Dancing With the Devil in the City of God: Rio De Janeiro on the Brink

by Juliana Barbassa

  This kid held a jagged piece of a beer bottle against my side, mugging me for whatever I had in my pockets. He stood close, mumbling his words.

  “Tia. Trocado, pra comer.” Change, for food, he said, half begging in spite of the sharp glass pricking the soft flesh beneath my ribs.

  I was only fourteen, but he was calling me tia, aunt. This is a very Brazilian expression, part affection and part respect, that kids use when talking to the grown-up women in their lives—their teachers at school, their friends’ parents. I was a child being threatened by a child. It was heartbreaking and revolting.

  A few months later, in August 1989, we left Brazil again for my father’s next assignment: Houston. I went back to a sporadic relationship with Rio. The image of that kid stayed with me as a reminder of what the city had become—something broken, abandoned, its decay more tragic because of its promise, like fruit that’s picked too green and rots before it ripens.

  More than two decades later, I was back. The country’s prospects had changed, and the city was shaking off the torpor of decades. But the clock was ticking. Rio had less than four years to go until it hosted the World Cup, and six years until the Olympics. The challenges were clear from the moment I landed in Rio’s old airport, with its perennially broken elevator, and drove past the polluted bay and the favelas alongside the highway. A massive overhaul of long-neglected infrastructure was in order; stadiums needed to be refurbished, new Olympic venues built from scratch.

  The biggest challenge, though, was security. Rio’s Olympic bid had promised “a safe and agreeable environment for the Games,” but this would not be easy. Gangs like the Red Command, which I remembered from my time in Rio a generation ago, had taken over favelas the size of small towns, marking their territory with graffiti tags scrawled on walls. From these safe havens they targeted the neighborhoods below. The police were poorly trained and ill-equipped at best, corrupt and lethal otherwise. Disputes between them, or turf wars between gangs, meant shoot-outs with a high body count.

  Rio would have to confront all this under the scrutiny of national and foreign media, which had the city in its crosshairs. In this era of social media and Internet activism, Brazil’s international standing would be measured in quantifiable terms such as gross domestic product, but also in the buzzwords that were becoming the yardstick of a country’s status in the twenty-first century: human rights, equality, justice, environmental sustainability, and quality of life.

  As I unpacked that Sunday night, getting ready for my first week of work, I wondered what lay ahead for me, for Rio, and for Brazil.

  CHAPTER 2

  THE RISE OF THE RED COMMAND

  The city didn’t leave me time to settle.

  The first sign of unrest was easy to overlook. It came on Tuesday, November 9, my second day on the job, just a short news brief tucked into the crime pages of O Globo, Rio’s main newspaper. It told of a violent carjacking in Jacarepaguá, a neighborhood in the far west of town. Four men armed with shotguns and pistols used their Peugeot to force a man in a Volkswagen to pull over. It was 7 a.m., and the driver, a pharmacist, was so scared he skidded up the sidewalk and smashed his car against a tree. He stepped out, as ordered. The men drenched the car with alcohol and set it on fire. Then they returned to the road and stopped the next motorist, a furnace operator driving a Chevrolet. They took the driver’s cell phone from his pocket, doused his car, and set it on fire. The victims were baffled: “They didn’t want to steal anything. They didn’t even want my credit cards,” the furnace operator said.

  Within the next couple of days, the hit-and-run attacks began to show a pattern. On Wednesday morning at seven o’clock, five armed men stopped two drivers in northern Rio, took their cell phones, and torched the cars. That night, two men on a motorcycle threw Molotov cocktails into cars parked near the subway stop where I got off in the morning, on my way to the AP office.

  This attack was close, but it was more worrisome for what it represented within the context of Rio. The neighborhood of Flamengo, a staid residential area on the south side of the city, was usually off-limits to warring gangs. A hit in these quiet street signaled this was not business as usual.

  After the Flamengo attack, the gangsters began to strike all over town, first cars, then buses. The burning hulks were meant to snarl traffic and spread panic as the perpetrators melted back into the chaos. No one had died—yet. But the flames left the city on edge.

  The experts I interviewed—former law enforcement officers, academics—said these attacks were likely a reaction the government’s initial efforts to make Rio safer. Under a new security program, heavily armed police invaded gang-controlled favelas, but only after warning the population. This allowed gangsters to flee, but it also reduced bloodshed, in a radical break with the old approach—fast, guns-blazing raids that often left bodies in their wake. The biggest difference came once the officers were inside. Under this new program, they stayed, and set up permanent bases with round-the-clock patrols. These special policing groups were called Unidades de Polícia Pacificadora, or Pacification Police Units—UPPs for short.

  The UPP program didn’t end drug traffic, but it reasserted the state’s presence in favelas where the gangsters had lived and run their businesses virtually unchecked. Nothing on this scale had ever been attempted.

  When I landed in Rio in November 2010, there were twelve of these units in place and a thirteenth planned for the end of the month. They were a drop in the sea of more than one thousand favelas, but pinpointing them on a map made it clear that law enforcement had a strategy. The targets were in key areas, around the principal sports arena and the upscale parts of town. Most of the UPPs were in the city’s south side, bracketing Copacabana, rubbing shoulders with Ipanema.

