Dona Mariette has no place for such cynicism. She accepts the perils of traveling in a combat zone, where things can go terribly wrong without the slightest warning. She sees the danger of ignoring the poor as far greater. “A starving child doesn’t know what is right or wrong, only that hunger hurts. Really hurts physically. If we won’t give the poor a crust of bread, we will lose them. We will have a second Brazil populated by a desperate anarchic people.”
Her reputation provides a measure of protection in the favela. — She personally avoids the word “favela” and refers to Riachuelo as a community. — She also makes accommodations with the shadow government: the drug bosses and gang leaders who rule the streets. Residents recall a famous meeting between Dona Mariette and crime boss, Café Carvalho. They sat together at the Seven Steps, a notorious boteco, drinking Antarctica and talking over matters. Which was more than any policemen ever did, unless he had his hand out under the table. Dona Mariette won’t accept a penny from Café Carvalho for the Casa dos Meninos.
The meeting with Carvalho in July 1995 was not the first time this courageous woman came face to face with corruption. Seven years earlier, Mariette da Silva Prado was the first woman elected mayor of Tiberica. She was the candidate for the Partido dos Trabalhadores, the Workers’ Party, which was in itself a revelation among the upper-class citizens of Tiberica. They were more startled when she trounced Oscar Amaral Dutra, who held the office for twenty-four years with the backing of the Clube das Monções, the richest and most respectable homen bons of the city.
Oscar Amaral Dutra was hailed for the “miracle” of Tiberica in the 1970s that saw the município advance from a provincial backwater to a bustling manufacturing center of 190,000. Every Friday, Dutra took lunch with members of the Clube; not grand meals but simple, genial affairs with a discreet word dropped here and there about impediments to progress. Dutra made careful note of everything said by his confederates to figure out how to help them. Sometimes, when his birthday was on the horizon, the old chefe gave a hint of gifts that would be welcome; one year he was collecting saints’ images; another time it was seventeenth century silver spoons.
Dona Mariette served two terms combating the Dutra miracle that manifested itself in waste and corruption from the highest municipal offices to subterranean levels of society. The very sewers of Tiberica were a cesspool of bribery. Factories and chemical industries that sprouted along the banks of the Rio Ipê spewed a toxic rainbow into the waterway. The lower reaches of the fetid river snaked through the favelas. City inspectors issued hundreds of summonses over the years. A trickle of fines reached the municipal coffers from small businessmen who didn’t know how to handle their affairs judiciously.
The município was a gold mine for fraudsters aided and abetted by employees who never did a day’s work in their lives, for the simple reason that they never existed except on the rolls of street cleaners, health officials and other essential workers. As a source of graft, the phantoms were rivaled by ghost projects like the Benedito Bueno da Silva Highway, south of the airport. To show what she was up against, Tiberica’s mayor took visitors for a drive on this pot-holed strip that led nowhere. Corrupt officials siphoned off funds for the road and an industrial park that was never built.
Dona Mariette’s initial term as mayor was during the presidency of Fernando Collor de Melo, the first democratically elected leader of Brazil since 1960. Collor took the sash with a vow for moral reform and a promise to rein in the marajás of Brasília, high civil servants who held the jewels of big government. Collor’s presidency ended in disgrace, with his resignation in December 1992 on the eve of his impeachment in a corruption scandal involving $50 million in payoffs and kickbacks. Collor’s wife, Rosane, was accused of embezzling funds from the Legion of Welfare, which she headed for the public good. While attending to the wants of needy Brazilians, the First Lady was reportedly spending $20,000 a month on jewelry and clothing.
“The country came alive,” says Dona Mariette. “Millions of people wore black and protested in the streets. It was dangerous and it was difficult, for we remember what happened before. The military didn’t make a move. The people got Collor out.”
Democracy triumphed and for the first time, Brazil resolved a major political crisis by constitutional means and not armed soldiers. However, Dona Mariette is quick to point out that in Brasília, the marajás breathed a sigh of relief and went back to business as usual.
