Rio de Janeiro is a beautiful warning to the rest of Brazil

RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil’s sun-soaked metropolis, is bursting with foreign visitors. Their numbers rose to 2.1m in 2025, up by 45% compared with the previous year. To them, Rio is an exotic fantasy, all twinkling waters and hills covered in emerald jungle. They sip sweet caipirinhas or draught beer ordered from keg-carrying vendors hawking their wares up and down the sand. Women in bikinis glide by, hunky men peacock on the boardwalk and selfies are taken against the backdrop of peach-tinged sunsets. Tourists love to visit Rio. But how well do they really know it?

Consider the latest political news from Brazil’s second-largest city (after São Paulo). The Supreme Court will soon rule on whether the governor of the state of Rio will be elected by popular vote or chosen by local legislators. That is because the previous governor, Claudio Castro, was barred from office for eight years last month for illegally using public money to boost his electoral campaign in 2022. The head of the local assembly, Rodrigo Bacellar, is also in jail awaiting trial for suspected links to drug-traffickers (he denies any).

All of Rio’s elected governors in the 21st century have been jailed or impeached on charges related to corruption. True, violence is less of a problem now than it was in the 1990s. But it still costs the state of Rio around $2bn a year, or 1% of local GDP, according to the National Trade Confederation, a large union. One anti-establishment politician hoping to run in this year’s presidential election has even pledged to separate the city from the rest of Brazil. Welcome to the other Rio de Janeiro: an urban jungle thick with the tendrils of crime and corruption.

The city boasts the famous beaches of Ipanema and Copacabana, as well as Leblon, Brazil’s most expensive postcode. Known as the south zone, this area is home to just 650,000 people. But situated beyond the hills are the areas where most of the metropolitan area’s 12m inhabitants reside. They are home to cramped favelas, working-class suburbs and the proud cariocas, as the city’s inhabitants are called, that politicians have failed. A tour through these neighbourhoods offers views of Rio’s other side.

Start with Maré in the north zone, which lies a few kilometres behind the coastline. It is a complex of 16 favelas filled with ramshackle houses built on top of each other like Jenga blocks. Over 140,000 people live in an area that is less than four square kilometres. On a Saturday morning the area is quiet—most residents sleep in after a baile funk, a throbbing local party, the night before. Stolen cars are strewn across the complex with their number-plates and windows ripped out. From the top of a hill the view is to Complexo de Alemão, another favela, where police killed over 130 people in a raid in October that targeted the Red Command (known as CV), Rio’s biggest gang. The bodies of the dead were left to rot in an adjacent forest, where their families had to pick them up. Such raids are popular, and often deployed by governors in need of a ratings boost. When asked whether residents of Maré fear the police or gangs more, Raimundo (not his real name), a local, responds, “Let’s just say we don’t prefer the police.”

To keep residents onside, the gangs provide swift justice and dole out gifts. Rapists and rogue criminals are punished with death. Lorries are robbed regularly and their contents distributed locally. Often that means alcohol, cooking gas or eggs, but “recently they were handing out electric scooters”, says Raimundo. Dona Maria José, a longtime resident, shrugs when asked about the gangs. “Every day there’s a scandal with our politicians,” she says. The traffickers “get their example from the top”.

And the top is as dirty as the sewage-filled stream that snakes around Maré. Mr Bacellar, for instance, was detained on March 27th on suspicion of obstructing an investigation into Thiego Raimundo dos Santos Silva, known as T.H. Jóias, a blinged-up local official who police say was an informant and a gun-runner for the CV. (Mr Bacellar denies wrongdoing.) Prosecutors claim that Mr Silva, who fled a police raid on his house, was tipped off by Mr Bacellar, who in turn learned of the raid from the judge in charge of the case. That judge is now himself imprisoned, by order of Brazil’s powerful Supreme Court.

Mr Silva is accused of laundering money in shops in Madureira, a bustling working-class neighbourhood in the heart of Rio’s north zone. (He calls the accusations “absurd” and denies them.) Most inhabitants are black, many descended from poor dwellers who were expelled from downtown Rio during an “urban cleansing” push in the 1920s. Rio’s most decorated samba school is here, the pride of the neighbourhood, freshly painted and guarded by a surly porter.

Less noticeable are pairs of chairs dotted on the corners of some streets, with a small table between them. They signal the presence of jogo do bicho, a popular illegal lottery. The bicheiros, or bookies, often finance samba schools and exercise political clout. In February police arrested Adilson Oliveira Coutinho Filho, a leading bicheiro and patron of one of Rio’s largest samba schools. He was being investigated on suspicion of ordering a rival’s murder and running a contraband cigarette business that employed workers in slave-like conditions in Paraguay—all of which he denies.

Over in the city’s west zone, the criminal underworld also rules. It was here in the 1990s that former policemen formed militias to murder traffickers and carry out contract killings for other criminals. The biggest bicheiros, for example, hire former policemen as bodyguards and hitmen. One particularly successful hitman was Adriano da Nóbrega, a former captain in the police’s elite force who went on to run a death squad. Militias now engage in trafficking and extortion, too, and their money is often laundered into local property. According to researchers at nearby Fluminense Federal University and a group of security-focused charities in Rio, around 1.7m people live under the control of militias, a similar number as those under the control of the CV (see map).

Local politicians long tolerated them. But then Nóbrega’s associates shot dead a local councilwoman, Marielle Franco, and her driver in August 2018 after she criticised illegal militia-linked property projects. The assassination shocked the nation and led to federal investigations. In February Brazil’s Supreme Court sentenced Chiquinho Brazão, a former federal congressman, and his brother Domingos, who was a member of Rio’s audit court, to over 76 years in prison for ordering the killing. The state’s former police chief was also jailed, for accepting money to derail probes into the brothers.

Ms Franco’s killer, Ronnie Lessa, was a sniper and arms dealer. But he had powerful friends. His daughter dated a son of Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s former far-right president, for a time. Another of Mr Bolsonaro’s sons, Flávio, employed Nóbrega’s wife and mother to work for him when he was a local legislator. Nóbrega was killed in a shoot-out in 2020. But dealings with him and his family remain under scrutiny, especially now that Flávio has become a leading contender in the presidential race in October. (He says he was unaware that Nóbrega’s relatives were on his payroll.)

Exasperated cariocas crave drastic measures to halt Rio’s decline. “We need federal intervention here,” says Wellerson Milani, a local. “How are you going to have a clean election when half the city is controlled by criminal groups?” On April 14th Brazil’s Senate heard his concerns. A Senate committee probing organised crime in the country is mulling recommendations, including one that would call for federal action in Rio to clean up “the systemic infiltration” of crime in public institutions. Brazilians are hoping that Rio’s mess does not become theirs, too. ■