RIO DE JANEIRO — An adult man with dirt clods on his face stares silently at the perforated tinfoil lid on his plastic juice cup, a makeshift crack pipe. Behind him, Rio de Janeiro's postcard-green hills shimmer above this battered favela slum, a 15-minute motorcycle ride from Brazil's iconic Maracana soccer stadium. On a weekday afternoon, you can see young boys riding horses bareback next to a trashed former soccer field, now home to pigs, chickens, and hundreds of crack addicts clutching their own cups with tin lids.
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Two decades after the United States saw urban centers like New York and Los Angeles devastated by the spread of crack, Rio de Janeiro and cities across Brazil are facing their own crises, threatening the gains against poverty and organized crime that have spurred Brazil's recent sense of optimism and growth. A comprehensive study in the works by the government-linked Oswaldo Cruz Foundation has offered early estimates that Brazil has 1 million crack cocaine users, far more than was expected (this in a country with just under 200 million inhabitants).
The first and largest success story of the region -- a third of Latin America lives here -- Brazil has become a majority middle-class country that recently got a vote of confidence from risk agency Standard & Poor's at the same time the United States' assessment was lowered. Quality of life in Brazil is on the rise by nearly any measure -- be it the expanding middle class, the government's plan to eradicate extreme poverty through the much-touted "Bolsa Familia" cash-transfer program, a zooming currency that is allowing middle-class Brazilians to travel abroad like never before, or impressive public-works projects as the country prepares to host the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics. In Rio de Janeiro, its second-largest city and beating cultural heart, a new policing program slated to spread to other Brazilian cities is garnering praise for apparently achieving the unthinkable -- beginning to place the hundreds of favelas long controlled by drug traffickers back under state control. Both Brazil's and Rio de Janeiro's staggering homicide rates have began to edge downward in recent years (though the national murder rate still puts the country in the top 5 percent worldwide).
But the rapid rise of crack use could turn these gains on their heads. The drug, virtually nonexistent in most Brazilian cities before 2005, has captured hundreds of new users in Brazil's cultural capital ever since Rio's largest drug-trafficking faction ended a de facto ban on selling the cheap cocaine derivative six years ago. While users are still concentrated in crime-ridden favelas like Jacarezinho, Coreia, Mandela, Morro do Cajueiro, and the Complexo da Mare, they are increasingly visible in Rio's wealthy "asphalt" neighborhoods, like the downtown Centro and Gloria. Arrests related to crack jumped fivefold between 2009 and 2010 in the state of Rio de Janeiro, according to the state's public safety ministry.
The drug has meanwhile infiltrated other Brazilian cities, such as the capital, Brasilia, and Recife in Brazil's coastal northeast, where the state governor claims that 80 percent of murders are linked to drugs, mostly crack. It predominantly affects the young: A recent analysis by Rio de Janeiro's Institute for Public Security estimated that, based on crime reports, 57 percent of users are under 24.
And where crack use has spread, violent crime has followed. In Belo Horizonte, the capital of the state neighboring Rio de Janeiro, a recent study linked crack to a quadrupling of the percent of drug-related homicides in the decade leading up to 2006. Belo Horizonte's murder rate more than doubled between 1998 and 2008.
The study's author, Luiz Flavio Sapori, says the lethal violence surrounding crack use comes from both dealers and users. In his Belo Horizonte case study, for example, he found that homicides stemmed from drug trafficking more than any other motivation, such as crimes of passion, revenge, or bar fights. He writes that crack's particular danger comes not from the physical sensation the drug provokes but from its extreme addictiveness, which creates a habit of continual use and a cycle of urgent need and debt, leading to robberies and conflicts with dealers if a user can't afford to pay.
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