John Patrick Grace: Rio to host Olympics despite king-size security challenge

A recent world news page in The Herald-Dispatch, via an AP story, portrayed the slums of Rio de Janeiro as infested with ferocious bands toting automatic weapons who were outgunning the police and terrorizing various areas of the city.

Just as startling was the breakdown of Rio's 6 million inhabitants: Fully one third, or 2 million of them, apparently live in the favillas, or slums of makeshift tin-roof dwellings that crawl up the hillsides.

Dangerous criminality, then, looks to be an issue for the 2016 summer Olympics, which Rio just won the right to host over the U.S. entrant Chicago and over Tokyo and other competing venues.

I could not imagine the International Olympic Committee assigning the games to Chicago at the height of prohibition in the 1920s when Al Capone, Bugs Moran and other mobsters were shooting up the neighborhoods -- and the cops -- with tommyguns aimed from speeding roadsters.

So why Rio?

Well, with some justification, the committee reasoned that no South American city had ever hosted the games, either winter or summer, and it was high time to give that populous continent its due.

Not even the presentation pitches of President Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle, to the committee at the recent Copenhagan jurying of the Olympic sites could sway the decision Chicago's way.

Much of the world -- and indeed perhaps the Olympic coaches and athletes -- might sympathize with the committee's thinking.

Nonetheless, no one except the Brazilians is likely to take in stride the perilous challenge of assuring the safety of Olympic teams from 140 countries plus their rooting sections against the threat the slum-based marauders pose.

Add in the likely threat that elements of al-Qaeda and associated Islamic terrorist groups might present, and you have a king-size security problem, the like of which may not have ever been equalled in previous Olympic settings.

In the year 2009, the United States has had a rash of difficult challenges including the crash of major banks, investment houses and insurance companies, plummeting housing values and widespread foreclosures, sharply rising unemployment and even the dangers posed by a network of Mexican druglords operating in more than 30 American cities.

But not since Chicago during Prohibition has any of our cities or states experienced the level of raw criminal violence that the gangs in Rio seem to demonstrate almost on a daily basis.

Baghdad and Kabul might rank in that league.

However no one is suggesting we send all the world's Olympians to those capitals of Iraq and Afghanistan for competition. Rio, however, apparently has passed muster. Let us all hope -- and it may take some help from the police and military of other nations -- that Brazil can get its security act together before thousands of Olympians and tens of thousands of their fans fly in for the 2016 games.

John Patrick Grace, while living in Italy several decades ago, visited Barcelona and spent a half day exploring the favillas that climb the hills surrounding that city, similar to the slums of Rio. He says he has never seen that level of poverty in any American slum or impoverished rural area. He is now a book editor and publisher and lives in eastern Cabell County.