The Rio-Recife Blog

“the most violent favela”

 Home to some 30,000 people, the Santo Amaro favela complex near downtown Recife began as a conglomerate of unregulated shanties surrounding various new factories erected during the “Estado Novo” regime of pres. Gertulio Vargas some seventy years ago.  The area at the time was predominately swampland (“mangue”), and was filled in bit by bit with dirt and debris carried by each squalid family arriving en masse from the sun-scorched countryside.  They went to work mixing soft drinks, hemming clothes, and assembling razorblades.  They came home to the same muddy, mosquito-infested squalor, decade after decade.   

 Only in the 1970s did local community leaders successfully organize to have basic services brought to the favela, including trash collection, basic sanitation, running water, and electricity.  By the 1980s Santo Amaro was politically organized, and became a significant vote center for local politicians during Brazil’s democratization years.  Since then, the construction of little plazas that rapidly deteriorate and intermittent social projects that quickly come and go became commonplace, especially during campaign periods.  However, the ills of urban poverty continue to befall the community, which has been famed the “most violent favela in Pernambuco.” 

 Around the same time the favela started to look like a real neighborhood, new waves of migrants flooded in, and amidst the confusion things began to fall apart.  The traditional family structure of the sertanejos (the rugged conservative folk from the arid sertão region of Northeastern Brazil) deteriorated in the ebb and flow of poor migrants and economic crises.  Unemployed men drank themselves into oblivion.  Their children learned the new way to be a man, and took it a step further, consuming drugs in their hopeless leisure.   Crack cocaine—here in Pernambuco made directly from coca paste—poured like rain on the startled community by the mid-1990s, and Santo Amaro lost its innocence. 

 “Today there are very few fathers in Santo Amaro,” commented a local activist.  “They are dead, in prison, or have simply abandoned their families.”  On one hand, the demise of the traditional man has opened the way for women to become the heads of households, and consequently, an unheard before voice in the community.  Illusions aside, however, women continue to suffer regular violence in their homes, and must now take on the role as breadwinner on top of it all.  And in the streets, guns still speak louder than minds.   

The Gangs

There are three umbrella gangs in Santo Amaro, corresponding to four territorial sections of the favela.  Each gang is referred to by the name of the section: Joao de Barros, Campo do Onze, “D.” (a.k.a. Demonios da Ilha), and Salgado.  The feared and respected “Junior Box” is the dono of both Campo do Onze and “D.”, ever since he successfully invaded the latter section a year ago.  He is now in prison, but still controls everything via cell phone and visits.  The dono of Joao de Barros is also in prison.  Both gangs are similar in profile.  The leaders are somewhat older (between 25-35 years old), although they use young children and teenagers for selling and security functions.  The Salgado gang, however, is principally run by teenagers, and is known to be less organized and more audacious (and consequently, more dangerous) than the others. 

 Loyal and submissive to this larger structure are subgangs and families that sell drugs out of their homes, and offer protection and other services to the main gang leaders.  It is essentially a very loose association of criminals and criminal groups, most of whom are also drug users/addicts who have simply found a way to make a living that simultaneously supports their habits.  Selling drugs is an obvious option, too, for the uneducated poor with criminal records that limit their legal marketability.  That said, gang allegiance, not only of its members but also of residents of the dominated areas, is particularly strong.  Or, rather, popular identification with the local gang is highly normalized.

 The “Law of Silence” remains in full vigor.  As in Rio de Janeiro, caguete tem de morrer—“Rats must die”—complicating or even nullifying police investigations in the area, and biasing media representation of events and conditions of life in Santo Amaro.  One resident explains: the number of homicides in the favela has not actually gone down since the implementation of the Pacto pela Vida (the ambitious results-based public security policed implemented in 2007).  With increased police presence, the drug traffickers have simply gotten more clever. They continue to kill, but take the bodies to dump elsewhere, usually as unidentified victims.  No one approaches the police about these disappearances, not even the victims’ families, for fear of retaliation. 

 Likewise, murders committed inside Santo Amaro—such as the three assassinations during an invasion just last week—are underreported by the media.  The drug traffickers removed the bodies themselves so as not to call attention from the police, which would hamper sales and increase the risk of confrontation. 

