by Ioan Grillo
“I have to find a proper job. I know I can do it. If you stay in the commando, the only options are to end up in jail or in the cemetery.”
* * *
Like most of the commando youth, Lucas reads little. But he loves music and can recite songs word for word about the Red Commando, its battles and its gangsters. Sitting in the café, he sings me a verse about the cocaine king Seaside Freddy.
I wonder how the singers are motivated to write these lyrics, and how much they reflect any sense of the political roots. To find out, I track down a vocalist called MC Cheetah, who sings on Red Commando funk records. Cheetah lives closer to the center of Rio, where favelas are built on sharp hills like the villages of southern Italy. He talks to me and croons his verses as we sit on a plateau high up the slopes, the towering statue of Jesus behind us.
Cheetah is in his early thirties, short and slim, wearing a backward baseball cap. He used to perform regularly, but stopped after death threats. As well as singing, he works as a porter. He also spent time selling drugs as a vapor and confesses to firing at police.
Growing up in a favela, Cheetah says he would hear the funk parties from when he was a toddler and was drawn to the music. By the time he was a teenager, he was a regular at clubs, including some where the youths would have punch-ups to the songs, known as fight dances. My ears prick up. When I was a teenager I used to go to punk rock slam dances and get the occasional black eye. It was a way to let off steam, forget whatever adolescent stress we thought was bothering us. He describes having a similar motive; but it sounds like it was a whole different level of thumping.
In the Rio fight dances, mobs form on each side and clash in the middle in a melee of kicks, punches, elbows, and head butts. It is just for fun, not what the favela kids consider real violence (i.e., killing people). But some of the fight dancers are beaten black and blue and a nurse is often on site to bandage them up.
“It was our five minutes of happiness,” Cheetah says. “One time, I got smacked so hard that I had to eat soup for three weeks. But I didn’t care. The music brought it out in me. I was pumped full of adrenaline.”
Cheetah performs his songs for me. His style is between rapping and singing, a kind of melodic chant. The melody is interesting to my ears, different from music in either English or Spanish. The Brazilian sound has its unique fusion of African and Portuguese influences.
Cheetah’s songs are explicitly about the Red Commando and gang life. It’s the most hard-core version of the music, called funk proibidão—or “banned funk.” Police can actually arrest singers who perform this music for association with organized crime, although they rarely do.
I ask why he sings about crime and drugs. Does he think it’s good? Does he feel there is a cause?
“It is not that it’s good,” he says. “It is just us. This is my family, my friends, my brothers, the people I have grown up with, the people I have laughed and joked with, picked up women with and fought side by side with.”
He has several cousins and many friends in the commando. Police killed one cousin when they stormed the favela. Police also killed a friend, taking him into an alley and shooting him in the face. In anger, he writes lyrics about shooting police.
However, his most successful song was against the Third Commando. He sings it to me a cappella over the sounds of the street. In the recording, it is over the beat of a soulful 1970s Brazilian crooner called Tim Maia and its melody is melancholic. But there is nothing sweet about the lyrics of his song, entitled “The Third Commando is Worthless.”
This is for the soldiers,
The Third Commando is worthless,
If the Third Commando comes up here,
We are going to give it to them,
With our AK-47s, with G3s and .762s.
The whole week, my boy Alexo is selling drugs,
So that you can smile, and the Third Commando can cry,
When we grab them,
We just want to kill them,
Cut them,
And dice them up,
(He says at that point there is normally a spray of gunfire—)
We are sincere,
We don’t give any money (to politicians or cops),
If you fuck up,
You are going to the cemetery,
I just want to see if they try to come here,
In the life of crime,
I show no weakness to anybody
Here comes the Red Commando! The Red Commando! The Red Commando!
The song was a hit with Red Commando operatives across the city. But it didn’t make Cheetah any friends in the Third Commando. They discovered which favela he lived in and got on the frequency of the traffickers’ walkie-talkies to threaten him.
“They said, ‘We are going to invade your favela and we are going to kill you.’”
Cheetah hoped it was a bluff. But then, true to their word, Third Commando thugs launched an assault on a funk dance he was at. During the ensuing gun battle, Cheetah escaped.
“My son was born soon after that, and I decided not to risk performing. It is safer that way, but I miss the buzz of singing and people shouting along and firing guns to the music.”
I don’t hear much of William’s revolutionary rhetoric in Lucas or Cheetah. However, I do hear a hatred for the police and a sense of belonging. This latter factor is key. One reason that young people join commandos and cartels is to be part of something. The crime family offers security in a dangerous environment, as in Lucas’s case, and provides a home for people who don’t feel included in the wider society.
But Lucas and Cheetah are on the lower rungs of the commando. I need to speak to the midlevel operators who move between the leaders such as William and those on the street to understand how they think. I need to speak to the favela donos.
American journalist Joe Carter trails the streets looking for a favela boss who will talk to us. In his work filming in favelas, he has been forced to deal with gangsters to smooth out any problems with residents. The gangsters are the de facto authority for neighbor disputes as well as drug dealing.
