RIO DE JANEIRO - Fans were lining up to watch an American beach volleyball duo square off against Mexico on the alluring sands of Copacabana Beach.

But across town, far from the Olympic excitement, the crackling of gun battles echoed through the colossal favelas that envelop Rio de Janeiro's hillsides.

As soon as he heard the bullets whizzing by early on Tuesday, Richard Conceicao Dias, 9, knew what to do.

"I lied down on the floor, hugging my mom," said Richard, who lives in a one-room home in the sprawling Complexo do Alemao group of favelas with his mother and his three sisters. "She told me, 'Get away from the window, close your eyes, dream about something nice.'"

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TABATINGA, Brazil-Two Brazilian police bolted from a helicopter in Peru's Amazon jungle on a recent day with a squad of Peruvian commandos. Cracks of gunfire shook the forest before the group captured and destroyed a secret cocaine lab.

The Brazilians had the legal status of unarmed observers during the Aug. 19 raid led by Peru's elite antidrug police.

But both Brazilians carried assault rifles and faced hostile fire. The lab was in Peru, but the raiders flew from a Brazilian airport in a chopper running on Brazilian fuel to hit a target provided by a Brazilian-paid informant. From its Amazon border with Peru to its bustling cities, Brazil is getting drawn deeper into a drug war as surging cocaine use turns it into the world's biggest market after the U.S. It is a surprise since Brazilian politicians once criticized aggressive antidrug strategies espoused by the U.S. as causing more harm than good.

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RIO DE JANEIRO - Business was brisk in the Mandela shantytown on a recent night. Customers pawed through packets of powdered cocaine and marijuana priced at $5, $10, $25. Teenage boys with semiautomatic weapons took in money and made change while flirting with girls lounging nearby.

Next to them, a gaggle of kids jumped on a trampoline, oblivious tothe gunsanddrug-running that are part of life in this and hundreds of other slums, known as favelas, across this metropolitan area of 12 million people.

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Hampered in the U.S., Drug Traffickers Find a Replacement; Skeletal 'Zombies' Rule Sao Paulo's Cracolandia After Dark.

SAO PAULO, Brazil--A crack cocaine outbreak reminiscent of the one that devastated U.S. inner cities in the 1980s is starting to take hold in this South American nation, as drug traffickers facing more difficulty selling into the U.S. are pioneering markets elsewhere.

In Sao Paulo, Brazil's biggest city, what to do about the hundreds of zombielike addicts who by night wander a downtown no man's land known as Cracolandia, or Crackland, has become a key issue for local elections this year. But mayors from Rio de Janeiro to outposts in the Amazon lament that dangerous cracklands are sprouting in their cities as well.

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One of the world's last uncontacted Indian tribes in the Amazon rainforest is nowhere to be found after a guard post protecting the indigenous clan was attacked by suspected drug traffickers, Brazilian authorities say.

A preliminary survey of the tribe's lands near the Envira River on the western Brazil-Peru border by government officials has revealed no trace of the tribe, the existence of which was made public in February with the release of rare aerial photographs.

Fiona Watson, research director of the tribal peoples' rights group Survival International, which is working with the Brazilian government's Indian Affairs Department, told the Star her organization fears for the survival of the indigenous tribe -- believed to have about 200 members -- after a backpack believed to have belonged to a drug trafficker was found with a broken arrow inside.

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RIO DE JANEIRO -- Flanked by officers holding assault rifles, Jose Mariano Beltrame, Rio's security chief, strolled through the streets of Complexo do Alemao, just days after the police and military had stormed the notoriously dangerous slum and retaken it by force.

It was a historic walk, the first time he had set foot in the slum in years, underscoring this city's newfound willingness to wrest away areas of the city that have been violent refuges for drug gangs for more than three decades.

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RIO DE JANEIRO -- In a quick and decisive military sweep, Brazilian security forces seized control of this city's most notorious slum on Sunday, claiming victory in a weeklong battle against drug gangs that has claimed dozens of lives.

By early afternoon the military police had raised the flags of Brazil and Rio de Janeiro atop a building on the highest hill in the Alemao shantytown complex, providing a rare moment of catharsis and celebration in a decades-long battle to rid this city's violent slums of drug gangs.

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RIO DE JANEIRO -- Police and Brazilian Army soldiers, struggling to take control of a second huge slum complex here, were fired on by drug gangs on Friday, but by nightfall they had managed to trap the traffickers inside, a military spokesman said.

Friday's activity, at the Alemao complex of shantytowns, which is home to about 400,000 residents and considered by many to be the most violent of the city's slums, is a response to the latest eruption of gang violence, which began Sunday, as well as an effort by the Brazilian authorities to show that they can secure the city well in advance of the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympic Games.

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RIO DE JANEIRO -- Two Brazilian federal police officers were killed and a third badly wounded Wednesday in a battle with drug traffickers in the Amazon region, authorities said.

The shooting erupted in the wee hours when the crew of a police launch tried to board a suspected smuggling boat headed east on the Solimoes River, a tributary of the Amazon.

Authorities had intelligence indicating the boat was carrying 500 kilos (1,100 pounds) of cocaine from neighboring Peru or Colombia, federal police said in a statement.

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The Philippine embassy in Brazil warned Filipinos against being victimized as drug mules in light of the arrest of a Filipino woman found with 5 kilos of cocaine in the South American country, the Department of Foreign Affairs said Wednesday. The alleged 5kg of cocaine were found hidden in her luggage with false bottoms at the Guarulhos International Airport by Brazilian Federal Police on August 19.

