by Ioan Grillo
Others reject this idea as a farce that hides a highly prejudicial system. They point out that favelas are dominated by people of more African ancestry. Some even view crime as poor black people getting their own back on the whiter middle class. Paulo Lins, who wrote the book City of God, made this point at a seminar of Latin American writers and journalists that I gate-crashed.
The police is a force of repression. They go into favelas and they kill innocent people and say they are drug traffickers. Rio is a completely racist city. It’s a thing people don’t like to talk about, but if you are black then you don’t get mugged. The other day, some robbers went into a fancy party and stole everybody’s wallets. They robbed a hundred people. However, there were two black people there and they let them off.
Like in the United States, Brazil’s racial divide has its roots in slavery. The Portuguese Empire shipped millions of enslaved Africans to toil on sugar and coffee plantations and chop Brazil’s precious wood. There is much dispute over the exact numbers of the Atlantic slave trade. But the most respected estimates come from a database compiled at Emory University in Atlanta, which counts all available records of slave ships. It finds that slavers shipped an astounding 4.86 million Africans to Brazil.6 This is ten times more than the 450,000 slaves that arrived on U.S. plantations; Brazil had the biggest African slave population on the planet.
Brazil’s independence from Portugal in 1822 did not create a progressive free republic. Instead, power moved into the hands of a Brazilian emperor presiding over his South American realm. Slavery continued unabashed, outliving abolition in the British Empire and the U.S. Emancipation Proclamation. When Brazil finally abolished slavery in 1888, it was the last country in the Western world to do so.
Leaving the plantations, many freedmen headed to Rio, then Brazil’s capital, and claimed their turf by squatting on the surrounding hills. However, while the favelas show a more Afro Brazil, they are not exclusively so. They include others of Brazil’s multiracial fusion of Europeans, indigenous, and X amount of combinations. The commando gunmen guarding Antares may be generally darker skinned than the bathers on Ipanema Beach, but they still show a spectrum of shades and features.
The name favela itself claims a curious origin, one that also speaks to the violent foundations of Brazil. In the nineteenth century, favela referred to a spiny plant that grew hundreds of miles from Rio, in the Bahia region. Here, a preacher known as Anthony the Counselor founded a colony of landless peasants and freed slaves in an arid valley sprinkled with favela plants. The Counselor was a fire and brimstone type who predicted water turning to blood and stars falling from the heavens.
The Brazilian government, now free of an emperor and going through a modernizing phase, determined to crush the Counselor and his band, viewing them as superstitious outlaws. It 1896, it unleashed the War of Canudos to bring them to heel. The war descended into a grueling campaign in which the starry-eyed rebels beat back waves of troops. Finally, the Brazilian army used cannons and dynamite to massacre the rebels, killing some fifteen thousand in 1897.
The soldiers who carried out the slaughter marched back to Rio where they had been promised land as payment. But the government repudiated its debt and left them homeless, forcing the veterans to settle on a hill beside the city. This is the big irony of the tale: after crushing one group of squatters, the soldiers were forced to become squatters themselves. The slum built by these battle-scarred veterans became known as the Morro da Favela, or Favela Hill. It’s murky whether this was because the soldiers had brought back favela plants and they took root there, or just because they had been among the favela plants for so long that they were associated with them. Either way, the name stuck as the slums expanded along miles of Rio’s dazzling slopes.
For much of the twentieth century, successive Brazilian governments provided nothing for favelas: no sewage works, paved streets, or security. Many slum residents were also barred from voting by a literacy requirement. The communities grew outside the system, scrambling to provide for themselves. In recent decades, there has finally been an effort to give favela dwellers deeds and urban services, but it has been a slow and tricky process.
Brazil’s 2010 census found a third of favela households still had no sewage collection or septic tanks. It counted a total of 11.4 million Brazilians living in favelas.7 That’s more than the populations of many countries. But it should also be kept in perspective. Brazil is the fifth largest nation in the world, with two hundred million people. Favela residents only make up 6 percent.
However, in Rio de Janeiro State, home of the original favela, slum dwellers are more than 12 percent, making up two million of the sixteen million people. The favelas begin a stone’s throw from Copacabana Beach and slope up the hills that spiral through the spectacular-looking city to the jungles behind. Steep narrow streets thread round them in labyrinthine patterns. Overhanging trees allow cheeky marmoset monkeys to spring into their alleys.
In the early 2000s, Chicago academic Ben Lessing wandered into these favelas. He had come to Rio to study environmental regulations. But seeing this crazy urban habitat made him switch direction and begin his work on crime wars.
