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

by Juliana Barbassa

  Over the next decade, the Red Command expanded its reach. One of Rio’s particularities helped the group’s spread: the favelas that climbed steep hillsides and blanketed stretches of suburbia. These communities, which often started as informal squatter settlements, were physically wedged within the metropolis and tied to it by the daily ebb and flow of residents who worked and studied beyond their borders, but they lacked access to even the most basic services. Residents rigged up their own electrical hookups and running water. Garbage collectors and mail delivery never climbed the morro, the hill; neither did the police, unless it was to look for suspects of crimes on the asfalto, the asphalt, slang for the formal city with its paved streets. Cariocas grew used to thinking of their city in these confining terms: the morro and the asfalto. Rio was the cidade partida, the divided city.III

  Within these favelas, the Red Command found room to grow unchecked. One corner of northern Rio in particular brought together conditions that made it ideal as headquarters: the Complexo do Alemão, a cluster of fifteen communities that joined in a sprawling patchwork and spread over the hills.

  This region had once been an industrial center. The first modest housing developments went up around the inauguration of the Curtume Carioca, the Carioca Tannery, a pretty Art Deco building with soaring windows and imperial palms along its sidewalks. It opened in 1920 and anchored industry in the area. From atop one of the granite peaks nearby, a quaint little colonial church, Our Lady of Penha, watched over the thriving working-class neighborhood below.

  In the early 1950s, a Polish immigrant with a last name no one could pronounce—Leonard Kaczmarkiewicz—and who owned some of this land carved up the property for sale. New arrivals called him the Alemão, the German, because of his European appearance and his tongue-twister of a last name. The settlement became known as Morro do Alemão, the German’s Hill.

  Fueled by federal policy, Brazil industrialized and urbanized at dizzying speed over the 1960 and 1970s. Buses arriving from the vast interior spilled entire families into Rio’s streets. Without affordable housing available, they made their own. Favelas grew apace, including those around the Morro do Alemão. Over time, the nearby settlements merged, and the resulting conglomeration of favelas became known as the Complexo do Alemão.

  This densely populated maze was nearly impenetrable to outsiders. Gangsters on the run could fall back into the conjoined favelas and disappear. Lookouts—the fogueteiros, boys on the lowest rung of the traffic hierarchy—would set off fireworks to warn their bosses should the cops or an aspiring rival broach the perimeter. In the investigation that followed the shoot-out with Zé Bigode in 1981, police found a large stash of guns and ammunition hidden in the Morro do Adeus (Good-bye Hill) one of the peaks that make up the complex.

  Alemão had another advantage: location. This network of favelas ran right up to the city’s main thoroughfare, Avenida Brasil, and sat less than ten miles from the port and the international airport. Later, when two new highways plowed over the landscape to ease the perennially jammed traffic—the Linha Vermelha and the Linha Amarela—the city’s three main arteries formed a confluence within easy reach.

  Inside these favelas, the Red Command was untouchable. From this safe base, the gang could stage robberies in the asfalto and run a side business in marijuana, which they sold in drug retail outlets within the favelas known as bocas de fumo.

  Then cocaine came to town. The new drug hit Rio in the early 1980s; it upped the game and the stakes. Marijuana was cheap; cocaine was a highly profitable enterprise with international ramifications. Running it was a complex business that required transportation and distribution channels, packaging sites and sales points, plus a specialized army of lookouts, carriers, soldiers, and moneymen. It would change the Red Command and it would change Rio.

  With more money to spend, and more money to be made, gangsters began to import weapons more powerful than any the police had seen, and to move aggressively into new territory.

  Control of favelas was more important than ever. Local drug bosses often self-consciously stepped into the role that should have been played by government, securing the loyalty of residents and strengthening their grasp on the community. A Red Command man known as Pianinho described this to the Jornal do Brasil newspaper on December 10, 1984:

  We, former bank robbers who have now entered the drug trade, educate the favelados and show them that the government isn’t worth a damn, and won’t do anything for them. Then we give them food, medication, clothes, school supplies, uniforms for the kids, even cash. We pay for doctors, for funerals, and we don’t let the favelados leave for any reason. We even resolve fights between husbands and wives within the favela, to avoid messy situations that would require the police to come in.

