World News General behind deadly Haiti raid takes aim at Brazil’s gangs
RIO DE JANEIRO, (Reuters) - 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 Portau-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, farright 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.