He manages to get us a sit-down with a commando operative in his late thirties with a reputation for violence. I’m told he has eight tattoos of skulls on his body—one for each police officer he has killed. (The commando use skulls to portray the police, just like the CORE officers use the skull to represent themselves.) One time, the police approached the favela, and this dono was seen standing at the entrance in a bulletproof jacket and metal helmet firing wildly at them with an automatic rifle.
We meet the gangster inside the offices of the favela residents’ association. This confirms what I have heard from many people: The commando is the real power behind these neighborhood groups. They choose the director and they funnel money into them to pay for their social schemes.
The favela boss is an imposing figure, with strong African features and a powerful build. I am told he is a worshiper of candomblé, a Brazilian folk religion that mixes African and Catholic saints and is favored by many gangsters. I’m also told he is stoned a lot and gets paranoid. I sit down with him and show him a first book I wrote about Mexican cartels, with photos of opium plants and bricks of cocaine. He looks at it and up at me, his eyes flicking nervously. I tell him I am writing a new book and want to talk about his experience in the criminal underworld. He doesn’t look happy. He mentions a local gangster who gave an interview and ended up in prison. He won’t tell his story.
Back on the trail, we go to another favela where Joe has contacts. Here we find a commando member called Fidel. I find it interesting that he has the same nickname as Latin America’s famous revolutionary. He doesn’t look much like his namesake though. This favela Fidel is clean-shaven with light black skin and built like a tank, wearing a pair of soccer shorts and sneakers. He is relaxed, sharp, and confident. The thirty-seven-year-old was dono for close to a decade but recently stepped aside to focus on a small business and get the police off his back. He agrees to t
ell me about running a favela for the commando.
Fidel is a clear authority in his neighborhood, giving orders and nods to various people in cars, on motorcycles, and on foot who come past. He says we can talk in a bar-café, and the owner rushes to give us a good table. We chat while there is a Champions League soccer match on a TV in the background. The English team Chelsea loses while we speak.
Born in the late seventies, Fidel was a toddler when William founded the Red Commando on the prison island. He moved with his family from the state of Minas Gerais to a central Rio favela when the commando was growing. Unlike many wayward kids on his street, he lived with his father, who was a working man. And although Fidel joined the commando at twelve years old, serving as a lookout, he stayed in school until he was seventeen.
This question of gang leaders having a better education than many of the soldiers strikes me again. It’s not only who can hit hardest. It’s who can think. Fidel can do both.
Completing school, Fidel got a job as a bank teller. This is uncommon among the commando recruits, many of whom have never had formal work. However, Fidel got pulled back into the crime world following a family tragedy. His older brother was a commando gunslinger and was murdered in a beef with some of his friends.
“They betrayed him.” Fidel shakes his head. “When they were out dancing at a club, he was sniffing coke and they shot him in the back of the head.”
The murder was not sanctioned by the commando leadership, so Red gunmen went after the killers. Fidel helped them; he had to avenge the murder of his brother. The commando took care of the offenders in its usual way. But the revenge killing became a rare crime that police investigated and Fidel’s name came up. He was convicted as an accessory and spent eight years in Rio’s worst prisons.
Inside jail, Fidel moved closer into the Red Commando for protection. While prison was a savage place, the Reds shielded Fidel from problems. “If people even looked at us bad, they could be killed,” he says.
As a smart and charismatic youth, Fidel won favor with the Red leadership. Among those who supported him was William, whom he shared a cell with.
“William is a great man, one of the biggest bank robbers in Brazil.” Fidel taps his head with his index finger. “He’s smart. He taught me a lot.”
Fidel joined the Red Commando in prison riots, once taking fourteen guards as hostages. It was all part of the constant push and shove between the commando and prison authorities, which sporadically explodes into violence.
He describes how the jailed Red Commando bosses would meet to decide certain issues, such as starting a riot. They would also give their blessing to new favela bosses or sanction the invasion of a turf. The power with this leadership is less about who is a formal boss, Fidel says, and more about who is most influential through convincing arguments.
“Some people can talk and others can’t. If someone is making sense, if they are right, then people will listen to them and follow them.”
When Fidel was released, the commando leadership asked him to take over as dono of his favela because the boss running it was tyrannical and corrupt. “He was treating people badly, beating up residents and making them suffer. And there was money missing from the accounts. I had to put some order in the favela.”
With the commando leadership behind him, Fidel took over in a bloodless coup, the old boss running for his life. He claims his control was firm but just. He wouldn’t punish residents in his neighborhood unless they committed a heinous crime, such as rape. But after he ruled there was no going back.
“Someone has to do a lot of shit to get himself killed. But once I have warned you, then I am not going to give you a second chance.” I ask Fidel how he actually knows if people are guilty. He describes how they conduct trials, listening to witnesses, and then he makes a call. Sometimes, the accused will confess to the crime, he says, and that will give them a better chance of getting off with exile instead of death. In certain cases, Fidel would confer with the bosses in prison before passing judgment.