“Immediately when I got to Rio, I saw the absurdity of the situation there. You had this archipelago of favelas right in the heart of the metropolis, sometimes in the wealthiest neighborhoods. You had a significant portion of the population, maybe about a million people, living under the dominion of armed groups. It was very clear from the first time that I went into a favela that the drug traffickers held the monopoly on armed violence. To people living there, this wasn’t abnormal. It was just the way things were.”8
As I watch the young gangsters raise their rifles to the pounding electro beats, I wonder how this alternative gangster government became so strong here. A central theme running through the crime wars of Latin America is that of inequality and class struggle. The region is home to some of the most unequal societies in the world, and many gangsters claim this is what drives them. But even within this environment, the Red Commando is an extreme example of a crime syndicate embedded in a community, with a rhetoric tinged with class struggle and leftist politics, starting with the name.
How was the Red Commando born?
CHAPTER 5
All gangs have their creation story. Accounts, tales, and myths trickle round the streets about who was there on day one, how they got together, what they vowed. The creation story of the Red Commando is especially alluring.
I hear varying versions from gang members, community activists, and police officers. But they all concur on a central detail: the Red Commando was born back in the heady days of the Cold War and Brazil’s military dictatorship, which ruled from 1964 to 1985. It came about when ghetto criminals were locked up with leftist guerrillas who fought the dictatorship.
The guerrillas—who were mostly middle-class intellectuals—wanted to be granted political prisoner status and held away from other inmates. But the dictatorship’s generals thought otherwise. They feared that awarding the leftists a political status would legitimize their insurgency. They also wanted to teach the uppity rebels a lesson. They put them in the most high-security prison—on an island—with the most hard-core bank robbers and gunslingers from the favelas. The ghetto villains, they believed, would soon rape and beat the politicos into submission.
But the opposite happened.
The political prisoners “educated” the bank robbers with their revolutionary ideas. And together they formed a united group mixing the cell structure and politics of the guerrillas with the violence and street connections of the gangsters. The Red Commando’s unique political influence from the guerrillas gave it its name and quasi-socialist discourse.
From a few dozen inmates in a wing it spread like a virus through the prison system, spilling onto the streets as members were released or escaped. Dozens of adherents became hundreds, became thousands.
It’s a fascinating creation story. But I want to dig fu
rther into how this alliance between guerillas and gangsters led to fights in Rio’s favelas that would claim tens of thousands of lives. And there is one man, I discover, who is best placed to fill in the details, a man who was there when the alliance was forged and has survived decades of bloodshed to tell the tale. I need to talk to “the brain” of the Red Commando, the man they call the Teacher.1
CHAPTER 6
For a man who has spent most of his life in prison, and suffered beatings to an inch of his life, electric shocks, starvation, and every other method of torture known to Brazilian police and jailers, William da Silva Lima appears remarkably unfazed. He has a look that says “You won’t break me” as he sits with his back straight, owlish eyes staring like laser beams. It’s a bit like Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke. Times a thousand.
Despite being known as the Teacher, William left school at twelve. But as he talks to me, he shows that he’s both knowledgeable and sharply focused. He has the ability to swiftly answer questions on complicated issues with a clear and firm position. This ability, it strikes me, can make bosses in these crime organizations. It’s not only who can hit the hardest. It’s who can lead. The Red Commando has no single kingpin but a copula of bosses, and the Teacher survived on this top rung for decades.
William was first incarcerated when he was seventeen and has been in the penal system most of his life. He’s now seventy-one. His specialty crime (and love, it seems) is robbing banks. He once escaped from a prison island and was robbing banks within days of achieving his freedom, carrying on for ten months until police officers nabbed him again.
He doesn’t come across as a regular tough guy, being short and slim and having the habit of spontaneously reciting poetry. But he carries an intimidating air. A prison guard almost killed him by opening up his head with a metal baton, an injury that left William with a degenerative nerve disease. William describes how the guard was mysteriously murdered, and smiles broadly. He has a distinctive grin, lighting up his nerve-damaged face and penetrating eyes. He also talks about guards getting burned with gasoline and rival prisoners being “executed.”
With the degenerative disease almost crippling him, authorities finally allowed William conditional release on the grounds of his medical condition, age, and time served. Even so, he wears an electric bracelet round his leg. He looks too old and frail to stick up banks, but police want to make sure.
William clearly sees himself as a social bandit. He comes from the ghetto side of the Red Commando—what they call “proletarian prisoners”—but says he was politicized even before he was locked up with leftist guerrillas. He views the world in black and white terms, in which the system—the police, politicians, businessmen, the rich—is the enemy. The poor struggle, and the Red Commando is the spear of that struggle. He shrugs off atrocities by his clan with phrases he repeats several times to me. “The Red Commando is the resistance. It doesn’t negotiate with police.”
In line with seeing himself as a resistance fighter, he wrote his own account of his tribulations, which was printed by a local press. It’s called Four Hundred Against One, after the number of police who surrounded and shot dead one of his cohorts.1 The cover has a picture depicting favelas in one corner with kids bearing pistols; a prison in the other corner with a giant skull; and him standing at the bottom alongside the word Liberdade—or Freedom. This is one of the three words of the Red Commando slogan he tells me: “Peace, Justice, and Liberty.”
