ROGER COHEN: War That Doesn’t Speak Its Name Rages in Brazil

RIO DE JANEIRO Brazil is not for beginners. That was a line of Antonio Carlos Jobim, the musician who was the father of the bossa nova movement, wrote "The Girl from Ipanema" and knew that the languorous sensuality of his country that he captured in that song was only one aspect of the story.

Another has been on lurid display of late with the killing of more than two dozen people, including seven incinerated on a bus, since violence led by drug gangs erupted in Rio on Dec. 28. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva marked the beginning of his second term this month by calling the slaughter "terrorism."

His choice of words upped the ante, but the stakes in Brazil's war that will not speak its name have been clear enough for some time. Official statistics put the number of killings in the state of Rio alone at 6,620 in 2004, 6,438 in 2005, and 5,232 in the first 10 months of last year. That's 18,290 violent deaths in less than three years.

You can look at this figure in several ways: as more than six times the number of American deaths in the Iraq war since 2003; as about half the estimated 36,000 people killed annually by firearms in all of Brazil; or as the consequence of combining extreme wealth and extreme poverty in a single poorly policed metropolitan area of 11 million people awash in cocaine and other drugs.

No, Brazil is not for beginners. It is not what it seems. There are wars and wars. This one can seem quite invisible.

On the beaches of Copacabana and Ipanema, the well-heeled try to banish growing anxiety about "insecurity." Grilled shrimp are sold on skewers and coconuts are cut open with clean sweeps of a knife and bright plastic beach balls glisten in the light.

The ocean beside which the wealthy bask is also visible from many of the 752 shantytowns, or favelas, that are Rio's ubiquitous urban stains. The water lures; it shimmers; it deceives. The reality in the slums is not of space and sunlight but of confined lives often broken before they have begun.

Think of this city as a child's picture book with jets landing and yachts passing and traffic sweeping along the waterfront and vegetation sprouting beneath bold outcrops of rock from which hang-gliders jump and loop toward the glittering bay. There's enough here to inspire any kid's wonder and vocabulary.

Or think of it, rather, as the picture book of globalization where high- rises and luxury shopping malls abut teeming hillside shanties where 9- year-old kids carry submachine guns, 11-year-old girls get pregnant and gangs control a multimillion-dollar drug trade that is the passport to status and name-brand clothes and coveted sneakers.

Rio tends to provoke awe and shame in equal measure. Things have been going wrong here for some time. The move of the capital to Brasília more than four decades ago left the city bereft of its core purpose. Poor migrants from the Northeast continued to pour in looking for work, but there was little of it. Often they found only a precarious perch on the hillsides. They had a view but no income.

Drugs filled the void. Gangs like "Comando Vermelho" (Red Commando) or "Terceiro Comando" (Third Commando) formed. They were businesses engaged in the lucrative trafficking of Colombian cocaine, but they were also purveyors of a powerful legend of the armed struggle of the poor and humble against the wealthy. A gun was one way to fight Brazil's skewed income distribution. Gang leaders gained mythic status.

Over more than 20 years the situation has festered. There is no shortage of reasons. Police officers with monthly salaries of less than $500 are easily corrupted. Politicians have also been bought. Prisons are overcrowded. Jail sentences tend to be short. Impunity is widespread. Inefficiency has been rampant, with authority and intelligence scattered between competing city, state and federal authorities.

As a result, Rio's loveliness has never been without its taint of blood. More than 18,000 violent deaths in less than three years are a lot. If the toll were in Baghdad, people would be talking about it. But the world's attention is a capricious thing.

Sérgio Cabral, the newly elected governor of the state of Rio de Janeiro, is determined to bring his attention to bear on the problem and change things. The recent spurt of violence has been interpreted as a warning to him. But he's still promising a Giuliani-like clampdown.

"Our public security apparatus has been contaminated," he says in an interview. "There's been political contamination, and promotions have not been merit based. We are determined to professionalize the police."

Cabral, a Sony laptop and a Diet Coke at his side, continues: "By contamination, I mean corruption. We are going to remove the corrupted, be severe with them. Those in uniform who use their arms to serve themselves rather than serve the public are on their way out."

Fighting words: Cabral seems resolute. He has already transferred a dozen of the most dangerous criminals from local prisons to a newly built facility in another state, where their influence and ability to communicate with gang leaders will be reduced. He's acted to integrate the city and state police in more effective way.

He's promising new roads into big slums like Rocinha, where more than 50,000 people live and the drug trade is worth over $1 million a month. He's embarking on an ambitious family- planning program in the slums, making condoms and the pill more readily available.

"We have a situation here where a woman in the shanties is having an average of five children and just down the road a woman in Leblon is having an average of two or less," Cabral says. "That's unacceptable."

So much here is. But the tropics are lulling. The sun shines, the bossa nova rhythms seduce, old patterns prove very hard to break. Jobim's girl comes walking and the blood gets forgotten again.