by Ross Kemp
Everyone, including the top bosses, starts on the bottom rung of the ladder, either as an ‘aeroplane’ or a lookout. Often as young as six or seven, aeroplanes tout for customers and lead them to the dealers at a boca do fumo. Until the 1980s the drug of choice in Brazil was cannabis, with most of the cocaine that came into the country shipped abroad. Since then, more and more of the coke has stayed put in Brazil to supply the burgeoning home market – not least in the favelas themselves – and let’s not forget the tourist trade.
Although I had thought they were just kids having fun, Catra gave me the heads-up on the boys flying kites in the stiff onshore breeze. One of the first jobs a wannabe gang member will get is flying a kite to warn the rest of the gang of approaching trouble. The systems differ: sometimes kites flying steadily in a certain area mean everything is cool and dealing can go ahead. If the kites go up in other areas it means police or rival gangsters are on their way, so grab the hardware and get ready to fight. To make sentry duty more interesting, the kids glue ground glass fragments onto the strings of their kites and try to cut one another’s lines. Well aware of the part they are playing in the bigger scheme of things, the kids hope that one day, if they live long enough, some of them will reach the top. But with the average life expectancy of a hard-core gang member in a favela like Borel around nineteen years, they have more chance of winning the lottery. The truth is that most end up dead on garbage heaps. Catra told me about a ten-year-old who showed such promise as a CV colt that he came off the kites after a couple of months and turned to killing. By the time he was twelve, this particular boy had shot dead five men.
By the age of sixteen, many of these boys have children of their own. More often than not, these kids will join the family business in their turn. What’s life without something to hand on to your offspring? Trailing death, crime and disorder in their wake, Rio’s gangsters burn fast and short. Whatever they might start out doing for the gang, if they follow the usual career path and move up through the ranks to become soldados, by the time they are teenagers they will generally have made their first hit – killing a rival gangster, a traitor or a customer who has made a life-threatening mistake like trying to cheat the gang or failing to pay a debt. On their way, they will have committed armed robberies, extortion and a whole host of other crimes. Catra said most Rio gang chapters operate an iron rule of ‘blood in, blood out’ – you have to kill to join, and you have to die to leave. In between, if you are not selling drugs then what you mostly do is kill.
In the favelas, death is casual and dying is everyday.
So while they might be colourful, vibrant and fascinating to the point where some of the bigger and better developed ones have started admitting thrill-seeking tourists for a small fee, we need to remember that favelas are very, very deadly places. Being a fully paid-up gangster in an area like Borel means fighting war to the death, day in and day out, with serious firepower: 7.62-millimetre FAL self-loading rifles, Heckler & Koch G3s with enough power to punch through the shell of a car and kill its occupants, RPG-7 armour-piercing rocket-propelled grenades, hand grenades – they use a lot of these – SPAS-12 shotguns, landmines. You name it, the gangsters either already have it or they can buy it at will.
With this sort of weaponry and plenty of willing soldados to use it, CV, Amigos dos Amigos and the Terceiro Comando (TC) can and do take on Brazil’s CORE (special police commando) units as and when. The police in their turn dare only go into the favelas mob-handed, with top cover in the form of helicopters and squads of commandos able to fast-rope in, hunt down a target and either pluck him out or kill him. If they are lucky, that is, and they put down enough firepower; if a RPG-7 round or a burst from a heavy machine gun doesn’t hit the helicopter and if the snatch squads succeed. When they do go in, the resulting shoot-outs are like something out of a Western, as the police video footage we were given of one such battle shows. Waged over rooftops and through twisting, narrow alleyways, during this firefight one policeman and two CV gang members died.
To make it harder for the police the gangs work mainly at night, using the rooftops to travel, taking to the streets only as a last resort. The police wear masks or hoods; like the gangsters they hunt, many of them live in the favelas, heading off to work every day in civilian clothes and then changing into uniform at their police station. If the gangs ever got to know what they did for a living, most of these officers would be dead within the day. Living in the favelas they are trying to police, they certainly know the turf. No one on either side plays by any rules. The gangs kill policemen, civilians and anyone who gets in their way without a second thought. For their part, some police and CORE members hand out summary justice, including on-the-spot execution, torture and imprisonment without trial. Thanks to the efforts of our local fixer, Fernando, we were lucky enough to obtain footage of one police squad dragging a suspected dealer they had just arrested behind a bus. The shooting that follows does little to suggest he stayed alive.