 Meanwhile, war between the gangs is relatively constant, although it is cyclical in nature.  That is, heated periods of combat and high levels of violence are followed by periods of calm due to a temporary power equilibrium.  Several residents assured me that we are currently in a period of calm, despite the murders last week.  When war is at hand, everyone is tense.  An attack could happen in any place and at any time of the day.  And “stray bullets don’t discriminate.”

 Inter-gang combat is far less cinematographic here than in Rio de Janeiro.  The weapons are limited to pistols, revolvers, and the occasional shotgun, rather than automatic rifles, machine guns, and hand grenades.  Perhaps for this reason—the short-range effectiveness of the weapons used here—larger territories are more difficult to conquer or defend for any single gang.  To illustrate, average pistol accuracy is somewhere between 10-25 yards.  Average AR-15 rifle accuracy (much used by Rio’s drug gangs), by contrast, is around 300 yards.  In any case, pistols and revolvers are still quite deadly, and once again, stray bullets don’t discriminate. 

 Most of the violent gang confrontation is due to so-called “rinchas,” or revenge attacks in response to previous aggressions.  These are not territorial disputes or conquests per se, rather collective manifestations of the hyper-macho male ego embedded in a culture that celebrates violence in the name of personal honor.  This corresponds to the Homicide Department’s categorization of “revenge motive” (see previous post), to which nearly 30 percent of all of Recife’s murders are attributed.  [note, however, the difficulty in categorizing motives: this violence is also a matter of drug trafficking and perhaps even interpersonal conflict, as everyone in a favela knows everybody]. 

 More clearly tied to the logic of non-institutionalized illicit commerce, the rules and norms of transactions and general behavior are enforced by the use or threat of violence.  A great many homicides in Santo Amaro, and Recife as a whole, are regulatory sanctions of the non-institutionalized market.  This means that most victims are somehow related to drugs and drug trafficking.  There is no tolerance for indebtedness, for example.  Drug addicts are those who most often die because they are unable to pay their consumption, which at some point in the collapsing functionability of their lives comes to be supported by that oh-so-bloodily taxed credit system of drug traffickers.  Next in the mortal line are those lowly drug traffickers who also use drugs.  They kill so often because if their users learn that it is okay not to pay, it will soon be them in a coffin for owing their wholesaler. 

 The desperation of drug traffickers always riding the fragile wave of indebtedness mixes with an acquired tasted for extreme cruelty, and it is this that often affects the totally innocent, or those who only by association with someone involved in crime must pay for the sins of others. In Santo Amaro, for example, the families of the three men who were killed last week were forced to flee their homes or otherwise face extermination.  The parents must pay their murdered sons’ debts.  Death alone is just a warning to others.  The debt lives on long after the pulse of the addict is gone. 

 In some spectacularly cruel cases, the sisters and mothers of indebted addicts were beaten and raped in front of them, but this is just sadism and evil. 

 Meanwhile, gang leaders often offer assistance to needy families, at least to those who are willing to ask for it.  The purchase of medicines, food baskets, and other basic necessities are particularly common, although not to the degree in which the criminal giving tree has developed in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro.  It is somewhat more difficult here due to the relative poverty of the local drug trade itself, and to the more clandestine structure of drug trafficking in general.  That is, there is less to give, and it is harder to find.  In any case, the return on these partial and petty benefits is collective.  Everyone pays for them with silence.

and to conclude…

None of this is to say that Santo Amaro is a living hell, of course.  And, of course, it is not.  At least I enjoyed the quiet narrow streets of dirt and scattered stone; lined with quaint little countryside homes painted in myriad pastels; the clean laundry draped from house to house and drying in the glorious sun; the playful assaults of children and the sugar-sweet smiles of their mothers; the crippled old men stuck forever with a wry smile in a porch chair; the occasional lump of human being passed out with a bottle of glue stuck to her nose… 

 I tend to focus on the bad things, but this is never to say I am not actually talking about paradise on Earth. 

The Fog of Homicide

                   A Preliminary Personal Adjustment to Crime and Violence in Recife

 For two weeks I have been mulling over how to make this blog’s transition to another city’s story of crime and violence, and what I have encountered day after day is… writer’s block.  Because…it is difficult to crack the ice in this place that is so different than Rio de Janeiro.  Recife, Pernambuco, torchbearer of Brazil’s most violent cities, is a bizarre contrast of colonial social structures and spastic modern economic development.  Violent crime is rampant, and each day the bodies of a half dozen more youths are brought to the morgue, full of .38 cal lead heads or thrashed to shreds by knives.  But it is not like Rio.  Favelas are not governed by rifle-toting drug traffickers or sly violent militiamen.  The police carry only handguns, and they have no armored assault vehicles.  Tracer bullets do not illuminate the night sky when combat ensues.  Here there is much less order and sophistication to the violence.  The reality is more fluid and much harder to grasp.