  Now the gangs were pushing back.

  I churned out the standard thousand-word articles for the AP about the attacks: the usual who-what-when-where-why, weaving in the requisite quotes by frightened residents, filing the story.

  But as I sat alone in my office at night, staring at the scenes flashing on the small television—flames leaping from busted bus windows, the rictus of fear on the face of commuters—I was struck by how little I understood the forces tearing at Rio.

  I knew the Red Command was first among these criminal networks in scope and power. I remembered its initial forays; the gangsters’ bravado had left a strong impression on me as a teenager. About Rio’s police I knew only enough to be wary of their methods. Now there were signs these forces were gearing up for a confrontation unlike any the city had seen.

  Over the next three weeks, the conflict would leave dozens of people dead and more than a hundred buses and cars burning. In that short time I’d learn the peculiar Brazilian formula that determined which lives and which deaths counted and which would not be part of the tally, even when one of the bodies in question had just been heaped onto a gurney, warm and bleeding before my eyes.

  Even as I covered the conflict, I realized that to really understand the balance of power in the city and to grasp what was at stake, I needed to fill in the gaps left by my years away. This meant reconstructing the history of the Red Command and of its influence on Rio, from the gang’s origins to the moment when I returned and found buses on fire in public streets.

  This mattered not only because of the November 2010 attacks, but because the gang’s evolution was entwined with Rio’s own. Its rise over the past forty years was intrinsically connected to the escalation of the drug trade and the armed violence that shaped this place, its culture, and its landscape.

  This new UPP security program was a threat to the Red Command’s core. The fallout would determine important aspects of life in Rio for years to come, years in which the city would host World Cup events and the Olympics. To understand what was at stake and gauge the consequences, I had to understand the Red Command.

  This is the gang’s story. In many ways, it is
also the story of Rio.

  The criminal organization that would one day strike terror in Rio was born in one of the most beautiful corners of the state: Ilha Grande, a pristine island of forested mountains skirted by beaches and fishing villages, about one hundred miles off Rio de Janeiro’s southern coast. Even today Ilha Grande has few roads and cars. Abraão, the island’s main settlement, barely registers as a town. It is a cluster of homes and pensions scattered along the dozen or so streets that spread at cockeyed angles from the dock.

  It was on the island’s ocean-facing side, where the waves are roughest, that one of Rio’s most notorious prisons once stood. The institution that would later be known as Cândido Mendes Penal Institute was first established as a penal colony in 1903. Because it was so remote, it became a dumping ground for dangerous criminals and political prisoners.

  Brazilian writer Graciliano Ramos, sent there in 1936 on charges of “communist subversion,” described its filth and the violence in his memoirs. “Simple mention of the God-forsaken place froze conversations and darkened faces,” he wrote.

  Conditions were so loathsome inmates nicknamed it “the Devil’s Cauldron.”

  By the time I moved to Rio, the prison had been shut down and its inmates scattered.I But one man could answer my questions about the gang’s origin: William da Silva Lima. He was there at the beginning.

  He did time in Ilha Grande starting in 1968 for robbing a bank, and was back again in 1974. Old mug shots and prison records show he was a slight man with a thick black beard, a receding hairline, and a long rap sheet. Beyond the bank robberies, he had convictions for kidnapping, extortion, and handling stolen goods. His calm demeanor and intellectual bent earned him the trust of other inmates; he wrote many of their petitions and letters and acted as their go-between with authorities. In return they gave him the nickname he still carries: Professor.

  The Professor was seventy-one when we met. By way of introduction he showed me his scars, now spidery marks on his crepe-paper skin. The uneven knuckles on his left hand came from a time he was tied to his cell bars and beaten with a stick. The dent on the back of his head had the shape of a metal rod; it was the revenge of a guard after one of his many escape attempts.

  “But I survived,” he said, sitting down at a well-worn dinner table in his modest Copacabana apartment. “Many more didn’t.”

  His body was broken from his forty-odd years in prison, his speech was slurred, but his mind held the stories I’d come for. These he spun with little prompting—tales of his first crime, an embezzlement carried off to perfection when he was fourteen, of famous cellmates, of his four prison escapes.

  He also spoke of the prison—an overcrowded, disease-ridden hell ruled over by authorities who made no pretense of reforming those who landed there. The food was never enough; there were no mattresses, no blankets, no uniforms, no cleaning supplies unless inmates bought these themselves. Men slept on the floor and fought off the rats that crawled from the open pits that served as toilets. Insects feasted on the naked flesh, leaving prisoners with swollen limbs and suppurating wounds. Guards, lacking enough guns and munitions and given free rein by distant prison authorities, improvised methods of keeping control. These included beatings, electric shocks, inventive forms of torture.

  Guards terrorized the inmates, but so did other prisoners. Groups of inmates robbed and raped newcomers; prisoners killed each other over differences they brought from the outside, internal rivalries, or for pay. The inmates, the Professor said, were their own worst enemies.

