這是一篇紐約時報上報導里約熱內盧最近治安敗壞的文章，老實說我也一直擔心這件事，因為從新聞報導上看到最近已經有26人因為治安惡化而死亡，不過這篇文章則是用一個相當理性的口吻(冷靜到感覺不出記者任何的情緒，這大概是國內記者難以想像的吧)談到毒販利用各種事件想嚇走里約的觀光客，但卻無實際的作用，原因是觀光客去里約本來就知道這是一個人口600萬且治安不好的大都市，沒有人來是要享受安全平靜的都會生活，里約吸引觀光客的就是他那得天獨厚的自然美景與和海灘生活融為一體的大都會生活，所以這些搶案事件對里約的觀光其實影響不大。
而且不敢離開觀光區的人自然留在觀光區，照樣也是有觀光客跟當地人在郊區的bar喝酒，這讓我想起我在瓜地馬拉市或是哥斯大黎加San Jose的日子，當地的治安也是遭到不行，每個商家門口都有拿著衝鋒槍的保全看守著，也不時會聽到有朋友在路上被人持槍搶劫的事情，但我還是會在半夜去完bar之後一個人走在路上，搭車回旅館，很多人聽到都覺得不可思議，不過我想大概是因為我運氣好加上看起來像當地人，不像死Gringo一樣到處招搖。
看了這篇我稍微安心了，希望我的巴西之行一切平安，好好體驗烽火下的美景！
Ricardo Moraes/Reuters
Rio Dances Into New Year Despite Violence
Published: January 14, 2007
THE drug traffickers who rule many of
Rio de Janeiro’s slums may have been hoping, in part, to scare people away from the city’s famous New Year’s Eve celebration on Copacabana Beach. But the coordinated acts of violence they committed on Dec. 28, which killed at least 20 people and made news worldwide, were upstaged by two forces apparently more powerful: a steady drizzle that kept some revelers away and a concert by the Black Eyed Peas on Ipanema, the next beautiful beach over.
Despite violence, crowds packed the beaches before New Year’s Eve.
There, crowds of young Rio natives, visitors from across Brazil and international tourists, mostly dressed in traditional white, were packed like dancing sardines to hear a night of concerts on the beach. Estimates by the local news media put the audience at about 1.5 million, whereas the crowd at Copacabana was estimated at about one million.
These were the hotel-packed neighborhoods where most tourists heard of the attacks three days earlier, either in their Internet-connected, CNN-equipped rooms or in worried text messages from friends and relatives abroad. For the Portuguese-speaking, banner headlines like “Factions Unite Against Militias and Terrorize Rio” in O Globo, the city’s main daily, told the story. (No translation was needed for Jornal do Brasil’s headline: “TERROR.”)
And with Carnaval beginning in just over a month and the quadrennial Pan American Games scheduled for Rio in July, the state’s new governor, Sérgio Cabral, declared security his priority. Taking office on Jan. 1, he immediately asked Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, to send in the country’s National Security Force. The president himself labeled the violence “terrorism” that same day in his second inaugural address. Thousands of troops were already scheduled to be sent in July for the Pan Am Games; Mr. Cabral asked for them to come as soon as possible.
Regular travelers to Rio understand that it is not known as the Marvelous City because it is marvelously safe, so it is unclear whether the attacks will have a long-term impact on tourism.
Paulo Senise, the executive director of the Rio Convention and Visitors Bureau, said such incidents affected tourism in the short run, especially among domestic travelers bombarded with news media coverage, but then things settled back to normal. “Sometimes there is a wrong perception that Rio is another seaside town and people don’t realize the size of this city of six million people,” he said. “The new governor and security secretary are planning a whole new series of strategies. We need to give them a bit of time before we measure the results.”
In Rio, the standard tourist warnings are: Don’t wear jewelry; don’t bring lots of money; don’t leave tourist areas.
The city’s poverty is painfully apparent in everyday scenes: men and women sleeping in the street; destitute boys juggling for spare change at major intersections; tiny girls peddling gum outside chic nightclubs. The city’s slums, or favelas, rise up on the hills around the city. Travelers taking the Linha Vermelha, as the highway to the airport is called, sometimes drive through gunfights in the favelas. On Jan. 4, a group of German and Croatian tourists were mugged after their vehicle left the highway.
In return for such risks, visitors get to savor the city’s beauty, both its natural surroundings and the tanned, gym-going denizens of its wealthier neighborhoods. Bewitching nightclubs offer live samba and pagode, bossa nova and forró. For New Yorkers, Londoners and the like, the combination of year-round beach life and cosmopolitan lifestyle defies logic. Then there is the much dissected but never completely explained spirit, energy and happy (if vain) disposition of the Carioca, the Rio native.
So it is the kind of city where travelers have long invented their own rules based on their own perceptions of risk and reward. Everyone has a different opinion, and for every gringo drinking a Skol beer with local residents in a slightly marginal part of town, there’s another who refuses to stand still for even a second along the tourist-infested Copacabana beachfront avenues, for fear she will be instantly robbed.
On Dec. 30, two days after the attacks and the only really sunny day around New Year’s, crowds on the beaches did their usual thing, lolling on the sand as vendors made their way around selling iced-tea-like mate from metal canisters or scooping seedy pulp out of a passion fruit to make caipirinha cocktails (about $2.50 for local residents, significantly more for tourists).
At a kiosk along the walkway at Copacabana beach, a 65-year-old tourist named Francine West was wearing an “Over What Hill? I Don’t See Any Hill” T-shirt, drinking beer with a group of friends from California, and looking most unconcerned. “I think they’re trying to scare you to death,” she said of the news reports.
The group, mostly old Rio hands, had a been-there, heard-that attitude about the risks. “The first time we came here in 1987,” Jean Segers said, “they told us be careful, blah blah blah, whatever spiel you get from travel agents. We have no fear. The same thing could happen to us in Oakland.”
Hotel staff members at places like the luxury Caesar Park on Ipanema Beach gave the same advice as always about not venturing out of tourist areas or walking around with expensive jewelry. The United States Consulate issued a warning on Dec. 29, but stopped short of advising visitors to avoid any particular areas.
Most visitors who come to Rio for New Year’s Eve are domestic travelers, who are even more familiar with what goes on in the city. Dagmar Bedê and Nayara Mesquita, 18-year-old journalism students, were stretched out on Ipanema Beach. “There’s violence everywhere,” said Ms. Mesquita, who, like her friend, lives in Belo Horizonte, the capital of Minas Gerais state. “I would never not come to spend New Year’s in the Marvelous City.”
Tourists who experienced the violence firsthand were more concerned. Max Erdrich, a 20-year-old from Berlin now living in Santiago, Chile, heard gunshots from his hostel in the Botafogo section, and saw bullet holes in cars near a police post that had been hit by machine-gun fire.
“My Dad told me to be careful,” he said. “I said, ‘Well, thanks, Dad, but I think I know more about South America than some German tourist who walks around with their camera.’ ”
A few days after the attacks, the city celebrated what most considered a successful and safe New Year’s Eve, and photos of fireworks ruled the newsstands the next few days. But readers who delved into the newspaper might have seen another item from New Year’s Eve in Copacabana: Four people were wounded by stray bullets, apparently from celebratory gunfire, on or near Copacabana Beach.
In O Globo, the news only made Page 22. This is still Rio, after all.
