Small Wars Permitting

by Christina Lamb

  On 1 May 1989 the strangled body of a 9-year-old called Nico was found in a wealthy Ipanema street. A card beside the small corpse read: ‘I killed you because you weren’t studying or building your future. The government shouldn’t allow the city’s streets to fill up with brats.’ It was this that made Freddie Marques, now press officer for the National Streetchildren’s Movement, decide to devote his life to helping the children. He himself has a baby by a street girl with whom he lived for four years, before she was lured back on to the streets. He explains: ‘It’s not just a matter of giving money. The kids need to be given values and respect. The attitudes of Brazil’s main economic players have to change. Maybe these children do look black and dirty, but they are not dogs or pests, they are Brazil’s future.’

  Unfortunately, Freddie and the few who think like him barely scratch the surface of the problem. The safe houses and day centres run by the Church and social organisations in Rio can cater for only a few hundred.

  Paulo Faustino runs República dos Meninos (the Boys’ Republic), a safe house where up to forty boys learn to integrate with society. He arranges for them to get legitimate work, explains their rights and sends them to school. He says: ‘The idea is for them to learn self-respect. But the real problem is for society outside to learn a social conscience. The people of Rio cannot wear jewellery in the streets or have car radios, they must have countless door and window locks and wear plastic watches. Yet, rather than trying to understand why this is so and pressurising the state, they blame the children.’

  At the root of the problem lies a federal government that appears to have little interest in 18 million of Brazil’s children living in subhuman conditions, and the fact that only 25 per cent of its 63 million under-eighteens finish primary school. Alceni Guerra, the Minister for Children, recently said in an interview, ‘It’s Rio’s problem.’ The participation of police in atrocities has been repeatedly claimed and proven by judicial investigation (police were identified by surviving victims and witnesses), and the Rio state government set up a commission of inquiry into death squads in 1983, yet witness intimidation and murder make prosecution almost impossible.

  Amnesty International’s report last year did not mince its words. It stated: ‘Hundreds of children are being assassinated by death squads and tortured by police in various Brazilian cities, in some cases to clean the roads.’ The government recently announced an investigation into the involvement of Rio businessmen in the financing of death squads. But, says Freddie Marques, using a common Brazilian expression, ‘This is para inglês ver – just for the English to see.’

  Many of the people enjoying Rio’s high life are oblivious to the killings and have grown accustomed to seeing small bundles in the road or stepping over them on the way to work or to a restaurant. Others condone the deaths of those whom they regard as a nuisance. The head of Rio’s Shopkeepers’ Association, Silvio Cunha, told Rádio Nacional, a Brazilian radio station: ‘When a pivetinho [slang for street child] is killed, this is doing society a favour. What is being killed is not a child but a small bandit. Children are what live with people in homes.’

  Now, a second generation of street children is emerging – those actually born on the street, often looked after by sisters or brothers, themselves aged 10 or less, or, like Marcio, by teenage single mothers. With no identity papers and no education it is hard to see how they will ever escape from the vicious circle into which they were born. And because those who should be preventing or solving the crimes are actually committing them, the morals of the celebrated city have become so topsy-turvy that killing children seems to have become accepted. Freddie Marques believes that the only hope for Rio’s underage victims is external pressure. He pleads: ‘The western world is worried about ecology and Brazil destroying the Amazon, but surely the death of a child means more than the death of a tree?’

  Two years after I wrote this report, the baroque-fronted Candelária church that I passed every morning, a block away from my office, was the scene of a horrendous massacre. Around seventy children were sleeping huddled in the doorway when, at midnight on 23 July 1993, several police cars drove by and started shooting at them. Eight were killed, many more wounded.

  When I arrived the next morning all that remained were two pairs of torn canvas plimsolls with no laces and a grubby, bloodstained blanket. Someone had erected a makeshift wooden cross. But most office workers were walking past without stopping.

  I liked the Candelária church. It was said to have been built with the money of a group of Spanish sailors whose ship, the Candelária, had almost sunk during a tempest at sea at the beginning of the seventeenth century. In the midst of the storm they had vowed to pay for a chapel if they survived.

