he was a proper accountant you expect them all to be sort of bloodthirsty killers but actually they're not it's just actually a business and as he said all the societies involved they were perfectly happy to talk we were in their house yeah and they and know that they're the government's we wanted to visit a school that was caught in the crossfire between two rival drug gangs and also with police operations [Music] it's right in the boundary between two crime gangs and it's also on the main route that the police take to come in and attack the day was the first day that the school has been open for the last three days because of fighting here we can't film anywhere but in this little alleyway at the end of that we've already passed gunman there's more that way and there are more that way this school is an oasis in the middle of a war zone we were in there and we were interviewing the headmistress is an absolute firecracker she just gets out her phone that's just the audio from from here he starts playing me the sound that they had recorded on our phone okay so that's what I wrote that's the war yes 15:30 record but to go over all days the teachers also also took pictures of their kids lying on the ground scared while the firing was going on just outside the window with their hands over their ears who just can't cope with that level of violence and they're just little kids we knew that this wasn't a one-off when we saw on the roof of the school mr. sighn on the television spaces the school don't shoot and that's for the police helicopters when they're doing the operations I mean incredible you can't imagine what that must be like for a 5 6 7 8 9 14 50 it would be terrifying for me never mind a child who is in school amongst all of this adventure that we were having there is also the tragedy that was very clear to us when we met andria a lovely woman who had tragically lost her husband he was actually a brazilian jujitsu instructor who helped local kids get off the street and give them some structure in their lives he was at this favela as they volunteered to help kids find a different path outside of violence she had arranged to do the interview with us at the club where her husband had taught jiu-jitsu to the kids it was the first time she'd been back to the gym since her husband had been killed she walked in and the reaction from the kids in the other instructors was really really heart-rending it English special the kids out and then greeted her and was very very emotional for her my son does exactly the same sport and I could see my boy in in the same environment and then he suddenly realized where you are and how dangerous it all is I felt really choked up at the time they volunteer to working with us a raid took place it was sort of hiding from the bullets and the police came over and shot and he was killed outright he was on his way to class we often don't realize that in Brazil does a terrible racist issue and that her husband was killed because he fit the criteria of somebody who would possibly be a gang member she wasn't full of hate or anything like that she was still a kind compassionate woman and then at the end of the interview she pulls up a shirt shows where she's been shot almost casually you know oh yeah I I've been shot as well hard line policies are really mostly supported by people who are not affected by them behind the current push against the favela gangs as brazil's newly elected president the government's saying that they're going to eradicate crime in the favelas job Olsen ro the president he's just hardcore right-wing the problem is is that a huge sections of the country don't like this we had only been in Brazil a day or two and there was a huge demonstration on the streets and we first turned up I would say well this is just like a party we felt we were sort of more part of just say a carnival Brazil so I mean everything's an exclusive party isn't it there's still you know great music there was still a lot food going around the place there was still a lot of dancing [Music] marceia our Brazilian producer said guys you're being lured into a whole sense of security it will turn nasty an extreme far-left element where they're definitely intending to provoke a reaction from the police Richie's tried to get the best pictures and trying to get right amongst it and then we're trying to keep up with him and there's always an element of chaos I see these guys and I think I'll go and get a shot of them they start to put hands in front of the cameras and then try and head a little bit so I backed off because I did not want to be the cause of a situation happening suddenly the more anarchist side of the protest group launched fireworks directly over the police not just your average firework Lipset it's the sort of incendiary device decided to move forward it was going to happen this last bombs going off left right center just trying to figure out teamworks really important in a situation like this because I'm obviously concentrated on the pictures and it's very easy to get tunnel vision and not see what's happening around you everybody's we're having to watch everybody's back because the threat can come from anywhere and it's people like Dominique and Marcia who actually keep her safe in those situations it's already a war zone it's difficult to see how it could get any worse it's very easy to see these gangs as extreme criminals which is something that they are there's no denying that [Music] these are people who are the marginalized of society there may be a policy to try and eradicate the gangs but it's very difficult to see how that can be done when they are absolutely part of society and poverty is everywhere so they are there and probably there to stay [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Sky News

Views: 1,993,550

Keywords: Jair Bolsonaro, Stuart Ramsay, hotspots, rio, drugs, cocaine, gangs, guns, police, crackdown, favelas, innocent, cross fire, president, government, sky news, frontline

Id: ow7veSBzWfY

Length: 22min 57sec (1377 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 23 2019