“The same power and patronage that you find in a city like Tiberica,” she says. “Only here, it can be worse. The farther you get from Brasília, the fewer watchdogs. The pickings may not be so grand, but the cake is still big. There is a piece for everybody.”
Mariette Monteiro da Silva began her life fifty-nine years ago in the manor house at Fazenda Itatinga, which her family has owned since 1758. In that year, Benedito Bueno da Silva ran his great canoes up on the bank of the Rio Tietê at the Place of White Stones, 125 miles north west of São Paulo, ending the mighty journeys through the Brazilian wilderness that began with his forebear, Amador Flôres da Silva. Benedito Bueno’s grandson, Ulisses Tavares da Silva, a baron in the Brazilian Empire, planted the first coffee bushes on these lands in the mid-nineteenth century. Today Fazenda Itatinga is still one of the finest and richest coffee plantations in the world.
Itatinga lies barely twenty miles from Tiberica, but they are worlds apart, the whitewashed mansion on the headland overlooking the great bend of the Rio Tietê and the favela of Riachuelo. Dona Mariette moves effortlessly between the two, from a humble shack, where later that week she attended Carminha Nascimento’s wake, to the magnificent fazenda with its polished hardwood floors gleaming like mirrors and rooms filled with treasures. She is proud of the family she comes from and can point to this or that item and tell a story associated with one or other of the da Silvas of Itatinga, from Amador Flôres, the “King of Emeralds,” to her own father, Roberto da Silva, who has retired to the fazenda.
She spends time with Roberto every week, no matter how busy she is. He is eighty and very active, a fine old Brazilian gentleman who will sometimes greet his daughter in immaculate, well-tailored riding gear, the two going out together on the fazenda. Mariette is still a handsome woman, her hair slightly graying, her dark eyes with a kind, open expression. Seeing them ride side-by-side, father and daughter, offers a glimpse of the intimate bond between them.
Roberto da Silva belongs to the Clube das Moncões, practically an institution of Itatinga’s men. Unlike other members, he wasn’t surprised when his daughter took up the banner of the Worker’s Party. When she was in her twenties, Mariette da Silva Prado was with the right, an organizer of the “March of the Family with God for Liberty” in São Paulo on March 19, 1964. Several hundred thousand upper and middle class women protested the reform government of João Goulart. Twelve days later, the army launched a lightning coup d’etat that overthrew Goulart, extinguished democracy and instituted a military dictatorship that ruled Brazil for twenty-one years.
Mariette was working as a lawyer at the São Paulo headquarters of the family’s vast enterprises. When the generals took over — General Marcelo Araujo da Silva of the Minas Gerais branch of the family was one of the coup leaders — she believed, as did most citizens, that they stepped in to save Brazil from a Red revolution.
Roberto also saw no reason to oppose the military. “Goulart was a gaucho from Rio Grande do Sul. What he forgot was that you have to prepare the hoof and the shoe to make a good fit,” he says, a reference to Goulart’s lack of political tact. The military’s first order of day was to build up the country teetering on economic collapse. The da Silva construction company landed multi-million dollar contracts for roads and dams in the north.
In the summer of 1965, Mariette was traveling in Europe, when she met Gilson Prado, the son of a retired São Paulo judge studying in England at the London School of Economics. They were married in 1966 and set up home in São Paulo, where Prado was a lecturer at the University
of São Paulo. By 1971, the couple was living with their two young sons, José and Sergio, in an apartment on Avenida Paulista.
Prado was on his way home from the university one day in March 1973, when the São Paulo DOPS picked him up. — The Department for Political and Social Order. — Eleven days after Prado’s abduction by the political police, they turned his body over to his widow. Two doctors, Rudolfo Lopes and Hector Saito, signed an autopsy done at São Paulo’s Forensic Medical Institute on March 26, 1973. The report registered “HISTORY: According to what was told to us, he died by hanging in his cell, where he was detained.”
