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The north, called the Baixada Fluminense, is one of the most violent stretches of urban blight in the world. Its streets are besieged, its laws ignored, its people embattled and its children exploited. An annual inflation rate of 1,765% aggravates the huge gap between rich and poor. "Children learn to steal because they are hungry," says human rights lawyer Fernando Rodrigues. "If the problems of the distribution of wealth and the elimination of hunger are not solved, there is no way one can expect to reduce the violence in the streets."
At least six people are murdered in the north of Rio every day. If the killer is not a known criminal, he could be a policeman; local shopkeepers hire moonlighting cops to hunt down robbers or deadbeat customers. "Merchants will make up a list of people to be killed and give it to the death squads," says Rodrigues. "The official statistics don't include all the killings because people are afraid to report them, since they know that the police are part of the death squads." Many are afraid to go out at night.
Though most tourists will never see the Baixada, they will feel its effect -- for the fear of crime colors the character of the entire city. Women avoid wearing necklaces and earrings. Drivers run red lights at night, lest they be held up at gunpoint while stopped. Some cars are equipped with a hidden button that cuts off the gas line, so that a thief can travel only a few blocks before the engine stalls. In the absence of reliable police patrols, neighborhoods band together to hire private armed guards who demand identification from visitors. "There is more fear now than ever before," say sociology professor Luis Garcia de Sousa at the Pontifical Catholic University. "People live with this fear daily, so it has become part of their lives, their culture, like the climate here."
Police Chief Helio Saboya reckons that if his 12,000-member force were twice its size, he might be able to make a dent in the crime. But in a country grappling with a foreign debt of $112.4 billion, the budgets for local services are going nowhere but down. The policemen themselves, who know they are undervalued, lacking respect and easily corrupted, earn on average about $100 a month. "When you have a family and you're risking your life on the job, that's not much at all," says a young officer. His fellow patrolmen all have other jobs -- as mechanics or security guards or butchers. One source of extra income is shaking down the thieves: for a share of the plunder, the police will agree to look the other way.
Not only is there temptation to break the law; there is no incentive to enforce it. Policemen know killers may do little prison time. "When you arrest a person, they know who stuck them in jail," says a 29-year-old officer in Ipanema, "and when they get out, they'll come to get you. I have a wife and daughter, and I'm not going to let that happen to me or them."
Tourism officials like to point out that as bad as the crime wave is, it should not trouble foreign visitors if they avoid the worst neighborhoods. "The biggest problem with these reports is the false impression they leave," says Trajano Ribeiro, president of Rio's tourist agency. "When a report comes out saying 50 people were killed in a weekend, the image is that 50 people were gunned down on the beach."