RIO'S DRUG WARS BEGIN TO TAKE TOLL ON TOURISM

RIO de JANEIRO - THE long-standing war between municipal authorities here
and the drug trafficking gangs that control many of the city's teeming
squatter slums has escalated to the point that tourist sites are affected.
Early this month, gunmen fired at the train station where visitors leave
for the statue of Christ atop Corcovado Mountain, one day after a bomb went
off just outside a luxury hotel in Copacabana.

Both incidents took place in predawn hours and no visitors or local
residents were injured, leading city officials to argue that the attacks
were intended not to disrupt tourism but to intimidate them into easing up
on their campaign to crush powerful criminal organizations. But threats
have also been made against Sugar Loaf, another tourist site, famous for
its spectacular views, and shopping malls, police stations and buses have
been attacked.

Gang leaders have issued statements saying that their offensive is a
reprisal for harsh conditions imposed on jailed drug lords and have
demanded to meet with the governor of Rio de Janeiro State, vowing to
intensify the state of public insecurity here until their demands are met.
The city government is urging calm, describing the incidents as isolated
and arguing that the risk has been exaggerated by a jittery media.

"This sort of thing can happen in any large city," said Rubem Medina, the
Secretary of Tourism for the city of Rio de Janeiro. "I've been mugged
myself in New York City right near Times Square."

Thanks largely to the wealth they have earned from drug trafficking over
the past 20 years, criminal groups, with names like the Red Command, now
physically control many of the city's principal favelas, or poor squatter
communities. They boast that they have become a "parallel power," and to
demonstrate their strength and the government's weakness, they periodically
force stores, banks, schools, offices and markets not to open for business.

"If these episodes continue at tourist attractions, the consequences could
be grave," Sergio Ricardo de Almeida, director of a newly formed Integrated
Committee for Tourist Security, said. "The proper precautions have been
taken, but since the government is combating the gangs with force, they are
also going to react with force."

Criminologists at universities here, along with other independent security
experts, say that the risk of violence is indeed likely to continue, in
tourist areas as well as others. For instance, two rival gangs in a pair of
hillside slums overlooking Copacabana and Ipanema are said to be fighting
over the lucrative drug trade in those neighborhoods.

The police delegate in charge of tourist security, Elizabeth Cayres, said
she was under orders not to talk to the news media about the situation. The
Secretary of Public Security of the state of Rio de Janeiro, Col. Josias
Quintal, did not respond to requests for an interview.

To counteract the growing threat, the police have announced a doubling of
the special battalion for tourist security, to 400 officers, and the
shifting of other units to "uninterrupted, round-the-clock patrols at main
hotels and tourist sites," Mr. Medina said. In addition, more money has
been set aside to equip, train and pay better salaries to police units
assigned to protect tourists.

Individual hotels, tourist attractions and shopping malls are also acting
on their own. After a grenade was thrown at the popular Rio Sul shopping
center in Botafogo and police assigned an additional patrol car to the
area, the mall management doubled its security force, the police said.

The bomb that went off outside the nearby Meridien Hotel, on April 2, at
the junction of two of the busiest streets in Copacabana, was described as
not very powerful, but it was enough to startle those who heard it. On
April 14, the historic Hotel Gloria, near downtown, was sprayed with
machine-gun fire by two carloads of men.

The attack on the Corcovado train station followed an incident in March in
which a well-known Brazilian actor and two American friends were reported
to have been robbed by six men with machine guns while on an access road
that leads to the statue. The exact location is in dispute, but the three
said they were robbed of money and cameras, according to local news media.

Conditions at Corcovado may also have been complicated by a new mechanized
transport system inaugurated in January. Intended to make access simpler,
it appears to have made the process more cumbersome and to have left the
estimated 1,800 daily visitors to the site more vulnerable.

In the past, visitors could drive to the summit and its sweeping views in a
private car, an option that was especially attractive to elderly and
disabled people. Now private cars are not allowed, and visitors who who
cannot afford taxis must wait for trains, which depart every half-hour, and
stand in line for an elevator to the summit; they no longer have the option
of arriving and leaving at times convenient to them.

Mr. Medina promised that some of those deficiencies will be corrected soon.
"By the end of the year, we will have two new parking lots near the top for
people to leave cars and will have buses to take them the rest of the way
to the summit," he said.