Getting lost by car can have a very high cost when part of the city is controlled by organized crime. In Rio de Janeiro, cases of Uber drivers or tourists mistakenly entering a favela dominated by drug trafficking and being shot are not a rarity. In mid-December, Argentine tourist Gastón Fernando Burlón, 51, was heading with his family by car to one of the most visited points in the city, the Cristo del Corcovado. He got lost in the vicinity of the tourist neighborhood of Santa Teresa, at the foot of the Morro dos Prazeres favela. Some armed young men ordered him to stop, but scared, he accelerated to escape. That’s when he received a fatal bullet in the head. Since then he has been hospitalized in very serious condition. Two weeks later, Brazilian Diely da Silva Maia, 34, met a more tragic end. I had arrived in Rio as a tourist to spend a few days on vacation with some friends. On a Saturday night, they were heading to a party by Uber when the driver, following the GPS, arrived by mistake at the Fontela favela. They were met with gunshots. The driver was injured. The tourist died instantly.
The victims usually follow two profiles: tourists or those who do not know the city and trust the GPS. Among taxi drivers, who know better the street scene, these fatal errors are not so common. It is not a new problem, nor is it unique to Rio, but authorities admit that it has increased in recent months. The Secretary of Security of the State of Rio, Victor do Santos, attributes this to the increase in . “When a car suddenly enters, the criminal imagines that it is an adversary who wants to enter to conquer his favela, which is why the reaction is greater. There is a direct relationship with these incidents, they end up firing shots for not following the guidelines,” he explains by phone. Driving slowly, lowering the windows and illuminating the interior of the vehicle are gestures that can help prevent dangerous confusion. The Rio authorities themselves ask companies to guide their drivers about these protocols.
Given that it is a reality that will not change in the short or medium term, in 2019 the Rio City Council approved a law that requires navigation applications (such as Google Maps or Waze) to alert when entering a risk area, but its compliance depends on the voluntarism of each company. The maps used by Uber, for example, are considered extremely dangerous, although these are very specific and momentary cases. Other apps, like 99, alert the user but leave it up to them to decide whether to go or not.
The alert system opened several debates: on the one hand, what is a risk area? The law does not define the criteria and companies do not explain what scale they follow. Furthermore, these alerts make the already precarious access to transportation even more difficult for favela residents, who also lament the social stigma of marking their neighborhood in red on the map.
There is no easy solution. From the Brazilian Association of Mobility and Technology (Amobitec), which brings together companies such as Uber, 99 and IFood, they affirm that they are in constant dialogue with public power and that, in some states, such as Rio de Janeiro, the application itself is Integrated with the emergency system so that the driver can quickly notify the Military Police without the need for a call.
Public security specialists, however, believe that the focus should be on the State, not so much on private companies. For the coordinator of the Center for Security and Citizenship Studies (Cesec) Pablo Nunes, transport platforms could study how to exploit the potential of tools that emerged from civil society in recent years, such as the application Cross-firewhich warns in real time of where there are shootings, or neighborhood pages on social networks, which also tend to be very effective when it comes to reporting violent incidents. However, Nunes insists on not outsourcing responsibilities: “When we have sectors of civil society, of private companies, having to create mechanisms to deal with an issue that should be public, we have a problem.”
Santos, as the head of security in the state of Rio de Janeiro, admits that in many cases the drug traffickers extended their area of control a few meters beyond the central core of the favela, reaching its entrances, the adjacent streets of the formal city; what is colloquially known in Brazil as “the asphalt.” To shield themselves from police and rival gangs at the entrance to the territory they control, on many occasions. Last year, police removed 7,000 tons of those obstacles. Sometimes they even use buses.
For the security secretary, this dominance and feeling of impunity occurs due to judicial decisions that in recent years have limited police operations in favelas. Despite the social alarm caused by deaths in accidental encounters between drivers and criminals, the state of Rio is not among the most dangerous in Brazil and the number of violent deaths has fallen constantly in recent years. Between January and November of last year there were 2,626 fatalities, 13% less than in 2023. It is the lowest number since 1991.