Gilson Prado’s final hours were more truthfully recorded by a fellow detainee, Ana Leite Barreto, twenty-three, testifying at her own trial in the 2nd Military Court at São Paulo in 1974:
That she was taken to an interrogation room where she witnessed the torture of a prisoner, and that his name was Gilson Prado; . . . that he was naked and had been strapped into in a contraption known as the dragon’s chair, made of heavy wood covered with strips of corrugated iron; that they connected electric wires to his ears, teeth, tongue, and fingers and sexual organs, and began administering the shocks; that the magneto produced sparks that burned the skin. A strip of wood at the base of the chair forced the prisoner’s legs backwards, so that with each spasm his legs slammed against the bar tearing his flesh. There was a radio in the room and they turned up the volume when he began to scream; . . . Prado was perversely tortured and tormented for three days. On the morning of the fourth day, I saw his corpse dragged out of his cell, spreading blood over the entire corridor.
Gilson Prado was involved with Popular Action, a Catholic group with a strong following among university students and peasants. After his detention, his wife’s family and his father, Judge José Prado, did everything possible to gain his release. Roberto da Silva went to Brasília to see his cousin, Marcello Araujo da Silva, who made some calls and confirmed Gilson was in custody in São Paulo, but his source would not say where they were holding him. Marcello da Silva was a fervent anti-communist who steadfastly believed that the “revolution” was a victory for freedom, no matter how loud the blows from the secret houses of torture.
Mariette came under suspicion. The DOPS raided her apartment and removed books and papers. Roberto wanted his daughter and grandsons to leave the country. She refused to go. “The only crime I committed was to open my eyes,” she recalls. “I marched in the streets in support of the military. I never expected them to go to war against our own people. They killed my husband and hundreds more; others were ‘disappeared’ and never seen again. No one knows how many perished in the terror. None of the culprits has ever had to say they’re sorry. They took off their uniforms and put on gray suits. The blood was still on their hands.”
It was the gray hour in Riachuelo, when mist from the Rio Ipê blankets the favela. Children began to stir in makeshift beds in the two largest rooms at the Casa dos Meninos. Forty boys and girls from three to seventeen years old spent the night here, with no homes to go to.
By 7:00 a.m. on April 12, 2000, the plaza flanked by the shelter’s three buildings was crowded. Parents brought some of the children to the Casa. Most came by themselves, even the smallest ones who walked a mile or more. Their families — often a single working mother — have no option but to leave them alone during the day. They are called children on the street, meninos na rua, to distinguish them from those whose family ties are broken and live on the streets day and night, children of the streets, meninos da rua.
“The army of the streets is constantly on the lookout for recruits. It takes them at any age and moves them rapidly through the ranks. In no time at all, the kids are in the front lines fighting to stay alive,” says Dona Mariette.
Tiberica’s 3,000 street children represent a national problem in microcosm. A lack of childcare facilities and inadequate schooling compound the poverty and horrible family conditions that drive them onto the streets. Half of the street children do not make it past the second grade. Half of them are black or mulatto kids occupying the most perilous ranks of the street army. “With blacks you shoot first and ask later,” said a military policeman, when asked why he didn’t try to stop and question a sixteen-year-old boy who ran away from him. He put three bullets in the teenager, who bolted because he was embarrassed to be caught looking at a Playboy magazine.
Many of Tiberica’s street kids are involved in crime, from petty theft to drug dealing and child prostitution. Many admit to substance abuse. Many are not criminals and work the old praça and other downtown locations; they sell lottery tickets, “guard” people’s cars, do cartwheels and other drills for a few coins. — Like voluntários da patria of the past, the Tiberica youths are reluctant to join Brazil’s army of the streets, but have no choice.
Tiberica’s police periodically launch operations to “clean things up,” storming the praça and scattering the street kids squatting in the shade of the acacia trees. In August 1993, a night raid left three children shot execution-style in an alley behind the square. Off-duty policemen were suspected of carrying out this cleansing, paid for by local businessmen who sought the pest control.
Mariette da Silva pressed for a police investigation that turned up nothing beyond an allegation that drug dealers from São Paulo had the boys murdered. Tribuna de Tiberica journalist, Rafael Santos, who investigated the deaths of thirty minors, all under eighteen years of age, concluded that the police killed 30 percent. Professional assassins were responsible for 50 percent of the deaths. The remaining 20 percent were attributed to revenge, gang rivalries or unknown motives. “A code of silence protects the death squads and the police. It is the same secrecy that granted impunity to the security organisms of the military regime,” wrote Santos.