 Last week I learned that my old capoeira instructor, Professor Gavião, was gunned down at a bar in front of his family a year ago.  As the story goes, he had “humiliated” a local thug, slapping him on the face and kicking him out of the bar for selling drugs there.   An hour later the thug came back with a revolver, and unloaded it into Gavião’s head and chest.  His capoeira group disbanded a few months later, unable to reassign effective leadership.  And his five children…

 The first thing I needed to figure out is who is doing all the killing and dying, and why.  There are no large, organized, prison-based criminal groups at war for territorial control.  Instead, there are an unknown number of loosely structured street gangs, drug trafficking families and clicks, extortion and robbery mafias, and “extermination groups” offing each other one by one, day by day.  And there are countless drug addicts—so many of them beholden to crack—who kill for a fix and die when they fail to pay their inevitable debts.  Finally, there is the omnipotent idiocy of alcohol lubricating a patriarchal culture of “cabra-machos” that holds a man’s honor high above his own life and that of others, such that spontaneous bar fights or other drunken misunderstandings often lead to…  

…five fatherless children

According to the Civil Police’s homicide department (DHPP), the one thousand + killings in Recife proper each year (and by extension, the some 2-3,000 in the metropolitan area) can be categorized by motive genre.  See the chart below:

 

 In order as listed, the categories are fights, extermination groups, crimes of passion, interpersonal crimes, revenge killings, and drug trafficking. 

 At once the categorization of motivations is questionable, and it becomes more so once we understand that each homicide is here categorized based on the investigator’s initial assessment of the crime (while some 90 percent of all murders are never solved).  “Fights,” for example, represent only 4.14 percent of all homicides, yet “interpersonal crimes” represent over 20 percent.  The former concerns incidents such as bar fights and violent confrontations at soccer games between fans of opposing teams.  The latter refers to crimes of proximity, or those in which the assailant and the victim knew each other.  However, I imagine that to kill someone you are close to, there must be some kind of fight, yet this distinction is not made at any point in the investigative process. 

 Crimes of passion are less confusing, as they usually refer to someone killing his intimate partner, which in the cabra-macho world of the Brazilian northeast seems to happen with some frequency. (note: intimate partner killings are, ironically, the one homicide genre not significantly predicted or changed by a country’s level of economic development (see UNODC Global Study on Homicide 2011)).   

 Not surprisingly, “drug trafficking” is the motivational basis for the highest percentage of homicides, according to the chart.  This includes territorial conflicts as well as the whole range of control killings necessary for the un-institutionalized illicit market to run a profitable and respected business.  Two examples to illustrate: a) a drug addict rents a gun from a drug trafficker to rob some pedestrians, but loses the gun while being chased by the police.  He has to be killed, because otherwise he could be lying just to keep the gun; b) two brothers realize they could make good money by selling a little bit of weed out of their mother’s home, but gangsters from down the street consider that their territory.  Adjustments need to be made. 

 Curiously, however, “revenge” accounts for nearly 30 percent of all killings.  If this is true, what does it say about the current cycle of violence and its future?  Is this revenge for previous killings?  Will all of these revenge killings also be avenged with more killings?  A frightening thought.

 Last, but of course not of least importance, is the 7 percent of killings attributed to “extermination groups.”  These groups gained substantial notoriety during the last five years or so, and as a result several large-scale operations were carried out to disarticulate them and jail their members.  They are often made up of policemen and firefighters—like their milicia counterparts in Rio de Janeiro—but have in only one known situation (a group called the Thundercats) developed any apparent territorial control or high-profile political ties.   They often start as individuals or small groups that initially kill for revenge or to get a particular bad man off the streets, and then evolve into cash-hungry social and political cleansing organizations.  And killing is usually only one of many functions they may have.  Many if not most of these groups also practice extortion, kidnapping, theft, and drug trafficking, or some mixture of these. 

