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

by Juliana Barbassa

  Just past noon, the taut stillness finally broke with the clattering of tanks rolling uphill and the roar of police helicopters. Short staccato pops of machine gun fire greeted them. The sudden burst of movement and the explosions sent adrenaline flushing through my system; after a tense wait of nearly five hours, any action felt like a release. Conversations broke into a garbled stream of voices, noise. Interviews were useless now. I took refuge inside Getúlio Vargas Hospital and stared out the windows with other reporters, nurses, staff, watching and waiting.

  Three blocks away from the hospital, inside a metal pod that served as her commercial kitchen, Dona Nilza moved her ample body closer to the television that sat above her refrigerator. Her eyesight forced her to squint an arm’s length from the screen to follow as the police stormed Vila Cruzeiro.

  It was from this tin-can space that she ran a van line—the extra-official transportation that served communities such as this one—and made lunch for the drivers.

  A small plastic fan chopped at the air, swirling the steam around and stirring the tired pages of the Bible that always lay open behind the counter. On calmer mornings, neighborhood kids ran in for a kiss and some candy, calling out: Dona Niiiiilza! Dona Nilzaaaaa!

  Not on that Thursday. The children were locked indoors, and Dona Nilza’s thoughts turned to her own child.

  To the police, the conglomeration of favelas was a fortress bristling with enemy soldiers; to people like Dona Nilza it was home. These alleys now swarming with men in flak jackets were playgrounds for their kids. She’d brought up ten children in Alemão, all of them crammed into a narrow, three-story house where rooms had sprouted organically, one on top of the other, as the family grew. She’d reared them all on the money from the van line and the teachings of the Assembly of God evangelical church, then set them loose in the world to find their way.

  They’d all chosen the straight-and-narrow path—all except Diego, her second youngest. She’d lost him to “the life,” as she put it, when he was a tall, spindly sixteen-year-old, timid for all his size. That was nine years ago. He’d be twenty-five now. He was up there, somewhere. This was why, when police and the army charged up the hill, she watched so closely.

  “The bodies come down wrapped in sheets,” she said. “You can usually see the feet sticking out. That was my biggest fear: recognizing my son by his feet.”

  That Thursday, she was also watching and waiting.

  Once the shooting stopped, I walked out of the hospital. Across the street was one of the rickety wooden stalls that sold drinks and snacks—the convenience stores of communities like this one. I went over for some water. Nothing else was open. As I got closer, I noticed a man sitting on a short stool, taking deep drags on his cigarette. His hands shook and his outstretched leg was bandaged. His name was José Pereira, and he worked as an assistant at construction jobs. A stray bullet had lodged itself in his calf right around noon, when he tried to walk up to his shack in Chatuba, a favela bordering Vila Cruzeiro. After a cleanup at the hospital, he was released, the bullet still embedded in his leg.

  It was nearly 3 p.m., and he was stuck there in a tank top and flip-flops, without money, without a phone to warn the wife who worked as a maid in the city and without a way to get back up the hill to the three kids who were home, waiting out the police invasion. Their school had been canceled for days.

  I got him some water, offered my phone. He wanted Brazil’s searing white sugarcane rum, cachaça. The leg was throbbing now. I had nothing else to give him. His broad face was set in a mask of pain. Talking cracked his resolve; tears found a path among the furrows that lined his face. He was a migrant from the Northeast, and spoke with the broad vowels and the hard t’s and d’s that set their speech apart from the Cariocas’ soft, sibilant accent.

  “They fight, but we’re the ones who suffer,” he said. He didn’t know who’d fired the shot, and he didn’t care who won. He wanted to be with his wife, his children, and to hold on to the job he had. “What am I going to do now, like this?” he said, gesturing at the bandaged leg.

  When I looked back up at the hospital, I saw six people shuffling in, holding on to the edges of a bedsheet. They leaned outward to balance the weight of the body in the middle; blood pooled at the bottom and dripped through the thin cotton, leaving a trail of lustrous red droplets. The bundle was heaved onto a gurney and gone before I could see if it was a man or a woman, young or old.

