Two years on, I remain astounded by the same daily display. In a bustling scene, a series of bronzed musclemen, surfboards under arm, scatter small children flying bird kites, as they rush into the water to ‘catch’ the next wave. Curvaceous women in scarlet lipstick and dental-floss bikinis strut along the shore. Everyone is an enviable shade of brown – here skin cancer are dirty words and telling a Brazilian it is fashionable to be pale could result in an unfortunate incident.
Revelling in air filled with laughter and the aroma of salt and coconut oil, wrinkled old people lower their sagging bodies into the shallows. Groups of beer-guzzling and pot-smoking teenagers squat in the sand puzzling the meaning of life. Spiritualist groups ceremoniously place small offerings of quails’ eggs and empty perfume bottles on mounds of sand or cast roses and lipsticks to the waves to please the vain goddess of the sea.
Activity reaches a peak at weekends. True cariocas even have a ‘beach address’ where they can always be found on Saturday mornings. In among everything hawkers wind their way selling ‘natural’ sandwiches, foam biscuits, suntan oil and green coconuts. Even the police wear bermudas.
At the top of the beach loud cheers emanate from the vigorous volleyball and football matches under way. Exercise bars have been erected from which grunting athletes practise monkey-like swings. There is so much activity that some years ago the authorities had to widen the beach through a landfill and install floodlights so that play could continue into the night, when the beach becomes the preserve of prostitutes clad only in G-strings and open jackets, baring all to passing motorists.
Most bizarre of all is the assortment of people standing with one leg in the air or jerking their arms skywards as they jog in what could be mistaken for audition time for Monty Python’s Ministry of Silly Walks. All this in the name of beauty. Brazilians are big on body culture – not for nothing is Rio’s main bikini shop called Bum Bum.
Across the city, gymnasiums pound morning to night with people preparing their body for display on the beach – there are more than forty studios in Copacabana alone. I tried one for a time with the aim of keeping fit rather than sculpturing my backside, but the teacher was relentless. ‘Bottoms are not for sitting on, girls!’ she shouted, if we dared let up on the fight for the perfect buttocks. ‘They are for showing off.’
If one is more impatient, or simply a lost cause, there is always plastic surgery. Rio has 500 registered plastic surgery clinics and the number one op is not the nose job but the bottom tuck – perceptible only by suspiciously firm peach-shaped buttocks with narrow scars in the centre, often covered by tattoos.
But Copacabana beach is not just for the body beautiful or those who can afford to cheat. Long gone are the days when it was an essential stop for Hollywood stars. Black-tie balls at the Copa, as the Copacabana Palace Hotel is known, attended by such notaries as John F. Kennedy, Eva Perón, Charles de Gaulle and Gene Kelly, are a distant memory.
Under Brazilian law beaches are public goods which cannot be fenced off and, since Rio’s populist Governor arranged bus routes direct to Copacabana from the poor northern slums, its beach is no longer the preserve of the middle class.
It is the one facility accessible to all in the world’s most inequitable society. Many Brazilian sociologists believe the beach is why, in spite of lurching from crisis to crisis in which the poor become poorer, the country experiences little social unrest.
Days were for the beach, but my evenings were spent in smoky bars listening to bossa nova that ran up and down my spine like massage and drinking caipirinhas, a wicked concoction of crushed lime, sugar and ice with cachaça – sugar-cane spirit. Best of all was going to hear Tom Jobim sat at the piano with a bottle of whisky and a cigarette to fuel his gravelly voice.
Never had I been to such a hedonistic place. Yet it was also mystical. On Friday nights, I would often come across little offerings on street corners of quails’ eggs, candles and perfume bottles to appease the ‘devils of the crossroads’. And on New Year’s Eve, the whole of Rio, it seemed, would dress in white and head to Copacabana beach to throw gladioli into the waves to Iemanjá, the goddess of the sea. If your flower was carried out to sea it meant a good year, so most of us waded quite far before throwing them.