 At issue with the categorization—beyond its high potential for inaccuracy—is that any particular homicide may very well be attributed to several if not all of these categories, perhaps with the exception of “crimes of passion.” 

 Today, for example, I visited the mother of an 18-year old boy named…

 …whose charred body was found alongside his friend last month near the town of Cabo de Santo Agostino, outskirts of Recife.  A group of young girls had invited them to some fun up in the hills, and led them into an ambush.  Their enemies, another group of teenage boys, gunned them down and then set fire to the bodies. 

 How will this massacre be initially categorized?  The assailants and victims knew each other.  They had fought before.  Everyone smoked marijuana, and when they could afford it, snorted cocaine.  There was jealousy over Geimerson’s new girlfriend.  Perhaps the killers had been given the green light by another party that may have also put some cash into their pockets.  Nearly every stated motivation could plausibly be attributed simultaneously.   

 Ay, the poor unemployed bastard never even finished middle school…

 But looking forward, I hope to get a better idea of the causes of homicide here, as well as the dynamics organized crime and violence in Recife, over the following months.  I will also evaluate the state government’s relatively ambitious public security policy, the “Pact for Life,” initiated in 2007, which according to the Secretary of Social Defense’s own statistics, has reduced the homicide rate by 33 percent since it height five years ago. 

 This is the sloppy finger hammer jabbing away at the obstinance of writer’s block, little by little, painfully but surely moving forward.  This is the proactive process of the brain adjusting to the new and strange.  This is life amidst death, and lots of mosquitos. Until next time, peace.  Recife, Brazil, God bless you.

Rescued Souls

I had fled amidst the screaming in tongues a few nights prior, but felt compelled to return to Pastor Dione’s church once more.  So that I might learn something about human breaking points, about where life paths reach a fork and choices are reduced to extremes, for at this point there is no going back to innocence.   And so that I might feel something, the exaltation of the human soul, cracked and broken and then reborn to a new world where nothing is as it was. 

 What brought these people into Pastor Dione’s hands, or as they say, into the hands of God?  What was the breaking point, that moment in which the fear of Hell beyond and perdition on Earth make one drop everything and deliver himself to God?  Or is it not only fear but also love for oneself or one’s family that drive him to extreme remedies to cure their self-destructive behaviors?  Is the path to God linear and positive, or is it replete with reversions and retreats?  Does deliverance to God require Evil to always be near and menacing, or can there be peace in the balance of things good and bad?

 Sunday evening’s cult service had already begun when I arrived, and I avoided entering for some time because where the pastor’s screaming evokes God like bolts of lightning, it also, in me, evokes the demented aggression of a heavy metal concert.  But as the church filled up, men in suits to one side, women in solid-colored robes to the other, I ventured in to watch and listen. 

My reactions were softened this second time around.  I felt neither God nor Satan, such that more was needed than an observation of the devout.  Then Pastor Dione invited me to stay the night in the men’s dorm, and alas, there I could begin gathering histories. 

 After the service, Axel, the Pastor’s assistant, led me tip-toeing over fifty men sleeping head to foot on the floor and in the hallways, and on to an empty bunk bed that someone had given up for me.  “Let’s put your stuff in the Pastor’s cabinet,” he said looking around. “There’s a lot of new people here, and someone might run off with your camera.” The “House of God,” the Pastor had mentioned earlier, “is not immune to the Devil’s ploys.” 

 Still I slept like a child through the miraculously snoreless night, and woke the next morning with a skip in my step.  It was time to hear some stories.  The following are a selection among the many:

 

Gabriela is twenty-eight years old.  She interned herself at the cult refuge center this morning.  She had spent several months there twice already, but this time she was decided.  This time she was ready to make the long awaited and necessary change in her life.  She has two young children who she had increasingly abandoned for her crack addiction.  Fatherless already, she could no longer bare to watch, like a stranger, her own behavior that led her to spend days at a time in the “cracklands,” smoking and withering away as her children grew up alone with their aging grandmother.  A voice spoke loud and clear inside of her, and so after smoking her “last” hit last night, she called for help.  Today she resolved to come clean and deliver herself to God.  Her children will stay with her mother for some time, and if and when God desires, He will release her to care for them again.  It is all in God’s hands now, but the first step she has taken on her own.  Today she turned her back on Satan. 