  I hung around, waiting for the end, hoping to learn what was going on in the hills above. The temperature hovered in the triple digits. Time acquired a jagged quality: it jumped when the dead or wounded were carried down, and then it stalled. I heard bursts of gunfire, dry popping sounds that no longer startled me, and the deeper rumble of explosions. Plumes of thick, black smoke unfurled from different points within the hills. Otherwise—nothing. No information. The wait was dull and nerve-racking at once.

  A police officer of some rank strode into the hospital at a fast clip. I didn’t catch his title, but the cops stationed at the door made way for him as he passed. I caught him on his way out. I needed something concrete, numbers.

  “How many people have been killed?” I asked.

  None, he told me.

  “None?” I asked. Again, that sense of bewilderment, of hearing but not understanding. “What about the bodies?”

  “No one died,” he said again. “Just criminals.”

  The officer turned his back on me and my half-formed questions. In the world I’d known, bodies such as the one I’d seen lugged down to the hospital would be named, their shooting investigated—maybe not fully or fairly, but investigated. Back in California, when transit police had shot an unarmed black man in the subway—Oscar Grant—there had been riots in Oakland. I’d helped cover them, had gone knocking on doors looking for the white officer who insisted he’d accidentally pulled out his gun instead of his Taser. In Rio, one man down in a favela—or a handful of them, or more, mostly black, sometimes white, always poor—didn’t even count. Just criminals.

  Rio’s police killed hundreds every year. That much I knew. The law made no provisions for a death penalty, but somehow, having a rap sheet—being a bandido, a criminal, or just looking like someone’s idea of a bandido—was enough to earn you a trial, conviction, and execution all in the fraction of a second it took to pull a trigger.

  I knew it, had known it from years of following Rio in the news. But to watch it happen, to note the officer’s shrug of the shoulder, to smell the dead and face the crackling anger of the living . . . all of it left me feeling queasy, off balance.

  I turned my back and walked away from Vila Cruzeiro, toward the main road where the taxi drivers were waiting. I jumped into the cab and opened my laptop to write up the quotes I’d gathered and update the article published earlier. Deep into my work, I only realized the fighting was over when officers began to stream downhill and into the streets of Penha. A grinning BOPE officer gave me a thumbs-up. I stepped out of the car.

  “Vila Cruzeiro is ours,” he said as he ambled past the cars, loose-limbed and shaky from the win and the spent adrenaline. Others were still searching door-to-door in the favela above. The owner of a storefront bar rolled up the metal grate he’d pulled down during the shooting. Now that the fighting was over, he was open for business. The cops crowded in for a drink. I joined them.

  It was sometime past 6 p.m., nearly twelve hours since police started gathering at the foot of the hill. The officers jostled and elbowed their way to the counter, their exhilaration palpable. On the television hanging overhead, I saw details of the operation that had unfolded, matching images to what I’d heard. News helicopters had caught the moment police troops had broken into Vila Cruzeiro. In attempts to stop their entrance, the Red Command had strewn concrete blocks across the lanes and set fire to a delivery truck that blocked one of the main access roads, but the police had pushed in.

  Then ca
me the aerial images that would loop on TV over the next few days and define the siege: the gangsters who had been stoking fear in Rio for days were running for their lives. There were nearly two hundred of them; some carried rifles or backpacks, others were shirtless, in nothing more than shorts and flip-flops. A couple of them were clearly injured.

  They fled up a dirt road flanked by forest that cut across a hilltop between the smaller Vila Cruzeiro and Alemão. The men were falling back into the complex. As these images streamed on the TV overhead, a cheer rose from the policemen.

  One of the men on the run, reduced to a tiny pixelated figure on the screen, took a bullet, stumbled, and fell. This drew laughter from the cops, and shouts of “Perdeu, playboy! Perdeu!” This was bandido slang, the jeering refrain Cariocas often heard when they were held up for a wallet or a phone: You lose, playboy! You lose!

