DRUG TRADE IN BRAZIL GETS A DOSE OF IDEOLOGY

RIO DE JANEIRO - Every evening at 6, a chant echoes through the
cellblocks of Bangu I, the city's largest maximum-security prison. It
is the voice of the drug trade and its largest syndicate, the Red Command.

"Comando Vermelho!" the convicted "vapor men" and "mules" yell in
Portuguese. "For justice and freedom! To the streets now!"

In this city's favelas, or slums, the soldiers of the drug trade call
themselves "the movement." That term, like the chant inside Bangu I,
hints at the quasi-political ideas now circulating among the Red
Command and the city's other dominant drug syndicates, the Third
Command and the Friends of Friends.

The syndicates have as many as 10,000 armed men in Rio, according to
official estimates. In the city's impoverished northern neighborhoods
and hillside slums, they are a "parallel power" that metes out street
justice. Outside the slums, their small armies have brought a new,
frightening spectacle of violence, including repeated fire bombings of
city buses.

"We are facing a change in the nature of crime in Rio de Janeiro,"
said Luiz Eduardo Soares, Brazil's secretary of public security. The
drug gangs, he says, are trying to intimidate the city's elected
leaders with "terrorist methods" and actions that carry "a savage
political dimension."

This city's influential Jornal do Brasil newspaper calls the
ever-escalating conflict between the drug gangs and police "A Guerra
do Rio" ("The War of Rio").

That phrase runs in a banner over a string of stories detailing gun
battles on the highways that connect Rio to its international airport,
raids on public landmarks and forced closures of schools under threat
of attack.

Police officials and analysts here agree that one man more than any
other is behind the growth and increasing sophistication of Rio's
crime syndicates: Luiz Fernando da Costa, known by the nickname
"Fernandinho Beira Mar" (Freddy Seashore). He has fashioned the Red
Command into a well-funded, if loosely organized, alliance akin to the
infamous Medellin and Cali cartels of Colombia.

Da Costa began his career as a street-corner drug dealer in Rio, then
traveled to Paraguay and Colombia, where he became a wholesaler
supplying drugs and weapons to the Rio crime bosses, officials say. In
Colombia, he was arrested while hiding out with FARC guerrillas,
according to police reports.

"He brought a more systematic vision of the business and the power
game to Rio," said Rubem Cesar Fernandes, president of Viva Rio, an
anti-violence group. Da Costa and the other leaders of the Red Command
are "older, better prepared and have stronger links to the
international and national markets" than their predecessors.

After being arrested in Colombia in 2001 and extradited to Brazil, Da
Costa cemented his control of Rio's drug trade in a prison uprising on
Sept. 11, 2002, when his "soldiers" killed four rival drug leaders
inside Bangu I. Similar actions have followed as the authorities try
to stem Da Costa's influence by moving him from one penitentiary to
another.

"It's a matter of sheer power," Fernandes said.

"They are telling the government, 'We are the ones running the city,
not you. And if you put pressure on us, we are going to terrorize
the city.' "

Parallel to the Sept. 11 prison uprising - the chosen date, Fernandes
said, was likely not a coincidence - the young musclemen of the Red
Command forced merchants in several Rio neighborhoods to join a
"strike" in support of Da Costa and other imprisoned gang leaders.

Gang members also distributed a manifesto that portrayed the Red
Command as Robin Hood, the champion of the poor.

"The people can see that the real delinquents are not in the slums,
nor behind bars; they are in the highest level of politics," read one
flier. "Among all the inmates of this country is there one who had
committed a crime as heinous as killing a nation with poverty and hunger?"

Few Rio residents say they accept such statements at face value. In
the city's favelas, the drug dealers rule by fear. They run a parallel
economy with an elaborate division of labor, in which even children
are recruited to play a role in the sale and distribution of cocaine
and other drugs.

The children become "airplanes" who deliver drug buyers to the drug
vendors, called vapor men, says Geraldo Tadeu Moreira, a professor at
the State University of Rio de Janeiro who has studied the drug
economy. The couriers who keep the entire operation supplied are
called mules, with each cog in the system earning a small cut of the
drug profits.

Step out of line, or work against the system, and you run the risk of
being killed by one of the "soldiers," young men who usually work for
a salary of $1,000 per month, almost 10 times the wage of a typical
laborer.

"They impose order through force," Moreira said. An accused rapist
might be executed in an eye-for-an-eye style justice that is brutal
and swift. A man will be forced to pay a debt to his neighbor under
penalty of death.

"There is no right to a defense, no due process, no right to an
appeal," he said.

Moreira blames the growth of the crime syndicates on several
factors.

In the 1970s, Brazil's dictators tossed political prisoners and drug
dealers into the same facility; from this volatile mix of crime and
politics the Red Command was born. And after democracy was restored,
Rio's new civilian leaders adopted a hands-off approach to crime in
the favelas.

"There was a time when certain sociologists told us the people in the
favelas should have self-determination," said Marcelo Itagiba,
undersecretary of public security for Rio state. "They told us that
the state should not intervene there."

Now many of the favelas enjoy de facto autonomy. Just getting
crime-scene investigators to the body of a crime victim in certain Rio
neighborhoods can require an elaborate police operation. And taking on
the drug gangs on their own turf is both tricky and dangerous, Itagiba
said.

"I can't go in and start shooting," Itagiba said. "I have to find a
way to get in with minimum damage. The terrain here is not flat, like
Los Angeles. The criminals hold the higher ground. There is always the
danger of an ambush."

Complicating matters is the heavy weaponry now in the hands of the
drug gangs, Itagiba said, including AR-15 and Kalashnikov automatic
rifles.

In April, the Rio newspaper O Globo reported that Brazilian federal
investigators had uncovered a ring led by two Argentine army officers
that was smuggling submachine guns and grenades to this city's drug
gangs via Paraguay.

Da Costa, now the city's most notorious criminal, first rose to
prominence as an arms supplier, but he has left his biggest mark on
Rio since his arrest and imprisonment.

Officials say he ran the Red Command operation first by cell phone -
aided by prison guards paid off with hefty bribes. When the government
started jamming the cell phone signals, he switched to radios.

Last year, the rising tide of violence helped sabotage the political
fortunes of Benedita da Silva, who lost her bid to be reelected Rio de
Janeiro state governor last year. The new governor, Rosinha Matheus,
has appointed her husband, Anthony Garotinho (himself a former
governor), as head of security in the state.

In February, at the height of this city's Carnaval season, the drug
gangs ordered shops in the fashionable Ipanema district and other
neighborhoods to close. Members of the Red Command lifted a banner
across Avenida Brasil near downtown that read: "Human rights for Bangu
I - Or the war continues."

When Rio officials pressured the federal government into transferring
Da Costa to Sao Paulo, the drug boss issued a frightening threat:
"Starting now, this city will become an inferno."

In May, after an attack on the landmark Hotel Gloria and an evening of
gun battles that forced the closure of two major highways, Garotinho
admitted: "The situation in Rio is out of control.

"To deny that is to deny reality," he said. "Everyone needs to realize
the gravity of the situation."