By 9:00 a.m., 200 children had settled into the day’s activities at the Casa. The center has a staff of eighteen, including ten mothers whose own children attend. The women originally volunteered to work, but are now paid a small wage. Dona Mariette’s aim is to motivate Riachuelo’s poor to take the initiative for themselves. The Casa’s teachers and social workers are young and dedicated to breaking the cycle of violence and distrust that traps the children.
In her office, Dona Mariette received word that a boy had been hanging around the plaza all morning. New kids often come to the Casa when they are frightened and starving or just plain weary of the streets. In each case, a social worker will interview the boy or girl and make an evaluation. The center will not provide sanctuary for genuine criminals and is vigilant against drug peddlers given the vulnerability of its young charges.
Dona Mariette knew the boy, Marcos Gonzaga, a fourteen-year-old who shines shoes in the street outside the five-star Hotel Paraupava in the city center. Marcos’ parents migrated from the interior of Bahia to find work at Tiberica; his father moved to São Paulo ten years ago and vanished. At the age of five, Marcos became a “child of clay,” going to labor at the brick furnaces outside the city. He put in ten hours a day for the equivalent of US $13 a week, carrying clay, shaping it and piling up bricks for the miracle of Tiberica. In 1997, a pile of bricks toppled over and crushed Marcos’ leg. No longer employable in heavy industry, Marcos bought a shoeshine box and went into business next to the gleaming Paraupava.
A year ago, Marcos’s sister Rosalia, thirteen, ran away to São Paulo and was given up for lost like their father. Then two days ago, Rosalia was seen at the Tiberica bus station with Teresa Dominguez, the daughter of Pedro Dominguez, king of Tiberica’s garbage dump. Marcos was frightened to go alone to Pedro Rei — “King Peter.” He came to ask Dona Mariette for help.
The Tiberica landfill teems with men, women and children who mine the mound like garimpeiros looking for gold. Late morning, trucks roll in from the suburbs of the rich. Agile prospectors leap onto vehicles for first grabs at the refuse. Others swarm around the trash that boils and cascades from the trucks. Children burrow into the steaming piles at their parents’ feet. Dogs snarl and figh
t for possession of a meaty bone. Growling trucks, shrill cries of carrion birds, human shouts, howls of savagely beaten mongrels — worse than the din is the stench that permeates this field of treasure.
Pedro Rei knew Dona Mariette from her days as mayor, when she fought to break his monopoly on the landfill. Dominguez engineered a strike by garbage men at the height of summer that forced her to back down. A huge, rude man in his sixties, Pedro Rei controls his malodorous empire from a corrugated iron building packed with his followers from the favelas.
“A great honor to greet the prefeito!” he saluted her, when she arrived with Marcos. He offered the “mayor” a seat but she remained standing as she inquired about Rosalia.
Pedro Rei said that Teresa Dominguez had brought Rosalia to his house two days ago. He hadn’t seen them since and couldn’t say where they’d gone. Did someone in his Court know where the girls were? One man suggested that the pair had gone to Ipêlandia, a suburb next to Tiberica’s factories known for its bars and brothels. Pedro Rei agreed this was possible. “My daughter is trash, worth nothing to me,” he said.
Driving from the dump, Dona Mariette opened the car windows so that she and the boy could breathe more easily. While some neighbors in Pinellas admire her commitment, others express disgust that a woman from Tiberica’s first family crawls over garbage dumps and talks with people like Pedro Rei.
“Some people refuse to accept the reality of Brazil,” she says. “They know Orlando and Miami better than their own country. They go shopping on Fifth Avenue, New York. They come back and cry to their servants about how expensive life is in Brazil.”
At the dawn of the twenty-first century, Mariette da Silva is in the vanguard of a new revolution. It required no force or visions of El Dorado but began with one man, who changed the conscience of Brazil.
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