Posted by
InchDeep on Monday, May 05, 2008 4:45:12 PM
More from the Australian. Note the everyone is doing excuse.
Firm in trouble for slum tour
A RIO de Janeiro tour company could be in trouble for giving tourists too intimate a view of life in the city's notorious slums, including photo opportunities with drug gang leaders.
The Brazilian city's tourism chief said today the company, Private Tours, could be stripped of its licence after a report in today's Folha de Sao Paulo newspaper that it had set up meetings between traffickers and tourists.
The paper sent a reporter disguised as a foreign tourist on the 4-hour, $US55 ($59) tour of Rocinha, the city's largest slum, that included visits to the "bocas de fumo", where traffickers sell drugs to Rio residents.
It said the traffickers told the tourists stories about their time in prison, described the life of a Rio drug dealer, and would then pose for pictures with their guns - as long as their faces were not photographed.
Rio tourism chief Rubem Medina said the firm could lose its licence if the story was accurate.
"It's not necessary to do this kind of tour in Rio; there are a lot of wonderful attractions," he said.
Pedro Novak of the Private Tours firm acknowledged he ran that kind of tour but "I'm not the only one".
Several companies have for years offered tours of the city's more than 600 slums, offering tourists a controversial alternative to the city's beaches and an insight into the lives of the more than one million people who live there.
The slums, or favelas, are largely controlled by heavily armed drug gangs with names such as "Red Command" and "Friends of Friends" that fight each other for control of the lucrative cocaine market.