  The officers’ reaction at the scenes left me confused at first. The gangsters were getting away. Didn’t the police want to finish the job, bring them to justice? But I’d missed the point. The traficantes who’d been invincible within these hills were scurrying for safety like cockroaches while the whole nation watched. These cops saw themselves as the front lines in a war; they found real satisfaction in watching their enemy humiliated.

  “I’ve been police for twenty years, and I feel like I’m finally doing my job,” a heavyset BOPE officer with silver at his temples said.

  I went back to work, wandering into the dusty streets of Penha for comments. Vila Cruzeiro was still off-limits, but this working-class neighborhood just beyond the favela’s borders bore much of the burden when there was fighting between gangsters and police. Their schools shut down, their businesses lost customers, and their buses and van lines stopped running, leaving them without transportation.

  Every television I saw was tuned to the news, and every news channel was playing the same footage. The scenes sparked conversation everywhere, and left residents in a state of nervous excitement that was equal parts hope, disbelief, and fear. I stopped at a twenty-four-hour funeral home and watched the gangsters’ flight again while talking to the manager. He hadn’t dared take out his car in ten days. His kids had stopped going to school, and his employees weren’t showing up.

  “We’ve been at their mercy for so long,” he said. “Sometimes it’s the police, sometimes it’s the traficantes.”

  He paused, as if wondering how much to say.

  “Now this,” he said, gesturing at the endlessly looping track of men running down the dirt path. “They’ve really stepped on the anthill this time.”

  As I talked to other locals, I found that same caution tempering their glee. Tired as they were of the conflict, and eager as they might be to see it over, many could not believe that change would come so easily. They’d learned to conviver, to walk the fine line, coexisting with traficantes and a violent police force. They didn’t trust either side. The only peace they’d known in decades was the uneasy stillness of a standoff. To them, the images looping on TV brought a moment of exhilaration—the bandidos were on the run!—but left a deeper apprehension. What now, now that the balance they’d known was irrevocably upset?

  CHAPTER 5

  IN THE HEART OF EVIL

  Dona Nilza’s son, Diego, was also watching the gangsters’ flight on TV. He’d spent the day waiting inside a nondescript house on Rua Joaquim de Queiroz, one of the main access roads into Alemão.

  At twenty-five he was a big man on the hill, second only to the boss, Pezão, and doing well off the revenue from the three bocas, drug retail outlets, he controlled. He was also agile on a motorcycle. His last straight job was as a moto-taxi driver, ferrying partiers to and from the baile funk high up on the hill. When his legs hugged the machine, he could maneuver it through the narrow passes as if it were part of his body. Seeing his comrades run and fall along that dirt road, some of them clearly wounded, he ached to race over and help.

  But he stayed put. That was the plan. Any action they took would be coordinated. He paced and waited for a call from the boss, the room closing in, too small for the coiled energy of his six-foot frame. The call never came.

  It would be a long, sleepless night—for Diego in his hideout, for his mother at home, for Cariocas who did not know what to expect from police the next day, or from the gangsters cornered within Alemão.

  FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 26

  It had rained overnight. Vila Cruzeiro awoke dank and crawling with journalists, police, cleanup crews. Tempers were frayed after a night of little rest.

  Dozens of motorcycles had been abandoned by fleeing traffickers the day before; many were still strewn about the favela, clogging the way. The traffickers hadn’t allowed trash collection within the alleys; the residents had to take their bags down to the bottom of the hills. With the shooting over the last few days, they hadn’t been able to do even that. The wet lanes stank with days’ worth of fermenting garbage.

  Large stretches of the community had no electricity. The webs of wire that brought in pirated power had been severed in multiple places during the shooting, setting off small fires. The utility company had been afraid to send anyone for repairs. There was nothing, no cartoons, no video games to distract the cooped-up children. Schools were still closed, and kids had been locked inside the tiny homes for nearly forty-eighty hours.

  The consensus was that with Vila Cruzeiro under control, law enforcement had to keep rolling over the gang’s encampment. That made Alemão their next target, but the complex of favelas had a population of about seventy thousand—nearly ten times that of Vila Cruzeiro. It was also the heart of the Red Command. Taking it would require thousands of sharp, well-armed police.

