Since the city�s governor declared war on its gangs, a series of all-out assaults on their slum strongholds have taken place. risking their lives to record the battles are a new breed of bulletproof-vested photojournalists
By Tom Phillips in Rio de Janeiro

IT was mid-morning and at the foot of a sprawling hilltop shanty town in northern Rio de Janeiro, a sudden, hollow burst of gunfire rattled through the air sending bystanders scattering for cover.

Protecting himself behind a concrete lamppost, Severino Silva, a 48-year-old Brazilian photographer from Rio newspaper O Dia, raised his camera towards the direction of the shooting and began to click.

As the shots continued to ring out just metres away, he rattled off several dozen frames before lowering his camera to scan his surroundings for potential danger. For Severino, one of Brazil's most respected conflict photographers, this was another day at work in an ever-more dangerous city.

As Rio's notorious drug conflict claims more and more lives, being a member of the city's press corps has probably never been as perilous as it is today.

Cocaine and heavy artillery first started flooding Rio's 600 or so shanty towns in the mid-1980s. Since then, three main drug factions - Third Command, Red Command and Friends of the Friends - have seized control of large tracts of the city, barricading roads with metal poles and heaps of concrete and executing anyone who crosses their path, journalists included.

Today, Rio's drug factions boast an arsenal that would not look out of place on the streets of Mogadishu: machine guns capable of shooting down helicopters, countless AK47s and automatic rifles, and even bazookas.

At the start of 2007, Rio's incoming governor, Sergio Cabral, embarked on an unprecedented campaign to try to disarm the gangs by any means necessary.

"You can not make an omelette without breaking eggs," his security secretary, Jose Maria Beltrame, told reporters following an operation in which 19 people were killed.

The offensive, which included large-scale assaults on Rio's slums with hundreds of police officers, made last year the city's most violent on record.

In 12 months, Rio's police have killed 1330 people in confrontations, according to official figures. Dozens of innocent bystanders have also been wounded in the crossfire, several killed.

And, with the death toll rising, the frontline reporters whose job it is to document the conflict on a daily basis are also becoming increasingly exposed.

In 2005, a reporter from Bandeirantes TV was wounded while she was arriving at a shoot-out between police and traffickers in the southern beach neighbourhood of Botafogo. She was putting on a bulletproof vest at a nearby petrol station when she was hit in the lung by a stray rifle shot. More recently, a Rio cameraman was wounded by shrapnel from an exploding grenade as he covered another police operation.

In May, three of Severino's colleagues from O Dia were kidnapped and tortured for seven hours after being caught reporting in a shanty town controlled by a paramilitary gang reportedly including off-duty policemen. The reporters, who have now fled Rio, were beaten and given electric shocks. The female reporter among them was forced to play Russian roulette.

The increasing violence means nearly all media outlets in Rio now require their staff to wear bulletproof vests when operating in or around the city's slums. The television channel Globo TV recently invested in two bulletproof vehicles to protect its staff.

"Each day the fire power of these guys the traffickers increases," said Severino, who moved to Rio from Brazil's impoverished northeast more than 30 years ago - a time when the weapon of choice among Rio's gangsters was still the revolver. "Before you'd see .22 or .38 calibre (handguns), at the most a pistol. Today they have rifles Their power of destruction is much higher."

It was 7.30am and at O Dia's newsroom in central Rio, Severino was preparing for a more relaxed day than usual - covering the launch of a samba event not far from the office. As he was preparing to leave, however, a call came in reporting a shooting across town. A group of traffickers had attempted to invade its rival's patch and the police had intervened.

Severino was immediately redirected to the scene. Minutes later, he was clambering into the newspaper's silver Fiat, clutching his camera in one hand and in the other, a light brown flak-jacket with "imprenss" (press) stamped across its back.

Several hours later, Severino was picking his way through the backstreets of the Morro da Pedreira shanty town, behind a queue of gun-toting special forces police. The eerie silence was broken only by the bark of nervous dogs and the occasional shout from a policeman: "Get inside. Get back inside now!" Severino gazed anxiously into each alleyway before crossing it, beads of sweat dripping down his face.