  By the mid-1980s, little over a decade after the Red Command’s origin in the Devil’s Cauldron, nothing happened within a gang-controlled community without the gangsters’ authorization, whether it was the construction of a soccer field with federal funds or of a child-care center by a nonprofit organization.

  It didn’t take long for the rest of Rio to realize something unprecedented was happening in the hills. There were vicious clashes in south-side favelas like Vidigal, Chapéu Mangueira, and Pavão-Pavãozinho, which rose right by upscale neighborhoods like Copacabana, Leblon, and Ipanema. By the early 1990s, the taunt Zé Bigode had flung out of that third-floor window—“This is the Red Command!”—echoed around Rio; their tag—CV, for Comando Vermelho—was spread throughout hundreds of favelas.

  Their headquarters were in Alemão, which made the favela complex a focal point of violence. By 2010, life expectancy within the complex was sixty-five—nine years lower than Rio’s average.IV

  Back at the Professor’s apartment, our conversation was winding down. It was nearing dinnertime and his family began to trickle in: his daughter, his grandkids, and his wife, an attorney he met in Ilha Grande when he was already an inmate and she was a young law school intern with perfectly arched eyebrows and a lot of idealism.

  It was time to go, but I had one last question. What did he think of the Red Command now? As he described the values the gang espoused in its early days, I’d wondered whether there was any shred of connection left between this man and his once-upon-a-time group of jailbirds who organized Christmas parties and lived by the motto of Peace, Justice, and Liberty and the gang that held Rio in its grip decades later.

  He shook his head. He no longer recognized the Red Command. It had morphed into a monster.

  * * *

  I. The prison compound was torn down in 1994. No one bothered to salvage its records, which were only dug up in 2002. I found them years later in the state archives, unsorted but rich in details. In 2009, a modest museum was raised where the prison had stood. It displays minutes of prisoner meetings, prison memos, and other documents from the Red Command’s first few years, such as letters from gang members in prison to their “brothers” outside that signed off with “A family united will never be vanquished.”

  II. The political prisoners also shared their books. Some of them offered inmates a new perspective on their lives; some taught the specifics of guerilla warfare. Among the publications apprehended within the prison were Portuguese translations of Wilfred G. Burchett’s Vietnam: Inside Story of the Guerilla War, Ernesto Che Guevara’s Guerrilla Warfare, and the Minimanual of the Urban Guerilla, by the Brazilian communist Carlos Marighella.

  III. The term “cidade partida” was further disseminated when it became the title of a 1994 book of reportage by journalist Zuenir Ventura.

  IV. This was due in large part to fact that young men in the area died at a rate of 85 per 100,000. In Barra da Tijuca, the well-to-do western neighborhood of gated condominiums where my parents lived, the death rate for young men was 4 per 100,000.

  CHAPTER 3

  WHACKING THE WEEDS

  As the Red Command gre
w, its identifying call—É nóis!—had become the statement of an uncontested power. This sharp jab of broken grammar conveyed a simple message: it’s us. That was enough. Everyone knew who were the donos do morro, the kings of the hill.

  That included Rio’s police.

  Mário Sérgio Duarte couldn’t abide the short, taunting phrase; he spat out the words as he said them, upper lip curled back at their arrogance. He was a cop’s cop, with a bristling salt-and-pepper crew cut and a square jaw, in the force since 1983. The gang had cast a dark shadow over his entire career.

  When we first met, he was wearing in a black bulletproof vest and leading a battalion armed with semi-automatics. He’d barked orders then, and no one thought twice about obeying. But for this conversation, he’d invited me to his apartment in Grajaú, a middle-class suburb in northern Rio where he lived with his second wife and their twin toddlers.

