Brazil: Lula deploys troops to ports and airports in organised crime crackdown

Thousands of troops have taken up position in the ports and airports of Rio and São Paulo and along Brazil’s western border as part of efforts to “asphyxiate” organized crime amid an upsurge in bloodshed and violence, Report informs via the Guardian.

The military intervention – ordered last Friday by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva – will last until next May and is reportedly designed to cut off the drug and gun smuggling routes on which trafficking and mafia groups depend.

In recent months those heavily armed factions – which have spent decades consolidating their control over huge sweeps of Rio – have spent even more time in Brazilian headlines than usual thanks to a series of dramatic and deadly attacks.

Late last month, paramilitary gangs known as “milícias” (militias) brought much of west Rio to a standstill, setting fire to dozens of buses and a train in order to stop one of the city’s most wanted mafia bosses being arrested. In early October, three doctors were shot dead outside a five-star beach hotel after assassins seemingly confused one of the group with a crime boss they wanted to kill.

Separately, there was a public outcry over drone images released by police that showed rifle-toting drug traffickers holding guerrilla-style training sessions in the Complexo da Maré, a sprawl of favelas near Rio’s international airport.

This week’s deployment will see 600 members of the air force sent to that airport and Guarulhos international airport in São Paulo.

More than 1,000 members of the navy will operate in the container ports of Rio and Itaguaí in Rio state and Santos in São Paulo state from which Brazilian prosecutors say huge quantities of South American cocaine are shipped to Europe each month.

Two thousand army troops, meanwhile, will step up their activities along Brazil’s western borders with Paraguay and Bolivia, across which much of the marijuana, cocaine and weaponry that illegally enters Brazil flows.

Announcing the military operation last week, Lula said the federal government was determined to help Brazil “free itself from organized crime, gangs, drug trafficking and gun trafficking”. “The violence we have been witnessing, has been worsening day after day,” Lula told reporters.