"When I get to a story the first thing I think is I have to make it out alive'," said Severino, who routinely carries a large flask of water in case he gets caught up in intense shooting. "If you need the toilet, you can just go in your pants," he said, only half joking. "Without water you are in serious trouble."

Severino was speaking from experience. Last year, during a massive police incursion in the Complexo do Alemao slum, he spent 10 hours trapped under a hail of automatic gunfire.

"We had to lie down on the floor with bullets hitting the wall, smashing all the pipes, water falling on top of us. There were so many shots that you just heard the noise," he remembered.

A shy teetotaller who, like many colleagues, says he doesn't drink because the slightest hangover might cost him his life, Severino admitted he was growing worried about the pressures put on young photographers keen to advance their careers with pictures taken in potentially dangerous situations.

"Sometimes getting anxious about getting a good photo, you can end up losing the photo and your life," he said.

Rio's authorities share this concern and fear it might not be long before exactly that happens. This year, the city's military police are offering, for the first time, a training course for reporters covering the drugs conflict.

In March, the Brazilian army and United Nations also hosted a conflict-zone safety course for Brazilian journalists, at which 11 local journalists were taught survival techniques and even came under simulated mortar-fire in a fictitious war zone called Tudistan.

Faced with daily risks, some local reporters say they are becoming reluctant to cover the shoot-outs.

"Crime photography is not really my cup of tea," said Hipolito Pereira, a 58-year-old photographer from the O Globo newspaper, at the scene of one recent shoot-out in suburban Rio.

When he arrived at the scene, Pereira had come face-to-face with two gun-toting traffickers. Later, he was showing off the picture he had managed to take without being noticed, in front of his colleagues.

"You have to take the picture first and then think later," he explained, pointing to his camera monitor which showed a photo of two young men on a motorbike. One was brandishing a pistol.

"But you have to be lucky as well," he added. "If we'd arrived a bit earlier, we'd have been right in the middle of the shooting."

Stray bullets are not the only hazard facing Rio's journalists. In the 1980s, Rio's Robin Hood style of drug traffickers actively courted public opinion, often inviting journalists to impromptu press conferences in the slums they controlled to denounce police brutality or living conditions.

Things have changed since then. As a result of frequent articles denouncing the traffickers' increasingly brutal regimes in the slums, most local journalists are today considered as the enemy by the city's drug traffickers and, as such, are subject to reprisals.

In 2002, traffickers used a Samurai sword to hack to death well-known Globo TV reporter Tim Lopes after he had attempted to film their drugs market with a secret camera. His body was disposed of in a makeshift crematorium made of car tyres.

"Since the Tim Lopes episode, everyone has started worrying a lot more about the security of reporters, photographers and our drivers," said Guilherme Pinto, 48, a photographer from O Dia's biggest rival, Extra.

During a recent visit to a notorious shanty town in Rio's west zone, the Sunday Herald was received by a group of heavily armed traffickers in a 4x4 pick-up truck with the words: "You're alright here as long as you don't try and do a Tim Lopes."

Severino is all too aware Brazilian journalists have become targets for the traffickers. In April, his newspaper published a series of expose photos of drug traffickers parading with automatic weapons in one Copacabana shanty town.

He says he is now wary of spending time in the area, in case he is recognised as one of the paper's photographers.

By late afternoon, Severino and his colleagues were back at the foot of the shanty town, standing next to a pile of car tyres and a tatty street sign reading "Hawaii Road". They were tallying up the day's death toll.

According to the police, four traffickers had been killed and four policemen injured; it's an outcome that shocked nobody in the group. None of the photographers present had been able to get a shot of the bodies or confirm the police account of events.

Severino sucked anxiously on a Halls sweet as he prepared to return home to his wife and three children.

"War correspondents are something I've only seen in films," he said. "I don't know if here that is the reality. But it's a conflict. It's an urban guerrilla war. You know that apparently everything is fine one moment and then suddenly there is a shoot-out, people running everywhere. You never know when something might happen."

Minutes later, when the shooting finally seemed to have subsided, another volley of shots rang out from above, sending the group scrambling for shelter.

"If you don't have enough self-control and you get scared and get up and try to flee from what's going on, you'll die," Severino said, matter-of-factly.

"It's as simple as that, you'll die."