Iemanjá, the sea goddess, cast some of her magic over me that first year and, being in Rio and 25, I fell in love. He was a surf-mad banker called Claudio who accompanied his boss to my office for a meeting, carrying a suitcase, and stayed in my life for the next three years. He lived in São Paulo but was a carioca by birth and heart. He loathed São Paulo and every Friday jumped on the ponte aérea – the air shuttle between the cities – and came running down the steps to my flat. Sometimes we would go and visit his grandmother in Ipanema. She lived in one of Rio’s few remaining old houses, squeezed by apartment blocks either side, and resolutely refused the entreaties of developers with big chequebooks. Her husband had been an admiral and she had travelled with him to London. Every so often she would shout out ‘Piccadilly’ or ‘Buckingham’ as she remembered the names of the places they had seen.
One Saturday we drove out of town as we often did, beyond the crowds, to our favourite beach of Grumari. On the way back we stopped at the Pôr do Sol bar to watch the sunset over caipirinhas and shells of spiced crabmeat. I could think of nowhere in the world I would rather be and when Claudio asked me to marry him as the sun swelled red and disappeared beyond the edge of the sea, I was accepting Rio as much as him. The following week he presented me with a ring, a delicate wave of gold and diamonds, as we dined on langoustines in champagne at the Copa.
But it was not all wonderful. The morros or hills that give Rio its unique topography were gradually being occupied by drug barons. Rio was the world’s murder capital and crime was so rife that the police chief warned people not to stop at red traffic lights at night for fear of hold-ups. Friends of mine had been tied up in their homes by robbers; my own apartment had been broken into, and I had been held up in my car three times at knife-point or with a shard of glass wielded by pivetes or street kids. But I carried little cash and had no expensive jewellery to worry about (I used to laugh at the women taking their gold out from hiding places once inside the lift going up to a penthouse party). Anyway, it seemed a fair price to pay for all that beauty.
There was one aspect of life in Rio I knew I would never get used to. Every morning when I arrived at my office downtown, there would be little bundles in the doorways. After a while I discovered they had names and faces. These were children, some of the thousands – some say millions – of street kids who roam Brazil’s cities. Sometimes they would be sniffing glue from shoemakers’ tins or out of Coke bottles for a high and to dampen their hunger. Most cariocas just step over them as if they were insects. Some areas like Ipanema had even erected iron railings round the parks to stop the children going in.
The first year I lived in Rio, Amnesty International ran a series of advertisements: ‘Brazil has found a new way of taking its children off the streets – killing them.’
Why Rio is murdering its children
Marie Claire, June 1991
IN LARGO DA CARIOCA, a square in the old centre of Rio de Janeiro, a pile of bodies starts to squirm as the whirr of rubbish trucks rouses the city from its slumber. Ten small boys sleeping on top of a hot-air vent above the Rio Metro stir uneasily, fearing another, similar noise – that of the body truck making its daily rounds, collecting the corpses of those murdered in the night.
It might be famed as the city of Carnival, beaches and dental-floss bikinis, but Rio is also one of the most violent cities in the world. In just one month – April 1989 – there were 500 killings. Many of the dead were children. These deaths are not just the result of ordinary crime. Death squads pick up and kill the street kids who so upset the tourists and the businesses dependent on tourism. Many of the squads are run by policemen who have no shame about their methods of cleaning up the streets. Their victims often have no families, no history
, no names, no rights: like the 10-year-old boy in a parka jacket found dead with six bullets in his head and neck last September in the Niteroi area of Rio. He was tortured for more than half an hour by the two hooded men who had kidnapped him. His pleading voice was heard throughout the neighbourhood, but no one came to help. His last words were: ‘Mother, mother, they are going to kill me! For the love of God, don’t let them do this to me! I am only a child.’
The approach of footsteps awakens Alex, a cheeky lad in a faded yellow T-shirt, torn black shorts and rubber sandals. He sizes me up in an adult way to see if I am a threat or an opportunity though he looks much younger than the 13 years he claims to be. He has lived hand to mouth on the streets since he was left in Largo da Carioca by a mother who could no longer feed him. Alex thinks he has been there two years, but time has little meaning in his daily battle for survival.