The godfathers who run the favelas do sometimes live in them; if you are wanted by the law, then burrowed deep inside the likes of the Morro do Borel is the safest place to be. But increasingly the very top bosses live surrounded by armed bodyguards in fortified mansions in the better parts of the city, or in Florida. They pull the narco-strings, take the cash and let the gang manage business on the streets. A handful of people make a huge amount of money, and everybody else just gets by. I saw no mansions in the favelas – only clusters of crummy, low-rise blocks.
The violence that dogs the cities of Brazil isn’t all that surprising. Moving between my pleasant First World hotel and a Third World shanty in the space of a single day, I could see that the gap between the city’s rich and poor could hardly be greater. Or any more shocking. The large numbers of wealthy foreign tourists who come for the sex trade, to soak up some of the exotic atmosphere and for the natural beauty of the place add fuel to the social fire, as does the violent legacy of the generals who ruled the place with bullets and blood for so many years.
As with almost every controlling organization in the world, identity is all-important to Rio’s warring criminal gangs. Gang colours, gang graffiti – it is all about belonging to the group, the extended gang family, the substitute for hearth and home and family life that most of the people who join the gangs have never known. In the Rio favelas red is the colour of CV, while TC flaunts shades of green. The graffiti is a turf marker; the tags set the borderlines warning rival gangs to steer clear. Murals can put an ironic twist on the everyday reality of favela life, even depicting a stereotypical drug dealer supplying a white customer.
The Borel favelados were intelligent, articulate and very politically aware. In fact, many favela gang members use the massive inequality in Brazilian society to justify taking on the rich ruling elite, portraying themselves as latter-day Robin Hoods. When I got him on this subject, Catra waxed eloquent. ‘The favela protects itself,’ he told me. ‘The ordinary person as well as the drugs trafficker needs protection. Society attacks us and keeps us in a corner. We are in a civil war.’
The first serious gang in the city, Catra said, Comando Vermelho was formed in the 1970s to take on the vicious right-wing junta then in power. As well as using torture on its real or imagined opponents as a matter of routine, the junta made the mistake of locking up charismatic, intelligent left-wing agitators and rebels with ordinary criminals. From this enforced cell-block mix came a strange hybrid animal: the radical, politically self-justifying criminal gangs that rule Rio’s favelas today, using the have/have-not gulf to justify taking on the rich, the police and the establishment. In reality, the Robin Hood stuff in which the gangsters like to cloak themselves is almost wholly undeserved. Every gang makes money from the proceeds of drugs and violent crime, and its soldados will kill anyone at any time to defend its interests. Coming in as an outsider, I found it hard to spot any social justice at work in the mess.
The gangs may not be stealing from the rich to give to the poor, but
they do throw a great party. Everybody in Brazil likes to dance, and that includes gangsters. A man has to let his hair down after work, especially when it’s such a stressful business. As in all wars, the ever-present prospect of death makes people party all the harder. I could hardly tour Borel with one of its most famous sons without trying one. Catra led me to a long, low-ceilinged shack, one of the hottest, sweatiest rooms I have ever been in. It was a barely contained riot. A very important part of favela life, baile funk is kind of extreme-gangsta-rap-meets-techno-salsa. Heavy on the drums, it combines sexually explicit lyrics sung at a shout with throbbing bass lines and melodies ripped and looped from other people’s songs. Baile funk fuels the riotous favela dance scene, the sweatiest, noisiest, sexiest disco you will ever visit in your entire life.
