If honor is to be found among thieves, "Kavera" is a young man of some principle. "We only attack men," says the mugger, 22. "Never Brazilians, never old people and women." It is after midnight in Rio de Janeiro, and his gang of street thieves is eyeing potential targets. "Women yell too much and become hysterical," Kavera explains, "and old people can suffer heart attacks, and we don't want to kill anybody." He is willing to make exceptions, though. The last man he killed was a beggar who was trying to rape a three-year-old homeless girl. "Luiz poured gasoline on him," says Kavera, pointing to a 16-year-old friend, "and I lit the match."
These are busy times for Rio's thieves, at whose hands the lusty Brazilian city is suffering a public relations disaster. As the tourism season reaches its peak with the pre-Lenten Mardi Gras festival, the number of crimes committed against foreigners has risen so high that officials have predicted the most lawless Carnival in 25 years. Many tour operators are dropping Rio from their itineraries, and group sales from the U.S. could be down as much as 60% compared with 1988. Hotels that used to be 90% occupied at Carnival time are now only half full.
It is hard to sell fun in the sun with statistics this grim: homicides in Rio jumped from 2,200 in 1987 to more than 2,800 last year; an average of 100 cars were stolen every day; in just 24 hours ten people were shot through the head. Armed robbers even began holding up funeral services and processions in Rio's cemeteries, and last Christmas several churches scheduled their midnight Masses several hours early to reduce the risk of robberies. The city's largest electronics company temporarily stopped delivering goods because its trucks had been robbed so often.
A single gang like Kavera's claims to hit as many as 30 tourists a day during the peak season, when the sidewalks and beaches are plump with prey. Kavera happily recalls the cameras lying on towels, the bags left unattended. "Tourists can be so stupid," he muses. In January, 26 guests, including Americans, Danes, Austrians and Spaniards, went on a hunger strike at a Copacabana hotel to protest the management's refusal to reimburse them for valuables stolen from 50 of the hotel's 94 safes. "There is no question that crime in Rio, especially violent crime, is increasing," says a U.S. diplomat who has been investigating the issue for the past two years, "and we know that a lot of incidents are not being reported."
The reasons for the lawlessness are many, but the root cause is appalling poverty, rubbing raw against conspicuous wealth. The city is broken in half by a mountain range. The Zona Norte is dense, poor and desperately violent. The Zona Sul is laced with fancy apartments, fringed with world-class beaches, home to the rich and the tourists. In between, atop the granite peak of Corcovado, stands the symbol of Rio, a towering statue of Christ, his arms outstretched like a beleaguered mediator trying to keep two street fighters apart.