But during the investigation, the woman told police officers that she bought the bag in the middle of the street in San Paolo. She also said that she intends to sell the bags when she came back in the Philippines.

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In the murky depths of the Amazon, there is a rare combination of vine and plant geneses, when combined, they are among one of the most powerful hallucinogens known to man. Its many forms, which vary from brewer to brewer, are known as ayahuasca.

The drug conjures up images of fantastical and illusionary worlds, gives the sensation of visiting magical cities and generally invokes a state of being which most of us will never know. Though similar to psilocybin (magic mushrooms) and LSD (acid), it has birthed some fantastical practices in the greater Amazonian area.

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* Militia Says It Controls Slum Made Famous By Film

* Forces Plan To Stay, But Community Is Sceptical

It is one of the most notorious postcodes on earth - a sprawling red brick shantytown that has been under the control of heavily armed drug traffickers for nearly four decades. This week, however, police claimed the gangs were no more in the City of God, the Rio slum made infamous by Fernando Meirelles' 2002 film.

On Tuesday, after two months of incursions, special forces celebrated the "conquering" of the City of God by hoisting the Brazilian flag over a creche they said was used as a base by traffickers.

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TABATINGA, Brazil -- The Tikuna Indians living near this Amazon outpost long believed that their community was a portal to the supernatural, to immortals who would guard them and secure their existence.

But lately they are finding that location may instead be a curse.

The Tikuna community, Mariacu, lies along a placid stretch of the Solimoes River, less than three miles down a reddish-dirt road from Tabatinga, a bustling commercial town.

While seemingly tranquil, the area has become a magnet for drug traffickers who roam the borders here with Colombia and Peru.

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RIO DE JANEIRO -- When several Brazilian journalists decided to go undercover here in May to report on life in one of the hundreds of slums that have sprouted up around Rio, they thought they had chosen carefully.

The slum they picked, Batan, was under the control of a militia that had expelled a drug gang last September. The journalists assumed that a slum under the thumb of a gun-toting militia, which included off-duty policemen, would be safer than one controlled by drug dealers.

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Army Surprised by Discovery

Lab Equipped to Make Leaves into Cocaine Also Found in the Amazon

SAO PAULO, Brazil -- The army said Sunday it has discovered the first known coca plantations in Brazil's Amazon, along with a fully equipped laboratory to manufacture cocaine. The army used helicopters and small boats to reach the plantations and the lab near the northwestern city of Tabatinga, close to the border with cocaine-producing nations Peru and Colombia, army Lt. Col. Antonio Elcio Franco Filho said.

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RIO DE JANEIRO -- After taking a phone call last week, director JosA? Padilha stepped onto the patio of his studio and told a business partner that the intense discussion provoked by his latest film had spread to yet another sphere of Brazilian society.

"Now they're going to speak about it in Congress," Padilha said, looking at his watch. "In 20 minutes, someone is going to take the floor and start."

The film, called "Elite Squad," centers on the police officers who wage war against the drug-dealing gangs that rule Rio's slums, called favelas. The movie has put almost everyone -- from the slums, to the penthouses, to the halls of government -- in the mood to talk about this city's violence.

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Benedict Laments Lax Morals And Urges Bishops To Do Better In Building Up The Church. His Last Mass Attracts Only 150,000.

APARECIDA, BRAZIL -- Pope Benedict XVI ended his first pilgrimage to the Americas much as he began it: with a searing attack on diverse forces, from Marxism and capitalism to birth control, that he believes threaten society and the Roman Catholic faith.

And in comment likely to generate controversy in Latin America, the pope said the New World's indigenous population, "silently longing" for Christianity, had welcomed the teachings that "came to make their cultures fruitful, purifying them." Many indigenous rights groups say the conquest ushered in a period of disease, mass murder, enslavement and the shattering of native cultures.

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Benedict XVI, In Brazil, Urges Ex-Users To Heal Their Souls, And Excoriates Traffickers

APARECIDA, BRAZIL -- Recovering drug addicts, guitar-strumming youths and cloistered nuns on Saturday welcomed Pope Benedict XVI into rural Brazil, where he warned narcotics traffickers that they face the wrath of God for unleashing a deadly scourge across Latin America.

Pressing a crusade that has attacked extramarital sex, abortion and hedonism, Benedict congratulated the addicts for kicking their habits but said that for full recovery they must also heal their souls.

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GUARATINGUETA, Brazil -- Pope Benedict warned drug dealers yesterday to "reflect on the grave harm they are inflicting."

"God will call you to account for your deeds," he said before a cheering crowd of 6,000 outside the Fazenda de Esperanca, or "Farm of Hope," a drug treatment centre founded by a Franciscan friar.

The centre claims an 80-per-cent success rate, giving addicts spiritual guidance as they milk cows, tend apple orchards and work as beekeepers.

The Pope urged the more than 1,500 recovering addicts in the crowd to become "ambassadors of hope."

[end]

Tom Phillips reports from the front line in Rio de Janeiro's favelas, where the body count soars as paramilitaries and traffickers vie for supremacy

Night falls on the shadowy back alleys of Cidade Alta, and at the heart of the favela Gilberto Martins and his men are preparing for war.

At the back of a small, smoke-filled bar, a middle-aged man sits alone flicking through a thick wad of cash and occasionally fiddling with three revolver magazines stacked on the table in front of him. Outside a queue of teenage drug traffickers stare nervously down the road, with M16 assault rifles slung across their chests and their fingers clasped around the triggers.

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