Most of the people shaking their stuff were teenagers, and only the guys on the door were armed. MC Catra grabbed the mike and got to work, his first song being a long, graphic rap about having lots of sex. Swigging Skol, smoking dope and taking a variety of other substances, frequently all at the same time, everyone cheered at the chorus, which encouraged them to have more and more exotic sex. After a couple of numbers, the wild dancing made the room even hotter and people started to strip. Since they weren’t wearing much to begin with, this meant that at least half of the women in the crowd were down to their dental floss.
I was just getting into the swing of it when Catra stopped the music. Pointing at the shaven-headed English guy, he told the crowd I was going to make a speech. The bastard. With the whole place clapping and cheering, and the prospect of summary execution if I failed to oblige, I stepped up to the microphone. I told the sweating, heaving mob how pleased I was to be in Borel, what a great crowd they were and how nice it was of them to let me join in the fun. I’m not sure how many of them understood a word of what I said, but when I stopped speaking they all cheered wildly once more, Catra started the music off again, and everyone got back down to the business of having a good time. I was just glad they hadn’t opened fire.
Next stop, on our third day, was Cantagalo favela, which is loosely controlled by CV’s most serious opposition, TC. It smelled of the usual things: car oil, diesel fumes from the hundreds of generators used to provide power, sewage, cooking smoke, marijuana and rotting rubbish. The river that ran through the settlement was so polluted and toxic that any kids who fell into the water had to be fished out super fast, and even then they were at risk of serious illness.
As in all the favelas we visited there was a continuous background din, a mixture of baile funk blasting out from competing dance venues, gunfire, shouting, clapping and the revving of scooters and small motorbikes. Any newish cars you see in a favela have been stolen from the city by gang members, and once they are in, they don’t come back out. Would you go into a favela to retrieve your stolen motor? Me neither.
In baseball caps, dark glasses and with T-shirts wrapped up and over their heads leaving only their eyes showing, the five TC gang members we’d arranged to meet had the weapons handling skills of not very intelligent two-year-olds. They were also passing round a joint. As soon as they saw the camera they started larking about and showing off, pointing their guns and striking Rambo-style poses. If they hadn’t all been extremely young, drugged up, with their index fingers wrapped around the triggers and the safety catches off, this might have been funny. Nothing makes me more nervous than drugged teenagers waving loaded firearms in my face, and this lot were the worst I had so far seen. Even in the best-disciplined military units, accidents happen. The chances of one now were off the scale, and I didn’t want to be on the end of it.
We crabbed towards them, keeping a wary eye on the weapons. I asked them what would happen if CV came into Cantagalo. They started laughing uncontrollably, the first setting off the next and then back along the line again, cackling away like hyenas. Next thing we knew they were staging a mock gunfight for the camera, showing us how it was done – correction, showing us how they did it. This made me want to find the nearest ditch and lie flat on my face until they had stopped. When they finally grew tired of posing we managed to talk a little, but even our translator, Fernando, found it hard to make sense of their slurred, addled sentences. But he found out the reason the boys couldn’t stop laughing – as well as smoking dope, they had just popped their first Ecstasy pills.
One thing the gang were very clear about was the punishment they meted out to informers. First, and while the victim was still alive, they sliced off his arms and legs; then they slowly sawed off his head; and, as a final flourish, they threw the bits into a shallow grave, doused them in petrol and burned them. Called the ‘microwave’, they said the point of this last bit was to show disrespect to the informant’s family, especially his mother. They also believed that if they dismembered the person, that is how he would remain in the afterlife. While he told me all this, the gold cross on the gang leader’s chest winked in the dim favela light.
This kind of treatment isn’t just handed out to informers; anyone deemed to have shown TC disrespect stands to get it. On 3 June 2003 TV Globo reporter Tim Lopes, who had already made a programme about Rio’s gangs that suggested some of them were involved in the sexual abuse of minors, made the mistake of entering a favela to do a follow-up. A group of gangsters caught Lopes, tortured him, cut off his arms and legs while he was still alive, sliced off his head and then gave what was left of him the microwave.
Unable to get any more coherent comments out of them as the Ecstasy took hold, I thanked the gang for sharing their experiences. With a final flourish of their weapons, they turned and slipped off back into the darkness.
