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

by Juliana Barbassa

  He soon got word on his radio: his mom was looking for him. He was furious. What could the woman be doing in this place? Police could come up at any time. Diego had come to terms with the prospect of his own death. A neat round scar stood like a punctuation mark on his torso, amid the dark swoops and curls of his tattoos. There’d been other bullets, other times he’d been afraid. That was part of the deal. But he didn’t want the burden of his mother’s life on his back.

  She’d done what she could to keep him out of the movimento, the game. After he dropped out of school in the fourth grade, he’d started hanging around the hill, running errands for the traffickers just so he could keep the change. The bonds tightened and complicated over time. There were friendships and bigger jobs: a bundle of money to stash, drugs to hide for some time.

  “You don’t even notice,” he said. “You just slide into the life. Next thing you know you’re carrying heat.”

  His mother had seen this coming and had countered in every way she could: she found him a spot in a state program where he got some stay-away-from-drugs lectures, plus basic training in computers and literacy. He was agile and coordinated, and she encouraged him to practice jujitsu at the community sports center. It wasn’t school, but it was better than a lot of other options opening up to him.

  In spite of her efforts, his prospects were dimming. At fifteen, he was a dropout who wrote with the grammar and spelling of a child. She gave him a job herself, something to keep him busy and in some cash. For fifty dollars a week he sat in a plastic chair, held a clipboard, and kept tabs on the van line that carried passengers around Penha, the No. 77. It was good money for a teenager, and Diego made a little extra driving moto-taxis late at night, when the more experienced drivers were worn-out. He liked to dress well and blew his money trying to stay on top of on the trends introduced by the traficantes.

  The tipping point came on June 15, 2001, his sixteenth birthday. It was 5 a.m. and the baile was breaking up. Diego was at work, ferrying partiers down to the bus stops at the bottom of the hill, when police showed up. They often did at this hour, roughing up the strung-out teenagers, catching any drunks who’d found a quiet corner to piss in. This time something went wrong. Someone squeezed off some bullets, officers rounded up everyone for a search. Diego dropped the motorcycle, put his hands on the wall, legs spread wide.

  Search over, an officer turned to him.

  “Run,” he said. “Get the fuck out of here.”

  “The motorcycle’s not mine,” Diego said.

  “I told you to run,” the officer replied, lifting his rifle.

  Diego ran. But he turned back. The weapon was pointing at him. He felt a searing pain by his left knee; his entire leg recoiled, tucked up, useless now. Hopping on his right leg, using his hands to propel himself against the wall, he scuttled home.

  His mother took him to Getúlio Vargas Hospital, where there was always police on duty to run the names of gunshot victims through the system. Diego was clean. A stray bullet, he told the doctor.

  “It just fed my revolt. You grow up in the comunidade, you grow up hating the police,” he told me later, his slight stutter making him repeat himself, giving an edge of frustration to his voice. “They rough you up in the street, smack you, call you a vagabundo if you’re not carrying your documents . . . you grow up with lot of hate. That was too much, though.”

  He started within the CV as a motorcycle man, running errands from hill to hill. By 2008 he was Mr. M, one of Alemão’s most wanted. The muscles he’d built in the martial arts classes and his low-key lifestyle made him perfectly suited to be the right-hand man of an aspiring dono do morro, Pezão.

  A funk tune from the time marked the bloody putsch in which Pezão took down Tota, the former boss. Before the thump of the bass begins, a man’s nagging voice rises in homage to Mr. M: “É só rajada de meiota, é só rajada de meiota . . . foi o Mister M que executou o Tota. . . .” “It’s a hail of bullets, it’s a hail of bullets . . . it was Mr. M who executed Tota.”

  A cell phone video leaked to police shows Pezão all done up in Armani presiding over the night-long open-bar party thrown in Largo do Coqueiro, an open square where there was a wholesale drug market, to celebrate Tota’s death. In it, Diego danced, arms outstretched, baggy white T-shirt swaying around his lean frame. Other young men propped their semis on their hip or let them swing by their side so they could hold up their beer cans. A pretty young woman with jet-black hair and a white strapless top hugging her curves waved her hands before her face to show off the fat gold rings crowding her fingers.

  The video ended up on television, part of a Sunday special on the gang. A frame froze around the face of Dona Nilza’s son, capturing the flash of his smile and identifying him as the gangster Mr. M, rumored to have murdered the previous drug boss.

  “Nobody knew me outside the complex until then. After that, I was done,” Diego said. “Any ideas I had about leaving were over.”

  As Diego fell deeper into the movimento he withdrew from family life and traded day for night, taking care of business after dark while Pezão slept. He had his own semi, a Heckler & Koch G3 that he’d fire into the air during parties. But mostly he kept to himself, never leaving Alemão. When he wanted to blow some of the nearly five thousand dollars he made a week, he’d ask friends to hit the mall and pick up the entire new collection of a favorite stylist, mixing up the relaxed surfer look of Rio designers with the hoodies, basketball jerseys, and sneakers he saw in the hip-hop videos he loved. He was carving his own niche, setting the standard for the young kids, the runners and the fogueteiros who’d look up to him for style, for an example.

