When armed robbers assaulted her store in Rio de Janeiro’s Flamengo neighborhood and cleaned out her entire inventory of eyeglasses and jewelry, Valéria Cristina knew just what to do. She closed up shop and opened a new store with the same name, Lince Optical and Jewelers, in one of Rio’s more than 600 favelas, or squatter communities.
Valéria Cristina is frank about the reason she fled the legal city and relocated to an illegal neighborhood where cocaine and marijuana are sold openly and groups of men with guns roam the streets at night. “I wanted a more secure location,” she explains cheerfully as she sits amid the stylish designer frames in her bright new store on the Estrada da Gávea, one of the main shopping streets of Rocinha, Rio’s largest and most urbanized favela. In Flamengo, being assaulted was always a risk. But in the squatter community, things are different. “If someone broke in or tried to rob this store,” she says, still smiling, “they would die.”
Among Rio’s elite, the favelas are treated as an embarrassing secret. These self-built neighborhoods, home to about one million people, have sprung up all around the city. They are considered perilous places where drug dealers ply the streets and shootouts are the norm. And there is fact to back up this fear: The government estimates that $15 million in drugs—three to four tons of cocaine and seven to eight tons of marijuana, 20% consumed locally and 80% destined for Europe and the United States—move through Rio’s favelas every month. What’s more, the dealers are so rooted in some favelas, such as Complexo Alemão, Maré, Nova Holanda, and others in the city’s working class Zona Norte, that gun battles with the cops are almost everyday occurrences.
Yet, at the same time, in a city where assaults and gun violence are common and where thugs have been known to abduct people on crowded streets in broad daylight, the favelas are also among the safest neighborhoods. That’s because, instead of being controlled by politicians or patrolled by the corrupt and trigger-happy military police force, Rio’s favelas are ruled by three tightly organized drug gangs: The Comando Vermelho (Red Command), Terceiro Comando (Third Command) and Amigos dos Amigos (Friends of Friends.) The gangs ensure that there is no crime within the areas where they operate. The Comando Vermelho controls most of the drug trade in Rio, and Rocinha, the favela where I lived for three months, is part of its empire.
This contradiction—the relative safety of the criminal areas and the criminality that runs rampant in the legal neighborhoods—is startling to an outsider. And it presents a clear policy conundrum to the officials planning the national and international war on drugs: Even law abiding favela residents who would prefer to get the guns and drugs out of their neighborhoods have an interest in maintaining the status quo because their communities are free of the siege mentality that plagues the wealthier areas of the city. What’s more, the existence of an entrenched criminal power base in the favelas suggests that the power structure in Brazil doesn’t mind ceding some turf to criminal enterprises—as long as they remain out of sight and out of mind in the poor communities.
The drug rings took root in the favelas because of a power vacuum: These illegal communities were created through land invasions. Not wanting to reward the land grab, local authorities initially refused to provide services, including police patrols. This meant the drug gangs could operate openly and yet not be observed by the police.
Most of Rio’s favelas are located on the hills, on land that was too steep for developers to tame for private homes. But the poor figured out a way to build on this wild terrain, creating houses piled on top of each other in impressive agglomerations. Their form is dynamic: bricks jutting out at odd angles, partial floors framed in concrete, walls that rise only to end abruptly in the soft blue of the sky. Here, houses seem to twist towards the sun, crowding each other for light and air. From a distance there seem to be no roads, no yards, no restful space of any kind. Just a beehive of human habitations spread as far as the eye can see. Many parts of the favelas can only be reached on foot, by traversing steep becos—alleys—that zigzag between the buildings, sometimes leaving you in a dead end, sometimes winding upward the whole way like a narrow, twisty ladder. Rocinha sprawls across Pedra Dois Irmãos—Two Brothers Mountain—between the wealthy beachfront enclave of São Conrado and the luxurious wooded mansions of Gávea.
The guys with guns come out at night. Some stand as solo sentinels; others congregate in packs of ten or more. A few have pistols—sleek nine millimeter jobs that are light enough for kids to stick in the elastic waist bands of their Bermuda shorts—but most carry guns that would make even a well-heeled terrorist or revolutionary drool with envy: AK-47s, AR-15s, M-16s, submachine guns, even grenades.
You can usually see them on the streets where the drug trade is active, in locations called bocas de fumo, or mouths of smoke. Estimates are that Rocinha has 120,000 residents. Because of its size, there are many bocas in Rocinha. The main one is in an area called Valão (“sewer”), a crowded section of the favela that takes its name from the ten-foot-wide channel of storm water, trash and sewage than runs down the main street. But there’s another boca on the Via Apia, one of the favela’s main commercial streets, where young men sell papelotes, little paper sacks of cocaine and marijuana. And there’s also a boca on my street, in a quiet area called Cachopa, halfway up the hill. Here, the gunmen appear a few nights a week.
