The first sign something wasn't quite normal came almost a day earlier, on Wednesday afternoon. I was showing a new volunteer, Oliver, around the base of Rocinha during our lunch break when, during our ascent back to the crèche, we noticed all the guns blatantly on display.
During my previous ten days, I became used to the sight of machine-guns and pistols -- even one bazooka! -- around all the drug lord hangouts at the base, and along the main throughway. But I'd never seen guns up in the alleyways around the crèche and volunteer house. The walk up that afternoon was unnerving: we saw one guy sharing a drink with his gang, a large rifle slung across his back; another, sitting on the step just in front of the entrance to the crèche, with an AK-17 across his lap; and the two gentlemen with pistols, surveying the rest of Rocinha from the alleyway just before the gate to the volunteer house.
Since we had about fifteen minutes before we had to be at the crèche for the afternoon session, we went inside the volunteer house and hoped that the drug gangs would just go away. I was on the roof when the fireworks started. I'd learned earlier in my stay in Rocinha that fireworks are used to signal danger and the like to other members of the drug gang within the favela. This didn't exactly dial down the anxiety since the explosions sounded like gunfire.
When we got back to the crèche, we heard from the ladies there (Oliver speaks semi-fluent Portuguese) that the rumours flying around the favela had the drug lords preparing for a police raid sometime that night, or early the next morning. Given all the pre-warning, I suppose the money that the drug lords use to bribe elements of the police is well spent.
The residents of Rocinha were all preparing for the raid. Parents were picking up the kids early from the crèche. Stores were closing and boarding up. After finishing up my work for the day, I dashed down to the base because I wanted to send off a quick e-mail, and found that the Internet café -- a place that I had always found open, even into the wee hours of the morning -- was closed and shuttered. That was my cue to hightail back up to the volunteer house and shut myself up for the night, passing by gang members with AK-47s guarding quite a few of the landings on my way up.
The night turned out to be anti-climactic. There were a few fireworks shot into the air -- a burst every hour or so -- but nothing else. I whiled away the time by reading and working on a few of the photos I'd taken around Rocinha, going to sleep around 11:30pm.
I woke up to fireworks, helicopters bladed whirring overhead, and a burst or two of machine-gun fire. My watch said 6:00am. It was barely light in the sky.
After jumping out of my bunk-bed and looking out the window, I could see two helicopters buzzing the rooftops. I found also found Paulo -- the son of one of the UMPMRS directors and who also lived in the house -- in our front common room, checking out the situation in the sky. He said one word to me: "Police". Then he went back into his room and went back to sleep.
I snapped this picture of one of the Policia Civil helicopters from my bedroom window. I would have had a better vantage point from atop the roof, but I wasn't bloody well about to go up there during a police raid.
The helicopters flew out of Rocinha air space after about an hour-and-a-half, without doing much of anything except flying around. During a police raid five weeks ago, I'd heard that the copters fired into the favela for about three hours, targeting suspected drug lord locations.
Once the helicopters left, everything seemed quiet. Since it was around 8:00am, I got dressed and made preparations to see if anything needed to be done at the crèche. That's when I saw an entire platoon of heavily-armed Policia Civil officers marching up the alleyway past the front gate.
Yeah, I didn't make it out to the crèche.
A Policia Civil trooper (Not my picture, but the police running up and down past my house looked, and were armed, a lot like this guy. I didn't see any lit cigars though.)
I found out later that this particular raid was a relatively quiet one -- more cosmetic and aimed to calm the more affluent population of Rio more than anything else. Apart from the burst of gunfire I'd heard that morning, I didn't hear any further gun play. The drug gangs stayed hidden; the police did not engage, despite sending hundreds of officers into Rocinha.
I stayed in all morning, finally seeing some officers marching back down the alleyway around 11:00am. The previously-ubiquitous music in my area of the favela started blaring around 12:00pm. I ventured out of the house around 1:00pm.
Things were quiet, with a lot of the smaller markets and shops still closed, but there was already a significant amount of people out and about around the base of Rocinha. The Internet café was already back up and running.
Things were already getting back to normal.
Related Entries:
1. Rocinha
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