  I didn’t like passing it any more. It seemed to symbolise Brazil not caring.

  Back home it was summer and there was not much news and the killing of the Candelária children led to an international outcry. A few days after the massacre, three policemen were taken into custody. They had been identified as the gunmen by Wagner dos Santos, a 22-year-old veteran of the streets of Rio and one of the survivors of the massacre. ‘I will never forget that night even if I live 100 years – they must pay for what they did,’ he said as he recovered from two bullet wounds.

  Brazil actually had some of the most advanced child protection legislation in the world. Yet, according to the police’s own records, 320 children had been murdered in Rio in the first six months of 1993 – more than in the whole of 1991. Aid agencies estimated that between two and four children were being killed in the city by death squads every night.

  The problem was that the very people responsible for preventing crime were themselves involved. Paulo Melo, a former street kid who had become a member of the state assembly, told me: ‘Rarely does an extermination gang not contain a policeman. Everyone knows who the murderers are and where to find them, but people are scared to give evidence.’

  More chilling still was the public support for the killings. I listened in disbelief on my car radio after the massacre, when the overwhelming majority of people calling a phone-in on CBN national radio approved of the killings.

  Outside the church, a man who identified himself only as Jorge, told me: ‘These children have been sent where they belong. We should kill them all.’ But another man, Ronofri Cabral, a worker from Petrobras, the state oil company, who had brought his 12-year-old son to the site, said: ‘This all comes down to the failure of the state to provide a decent wage. What we should ask is why children, many of whom have families, are living in the streets without food, clothing or shelter.’

  The rising international pressure forced Brazil’s President Itamar Franco to go himself to Rio to monitor investigations. A grumpy Victor Meldrew character with a shock of white hair and a baffled expression, he turned the blame on the developed world. ‘The poverty and misery that exists here is often caused by the industrialised countries, which place obstacles in the way of our search for science and technology,’ he complained.

  That was not the end of the story.

  Five officers were accused of the massacre. One of them, Maurício da Conceicão, died during a shoot-out as he was about to be arrested in 1994. Two, Marcos Emmanuel and Nelson Cunha, were handed life sentences. Two others were acquitted, including one who Wagner dos Santos said had shot him in the face.

  A social worker later tracked the fate of the sixty-two children who survived the attack. He found that thirty-nine of them had either been killed by police or on the streets.

  One of the survivors was Sandro Rosa do Nascimento. He later became famous for hijacking a bus on 12 June 2000 – the Brazilian equivalent of Valentine’s Day – in an incident that was made into a film, Omnibus 174. Sandro had boarded the 174 armed with a .38-calibre revolver, intending to rob the passengers. But a passenger somehow signalled to a police vehicle, prompting the police to intercept the bus.

  With nowhere to run, Sandro took the ten passengers as hostages. The bus was
soon surrounded by police and TV news cameras, broadcasting live. The driver escaped through the window. Sandro at first reassured the passengers, the police, the television crews and their viewers that he did not intend to kill anyone. However, as the hours passed, he grew agitated and began screaming out of the window to the cameras a litany of compaints about the injustices of Brazilian society and its failure to treat homeless people as humans. ‘You pigs can’t terrorise me now!’ he yelled at the police. ‘Didn’t you kill my friends at Candelária? I was there!’

  The stand-off lasted for more than four hours as police and SWAT teams were prevented from intervening by politicians reluctant to provoke a bloodbath on national television. By the time Sandro finally exited the bus at 6.50 p.m., some 35 million Brazilians were glued to their screens – a quarter of the population. Both he and a teacher he used as a human shield were killed in the ensuing gun battle.

  Rio continues as violent as ever, so much so that in February 2007 a group of human rights activists started a website called Rio Body Count. It was modelled on the Iraq Body Count, which monitors deaths in the insurgency. Rio had no suicide bombs but within a week its body count was eighty-eight. A third of the dead were children.

  Dictators and Dinghies: Journeys in Latin America

  The strange case of the Bolivian Navy

  Financial Times, 11 September 1993

  Lake Titicaca

  CAPTAIN LUIS ARANDA is the proud commander of the Fleet of the Fourth Base of the Bolivian Navy. But the only ships at his command are those he makes at home from matchsticks, along with a motley flotilla of five small metal ferry and patrol boats that are gently rusting in the waters of Lake Titicaca. Aranda’s 150-strong division spends most of its time raising chickens and cultivating prize tomatoes. The reason: Bolivia may have a navy, but it has no sea.

