are guys from BOPE really uncorrupted?

The answer is yes and no.

Read the posts in this:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0861739/board/thread/97662496

There was a good discussion going there until the people discussing disappeared. Except me. I keep coming back to that thread because this movie is close to home for me. I come from a place where corruption is rampant and I understand why people in authority sometimes use unconventional methods of combat and why they lose it in the end and how all of it is just a cycle that won't stop until everyone involved: the government, police, users of recreational drugs, and NGO members need to get together to solve the problems but they won't because they are in the end corrupt or believe that they are not doing any wrong.

Then the few that aren't corrupt or know that it's everyone involved is at fault, either become corrupt OR use unconventional methods because that's the only thing they can do in a system which doesn't allow for them to rectify any wrong through conventional methods. Ultimately no one in the movie, the supposed good guys, are helping each other do the right thing, each one does their own part thinking they are doing right but each one, government, police, NGO workers, drug users, each one of them are doing something wrong and their inability to identify their wrongs but ability to only identify each others faults keep them separated and not together to solve the problem of violence in their community. The BOPE officers Matias for example starts to hate the protesters, the drug users who are also the NGO protesters they think all police are corrupt and eventually drives Matias to become one of those cops using unconventional methods. The users/NGO members continue to blame the cops and support the drug users, they hang out with them and give them business. The goverment turns a blind eye, don't care about the corrupt cops, as a public facade they use BOPE to say they are combating the violence and in the end don't listen to either the NGO members who are quick to point out corruption in police (a little too quick, that people like Matias who could have made real change with the help of them only get driven away) nor the BOPE members who aren't corrupt who try to make their police force more efficient.

Hope that answers your question. Don't mean to confuse you, it's somewhat of a complex situation.

well I saw the police being presented as corrupt in tropa de elite (2007), so maybe you saw a different cut, maybe, I don't know.

This is a movie that may have different effect on different people. I'll speak for myself in this post. So i'm going to start telling you something about myself.

I'm from Caracas, Venezuela. A city that has seen an increase of violence, crime and corruption in the past years. Everyday you hear about gang members, policemen, and innocent civilians getting mugged or killed in the barrios (our "favelas" in Caracas, you may say). And like the "favelas" portrayed in the movies, our barrios are places were life a we know does no exist, and police and law has no jurisdiction.

I'm a middle class, but in recent years the recession in the economy has made things harder on us, but we have managed to get by. I'm an student in a public university were people of all social status assist, rich, poor, anyone that gets in.

and regarding to crime i've had my share of experiences. Certainly I don't live in the barrios were life can be terminated without warning. There is no way i can confirm if life is so terrible there, as i hear in the news. But i've been robbed 3 times in this city, and one of them a group of robbers that got in our house and had me and my family threaten and imprison in my bedroom. Fortune smiled on us, when the men left the house and us unharmed.

So in conclusion, i'm middle-class, and i've had my encounters with crime. So this is how i reacted to the movie.

I loved it. It was entertaining, i didn't got bored for one second.

I felt identified with the characters living in a place where corruption is the rule, and their feeling of impotence to do something about it.

The one thing i might have reservations is in portrayal of the college students, where all of them are drug users. But, i can understand that in making a movie can just give much time to everything, so simple is better. And i can't deny that there is a lot of people like those students around. And i enjoyed seeing them getting ridiculed... but not the way the they shot the girl and burned alive that poor guy. They might be stupid from dealing with those criminals but i sure didn't wish for the such an end.

And last and most important, the thing that i liked more of "Tropa de Elite", what i felt most appealing was the power of BOPE and the way they used in the movie. To protect eachother and fight criminals.

Putting it that way it all sounds very happy and simple. But i'm sure in real life, it can't be as honorable and uncorrupted as it looks in the movie. But it sure gives you something to wish for and to look for.

Thanks for reading (if you did) this long post.
I'm open to hear your opinions.

"When you kill a man to defend an idea, you're not defending an idea. You're killing a man"

Then the history of mankind through ages is not history, just killing.


Going back to the this topic's main question: as one can see in the beginning titles, the story of Elite Squad does not take place nowadays. It's, if I'm not mistaken (and I won't torture myself watching this for the third time), back in 1994. Even the right-wing/conservative Brazilian press (Veja magazine), on an article written before the film (whose release made them love it), stated that nowadays the incorruptibility of BOPE is deniable.