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Muggings, violence during Olympics highlight Brazil’s tourism woes – USA TODAY

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Find out why some of Rio’s neighborhoods are clustered along mountainsides.

RIO DE JANEIRO — Immediately after celebrating the news that their daughter was named to Australia’s Olympic synchronized swimming team, Andrew and Leisel Rogers started to panic.

Taking the family to root on 18-year-old Emily Rogers meant two weeks in Brazil, a country they’d never been to and only understood from the horrific headlines of muggings, murders and Zika. They bought underwear lined with pockets to hide their money. They watched what they packed to make sure they weren’t bringing jewelry or anything too flashy.

And while they haven’t been assaulted or robbed in Rio, the almost daily reports of Olympians and foreign delegations being victimized has made clear why Brazil has long struggled to change how foreigners view the country.

“It’s on a lot of people’s buckets lists, but it’s not easy, is it?” said Andrew Rogers, 49, an air traffic controller as he strolled along Copacabana Beach on Saturday night. “Some people want an adventure. But it’s not very family oriented.”

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Ryan Lochte robbed at gunpoint in Rio

American Olympic champion swimmer Ryan Lochte became the latest victim of Rio’s street crime early Sunday morning when he was robbed at gunpoint after attending a party. That follows robberies of representatives from Portugal, China, Australia, Russia, and even an attempted mugging on the chief of security for the Games outside the opening ceremony, which ended with a bodyguard shooting and killing the assailant.

Olympic officials have found two bullets that tore through a media tent at the equestrian center and reporters claim their bus was shot at while driving along a highway from a basketball arena.

Those incidents help explain why Brazil is the fifth-largest country in the world, the fifth most populous and has the ninth largest economy, yet ranks 32nd in tourism.

The language barrier is a deterrent for some, as few countries speak Portuguese. The distance is another factor — it took the Rogers family 31 hours to reach Rio. And the Zika virus has kept many away in recent months.

But for those who made the trip for the Olympics, most cite security as their main cause of concern. Sergio Gonzalez, an economic consultant from Madrid attending his fifth Olympics, said he usually braces for petty thefts when he’s traveling abroad.

“But here, a tourist has to worry about being killed,” he said.

To counter that narrative, many Brazilians have gone all out to try and show their best face. Tourists have marveled at the overwhelming police presence around the Olympic venues and in tourist-heavy destinations like Ipanema Beach and the Christ the Redeemer statue that looks down over the seaside city.

Gina Cox, a software consultant from Phoenix attending the Games with her husband, said all kinds of locals — from cab drivers to police officers to their Airbnb hosts — are clearly trying to ensure that visitors have a good, safe time to encourage them to come back.

“Everybody told us we needed to be concerned, but after a few days here, the scariest thing is crossing the street and not getting hit by a bus,” she said.

To Brazilians, the picture painted of their country by foreigners is unfair.

Luciano Lewis, 22, an out-of-work commercial pilot from the southern city of Porto Alegre, said he was stunned when he watched an episode of The Simpsons where Homer and the family travel to Brazil.

“It was all a jungle and monkeys running around,” he said. “That’s like saying that in the U.S. you only have fat people because of the fast food. It’s not true, but the image remains.”

Anelize Meneghetti, an architecture student volunteering at the Games, said she gets inane questions from foreigners, including one who asked her if they have Coca-Cola in Brazil. She said some of the views of her country are fair, especially the security concerns. But she said there’s also a racial component to the negative impression so many foreigners have of her country.

“People think there are Indians walking down the streets in Rio,” she said. “I’ve never even met an Indian.”

American ex-pats share the same frustration with the foreign view of Brazil. Bobby Frischman, a Brooklyn native who moved to Rio 20 years ago after marrying a Brazilian girl he met on Copacabana Beach, said he hears the concerns all the time.

Frischman runs a tour agency called Blame it on Rio and he says he’s up front with people about the petty crime that is common on the streets. But he says he spends the rest of his conversations with possible clients knocking down wild misconceptions about what they’ll find.

“I tell people, ‘Has the person who told you to be afraid to come to Brazil ever been to Brazil?'” he said. “Once you get here for the first time, you say, ‘Wow, what a difference from what I thought.'”

Robert Muggah, a security specialist at Instituto Igarapé, a Brazilian research organization, said tourists aren’t even seeing the real violence gripping Rio these days, as drug cartels, street gangs and police continue shooting it out in Rio’s ungoverned neighborhoods known as favelas. Muggah said most of the 100,000 security forces in Rio to protect the Games are focused on Olympic venues and tourist destinations, leaving a gap that criminals have exploited, leading to the spike in violence.

Combine that with constant international coverage of the muggings affecting visitors of the Games, he said, and it’s no surprise that foreigners are finding Rio to be every bit as dangerous as they expected.

“If anything good has come out of the reporting is that it’s forced Brazilians to gauge their own backyard — especially the elite, well-heeled portions of the society — and forced a discussion of this epidemic of violence,” he said.

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