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 on Monday that the company, Private Tours, could be stripped of its licence after a report in Sunday’s Folha de São Paulo newspaper that it had set up meetings between traffickers and tourists.
The paper sent a reporter disguised as a foreign tourist on the four-hour, $55 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. – Reuters