It is not a justice system that would be approved by the United Nations Commissioner for Human Rights. But it is effective at reducing some crimes in communities where the rule of law fails to reach.
Brazilian academics refer to this alternative justice system as parallel power. André Fernandes, a journalist who heads a favela news network, says it is at the heart of the commando’s control. “The fact that the commando is the arbitrator of life and death makes them the absolute power in these communities,” he says.
This role of judge and jury is one of the many jobs that the head of a favela has to do. Fidel also oversaw thirty drug mouths, moving tens of thousands of dollars every day. His banking experience gave him ideas on how to wash the money through small businesses and front accounts. He had to appoint the mouth bosses, keep them in line, and stop them from stealing. And he had to oversee the soldiers. He was CEO, military commander, and arbitrator—a minor warlord, or gangster chieftain.
During his command, he led the invasion of a neighboring favela controlled by the Third Commando. He said residents urged him to come as the Third treated them so badly. “If anyone just looked at them then they would make them kiss the ground until the sun rises. People welcomed us in.”
He planned the invasion carefully and the Reds stormed the favela in the early morning when the Third gunmen were idle. They killed eight of them and the rest fled. The Reds secured the territory.
Fidel says he has finally decided to step aside to concentrate on a legitimate business, buying and selling cars. He is healthy and focused, and unlike many gangsters, he doesn’t use drugs, which helped him save his loot. He owns several of his own cars and could afford to get out of the favela, but says he prefers to be close to his people. He left his position as favela boss after showing the books were straight and he owed no money.
The fact the Red Commando allows its operatives to step back shows it is more benevolent than most crime organizations in Latin America. For many cartels and gangs, the only way out is death.
I ask Fidel if there was anything he regretted in his time leading the favela. He doesn’t mention the violence. He sees it as something that was thrust upon him, rather than something he should feel guilty about. It is a sad fact that many of these gangsters simply don’t see killing as wrong. This normalization of murder is one of the biggest obstacles to stopping the homicide epidemic in the Americas.
However, Fidel says he regrets selling crack.
“Crack destroys lives. If I knew what it was like, I would never have brought it here. Once people try it, they get hooked, and then they would sell their own mother.” Fidel throws his hands up. “It is the weak who get addicted to drugs. Strong people can resist it.”
Fidel is one of the strong ones.
Unlike the lower-ranking thugs, Fidel understands well the mix with urban guerrillas that helped found the Red Commando. He has a lot of respect for William’s ideas and sees the organization as an important form of resistance. But he is a pragmatist rather than a dreamer. He has made the commando work for him, instead of hoping for a revolution. I ask him how the violence can stop and he shakes his head.
“The violence is part of life. It’s part of humanity. People are dying but then other people are being born. It doesn’t make the world end. The fighting is not going to stop now. Maybe in two hundred years it will.”
When I look back at the interview later, I reread Fidel’s last answer, trying to make sense of what he is saying. It strikes me as a profound point from this favela chieftain, a reflection on the nature of humanity and violence. When I cover this bloodshed, I try and search for ways to stop it; I feel I have to, to justify seeking out murderers and misery. I imagine there has to be an end somewhere, even if that solution is evasive. But Fidel’s observation is more realistic, if cynical; the violence will go on whatever we do.
For Fidel, the commando is a way to have pride, a code of behavior. But he is not interested in trying to defe
at the government. His thinking is shared by many donos across Rio. They fight police when they come into their favelas, but don’t push outside. The result is a sustained stalemate with the police in much of the state, a low-intensity war playing out year after year without altering the bigger picture.
But while Rio remained in deadlock, two hundred and fifty miles away in São Paulo, a commando took William’s dream of criminal guerrilla warfare to new heights, striking at the heart of Brazil’s economic powerhouse.
CHAPTER 14
When the Brazilian government moved commando leaders to distant jails, it had a side effect: They set up new chapters wherever they went. Just as the Reds had multiplied through Rio state prisons, they spread through the national system, from Brazil’s northern coast to the Amazon jungles. In some cases, new cells kept close to the bosses in Rio. In others, they formed separate commandos with a loose affiliation.
The biggest prize was São Paulo. The heaving metropolis competes with Mexico City as the largest urban area in the Western Hemisphere with some twenty million people. It’s ranked in the world’s twenty most economically powerful cities with a booming stock exchange and auto, textile, and pharmaceutical industries. Its downtown has the biggest skyline in South America, and vast ethnic neighborhoods, including the largest Italian and Japanese communities outside their homelands. São Paulo State, which houses the city, has forty-three million people, more than most countries on the continent. It also has 2.7 million residents in favelas and 215,000 prisoners in 160 overcrowded jails.
In this megalopolis rose a crime group that was inspired by the Red Commando but that has posed an even bigger threat. The PCC, or Primeiro Comando da Capital (First Commando of the Capital), emerged after the worst of many Brazilian prison massacres—the slaughter of 111 inmates in Carandiru jail in 1992. After a hard-fought case, judges ruled that policemen had shot inmates in their cells after they surrendered.