A Brazilian director made a movie about the Red Commando and also called it Four Hundred Against One.2 The film, which has been a smash on the Internet, is an action-packed watch with lots of gangsters with Afros and flares in blazing gunfights alongside some seriously funky music. It also has some interesting real footage of shoot-outs. (As always, the actor is better looking than the true-life personality.)
While the name of his Red Commando colors the walls of favelas, William now lives outside the slums in the middle-class Copacabana area. It’s a nice street although his apartment and furnishings are modest.
His wife, Simone, is some two decades younger, a woman with a kind and pretty face from Brazil’s Afro center of Salvador. She provides legal services to inmates, and they met when he was in prison, carrying on their relationship through years of incarceration, escapes and recaptures, and several children. (He escaped to see two of them born.) She is sharp-witted and will contradict him on certain points, being more critical of the commando. They make a nice couple. An old photo shows them kissing through prison bars, their eyes closed in the embrace.
I am introduced to William by a Brazilian journalist who was critical of the dictatorship, making him one of the better guys in the Teacher’s eyes. The journalist hugs William and tells him it is fine to tell his story. He is still hesitant at first. But once he finds his rhythm he doesn’t stop talking. He recounts extensive details of his childhood, and several times when I ask about the Red Commando he lifts his hand and says, “I’ll get to that later.” And he gives that distinctive broad grin.
After hours, he gets into the gritty details, and during two long visits to his home I hear the blood-soaked tale of how the Red Commando became such a power in the world’s fifth largest nation. His story begins in the 1940s, when Brazil was just half a century out of slavery and empire.
CHAPTER 7
William was born a thousand miles from Rio in the northeastern state of Pernambuco. His father hailed from a family of sugarcane workers of Portuguese descent; his mother was part Amazonian Indian. His mixed heritage gave him high cheekbones and light skin. It was August 1942, and the Brazilian navy had just sailed into World War II. His father bequeathed him the English name William in the spirit of the war alliance with the United States.
His parents broke up when he was two years old, and he stayed with his father and grandparents. His mother would visit and take him out for sorbet. He remembers her as kind and beautiful. One day when he was five years old, she took him for his treat and didn’t return him, running off to her native village in an indigenous area.
“I was really happy in her village. It was deep in nature. You could drink the clean water. There were beautiful trees you could climb up. But it didn’t last.”
After five months, his father and uncle arrived with two military policemen and a man from the justice department waving a court order for his custody. His mother screamed and held him, but the policemen pulled her away and beat her. This is one of William’s most vivid childhood memories.
“The policemen hit her again and again in front of me. I’ll never forget that image. From that day on, I hated policemen.”
He lived with his father and grandparents, starting school when he was seven. His father became the driver for the manager of the sugar mill and would often be on the road. William spent most of his time with his grandfather, who cut cane in the seething hot fields, the job African slaves had done for centuries. His grandfather was warm like his mother and showed a fighting spirit. He taught William how to stand up for himself.
“He would talk about the struggle for better conditions. He took me to meetings with sugarcane workers in the square. I loved hearing the workers talk about their fight. I became politicized.”
One day, police broke up a meeting of sugarcane workers, causing a scuffle. An officer on horseback ran over William’s grandfather. He was badly injured and for the next year, William would run back from school to care for him. He never recovered and passed away of his injuries and age.
William hated the police even more.
Following the death, William moved across the country to São Paulo, where his father found a new wife and a job as a bus driver. William liked this bustling city attracting immigrants from all over the globe: Italy, Japan, Lebanon. He made good friends and loved to play soccer from dawn until dusk. But his homelife went from bad to worse as he fought bitterly with his father and stepmother.
He finished primary school at twelve and got a job as a delivery boy for a laboratory
. He often fled arguments at home by sleeping in the Praça da Sé square by the elegant cathedral; he loved the street life but often lacked enough to eat.
At fifteen, he got a job collecting rent for a landlord. It paid better than the lab, but he was still struggling to put food in his mouth, and his father never helped. So he planned his first robbery.
“The landlord was a rude pig of a man. I would go on trips to collect rent with him, and he would make me wait on the street while he slept with prostitutes. I had no qualms about stealing from him.”
William pilfered checks from the landlord and got two of his friends to cash them. The furious landlord ordered the police to drag William to the bank. But the clerk said he wasn’t the person who had collected the money.
“They couldn’t do anything. I lost my job, but I got away with the crime.”
William flashes an especially broad grin when he tells me this story. Fifty-six years later this robbery still gives him satisfaction. He is one of those thieves who gets pleasure out of the act of stealing itself; he wants to beat the system. Later when he robbed banks, he loved to shoot the pictures of bank managers off the wall.
He made a good haul out of the stolen checks, buying kneepads for the beautiful game and eating in a restaurant that he had previously walked past longingly. He even invested in materials to make stuffed toys and sell them in the market. But his business didn’t last, and he was soon out on the streets picking pockets.