  Seeing her son sink into this life nearly broke Dona Nilza. She couldn’t stand to be in Alemão, where he lived a shadow life far from her eyes. She left the bustling three-story house where she’d raised her brood for a quieter one in Olaria, a blue-collar neighborhood nearby. A few times she heaved herself up the hill, asking the kids who ran the retail drug stands if she could talk to Diego. He’d never leave the life, he told her. Where would he go? What would he do? His face had been on TV, his name was dirty.

  “I thought I’d only leave Alemão dead,” he said.

  Then that Saturday came. Dona Nilza walked past police barricades, asked around. This time, he let her find him, sitting by himself in his hideaway on Rua Joaquim de Queiroz.

  By then it was clear his boss was gone and that his partners had run. He felt frightened and alone. She asked him to get down on his knees and pray with her. He did, and he cried. He thought of his two daughters, both growing up in the complexo, and about his mother.

  “I’m ready,” he told her. He rifled through his closet, picked out his favorite outfit: a sky-blue polo, slacks.

  They still had to get out. Dona Nilza had no love for traffickers, but she also knew how cops would treat her son. She would not turn him in to just anyone in a uniform. They had to navigate the barricades and find the one officer she trusted: Seu Ferreira, who was now with the Sixth Police Battalion in Cidade Nova. He’d been the coordinator of the program Diego had taken part in when he was fifteen, before he was Mr. M.

  Diego started walking down with one of his siblings; his mother went to get the car another son had brought.

  The mayor had finally made provisions for the safety of residents. A shelter had been set up with food and mattresses to take in those who were afraid of staying home during the upcoming police invasion. Dozens of families streamed down the alleys, carrying supermarket bags of clothes, fans, pillows, television sets. The police tried to scrutinize the flood of people. Even the children were searched. But Diego slipped in with a large family laden with suitcases. As police went through their luggage, he walked away. It was as if God were clearing the way for him, he said.

  He reached “A” Street at the bottom of the hill. He hadn’t been out of Alemão in years, and his blood ran cold with the expo
sure. His mother was nowhere to be seen. Standing still, he’d be conspicuous. It was a matter of minutes, seconds perhaps, before someone recognized him. He kept walking, looking straight ahead. A bus stopped at the light, opened its door. He walked right in. He didn’t care where he went. Anywhere. Away.

  Minutes later, he used his cell phone to call his mother. She’d been stopped by police who recognized her as Mr. M’s mother. The car was being searched. When she was released, she picked him up and they headed to the police department.

  “My son is here to turn himself in,” she said.

  “Is that right,” the cop on duty said, eyes darting between Diego’s lanky form and the heavyset senhora next to him. “You’re doing the right thing.”

  Within ten minutes photographers had their lenses trained on the handcuffed traficante. Gangsters who were arrested and dragged out before the cameras usually hung their heads, doubled down low to avoid having their faces stamped in newspapers.

  In pictures from that day, Diego stood ramrod straight, shoulders thrown back and head cocked at an angle, in spite of the cuffs that brought his arms together up front. His gaze rested somewhere beyond the flash of cameras. He was down, but it was his choice. He had walked out.

  Another trafficker was brought in by his father. The electrician Ivanildo Trindade walked his son Carlos to the police. “Better in jail, paying for what he did, than dead,” he said.

  There were just over a dozen who accepted the offer of a peaceful rendition. The deal was largely ignored. This, and the shooting overnight, heightened Beltrame’s fear of a bloody resistance. The barricade held. We settled in for a wait—the reporters, the families up in Alemão, Cariocas, Brazilians. A slow drip of sleepless hours turned Saturday into Sunday.

  SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 28

  When the wait broke on Sunday morning and the tanks rolled up Alemão, I wasn’t there to see it. I wasn’t even in Penha, waiting inside the hospital for the dead to roll in.

  I watched the action from within a hospital maternity ward. Early that day my sister had given birth to her first child. All the strain of the past few days, the tight knot of questions and anxieties that kept me up at night—questions about Rio, about the police action, but also about my place in this city—loosened when I saw Clara, with her crown of dark curls, through the window separating family from the newborns in their cribs.

  This was also why I’d come back. I’d missed the birth of my first nephew, my brother’s son. Now I held up the little boy so he could see his new cousin. He left smudgy handprints on the glass. My brother’s wife was pregnant again—I’d be there for the birth of another niece in a few months.

  My first three weeks in Rio had not been what I’d imagined; the first warm flush of recognition had given way to this landscape that oscillated, disconcertingly, between the comforting and familiar and the frightening unknown. But that Sunday morning at the hospital was a reminder: after decades of missed weddings, births, and funerals, I was where I needed to be, holding up my nephew, watching Clara sleep under the bright lights of the nursery.

  Still, I couldn’t stay long enough to see my sister, who was still recovering from the C-section. As soon as my brother-in-law came out of her room and gave us a thumbs-up, I ran back to Alemão.