  Bolivia has been landlocked since losing the War of the Pacific against Chile in 1879. Its capital La Paz is the world’s highest at 12,000 feet and the only place I have ever stayed where the list of numbers by the hotel phone includes ‘Dial 0 for Oxygen’. But from the moment one steps off the plane it is evident that neither the rarefied air nor the passage of years have served to quell passions.

  A tiled plaque across an entire wall of the airport asserts that ‘Bolivia Is a Maritime Nation’. Taxicab windows all bear bright-coloured stickers proclaiming, ‘The Sea Belongs to Us – to Recapture It Is Our Duty.’ Newspaper editorials rail almost daily at Chile’s mulishness in refusing to relinquish the land that blocks Bolivia from the Pacific coast.

  El Mar Boliviano is a primary school set textbook crammed with pictures of crashing waves described as ‘our sea’. Statues in otherwise sleepy town centres depict demonic Bolivians bayoneting hapless Chileans above the inscription: ‘What once was ours will again be.’

  ‘We’re the only landlocked nation in the world’ is a frequent complaint from locals, blaming Bolivia’s glaring poverty on its lack of coastline. They close their ears if one points out other examples of prosperous sea-less nations such as Switzerland or Austria.

  Bolivia is certainly one of the world’s most unfortunate or misguided nations. Once the second-largest country in Latin America, it has lost territory to almost all its neighbours in wars. But it is the loss of the sea that really rankles. At every international conference Bolivia raises the issue, demanding its land back, and Chile always replies no. On 23 March every year a Day of the Sea is held to mourn the loss, and thirty years ago the navy was re-established to show that Bolivia would never yield.

  A smart ten-storey building is headquarters to the high command of the 8,000-strong navy and its tiny fleet. On the top floor sits the commander-in-chief himself, Admiral Miguel Alvarez. Surrounded by pictures of ships on the high seas, he booms: ‘The sea is in the soul, spirit and heart of every Bolivian. Every one.’

  Admiral Alvarez believes that with the end of the cold war it is time to solve territorial disputes such as that between Bolivia and Chile. ‘We have great hopes from the new world order and will raise this issue at every forum until we get a satisfactory resolution reintegrating the land which, by historic, geographic and legal right, belongs to this country.’

  He thinks Britain should take a lead in this process, claiming that British merchants in Chile, seeing the value of nitrates in Bolivia, inspired and funded the Chilean invasion of the Bolivian port of Antofagasta. Apparently, during Queen Victoria’s reign, maps of the region were printed in Britain omitting Bolivia altogether – clear proof, he says, of conspiracy.

  According to the story, the problem began when the British Ambassador back in the 1860s declined a bowl of chicha, local fermented wine, from the then President Mariano Melgarejo. Some say it was because he didn’t care for it; others that he objected to the President’s insistence that the diplomatic corps drink from the same bowl as his favourite horse Holofernes, a regular guest at palace banquets.

  The Ambassador’s punishment was to drink an entire barrel of chocolate, then to be led, facing backwards, astride a donkey through the main street of La Paz. He was sent back to London.

  Queen Victoria’s initial reaction is alleged to have been ‘send in the navy!’ On being told that Bolivia was a landlocked country, she reputedly asked for a map of South America, drew a cross through Bolivia and declared furiously: ‘Bolivia doesn’t exist.’

  This must be an apocryphal story since Bolivia had not then lost its coastline. Whatever the truth of the matter, as Admiral Alvarez waits for Britain to get its act together, he sees nothing incongruous about being commander-in-chief of a navy which has no sea. He does, however, admit a certain envy for neighbouring maritime nations such as Argentina, Peru and Brazil, on whose goodwill he relies to allow his forces to practise their seafaring skills. Only the luckiest Bolivian naval cadets get to go to sea once a year.