 

Luciano stands with this daughter, Maisa.  A drug trafficker in Rio’s slums in the 1990s, he decided to change professions after escaping an attempt on his life.  At the time he was a “treasurer” for the Terceiro Comando faction, and had been accused of stealing money, the punishment for which is summary execution.  All of forty armed men broke into his house one night to make an example of him, but by mad luck he was at his mother’s place that evening.  When his old boss, who had been out of town, found out about occurrence, he ordered every one of the forty men who came to Luciano’s house that night to be killed, one by one.  Some thirty were killed before the boss himself lost his life, and the dust settled into a new order. 

 Although Luciano left the life of crime, he carried with him a cocaine addition that nearly destroyed his life by his own hands.  As a waiter he earned some $1,200 reais ($700 USD) per month, but would routinely spend all of it on cocaine, alcohol, slot machines, and women within hours of receipt.  He recalls the morbid feeling of remorse and shame when at 6 a.m. day post-pay, month after month, he reached into his empty pockets as sunlight seeped over the horizon.  He had a wife and children at home, and he became so much of nothing to them, and to himself, until an inner voice finally spoke for change. A friend of his brought him to Pastor Dione’s church, he was interned for one year, and now says that he is three years clean of alcohol and drugs.

 But recently new drama brought Luciano back to the cult refuge.  No longer with his wife—who he says has an addiction to men—he was living with his ten-year old daughter at his mother’s house. But several days ago his mother, aged and mean-spirited, beat his daughter, leaving her terrified and sick.  Unemployed and broke, but unwilling to submit his daughter to such abuse, he returned with her to the cult refuge.  The general rule is that no children are allowed, but Pastor Dione is known for never turning anyone away.  Exceptions can always be made. 

 Now Maisa, ten years old, sleeps in the women’s quarters, and Luciano sleeps with the men. Maisa says that it is difficult to live in such close quarters with so many people she just met, but she supports her daddy, and has faith that he will soon find a job and rent an apartment. 

 

Tamara arrived Friday night, barely conscious.  Pastor Dione received an emergency call that afternoon while ten men and two women beat her with fists, kicks, and a brick.  He arrived in time to plead for mercy on her soul, and the drug traffickers, so fearful and respectful of God and the Pastor’s connection to Him, relented.   Another soul “rescued” and brought to Jesus.  

 According to Tamara, a 23-year old who had been using and trafficking drugs since she was fourteen, her fellow drug traffickers meant to kill her, having accused her of being a “X-9,” a rat to the police.  The day before she had been picked up by the police and brought to the station, but was later released after the local drug boss paid a bribe.  However, some among the traffickers accused her of passing information to the police while in custody, and the plotting began.  Friday afternoon, while everything seemed back to normal, twelve of her old “friends”—people she had grown up with and had trafficked drugs with for years—smashed a brick into her head and began kicking her while she squirmed on the ground.   They tore her long hair from her head with a knife and screamed in her ear that she was going to be cut up in pieces. She was soon to be dead had Pastor Dione not arrived at the height of the horror.   

 Three days later her face and body are still deformed from the beating, but she is happy to be at the cult refuge, happy to be alive, and swears she will not go back to drug trafficking ever.  Her only problem, she laughs, is that it is hard to live in close quarters with a whole lot of other bitchy problem-women full of hormones, and she has never been one to be told what to do.  Tensions were going to be inevitable at the cult refuge.  She had been accustomed to resolving them with a .38 calibre pistol.  Now she must learn to live in peace with others without it.

 

 Marcos had been clean for nearly a year, but decided to come back to the cult refuge this morning, his eyes still glazed over from last night’s perdition.  He had been clean, but returning to his family’s home, and in the neighborhood where he and his friends used to traffic and use drugs, he eventually fell down the wrong path again.  It started with an occasional cigarette.  Then some beer.  Later he started going to baile funk parties again, and then it was marijuana, cocaine, women, and violence. 

 Disillusioned, his family turned away from him.  Seeing him down and out, his old enemies among the drug traffickers (those he used to abuse in the past) began to pursue him, threatening an attack when he least suspected it.  He sank into depression, and started using more and more. 

 Two years ago when he first came to the cult refuge he had to hit rock bottom in order to make the decision to accept Jesus.  He had recently been shot in the thigh by a policeman’s rifle, and two of his friends were killed in front of him.  Pastor Dione visited him while in the hospital.  Fortunately, he was never arrested, and since he never went to prison, his identity was never sealed as a permanent drug trafficker.  By “donating” everything he ever acquired through drug trafficking—car, house, jewelry—he was able to chose a new life without fear of retaliation.  They would let him go.

