Rio De Janeiro:
A police crackdown on drug violence intensified as security forces pushed deeper inside the slums of Rio de Janeiro early Sunday in an effort to boost security ahead of the 2016 Olympic Games.
The 2,600 police and military personnel swarming into the Alemao, a complex of shantytowns that are home to Rio de Janeiro's most violent gang members, "seized territory in hours and will now search every single house and corner," said Mario Sergio Duarte, a Military Police Commander at Complexo do Alemao.
The raid happened after Rio's authorities urged the hundreds of traffickers hiding inside Alemao to "surrender with arms in the air by sunset on Friday."
When traffickers refused to surrender, more than fifteen armored vehicles blocked some 80 entrance points and prohibited residents from returning to their homes hours before the incursions began.
Large quantities of drugs, ammunitions and arms have been apprehended this morning and police have more than "100 arrest warrants for Alemao", according to military police.
"So far, police have encountered less resistance inside the hills than we expected," a spokesman from the Special Police Operations Battalion (Bope) said Sunday morning. After dominating the highest and most strategic hill at Alemao, police remain vigilant while looking for criminals that might be hiding inside homes of innocent civilians and expecting confrontations to escalate at any moment now.
For decades, a lack of day to day police presence in Rio's slums allowed gangs to control territories with heavy weapons and drug trafficking. The last Alemao raid killed 19 only two weeks before the 2007 Pan American Games.