Is Rio de Janeiro living in a state of civil war? Can the violence breaking out in its slums be compared to conflicts in Chechnya and the Sudan? Is the city on the edge of an abysm because of drug trafficking?
The discussion, which seems useless to me, returned once again because of the publication on Oct. 12 in the British newspaper “The Independent” the story “The city of cocaine and carnage.” The story provoked emotional reactions and a letter of protest from the governor of Rio addressed to the British government.
The discussion seems useless to me because, independent of the exaggerations that the story told, in its essence it was correct: the problem of violence in cities such as Rio, So Paulo and Belo Horizonte is very serious because they are the biggest in the richest part of the country.
The facts narrated daily by newspapers show how these cities are in conflict, mainly in their poorest areas dominated by the gangs that fight among themselves and confront police forces as equals.
What worries me most is not reality, which is known, described in the story in “The Independent,” but another question: are journalists in Rio who are on the front lines of the coverage of this “war” able to perform their duties safely and independently?
After the killing of reporter Tim Lopes of the Globo TV network in June 2002, it became much more difficult to enter the slums. This means that we are not furnishing readers information collected on location and that today we have practically only one source for the news, the police.
We live in a conflict: we either take risks to guarantee the right for readers to have access to information and the right of residents in the occupied neighborhoods to tell about their version of events, or we deprive them of these rights in the name of safety, which is legitimate but anguishing.
This matter, which I mentioned in the column “Our war in the media” on April 18, returns with a vengeance for one reason: the sequence of risky episodes lived by reporters in Rio in recent weeks, mainly by those at the daily newspaper “O Dia.”
There were various cases. I will recount two. On Oct. 6, a team at the newspaper was detained in the headquarters of the residents’ association in the Dique slum by drug traffickers armed with guns. The journalists were trying to hear from victims about the war between the two gangs that are fighting for control of the Vigrio Geral slum. The team’s driver was obliged to take a trafficker who had been shot to a hospital, while a reporter and photographer were held as hostages. They were freed only when the car returned.
But the most revealing case of contradictions that journalists and news organizations are living today in Rio occurred on Monday, Sept. 27. A team from “O Dia,” designated to do a story about Core (Special Resources Coordinator), an elite group of police, was invited to ride in a helicopter. When it was flying over Providence hilltop in the city center, the aircraft was attacked by traffickers. One of the police retaliated with gunshots, and the police commander who accompanied the team asked for reinforcements. Police invaded the hilltop, capturing various residents, and killed two alleged traffickers.
A team from “O Dia” that was in the attacked helicopter ran a serious risk when the correct thing would have been to be taken out of the location. But being there allowed photographer Carlos Moraes to record something important red-handed before anybody realized what had happened. In the newsroom, examining the photos that Moraes had taken blindly by poking one arm outside the helicopter, journalists realized that the two dead men were the same ones who moments before had given themselves up and were lying on the ground. Therefore, they had been shot by police after being subdued.
The story, initially intended to show a positive side of the police, ended up being the basis for a formal complaint against the police: “Officers accused of execution” was one of the headlines the next day. Because of this, six police were dismissed, including the commander of the Core group who was in the helicopter with the journalists. This case proves the importance of the presence of the press in conflicted areas. But the risk, as we saw, is immense. What should be done?
The dangerous situation for journalists is not exclusive to Rio or police coverage. In an article published Oct. 2 in another British paper, “Financial Times,” Professor Rob Brown analyzed the difficulties of journalists in exposing crime in countries such as India, Colombia (“have been for a long time the most lethal countries for those who wish to work as a journalist due to the apparently unsolvable affliction of drug trafficking”) and Zimbabwe. And it cited Tim Lopes in Brazil.
Brown said that “journalists in developing countries have to be heroes to report about their societies.”
We don’t need heroes, only reporters who can witness and write about what they see.
Rio and Baghdad
Srgio Costa, editor in chief at “O Dia,” said: “I don’t believe it is possible to perform good journalism in Rio by turning your back on the poor neighborhoods where these is no presence of the government and the domination by crime is evident. After the episode in the helicopter, our teams in the streets became targets for taunts and insinuations by police, such as: ‘Would it be worth it to die for a story?’ It is a form of intimidation. Telephone threats to the newsroom also became constant.
“What do we do? Besides lending full support to the pair of journalists, we got in touch with the chief of police, lvaro Lins. The responsibility for any incident became well defined for the head of security in Rio de Janeiro state.
“Dealing with the facts, we combined a series of security procedures that were already in effect since the death of Tim Lopes that we should adopt more vigorously. Nobody is prohibited from entering the slums, but the need to enter an area of conflict is evaluated on a case-by-case basis, and good sense should always prevail. The supreme decision of journalists in the street should be supported by managers in the newsroom.”
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Srgo Dvila is a correspondent for Folha in California and covered the war in Iraq through the fall of Baghdad: “For the journalist’s safety, the basic difference between coverage of a war and violent situation such as is lived today in Rio is that in a war the attacks are constant and effective. Thus, it is logical that journalists run more risks in a war. To be numerical: in the 20 main days of the conflict in Iraq, between March 20, 2003 (the start) and April 9, 2003 (the fall of Baghdad), of the150,000 soldiers from the coalition involved in combat, fewer than 500 died (or 0.3%); of the nearly 1,000 journalists who participated in the coverage those days, 16 died (or nearly 2%). Proportionally, it is seven times more.
“I believe that the situation in Rio can be compared, but on a smaller scale, with what journalists are experiencing in Baghdad today. Reporters have become a declared target, for kidnappings as much as for killing, which makes their work enormously more difficult. There is a famous e-mail circulating on the Internet now, by a correspondent for “The Wall Street Journal” in Baghdad, in which she says that she and her colleagues spent one entire day sitting in the lobby of a hotel waiting for authorities to arrive to give a press conference that day. Going out in the streets to get exclusive and independent information became impossible.”
Translation by John Wright