When you see them for the first time, the weapons don’t look real. They seem like cartoon killing machines, with oversized bullet clips hanging off absurdly tiny barrels. And the comic book image is enhanced when the guns are clutched by pimply adolescents or moon-faced teenagers who silently watch as families return from church or children run by kicking a soda bottle soccer ball. But these are not caricatures. These guns will pierce a bullet-proof vest at a great distance.
For the favela dwellers—and one in five residents of this beach city is a squatter—the kids with the guns are infinitely preferable to the police. The drug gangs are at least community-minded, investing in local soccer fields, youth development programs, and boistrous public dance parties called bailes funk. Even the murder of television journalist Tim Lopes, who disappeared in June while researching a story on the bailes funk in Favela da Grota in the Zona Norte of the city, may not have dimmed people’s sense that the criminals are better than the cops. The police quickly announced that Elias Pereira da Silva—known as Elias Maluco (“the madman”) and said to be one of the leaders of the Comando Vermelho—had ordered the hit. But the authorities have so little credibility within the favelas it’s not clear how many people believe this. So far, the baile funk promoters are lying low, but no arrests have been made.
In Rocinha, one command leader, known as Denis, is so popular that residents blocked traffic in a nearby commuter tunnel as a protest after he was arrested. The gangs control the streets through brutal intimidation, or at least the reputation for brutality. Not only don’t they allow people to oppose them, but they don’t allow any crime, petty or violent, that might draw the cops to their hideouts.
Washington Gonçalves Miranda Ferreira, a teenager who has spent almost half his life in Rocinha, feels this acutely. He has seen violence. He has witnessed shootouts. He has seen the smugglers—his word for the drug traffickers—beat a man, douse him with gasoline, and dump his burning body onto a highway at the height of rush hour. He is extremely moral. He has never used drugs and does not participate in the underground squatter economy. Yet he insists he feels most comfortable inside the favela.
“I feel safe here,” Washington says. “I only feel scared when I go to the rest of the city. You can’t fight in Rocinha. If you have a fight, you can get—well, not necessarily killed but hurt. Because if you fight that might bring the police. And they [the drug traffickers] don’t want that. If you leave your knapsack somewhere—he points to my shoulder bag, which contains my money and my camera—people will return it. If you leave a bucket of money, if you leave your wallet in a restaurant, people will return it to you. If you lose your wallet in Copacabana [one of Rio’s most popular tourist neighborhoods], forget about ever seeing it again. It’s gone.”
Businesspeople, too, accept the trade-off: the proliferation of hard drugs and men with guns in exchange for security and freedom from crime.
“There is no risk doing business in the favelas,” says Daniel Pla, whose Deplá film developing franchise has 160-stores, including three in favelas, and Pla is making plans for more. “You have more risk with a store in [the well-off neighborhood] Ipanema than in Rocinha. Because in Rocinha we have no robberies. In Ipanema, we have problems almost every three months. In the favela, the community protects itself.”
He concedes that it is strange to see heavily armed men stalking the streets of the neighborhood after dark. But he suggests it is not a problem that’s unique to the favelas. “As a citizen, of course, it’s a shock,” he says. “When you see it yourself, it’s incredible. It’s very difficult to live with that. At the same time, if you go to the authorities, you know corruption exists and the problem will not be solved. All big cities live with these problems. It’s not only a problem here in Brazil. It exists in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles, too.”
But Deplá has a closer relationship with the traffickers than most businesses in Chicago, New York, or L.A. For instance, in a favela called Pavão Pavãozinho (“Peacock-Little Peacock”) the owner of the Deplá franchise is invited to parties thrown by the chief drug trafficker. Other merchants report similar encounters. The manager of a supermarket just outside Rocinha that caters mostly to favela residents, says that Rocinha’s drug traffickers call him regularly to find out how things are going and ask whether any customers are giving him problems.
Similarly, Dante Quinterno, who manages Rocinha’s cable television company, TV Roc, must deal with the traffickers. In order to string the cable to each of his 30,000 customers in the favela, he had to create maps detailing every beco in Rocinha. But when I ask him if I could get copies, he declines. “If I gave you a map, word would get around quickly. You might be with the police.” I laugh, but he remains serious. “These are the rules if you want to work well in this situation. I don’t need to explain them to you or give you a book. They’re not written anywhere. But if I give you a map, I will get a call saying ‘Be careful.’”