To Alex and the small gang of boys on the air vent, home is the few square feet of cracked concrete pavement in Largo da Carioca. They are just 10 of an estimated 7 million children living abandoned on Brazil’s streets – victims of the most unequal distribution of a nation’s wealth in the world. Most of them are black and come from the favelas (slums), in which a third of Rio’s 6 million population lives. Their parents tend to be migrants from the poor north-east of Brazil who have moved to the city in search of work only to end up in shacks cobbled from cardboard and plastic sheeting that wash away in mudslides. Ignorance, as much as religious abhorrence of contraception, results in families of four, five or more, too many to feed. (Sometimes whole families live on the street. On Sundays they turn the commercial centre into a massive laundry, hanging out their washing across the smart streets.)
The children are sent out to work at an age when they should be learning their times tables. Many end up stealing, mugging, picking pockets or prostituting themselves. Others work for Rio’s narcotics traffickers, starting off as lookouts or ‘airplanes’, tipping off the drug lords when a rival or the cops approach. Later they might graduate to working as guards, often ending up addicted themselves.
Alex’s day usually begins with a kick in the ribs from a worker at the fast-food restaurant outside which he sleeps. On a good day they might give him a bit of food; if not, he will forage in the rubbish bins, beg from a customer or steal from a bakery. Sometimes one of the others in his gang will have enough to share.
Like many of his fellows, Alex began by trying to scrape a living cleaning shoes and selling peanuts. But unable to afford the polish and nuts, he started scavenging rubbish. It is a marked contrast to the high life of Copacabana and Ipanema, where apartments sell for more than a million dollars. Brazil has no state welfare system to which the boys can turn, and many of his fellows end up picking pockets as the only way they can support themselves.
Often, it is the police who introduce the children into the crime for which they pay with their lives. Alex began by looking out for what he calls a boi, Portuguese for cow and street slang for an easy mugging. He then moved on to shoplifting. Once he started he found himself caught in a web from which he says he could not escape now even if he wished. He explains: ‘The police ask us to steal for them. I used to take just food and clothes for myself, but six months ago a military policeman grabbed me and demanded I steal him two watches. Then his demands got bigger. If I refuse he will kill me. Every time he asks for more he taps the gun on his hip.’ He showed me vivid bruises on his scrawny upper arm where the policeman had grabbed him.
It is common in Rio for children to work for the police. The kids guarding cars outside the Scala nightclub in the fashionable area of Leblon during Carnival balls have to give half their meagre earnings to local police. On Copacabana beach, bands of children terrorise tourists. At traffic lights they threaten motorists with knives or broken glass if handbags and jewellery are not handed over. They operate in front of police guard boxes. Each member of Alex’s gang has tales to tell of carrying out crime for the police and of what happens to those who refuse.
One of Alex’s companions told me the story of his 13-year-old girlfriend. Like an estimated 500,000 other street girls, she had turned to prostitution to survive. ‘We were caught fucking by this military policeman, a real swaggering character. He called us names, then he smashed me to the ground with his pistol and said to her, “I’ll show you a real penis.” Then he took her. I haven’t seen her since.’ He thinks she must be working for that policeman now.
Girls make up about 10 per cent of Brazil’s street children. Rita, aged 14, has doe eyes and hips that roll as if she is dancing a perpetual samba. She left home because her drunken father sexually abused her, and sex is the only way she knows to make a living. She sells her body for a hot meal or a night in a dingy hotel and considers Aids ‘just part of the scene’. Girls like Rita need protection even from other street children, so they form their own gangs and pimp for each other. And they have children themselves: the mother of baby Marcio is 14, and his cradle is a cardboard box. She is proud to have someone to look after, proud to be able to get enough money to feed him, but she will not
open the cloth he is wrapped in. She does not want me to see the sores on his skin.