  It was within these perpetually humid cells, described by another former inmate as “walls that weep,” that Brazil’s military dictatorship stashed political prisoners found guilty of trying to overthrow the regime. Many were convicted under a catch-all Lei de Segurança Nacional, or National Security Law, passed in 1968, so prison records referred to them as the LSN prisoners, or simply, the politicals.

  This group of convicts included student leaders, priests, academics, and union organizers; up to ninety-two of them were held at a time in the penitentiary’s Gallery B between 1969 and 1975, alongside more than 850 common criminals. When a bank robber like the Professor was thrown into the same gallery, he found himself in daily contact with the firebrands who’d been advocating the overthrow of government.

  The ideologues were impressive to the thieves and kidnappers with whom they shared quarters. They maintained within prison the same discipline they followed outside: a routine of regular study, collective decision-making, and obeisance to rules of conduct. Their presence began to change the prison: they curtailed robbery and rape, and led hunger strikes that gained the inmates better health care and better treatment for their visitors, who were routinely roughed up and shaken down by guards. They put the treats brought by their middle-class families into a collective pool and shared them.

  These LSN prisoners brought more than lofty talk. Many were there for executing precisely planned bank robberies and high-profile kidnappings to finance their struggle against the military regime. They discussed the heists with the other prisoners as well. These conversations would later prove far more dangerous than the sticks the men sharpened into daggers on the rough concrete floor.II

  From this stew of ideals, advice, and rebellion, the seeds of the Red Command began to germinate in Cândido Mendes’s cells. At first, they were no more than a prison gang focused on improving conditions on the inside. Some of the earliest documents connected to this gang that would later terrify the city were poignant letters sent to “brothers” on the outside asking for donations to the prison Christmas Party and signed with their motto, Paz, Justiça e Liberdade: Peace, Justice, and Liberty.

  As the dictatorship eased up, the political prisoners were transferred to prisons with better conditions; by August 28, 1979, the generals decreed an amnesty for those charged with political crimes. Just a month later, the incipient Red Command staged a coup within prison walls that left six rival leaders dead and secured its control of the penitentiary. In his 1979 year-end report, the head of the prison informed state penal authorities that “after the murders of September 1979 . . . the LSN phalanx or Red Command began to rule the prison of Ilha Grande and control organized crime in all of Rio’s penitentiary system.” His succinct account named the gang for the first time in an official document; it also recognized that they were no longer confined to the island prison.

  The veneer of idealism that had inspired the gang’s motto began to fade soon after the political prisoners were released. The men retained only the certainty that they were stronger together, and that they lived within a system whose rewards they couldn’t hope to attain. Instead of fighting to change that system, however, the gang would organize itself in the years to come to wrench from it what it wanted: money, power, and visibility.

  By the end of the 1970s, the Professor said, “what they called ‘Red Command’ could not be destroyed easily: it was a way of behaving, of surviving adversity.”

  The gang had risen within the penal system, but few outside the inner circles of law enforcement had ever heard its name. That changed on Friday, April 3, 1981, when the Red Command burst with a spasm of blood and bullets into Brazilian living rooms through the nightly news.

  The police had been investigating a series of spectacular bank robberies—well-planned, precisely timed heists in which a group worked together to disrupt traffic, hit a string of banks, and melt away . . . the sort of thing the leftist guerrillas had pulled off in years past.

  That April evening, a tipster pointed novice detectives to a north-side housing complex, saying the bank robbers had been hiding out there. The plainclothes investigation went dramatically awry. During the all-night shoot-out that followed—all of it covered on national news—a handful of men held hundreds of officers at bay. From their perch inside a third-floor apartment, the gangsters deployed a frightening arsenal and displayed an audacity that no one would forget.r />
  Throughout the night, their leader shouted taunts at the cops below: “Come and get me, you bastards! This is the Red Command.” He was José Jorge Saldanha, known as Zé Bigode, or Mustache Joe; at thirty-eight years old, he had twelve bank robberies to his name and had done time in Ilha Grande before escaping in 1980. An undated mug shot showed a man between black and white who looked at the camera through lowered eyelids, head tilted slightly back, with a dark mustache that hung over the top half of his mouth but left the lower, fleshy lip unguarded.

  The standoff lasted eleven hours; by the time a 12-gauge bullet left a gurgling hole in Zé Bigode’s chest, three officers were dead and half a dozen injured. Awe for the gang’s skill and fearlessness breathed through the lines of the newspaper articles that ran the following day. To one downed officer’s plea—“Get me out of here, please”—came Zé Bigode’s mockery: “I’ve got a bullet for each one of you!”

  The head of state security gave an interview that revealed the gangsters’ arsenal was far beyond what the police could access. “We’re in inferior conditions,” he said. “Our weapons are only those allowed by law.”

  A photographer for O Globo captured the essence of that episode in one last photo of Zé Bigode. In the foreground was the body of the gangster, thin and shirtless, flung face up and arms akimbo on a dirt path of the housing complex lawn. The dark bulk of armed, uniformed police officers loomed over him. The episode became known as quatrocentos contra um, or four hundred against one.

  This paroxysm of violence and daring became seared in the city’s collective memory. It marked the public debut of the Comando Vermelho, or CV, an entity that would haunt Rio for years to come.