Most favela dwellers handle the dealers in a slightly different way: They obey the rules but pretend the men with guns aren’t around. “Don’t think about them,” urges José Geraldo Moreira (aka Zezinho), a garrulous barrel-shaped man who has lived in Rocinha for 30 years and worked his way up from pushcart operator to fruit stand owner. “They do what they do. You do what you do. If you leave them alone, they leave you alone.”
This “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy seems the dominant attitude of City Hall, as well. One top staffer in Mayor Cesar Maia’s administration who has worked in favelas for almost two decades notes that the experience has given officials lots of insight into how the drug gangs work. I ask why the city doesn’t hand this information over to the cops. The official leans forward and wags a finger in warning. “Look,” the staffer says, “everyone knows the difference between the traffickers and the police is very small.” Another city worker whispers that he’d rather work with the dealers than the cops because they’re more honorable.
Indeed, as things currently stand, the police are not part of the solution to the hegemony of the drug barons. They are part of the problem. The cops here (the military and civil police—the cops with guns—are branches of the state government; the city has a force called the Guarda Municipal, but it operates downtown and in tourist zones, and officers only carry nightsticks) don’t patrol the streets. Even in the rich neighborhoods, they stand impassively at security posts holding their weapons with obvious pride. And in the favela it’s worse. In Rocinha, the cops have two small kiosks, but in my time here, I’ve never seen anyone talk to the cops who sit in the booths and I’ve never seen the cops do any policing. The police also have checkpoints on either side of Rocinha, just outside the favela. Some days they question every person entering or leaving the favela. Once, when I was leaving Rocinha with a friend, two cops rushed us, guns drawn.They pressed the revolvers against our stomachs and questioned us for 20 minutes. They couldn’t understand why gringos would have any business going to a favela except to buy drugs.
And this experience was minor compared with what favela dwellers have suffered for years. “The police didn’t respect the residents,” says Valquiria de Sousa Dias Rosa, the city’s regional administrator for Rocinha. “They would bust into people’s houses, guns drawn, looking for dealers.” And the police are also notoriously trigger-happy. In 1993, a band of marauding cops massacred 21 residents of Vigário Geral, a large Zona Norte favela, after local drug dealers killed five policemen.
One police officer, who agreed to talk as long as he was not identified, admits that the police often cause more problems than they solve. The officer—let’s call him Jorge—has been on the force since the mid-1980s and now commands a Patamo—a motorized tactical patrol vehicle—that conducts raids on drug dealers in the favelas.
Jorge says many of the cops who work in the most dangerous favelas are taking money from the drug commands. For instance, he explains the Vigário Geral massacre this way: Five cops who were on the take decided to extort more money from the local drug dealers. The dealers then executed the cops as they sat in their car. In response, the police raided the favela and killed indiscriminately. He doesn’t defend this action, but he understands it. “When you are trading shots and you see a friend of yours wounded and all the blood, when the mission stops, you have to control yourself not to take revenge,” he says. “It is very difficult.”
“Seventy percent of cops are corrupt,” Jorge says, meaning that they are willing to take money to void an arrest. “And fifteen per cent are involved in big corruption,” meaning that they are in league with the drug dealers. Vintém, for example, is a north end favela that is run by Amigos dos Amigos, the smallest of the city’s three drug gangs, which is controlled by Celso Luis Rodrigues, known on the street as Celsinho. Celsinho is an unusual drug dealer, because his posse has an unwritten rule not to kill cops. Instead, he bribes them. “In the 14th district, almost all the cops receive money from him,” Jorge says. “It’s not a secret. Everyone knows it. It’s been in the newspapers and on TV. When Celsinho needs to leave the favela, he calls the cops, who send a Patamo. He puts on a police uniform and goes wherever he wants to go, transported by the cops.” What’s more, Celsinho has community values. He funds the local samba school and sports programs for kids.
Jorge does not see police work as public service. For him, it’s more self-protection. “Traffickers kill police. And what gives them that power is guns. And what gives them guns is money. And how do they get money? Selling drugs.” His job, as he sees it, is to interrupt that pattern. And this allows him to justify things that to an outsider seem absolutely incomprehensible. For instance, Jorge has killed 13 people during his raids on favelas. He has a hardcore attitude. “It’s a war. If I’m a warrior, I’m a man who combats another force. I won’t tell you I am good and he is bad. I’m a warrior. There is a war. Forget bad or good. They are the other side and it’s my job to fight them. If you have a gun and you shoot at me, I will kill you. If you take out your gun, it’s sufficient for me: I will kill you. But if you don’t, if you surrender, then I will not kill you.”