 After this second perdition, he no longer had to hit rock bottom, for now he had a point of reference.  He knew already that through God he could rescue his own soul before it was too late, so today he came on his own.  “How long will you stay,” I asked.  “Until God decides it is time for me to leave,” Marcos says with conviction.

 

Susana is twenty-four years old.  Her soul was “rescued” by Pastor Dione’s van crew three months ago during a cracklands visit.  Like many others at the cult refuge, she was a “total-flex,” a colloquialism for someone who uses any and every drug they can get their hands on. 

 “Do you think it will be hard to stay off drug once you go back out into the world?”

 No, she says.  She has put her life in God’s hands now, and in any case she could not possibly go back to living as she did.  She would rather kill herself than become again as she was, all skin and bones, black with dirt and grime, and groveling about—losing all dignity—just to get another hit.  No, she would not fall back into that life.  She feels healthy and beautiful again, and she could not bare to see herself again as a body destroyed, a soul lost, a life wasted. 

  

Denise, thirty-five years old, is the only woman at the cult refuge who claims to still have a husband or boyfriend in her life.  The other women—nearly all mothers—have lost or given up their significant others.  Most of them say that they have been physically and emotionally abused or were simply  abandoned after having children.  Men were, therefore, now of secondary importance, as the women are now dedicated first and foremost to God, who they believe will never betray them. 

 Denise, however, says that when she gets out of the refuge—whenever Gods decides it is her time—she will go back to her husband and make amends.  She has been using crack for ten years.  Her first daughter, now twenty, is now trafficking drugs in nearby favela.  Denise has made many mistakes, but hopes to make up for them.  Only her husband has no idea where she is.  She is ashamed to tell him. 

“Do you think he will be there when you get out?” I ask, choked up by what seemed a most heart wrenching delusion. 

 “I don’t know,” she sighed.  The entire room of women sat silent.  

Guns, Cops, and God on the West Side

Friday is “payday” in Vila Aliança, a favela complex of some 40,000 people on the far West Side of Rio de Janeiro.  That is, the police come to pick up their arrego—bribe money from drug traffickers—without which Friday night’s baile funk must be canceled or face a violent shutdown by the police later in the evening.  But today the Terceiro Comando Puro (locally called the Terceiro Comando “Pinga”) fails to materialize the $30,000 Reais demanded, and the police are upset.  Six rifle shots pound the sky from a few blocks away as I sit talking to Fafa, the president of Vila Aliança’s Residents Association, where he has presided unopposed since 1991. Thirty minutes after the bullets, his young assistant turns to me with a sad face after receiving a text message: “the baile is canceled tonight.”  The police have come in shooting, a message that everyone understands. 

 Fafa is also a member of Rio’s Military Police, once retired and recently reinstated as a sub lieutenant in charge of administrative affairs.  “I couldn’t stand to sit around the house all day,” the fifty-seven year old said.  His profession explained the .40 cal pistol he pulled out of his belt to show me as we drove to get lunch.  Police in Brazil are among the few citizens licensed to carry a firearm.  “I never leave home without it,” he smiled. 

 More difficult to explain is the fact that the residents association of Vila Aliança, a community dominated by drug traffickers for nearly three decades, is headed by an active police lieutenant who has lived his entire life in the community.  Alas there are nuances and exceptions to the Law of Drug Trafficking in Rio de Janeiro.  Although this Law violently prohibits residents from having any personal relations with police officers—and therefore many favelas have no police officers living in them at all—there are exceptions for people who have grown up in the community and later in life became policemen.  At Fifty-seven, Fafa has seen generations of young drug traffickers come and go.  As children they called him “Papa.” As young criminals they still do.  “I leave them alone, and they leave me alone.”  A mutual respect keeps everyone alive for another day.

 It is also popularly understood that most Residents Associations have functional ties to drug traffickers, and often act as legitimate fronts for local criminal factions.  Fafa explains, however, that in his case he always made it a point to never accept any assistance from the drug traffickers, lest he owe them favors that could haunt him later on.  “Of course we [the Residents Association] lack funds all the time, and sure they [the drug traffickers] offer help.  A thousand reais here and there.  But I can’t accept it.  If today I take their money, tomorrow they will want to store guns in our building. It’s not worth it.” 