Keen to see how much truth there was in the supposed political origins of the CV, I next went to visit an intriguing man named William da Silva Lima in Rio’s central prison. Imprisoned as a young student under the junta on a charge of armed robbery, da Silva Lima is known to his admirers as ‘the professor’. Lima is widely seen and respected as the guru and founding father of Comando Vermelho. He too has his war wounds: during his time inside, a warder beat him over the head with a shovel. He survived the attack – but only just. He also managed to escape from prison twice, but was each time recaptured. When I met him, da Silva Lima was only three weeks away from release after thirty-six years in jail.
From what I had seen, I told him, it seemed that CV is more about help yourself than self-help. He replied with the same rebel gleam in his eye that must have helped get him arrested in the first place, ‘We set up Comando Vermelho not as a criminal gang but as a means of fighting for social and economic justice. For the people. And for the first years, it was about the people. Now,’ he shook his head, ‘it’s just another gang selling drugs on the streets.’ I felt sad; it must be very, very tough to see your idealistic dream of a fairer society go up in a bonfire of crime.
To get another view of Rio’s biggest problem I went to see Vera Malaguti. I needed to meet some people on the right side of the law, people who were trying to make a difference. A criminologist who has written extensively about the gangs, Malaguti has a pleasant bungalow in a vibrant green, sub-rainforest suburb that sits in a gully between two favelas. As we spoke the sound of gunfire crackled around and above us. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said with miraculous calm, ‘it’s just Santa Marta – that favela over there.’ She pointed over her garden fence. ‘They’re shooting it out with their neighbour on the other side.’ It beats arguments over fences and hedges. I tried hard not to worry about the whizzing lead.
Her tone was calm and even, given what she was telling me. ‘Twelve hundred young poor black kids are killed by the Rio police every year and fifty million Brazilians live below the poverty line.’ The sound of high-velocity rounds in the background helped me believe her every word. Vera’s main point is that Brazil has a class system much more rigid even than Britain’s at its worst. ‘It is not just that 10 per cent of Brazil’s population owns 80 per cent of the country’s wealth; it’s that there is no movement across or betwe
en the classes. Everything is fixed; everything stays in the same place – the poor in their favela ghettos and the rich in their walled and guarded compounds. Which are also ghettos, only with running water, electricity, servants and satellite TV.’ She compressed her lips. ‘The police are there to make sure it stays that way: they protect the rich, and themselves. That’s it. But what we really have going on in Brazil is civil war.’
After hearing what Malaguti had to say, I went down to meet some of the CORE special weapons and assault teams. In part trained by US DEA and SWAT experts, the CORE guys are a very macho crew. They are very proud of what they do, and use the same kind of striking, death-laden imagery as Rio’s actual gangs – only stronger. There was definitely no hanging back when it came to the shields and badges plastered onto their black uniforms. A typical example? A lurid skull and crossbones with a dagger piercing one eye, a syringe spearing the other and a big rifle behind all that in case you still hadn’t quite got the message. And if you believed Malaguti, then all the pirate symbolism was apt.
Some of the crew are specially selected for their shortness – those who act as door gunners on the compact four-seat helicopters used for airborne assaults. In a cramped cabin filled with weapons, ammo and their hulking fellow CORE assault commandos space is at a premium, and the less of it a door gunner takes up the better. One man, a veteran of many shoot-outs, had a prosthetic left forearm complete with metal Dr No-style pincers fitted after a heavy-calibre round had blown away the original. Dr No had a Glock 17 strapped to the top of his right thigh, a .38 Smith & Wesson revolver on his left boot, plus steel handcuffs and plasticuffs looped on his belt. This along with smoke grenades, flash-bang assault grenades and pepper spray. One big serratededge combat knife was holstered across the front of his flak jacket. Another was strapped to his left arm, a flick knife concealed in one pocket, and a large number of spare magazines for his pistol and M16 assault rifle were draped across his chest. A stand-out member of Rio’s CORE squad, he looked more like a cross between the Terminator and Long John Silver than a police officer.