  The truth was, the state’s cops were exhausted. Dozens of officers had spent the night in the community, sleeping in shifts. One of them joked he hadn’t had a break in so long, he’d been wearing the same underwear for days. Police who hadn’t participated in the assault on Vila Cruzeiro had been in a state of readiness since Wednesday, stationed around town and sleeping in headquarters. There simply weren’t enough of them in fighting shape to invade Alemão, even with the navy’s tanks. I doubled back to the office, hoping for a quieter day in which to puzzle out Beltrame’s next move.

  The answer was in my inbox when I got there: the state police would invade Alemão. They’d do it with the help of Brazil’s air force and the army. The navy had shared its tanks with law enforcement during the Vila Cruzeiro incursion, but this would be the first time all three armed forces lent men and weapons to a gangland operation. By evening, eight hundred troops would take up guard of the favela complex’s forty-four entrances, with two additional battalions on standby.

  With the World Cup and the Olympics on their way, what happened in Rio reflected on Brazil’s international image. No one wanted to take any risks; support for the Alemão operation came from the top.

  “Anything we can do for Rio, within the rule of law, we’ll do,” President Lula had said during a press conference.

  I couldn’t sleep that night, and stayed up late drinking the weak beer in the hotel mini-fridge, watching the news and obsessively checking the police website for updated stats: 35 people had been killed over the past five days. More than 30 had been wounded, including a Reuters photographer who took a bullet in the shoulder. The late news showed heavy shooting into the night. Tracer bullets drew graceful arcs above Alemão.

  Mário Sérgio was up late as well. He thought back to the bodies and the damning human rights reports that followed the police’s last invasion of Alemão in 2007, and fired off an email to the governor.

  “Give me a chance to avoid a bloodbath,” he wrote.

  SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 27

  Mário Sérgio got his answer first thing in the morning. The governor’s reply hit his inbox at 7:34 a.m.: “Authorized.”

  It was worth a try. He called a press conference, and expounded his plan before a bouq
uet of microphones. It was a straight deal: any traficantes who wanted to surrender had to show up unarmed or with weapons held high, at the bottom of Rua Joaquim de Queiroz. The police chief couldn’t give more details on the timing, but there was urgency in his voice.

  “If anyone wants to turn himself in, do it now,” he said.

  He knew police would break into Alemão in less than twenty-four hours.

  Dona Nilza was watching, still. Always. She had seen law enforcement take over one of the gang’s most important bases of operations. Diego had survived that first assault. She didn’t know where he was hiding, but as those scenes of gangsters on the run played over and over on TV, Dona Nilza knew the favelas were no longer a safe haven for men like him.

  Walking past the favela complex, she eyed the police chokehold, the tanks grumbling at the bottom of the hill, the yard-long weapons soldiers held with both hands. She called on her God and weighed her options, praying and fasting, begging for a light. She had nine other children, plus grandchildren and great-grandchildren. They all depended on her. But she had one son who needed her the most.

  That Saturday morning she was back at work in her kitchen, although there were few customers for her prepared lunches. Van drivers were also staying home during the conflict. Taped to the metal siding behind her stove, right next to where it said “Double portions!” was a poster printed with Psalm 29:11: “The Lord will give strength unto his people; the Lord will bless his people with peace.”

  She made up her mind. She shrugged off the lifetime of worry that rounded her shoulders and untied the heavy-duty plastic apron. She would find Diego.

  “I couldn’t stand by and watch my son come down wrapped in a sheet,” she said later, returning to the image that haunted her. She called up three of her other sons, one of them an evangelical pastor, and told them it was time.

  The favela’s entrances were blocked, but she knew everyone living there and every alley. She found a way and walked into Alemão, huffing up the long flights of cement stairs, stopping here and there to catch a breath and ask about the man everyone else knew as Mr. M. It was a nickname Diego had always hated. It came from a corny magician who for years made regular appearances on Fantástico, a popular Sunday night variety show. The magician wore a black mask with white stripes. Diego was the darkest of her children; the name stuck. To her, though, he was only Diego.