 “So who is the authority in Vila Aliança,” I ask.  Fafa laughs, and pointing at a duo with a rifle cruising up the street on a scooter, says, “they are.”

 Convinced that I was “dying to see some weapons” (which I never let on about, but nevertheless is always true), Fafa called out to the two young men on the scooter as they drove by.  When they pulled up, Fafa told them about my apparent weapons obsession, and asked them to show me their guns.  The man with the rifle handed his weapon to me, giggling.  It was a Belgian made .762 cal automatic rifle mounted with a sniper scope.  It felt heavy, cold, and toyish.  “That’ll tear someone right to shreds!” one of the traffickers cracked up, while my boyish smile withered just a bit.  I handed the gun back, and watched them speed off brandishing their deadly toy in every which direction. 

 I suppose I wanted to see more, and since a few hours had already passed since the police incursion, Fafa assumed correctly that the drug points would be opened and well-armed again.  So he had his teenage nephew give me a motorcycle tour of Vila Aliança.  So many images I would love to capture: a man pointing a pistol at a cat; a young teenager with a an M-4 machine gun mounted with a grenade launcher in his lap; an exchange of money for little bags of white powder on a doorstep; and everything else, thousands of normal people going about their normal daily business and leisure.  But alas, one cannot simply take pictures in such places. 

 Night was falling, and though I was satisfied with Fafa’s interview, I had really come to find an a man named Pastor Dione, as ex-drug trafficker turned evangelical preacher specializing in rescuing other drug traffickers, drug addicts, and prostitutes, by bringing them to Jesus Christ.  His rehabilitation cult center, housing some 60 reformed criminals and addicts, was portrayed in a recent documentary (Dancing with the Devil (2009)).  He appeared in the film as an overpoweringly charismatic figure with a tinge of messianic psychosis, and I decided I must meet him.  So I said goodbyes to Fafa and his friends, and grabbed a mototaxi to nearby Senador Camara. 

 Pastor Dione and several young men were standing outside the church in stylish pinstripe suits and a strikingly Caponish air as the mototaxi dropped me off.  Dizzy from the hellish ride, I nearly face planted into Pastor Dione, who I did not see smile once during the next two hours.  He told me with irritation that, due to some problems in the past, he had resolved to give no more interviews to the media.  He showed me his cell phone messages: calls from Globo, Bandeirantes, R7, all wanting interviews with him.  But as a student researcher—that’s me—he reluctantly gave in…not to an interview per se, but my presence there, and a good long conversation about the “false peace” on Earth today and the one path towards real peace through the acceptance in our hearts of Jesus Christ.

 About crime and drug trafficking he did not care to talk.  “Why say anything more?  Everyone already knows the situation.  Poverty, the abandonment of the State, corruption and violence…the story has been told a hundred times, and the media just regurgitates it for ratings while nothing is ever done to change the situation!”

 About the path to Jesus Christ, I desisted, because everyone knows about that, too.  But night had fallen, and the gears of Christ’s engines were cranking into motion.  Pastor Dione sat at his desk in front of me, writing notes for the evening cult’s lecture.  His face so intense and focused, I felt as a paralyzed infant in a high chair in his presence.  Psychedelic choir music rose from the church below as dozens of young men in suits began descending the stairwell.  A few moments later I heard the yelling.  Pastor Dione’s preachers-in-training had begun the service warm up. 

 It sounded like a hundred banshees screaming in tongues.  The men to one side, the women to the other, all on their knees.  Some collapsed to the ground and cried for salvation.  Others rose in jubilation for having been saved.  I kneeled in front of a pew and dug my forehead into its wood, overwhelmed by the intensity of emotion.  All of these young men and women, so horribly scarred by life, are now finding God—finding peace—in a way that may appear to most people as a completely insane.  But there is power, unimaginable power, in this theatre of praise.  One feels it at once take over from within.  It is as a human wave lifted to illogical heights and then flooding down to crush the pervasive hold of Satan. 

 Overwhelmed, I opted to take photographs, and then leave even before Pastor Dione came down.  One of Dione’s disciples, a cocaine addict who nearly stabbed his wife four months ago, walked me to the bus stop.  As we passed Dione’s car, a shiny new SUV, I asked where the money came from to fund all of this.

  “God provides it for us.”