Deadly Attack Rattles Rio

RIO DE JANEIRO —  A deadly arson attack this week on a bus full of passengers has shocked residents of a city already accustomed to rampant crime and raised fears of a surge in violence on the cusp of the busy tourist season.

Five people were killed and several others hurt after a gang of suspected drug traffickers flagged down a bus, doused the interior and those aboard with gasoline and set everything ablaze. Among the dead were an infant and her mother, whose charred body was discovered atop her daughter, an apparent attempt to shield her baby from the flames.

Brazilian authorities say that Tuesday night’s attack was in retaliation to the recent police killing of an alleged drug runner from a nearby shantytown. Throughout the day, according to media reports, the local police station had been bombarded with phone calls from gang members vowing to wreak vengeance.

Cariocas, as residents of this popular travel destination are called, have become partially inured to the daily accounts of muggings, kidnappings and shootings that have marred Rio’s reputation as Brazil’s cidade maravilhosa, or “marvelous city” in Portuguese. But the brazenness and savagery of the arson attack, whose victims were innocent bystanders in the escalating conflict between drug traffickers and police, left many Cariocas shaken.

“Everything indicates that we are in a true civil war,” a reader named Luiz Marcondes wrote to the newspaper O Globo, in a letter published in Thursday’s editions. “When is it that government authorities ... will start to intervene?”

The assault on the bus occurred at the onset of high season for the tourism industry, one of Rio’s biggest sources of revenue. Officials are eager for nothing to alarm or dissuade visitors between now and the close of Rio’s famed Carnaval early in the new year. Authorities normally tighten security during this period, especially on the streets and beaches of the affluent South Zone, where well-known neighborhoods such as Copacabana and Ipanema are located.

The arson occurred in a poor district in the northern part of the city, wedged between several squalid hillside neighborhoods known as favelas. These precariously perched shantytowns, home to hundreds of thousands of people, have largely been abandoned by the state and are ruled by heavily armed drug kingpins.

In recent years, buses have become an increasingly favored target for drug traffickers and other criminals seeking to flaunt their defiance of authorities.

With a combined fleet of about 7,500 vehicles, Rio’s 48 private bus companies provide the primary means of transport for the vast majority of Cariocas. An estimated 1.4 million passengers, out of a total population of 6 million, ride the buses daily, according to Rio Onibus, an umbrella group representing most of the bus lines.

“We have 40,000 people who work on the city’s buses, and they’re all scared,” said Lelis Marcos Teixeira, the president of the association. “What outrages us most is that this was a chronicle of a death foretold. Why? Because there have already been 78 [assaults] this year.”

Teixeira blamed the state government, which is in charge of public safety, for failing to prioritize bus security as an urgent need. He said that bus company owners had asked officials to map out where and how attacks had occurred so that the firms could take action, but nothing had as yet been done.

The companies also have requested that, after any crackdown or raid on drug traffickers in the favelas, more police patrols be assigned to the area in the days that follow to prevent reprisal attacks on buses.

Survivors reported that the bus was flagged down by four teenage girls working in collusion with as many as a dozen young thugs who then mounted the assault. After the attackers set the bus ablaze, one passenger managed to pry open a back door, allowing terrified victims, some of them on fire, to escape. The thugs stood to one side, watching the bus burn and hurling rocks at the windows.

On Nov. 3, a woman was killed when suspected drug traffickers armed with assault rifles opened fire on the bus in which she was riding on the outskirts of the city. In February 2004, three police officers were killed when gunmen ambushed their bus.

The danger aboard Rio’s buses came to worldwide attention two years ago with the release of the documentary “Bus 174.” The film recounted the hijacking of a bus in 2000, a hostage drama that unfolded live on national television and ended in a botched police operation in which both the hijacker and one of his hostages died.