  The living room was cozy and unpretentious: a warm yellow blanket covered the overstuffed couch, and the sharp endpoints on the television stand had been padded with newspaper and tape. The twins, Marco Aurélio and Maria Luíza, charged around in their onesies in the last minutes of play before bed. His wife, Viviane, blonde and reserved, also a police officer, brought us sweet coffee in tiny cups.

  When I asked about his relationship to the Red Command, he’d leaned forward, his face hard, hands shaped into guns angled down at some imagined enemy, and repeated their boastful catchphrase: É nóis!

  His disdain for the gang ran deep. The CV was behind more officer funerals than Mário Sérgio could count. He also blamed them for the degradation of the police force. As the drug revenue soared, relations between traffickers and the banda podre—the rotten half of the police department—became more promiscuous. There was the regular arrego, the payoff that dirty cops got for staying away from illicit business, but there were also officers who dealt in extortion and who sold guns and information to traffickers.

  The CV had brought Mário Sérgio and the police force so many small, daily humiliations, so many public fiascos that over time, the frustration and the defeats had clearly distilled into something personal. He had defended the law in Rio for more than thirty years, and yet wherever he looked there were entire communities beyond his reach, visual cues of his powerlessness.

  I repeated the question—what was his relationship with the Red Command? He took a deep breath, as if returning to the present moment, to the journalist sitting on his couch.

  When he hit the streets fresh out of the police academy, the Red Command was one criminal enterprise among many. His first beat was in Niterói, across the bay from Rio, and he did the job with a .38 revolver on his right hip and a pair of handcuffs on the left, like real police, he said, working robberies, bank break-ins, armored car heists.

  “We didn’t worry about the morro then,” he said.

  Policing got in his blood; he was good at it, disciplined, and with a rigid sense of right and wrong that can be hard to find in a city known for its flexible approach to the law. By 1990 he was part of Rio’s elite special operations squadron, now known as BOPE. The men in black get the best training and the biggest guns in the system; they are the front lines when police quell prison riots or push into favelas controlled by drug traffic. It is a fierce and fiercely loyal brotherhood. They make no excuses for their truculence; their symbol is a human skull pierced by a dagger, superimposed on crossed guns. Many of the men tattoo it on their skin: once a caveira, a skull, always a caveira.

  By the late 1980s, however, the CV sported weaponry that no one, not even the caveiras, had ever laid hands on. Mário Sérgio remembered the 1988 shooting frenzy that marked the public debut of semi-automatics in Rio. Traffickers let fly rounds from the rooftops of the Rocinha favela; meanwhile, BOPE officers were limited to handguns and had one semi-automatic weapon per battalion for collective use.

  That imbalance lasted until 1994, when Rio elected a new tough-on-crime governor, Marcello Alencar. With two changes in policy, he transformed Rio’s police into one of the most lethal forces on the planet. First, he gave officers semi-automatics. Then he instituted raises for police who demonstrated bravery on the job—bravery as measured in the number of bodies left on the ground. This became known as the Wild West bonus: shoot, then collect. It was when Rio police really started aiming to kill. According to Mário Sérgio, they had a lot of catching up to do.

  “We had to whack the weeds that had grown too tall,” he said.

  The passage of that law doubled the number of suspects reported killed in gunfights with police, from an average of 16 per month before to 32 per month afterward. The law was revoked at the end of 1998. Researchers who investigated the deaths found most of the bodies bore signs of executions, not confrontations: there were no witnesses in 83 percent of cases, 61 percent had a bullet to the head, and 65 percent been hit in the back.

  But taking the Wild West bonus off the books did not change the culture it had reinforced within police departments.I Killings by cops on the job continued to rise. These reports were seldom investigated; they became an institutionalized way for police to settle scores.

  “We stopped being peacekeeping police and turned into troops at war,” Mário Sérgio said.