  Out at the fourth naval base of Tiquina on Lake Titicaca, Captain Aranda says his men are ready to take to the high seas at any time. While they are waiting for that great day, the Bolivian Navy is giving a useful lesson to the rest of the world in how to utilise an idle military. Captain Aranda’s men patrol the lake looking for Sendero Luminoso guerrillas in hiding from Peru, and his colleagues in the Amazonian naval bases chase narco-traffickers.

  But most of the time the men of the fourth base are engaged in raising chickens, growing vegetables and planting trees to replace those removed by locals. ‘Perhaps you might think it a little strange to see a navy growing vegetables,’ says the captain as he shows off a splendid selection of lettuces and tomatoes, ‘but armed forces should adapt to the necessities of the situation. It’s our duty to contribute to the development as well as the defence of the country.’

  The missing children of Argentina

  Marie Claire, May 1992

  Buenos Aires

  TEN-YEAR-OLD Marie Jose Lavalle Lemos was watching Disney cartoons at a friend’s house in the small Argentine town of Mar del Plata when the local judge arrived and escorted her to his office. Teresa Gonzalez de Ruben, the police sergeant she knew as Mummy, was waiting there. ‘Your mummy has something to tell you,’ said Judge Juan Ramos Padilla.

  Marie Jose was told that the people she had always called Mummy and Daddy were not her parents. She had been born in a concentration camp, not a local hospital. Her real parents were victims of the systematic repression inflicted by the military regime that lasted from 1976 until 1983. They were imprisoned and killed: two of the thousands of Argentinians who are referred to as ‘desaparecidos’ or ‘the Disappeared’, eradicated because of their opposition to the regime. Their corpses were disposed of in secret dumping grounds, all records of their fate destroyed. The woman who had brought Marie Jose up and registered her as her own daughter had been a guard in the camp and may even have been responsible for the torture and death of her natural mother and father.

  Known as niños desaparecidos, hundreds of children were also abducted with their parents, or their mothers were kidnapped during pregnancy
and kept alive just until they gave birth. Some of the children were adopted by childless couples who were unaware of their origins; more chillingly, others like Marie Jose were adopted by the very officers who had tortured or even murdered their parents.

  Marie Jose remembers the three days following the painful revelations at Judge Padilla’s office as a void; everything she thought was true was not. ‘I didn’t know who I was any more.’ She was taken to hospital for a blood test then put up in a local hotel while the results were scrutinised. On the third morning the results came through, revealing with 99.88 per cent certainty that she was the lost daughter of Monica and Gustavo Antonio Lavalle, who were abducted in July 1977 while students at Buenos Aires University and later killed.

  While for Marie Jose the discovery of her true origins threw her life into turmoil, for her maternal grandmother Haydee Vallino Lemos it was the joyful culmination of a long search. Haydee worked closely with an organisation called the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, formed in October 1977. Their untiring struggle to find missing children is internationally recognised, and every Thursday afternoon the Grandmothers march in the Plaza de Mayo outside the Presidency in Buenos Aires. With their heads wrapped in distinctive white embroidered scarves, they hold placards bearing faded photographs of their missing sons and daughters, and the names of the grandchildren they still hope to find. ‘We may have lost our children but we must fight for their children and make sure this never happens again,’ says 76-year-old Juana, who has never missed a Thursday afternoon in the fifteen years since her son was taken. ‘I will never give up asking what has happened to them.’

  For Juana, and many like her, the search for missing grandchildren has become their main reason for living. It is exhausting work and for seven years during the military rule they had to operate in secrecy. They were followed constantly, received threatening phone calls and were even taken into detention as they brought the plight of the Disappeared to the world’s attention. ‘We are all over 60 and mostly just housewives with no political experience or militancy, but we all share the knowledge that we have been robbed, not only of our children but also our grandchildren,’ says Estela Barnes de Carlotta, president of the Grandmothers. Their small office is filled with children’s toys and photos of the children who have been located. On the wall behind Estela is a photograph of her stunning daughter, Laura, who was two months pregnant when she was abducted, along with her boyfriend, in November 1977. Laura’s body turned up in August 1978 riddled with bullets. Estela learnt that she had earlier given birth to a boy named Guido but, so far, she has not been able to trace him.