Alex’s gang functions as friend, mother, brother and teacher. They search for nits in each other’s hair while we speak. Today, Paulo, the leader of the group, dishes out the bread and ham I have brought them for breakfast with impeccable democracy, giving what is left to one of the many other groups of small bodies huddled in the square. Chewing on the food, they seem no different from kids the world over, gossiping about girls and planning raids. But the girls they chat about are underage prostitutes, subject to sexual abuse from their fellow street children too, and the raids that they plan are not cowboys and Indians games but real attacks with knives.
Alex, Paulo and the rest do not question their lives; they see no further than surviving the day. Fourteen-year-old Paulo has already escaped one attempt on his life. He shows me a raised scar near his knee where a bullet grazed him. One night he was foraging in the streets when a station wagon slowed down and a hand pulled him inside. ‘We all live in fear of the sound of an engine slowing or a car approaching. We sleep with our eyes open.’ Dumped in a gutter and shot at, Paulo was one of the lucky ones. He survived. He knows ‘heaps’ who weren’t so lucky.
Suddenly the breakfast chatter ceases. A military policeman is pacing alongside our group, glaring. No doubt he has a ‘request’. For me to stay any longer would endanger Paulo, Alex and their comrades. As I leave they scuttle off towards the cathedral, where they hope to get a warm meal or a wash under a trickle of tap water.
Social workers estimate that at least one child a day is murdered on the streets of Rio and far more endure torture such as burning with cigarettes and electric shocks to their genitals. Accurate figures are almost impossible to obtain. These children have no birth certificates, and those who survive or witness such acts are afraid to speak out.
By compiling figures from newspaper reports, the privately funded Institute of Social and Economic Analysis (IBASE) found that last year 457 children were killed by death squads in just three Brazilian cities. Those, they emphasise, are just the cases reported. Herbert de Souza, head of IBASE, says he cried when, at the first meeting of the National Streetchildren’s Movement, a group of children stretched a ribbon listing the names of all their dead companions around a sports hall. He says: ‘This is worse than anything that happened under twenty-one years of military rule.’ Those twenty-one years ended in 1985, leaving weakened civil institutions and a climate of impunity and violent lawlessness. Some of the police involved in killing children are the same who were torturing people during the military years.
Bodies turn up floating in the filthy rivers or buried in makeshift cemeteries. Killings and torture are so frequent that a daily newspaper was launched last year called O Povo, categorising page after page of crimes in gory detail.
A large proportion of the victims are from Baixada Fluminense,
a slum on the outskirts of Rio. Wolmer do Nascimento, the local coordinator for the National Streetchildren’s Movement, runs a day centre in the Duque de Caxias area of Baixada – perhaps the most violent part of Rio. He says that in addition to one or two children being murdered each day, there is also everyday abuse. Marcio, one of the children at the centre, complains: ‘The police take our food and grind it under their heels. They call us whores and vermin.’
Inside the centre is a huge white board painted with red letters. On it are listed 106 names of murdered children, ranging in age from 5 months to 17 years. Most of the victims are male and between 14 and 17; all were killed during 1987 and 1988. Since then, says Wolmer, the situation has worsened. After receiving death threats, he started living under police protection in order to draw public attention to his cause. He estimates that between ten and fifteen of these death squads are now operating in Baixada alone. ‘Everyone knows who they are but no one dares speak,’ he says.
Many social action groups, like the National Streetchildren’s Movement, grew up in response to Héctor Babenco’s film Pixote, released in 1980, which portrayed the tragic life of a 10-year-old slum boy in São Paulo, Brazil’s largest city. The 12-year-old boy who was picked from Baixada to play the title role did not see his own life improve. He turned to crime; three years ago he was reported assassinated by military police.
International attention was focused on the issue when the killings spread to wealthy suburbs. As the lure of dollars attracted the children to tourist areas, tourism dropped off, falling by around 50 per cent in the past two years. It was this threat to Rio’s economic mainstay that prompted hoteliers and restaurant owners to encourage ‘the most brutal form of social control by people who think of street kids as lice, and killing them as cleansing the streets’, as Maria Teresa Freire, who runs a charity called Children’s Crusade, describes it.
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