  I knew right-wing politicians and reporters often spoke of the conflict between the state and drug traffickers as a war. But hearing it from a career police officer made me uneasy. This was about more than semantics; it represented a dangerous shift in perspective.

  Rio was not at war, I pointed out; and even if it were, wars have rules. I felt absurd, perched on the edge of his comfy yellow couch, balancing a thimbleful of sugary coffee on a saucer and bringing up conventions about wartime conduct. He rolled his eyes, made a flicking motion with his hand in front of his face, brushing my point away as if it were a gnat. Regulations, rules of conduct—these were formalities, refinements for those who could afford them. They had not applied to policing in Rio for a very long time.

  I remembered precisely when I first saw that word, “war,” applied to Rio: it was June 2002, and I was a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley. I’d been doing research for my summer job at the Center for Labor Research and Education. Out of habit, I checked the Brazilian newspapers. The double-decker headline froze my fingers on the keyboard. Police had found the body of Tim Lopes, a reporter who’d been missing for a week. Two gang members had been arrested. The story they told extrapolated the bounds of cruelty, even by CV standards.

  Tim was a well-known figure, an investigative reporter with a white goatee, graying temples and a social conscience who’d been writing about Rio for more than thirty years. He’d disappeared while looking into the raucous bailes funk, massive favela parties fueled by Red Bull and whiskey, cheap cocaine, and the heavy bass beat of Carioca funk. There were allegations that gang members were pushing underage girls into selling sex in bailes in Vila Cruzeiro; he’d wanted to check it out.

  According to the papers, Tim was kidnapped, tortured, and then executed, his body quartered and burned inside a stack of tires doused with gasoline—a gruesome device called a “microwave.” The tale laid bare not only the extent of the gang’s reach, but also the inability of authorities to intervene. Tim was kidnapped, tortured, and killed within Rio, and no one, not the police nor anyone in the city, state, or federal government, could do anything about it.

  News of the reporter’s death had run under an all-caps heading: A GUERRA DO RIO, Rio’s War. After Tim’s death, O Globo stopped referring to the Red Command by name; the organization became simply “the faction.” And the way to deal with it, according to then-mayor César Maia, was “more police, bullets. And if criminals die, so be it: 100, 500, 1,000, however many are necessary.”

  As the gang and its offshoots grew stronger and bolder, state authorities, unable to curtail them, raised the body count. And yet for each trafficker shot down there were scores ready to replac
e him, as Mário Sérgio himself had said: “You kill one, there was another in his place, and what’s worse, his nephew now hated you, his friend now hated you. . . . There was no end.”

  Leaving Mário Sérgio’s house at the end of our meeting, I pressed the button for the elevator and, as I waited, I heard the click-slide-slide-click of a key being turned and then turned again in his front door. I’d have to cross two other gates before stepping out into the streets. I noticed these safety procedures not because they were unusual but because they were so familiar, as much a part of life in the city as the profile of Cristo.

  Cariocas had lived for decades within a restrictive straitjacket of don’ts. I’d forget these commandments during my absences and then get chided upon my return: Don’t talk on your cell phone in public, don’t wear that watch, don’t wear that ring, don’t go out alone at this hour, don’t open the window, don’t stop at the light, don’t forget to lock the doors. You’re taking the bus, are you crazy? On a Copacabana sidewalk, a matronly madame with a helmet of frosted hair warned: don’t pull out your wallet like that, minha filha, carry only the money you’ll need. I was even scolded by a cabdriver once for climbing into his car without checking his face and his registration. Don’t flag a taxi in the street, he told me, call for one.

  Much may have changed in Rio, I thought, but the old precautions were still there—the nod to the security guard, the dark film plastered on the car windows, the thunk-thunk-thunk of the triple dead bolt on the door. They had practical value, but they were also rituals meant to soothe, much like doing the sign of the cross when passing a church or touching the little medal of Our Lady of Aparecida, Brazil’s patron saint, which hung on rearview mirrors and necklaces. Even police officers needed their reassurance.