Rio police surround, then occupy the dangerous North Zone favelas of Manguinhos, Mandela, Varginha, and Jacarezinho, midway between the Maracanã soccer stadium and the international airport. 

Rio’s transformation sometimes seems like an effort to divert a river as large as the Nile into hundreds of small irrigation channels, using only sand. The system is fragile and wont to revert to its original path. One often hears cariocas giving personal or corporatist rationales for decisions that affect us all. Some reports of today’s occupation say it’s simply a response to the cinematographic liberation last July of a Manguinhos drug trafficker from a police cell.

In the same vein, mayor Eduardo Paes announced this week that he’ll shut down militia-run passenger vans not for reasons of urban transportation efficacy, but because an August van demonstration created a huge traffic knot. “I have a horror of threats,” he told O Globo newspaper…