There's a police cover-up going on here - they're covering up the Girls from Ipanema, sort of…waging a crackdown on the practice at a beach adjacent to the one made famous in the bossa nova hit of the early 1960s.
Five beach police officers in T-shirts and shorts hit the beach on Sunday, Reuters says, enforcing the city's public decency code by asking dozens of women along Reserva da Barra, west of the famous Ipanema and Copacabana beaches, to cover their breasts.
Most of the ladies refused, Reuters says, prompting the beach police to bring in the reinforcements - twenty officers in full uniform with assault rifles. Rose Moura still refused to cooperate, lying on her stomach without a top, and she was arrested for indecent exposure, Reuters says, even as her husband tried to intervene when an officer grabbed her arm roughly.
The husband, Antonio Saraiva de Almeida, was arrested as well, which outraged other beachgoers joining the furor, Reuters says. The skirmish was caught on film and broadcast repeatedly on Brazil's main television network, Globo, the news wire says.
``I was quietly lying on the beach, without offending anyone,'' said Moura to the network, after she and her husband were freed on bail. ``Why don't the police worry about capturing drug traffickers or car thieves?''
Rio's famous beaches and near-microscopic bikinis leave so little to the imagination anyway that most residents can't understand why the police are making such a fuss over topless sunbathing, Reuters says. The crackdown began when a local newspaper called attention to it.
Ipanema Beach, of course, became internationally famous for its "tall and tan and young and lovely" women by way of the late Antonio Carlos Jobim's composition "The Girl From Ipanema," which became a worldwide hit when U.S. jazz saxophonist Stan Getz and Brazilian singers Joao and Astrud Gilberto recorded a seductive version of the song in late 1963.
