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TEHRAN, November 29 -Thirteen years ago, a Brazilian general named Augusto Heleno led hundreds of United Nations troops into a Haitian slum to bring a powerful gangster to heel.
TEHRAN, Young Journalists Club (YJC) -Thirteen years ago, a Brazilian general named Augusto Heleno led hundreds of United Nations troops into a Haitian slum to bring a powerful gangster to heel.
Over the course of a seven-hour gun battle, the peacekeepers sprayed more than 22,000 bullets into the impoverished Port-au-Prince neighborhood of Cite Soleil. Their target, a warlord known as Dread Wilme, was killed.
The operation, dubbed “Iron Fist,” was the capstone of Heleno’s mission to restore order in Haiti after its president was ousted by insurgents. Heleno declared the raid a success.
But various human rights groups called it a “massacre,” alleging dozens of bystanders were killed in the crossfire, many of them women and children.
The episode, largely forgotten outside Haiti, may provide a road map for the security strategy of Brazil’s next president, far-right former army captain Jair Bolsonaro. He has tapped Heleno to be his top national security advisor and wants the former general and other ex-Haiti hands to tame Brazil’s favelas using methods employed in the slums of Port-au-Prince.
Brazil suffered a record 64,000 murders last year, the most in the world. Bolsonaro has promised no mercy for lawbreakers.
“We are at war. Haiti was also at war,” Bolsonaro said in a recent TV interview. “(In Haiti), the rule was, you found an element with a firearm, you shoot, and then you see what happened. You solve the problem.”
Haiti looms large in Bolsonaro’s cabinet.
His proposed defense minister, former Gen. Fernando Azevedo e Silva, served there under Heleno as an operations chief. Bolsonaro’s incoming infrastructure minister, Tarcisio Freitas, was a senior U.N. military engineer in Haiti, arriving shortly after Heleno left in 2005. Retired Gen. Carlos Alberto dos Santos Cruz, Brazil’s next government minister, led U.N. troops in the Caribbean nation in 2007.
Neither Heleno nor Azevedo e Silva responded to requests for comment about the Cite Soleil raid.
It remains to be seen just how heavy-handed Heleno’s approach might be in Brazil, particularly in crime-ridden Rio de Janeiro state. But other crackdowns there have not produced lasting results.
Those efforts include a massive security push in some of the city’s favelas ahead of the 2016 Olympic Games, and a more recent state-wide military intervention launched in February. In Rio state, violent deaths are up 1.3 percent during the first nine months of the latest occupation compared with the same period last year; the number of people killed by security forces jumped more than 40 percent, with about four people slain daily.
Rio’s current intervention is slated to finish just before Bolsonaro takes office on January 1. Neither Heleno nor Azevedo e Silva have ruled out extending it.
In recent weeks, Heleno has expressed support for a radical crime-fighting strategy promoted by Rio state’s incoming right-wing governor, Wilson Witzel. That plan would put snipers in helicopters to take out favela gangsters.
Heleno said in a recent radio interview that his rules of engagement in Haiti were similar to those proposed by Witzel, adding that key parts of the Rio military intervention “can serve as a model for the rest of the country.”
Those views alarm some members of the armed forces, who fear protracted urban warfare could sap troop morale and stoke public resentment against one of Brazil’s most respected institutions.
Source:Reuters
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