  It had taken 2,700 soldiers and police to seize the complex. They’d positioned themselves soon after dawn. The traffickers were also prepared; the first bullets flew just before 7 a.m. An hour later the police entered slowly, on foot. The airspace was closed to civilians, but military and law enforcement helicopters lent support to the men on the ground, flying low and returning fire. The armored tanks followed. Their caterpillar tracks rolled up Joaquim de Queiroz and into the favela, crushing the metal spikes cemented into the ground and the concrete boulders laid along the way by the gang.

  After the weeks of planning and buildup, the takeover was smooth. There was no resistance other than the token shots after daybreak. This lack of resistance was unnerving; business as usual, even with the expected casualties, would have been more reassuring to the population. It was as if the gangsters had melted away.

  Soon after 9 a.m., Mário Sérgio declared victory: “Vencemos.” We won. He ordered the battalions to begin a thorough search of the more than thirty-one thousand homes within the Complexo do Alemão and the nearby favelas of the Penha complex.

  When I arrived at 11 a.m., the iron gates that barred neighborhood businesses were still drawn tight, some studded by bullets. Spent casings littered the alleys. Trash was strewn everywhere.

  Police pulled out tons of cocaine, crack, and marijuana, as well as the expected load of armaments: machine guns and submachine guns, dozens of grenades, homemade pipe bombs, rifles, handguns. More than 400 motorcycles were abandoned, along with 136 cars. There were 241 arrests and 275 people detained for questioning.

  Once I walked up the hillside, now open to journalists and anyone else, what I heard was that those who could do so dropped their weapons and blended into the population. With a change of clothes and a Bible in his hand, a gangster without a rap sheet was indistinguishable from a hardworking favelado heading to Sunday service. Rumor had it that some even escaped inside one of the black armored vehicles emblazoned with the elite officers’ skull and dagger. Evidence later surfaced that a few had managed an escape via Rio’s massive storm pipes. Of the hundreds of Red Command gangsters authorities had expected to apprehend, only about twenty were arrested that day. Pezão was never found.

  By 1 p.m., the Rio de Janeiro state flag and Brazil’s yellow and green colors flew from the complex’s highest point. This was the biggest accomplishment yet in Rio’s effort to take back territory occupied by armed traffickers, and officials drove that point home in interview after interview. They spoke to the population in the familiar terms: this was a war, and they had captured the enemy’s castle.

  “Alemão was the heart of evil,” Beltrame said at his press conference, summing up the tone of official comments.

  Gradually, favela residents who’d remained ventured from their homes after days spent shuttered indoors. Many welcomed the police, offering them food or a drink of water. A woman took her seven-year-old grandson to see the tanks just outside Vila Cruzeiro. I asked her what she made of all this. Josiane remembered a time when there had been picnics and fireworks up at Our Lady of Penha. Over the past few years even the church’s steps had been taken by traffickers, who used it as a lookout. She couldn’t remember the last time she attended Mass there. The shoot-outs had made her grandson a startled child, afraid of firecrackers.

  “Can you imagine raising a kid that jumps at every loud noise?” she asked. “I hope this will be the rebirth of this community. We have to hope.”

  I also heard a lot of skepticism. Three women gathered in a garbage-strewn plaza with a broken swing set. They smoked, kept their kids by their side, and laughed at the idea anything would ever be different.

  “Look at these guys milling around. You think they’re just watching the day go by?” one of them said, tilting her head toward the surly young men gathered at the edge of the park. “They’re with the movimento, just waiting until they can go back to business.”

  Many in these favelas had grown up under the authority of drug bosses and had never been directly addressed by elected officials of any sort. When they needed something—money for a sick child, a job, justice for some slight—they went to the reigning chief. They had little reason to trust authorities and a lot of questions. The police had often come into their community shooting, ready to treat everyone as a suspect. Why would be any different now? Even if officers did change their ways, would they stay, or would it be all over after the Olympics?

  Beltrame had promised that Alemão would get a UPP, but for the time being there weren’t enough trained officers. The military, untrained as they were for police work, would remain within the community indefinitely.

  �
��We’re trading one bunch of guns for another,” another woman told me.

  The state would have to earn the trust of women like these. It would not be easy. There were already reports of officers ransacking homes within the occupied favelas, shaking down residents for money, making off with cell phones, cameras, even a flat-screen TV. An ombudsman was appointed to comb through the accusations.

  This was far from an unequivocal triumph. At least thirty-seven people died during that last week of November. We never learned their names. It wasn’t clear exactly how many had been injured, but hospital officials told me the youngest person treated during the siege was two years old, and the oldest, eighty-one.

  I was new to this Rio with its UPPs and its Olympic plans, but the declarations of victory seemed too early, too eager. They reminded me of George W. Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” speech in 2003, when he made an action-figure landing on board an aircraft carrier and declared the United States had prevailed in Iraq. Most of the fighting and dying there happened after that moment of hubris.

  Something was happening in Rio, that much was evident. There was a cracking and shifting of structures that had long been in place. But what city was being created here? And for whom?

  CHAPTER 6

  NOT FOR BEGINNERS

  The apartment broker turned the key. The door didn’t budge. He put his shoulder against the unit’s front door, pushed gently. Nothing.