But he freely admits he has broken that rule: He was leading a patrol into a favela where two drug gangs were battling for turf. High up the hill, his team got into a shootout with one of the gangs. After a lengthy exchange of gunfire, there was a lull. “We injured the chief of that group,” Jorge recalls. “He took a bullet to his leg and fell to the ground. He threw his weapon forward and said ‘Hey. We can talk now. There’s money here. There are guns. Let’s work this out. Let’s talk.’” Jorge takes a slow sip of soda before he continues. “I said, ‘You want to talk? Here’s how we’ll talk.’” He pantomimes a series of gunshots. “We killed five guys. Each of the cornered bandits. We killed in a barbaric way.” He insists he has no regrets about this massacre. They were bandidos, the bad guys, and they were trying to kill him. Jorge says he has also marched into favelas and beaten people up in order to prove his toughness to the dealers, and has even seen innocent people wounded in crossfire. In one case, a six-year-old girl was seriously wounded during one of his gun battles, and though she recovered fully, he says the sound of her pleas for help plague him to this day.
Jorge believes that the people who he is trying to kill (and who are trying to kill him) are not the ones who control the drug trade. “Our country is dominated by drug traffic. Our federal government, our state government, everything is dominated by traffic. All of this may sound like theater to you. But it’s true.” Jorge believes that the true leaders of the drug gangs—the top dogs of the Comando Vermelho and Terceiro Comando—are not the drug dealers in the favelas, but people in high positions in society. “When we go to favelas and we find an arms stockpile,” he explains, “we see boxes from the Air Force, Army, Navy. They are very new weapons. The military is very serious about making sure all weapons are accounted for. How can three or four boxes of grenades, pistols, and rifles simply disappear from the military and re-appear at the favela? I am almost certain that the guys that really run the drug commands are big military guys from the army, air force, and even politicians.”
Still, politics does offer ways to help integrate favelas into the urban fabric. The Mayor’s office has opened satellite offices in many favelas, and two larger favelas, Rocinha and Cidade de Deus, are actually considered legal parts of the city. The theory is that bringing in representations of public power and political involvement will tame these wild boroughs of the city.
Rocinha is furthest along in this process. The city has big plans: Better sewage and drainage. Rules regarding construction techniques. Improvements in the look of the favela. And, ultimately, some form of property rights. “The proper traffickers respect public power,” Valquiria, the regional administrator, tells me. “They know that making the community better is making it better for their families, for their kids and wives and parents and grandparents.” Then she smiles and adds, “And, with our work, little by little, we’re trespassing a bit on the privacy that allows them to operate.”
In addition, the police have begun a pilot program in community policing that seems to hold great promise for the favelas. Instead of raiding the favela every night and engaging the drug dealers in shootouts, the police are trying a new tactic in Pavão Pavãozinho, which borders Copacabana and was once one of the most dangerous favelas in the city’s Zona Sul. Today, 100 specially trained officers walk the beat in the favela, and are working with the residents rather than fighting against them.
Still, it’s hard to convince favela residents that the police are not the bad guys. “It’s a very fragile model,” admits Pedro Strozenberg, a lawyer who works for VivaRio, a non-profit organization that helped spawn the community policing program. “The first problem we face is to convince people that there is a problem. The second problem is for people to speak out.”
Jorge, who has engaged in many shootouts in Pavão Pavãozinho, was initially dubious about this effort. But he’s become a convert to community policing. “It really works,” he says. “The violence has been greatly reduced. There is still drug traffic. But it is very small.”
But Jorge remains cautious. “The community still hates the police,” he says. “They don’t trust us at all. The program’s working, but it depends on everyone working together. It depends on the government and on the community sticking to it when things get tough.”
To be fair, Jorge doesn’t have a positive view of human nature. “For me, everyone is born bad,” he tells me. “Human beings are very bad. The strength is to control your bad instincts, control your impulses.”
Back in Rocinha, my friend Washington has changed his tune. He is not a spiritual person, but he talks about the violence he has witnessed in religious terms. “Sometimes it’s hard to believe in God,” he tells me. “But I do believe. I try to believe. Sometimes I imagine He will come back to tell people that all this is wrong. He will tell everyone that they cannot judge, only He can judge. And then all will be right.”
It’s only long after our conversation that I realize he’s talking about the Last Judgment. He’s talking about the end of the world. Not until then, he seems to be saying, will the violence end.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Robert Neuwirth is writing a book on squatter communities around the world to be published by Routledge. He was recently awarded a Research and Writing grant from the MacArthur Foundation.
