The following long article was published in The New Yorker by Rio Gangs. Stylistically, it is a model essay for "searching for" this matrix - the author's search is the main clue. In general, such clues are false clues. If there is really no way to organize the structure of the article, subjectively create a structure; but some mysterious The characters in the test are worth writing with the structure of "searching", and the climax is the moment of finding...
"Rio Gang" was published shortly after Rio de Janeiro's successful bid for the World Cup, and it was considered a "negative report", but after reading it, I thought of it again. "Rio Adventure", Rio de Janeiro has a charm of coexistence of evil and pure goodness.
Who exactly is the Rio gangster
who controls the streets of Rio de Janeiro?
Jon Anderson / Text (Jon Lee Anderson)
Du Ran / Translator
(i)
Thirty-one-year-old Iada is slender and dark-skinned; she manages Rio de Janeiro's Parqueroy slum for a gangster named Fernandinho. She calls herself a representative for Fernandinho. When I met Iada, she was throwing a tenth birthday party for the youngest of her three daughters. She was wearing a T-shirt, shorts, flip-flops, a ponytail, and a baseball cap. Her T-shirt reads in Portuguese: "I do not ask you to send them out of the world, but to keep them from the evil one. John 17:15". The shorts were puffed up with a pistol pinned to them.
Iada handles "community relations" on behalf of her gang, "Pure Third Directive" (which she calls "the company"). Although this is a new position, it is not optional. "There have been some problems before, mainly drug dealers bullying the locals," she said. Iada usually handles problems by "communicating with people," but if it's a big mess, she "takes it up the hill to solve it"— — This refers to the palm tree slum where Fernandinho lives. An incident happened the day before: "A man beat his wife. She wanted a divorce, but he beat her." Iada didn't say how the problem was solved, but it was solved anyway.
We walked together in the slum, a mess full of corrugated tinplate and brick shacks, tangled wires that were smuggled in order to steal electricity, graffiti on the walls and alleys, selling beer and Brazilian rum The small shops and humble bars take up space with the small Gospel Church facing the street. Parkroy's slum site was once a mangrove swamp, and Iada's home was on a rubbish-strewn seaside walkway. Raw sewage stinks, but no one seems to care. A few menacing-looking young men guarded the alley with weapons. They were all drug dealers in her gang. Iada greeted them, lest they trouble me.
She has a tattoo of a scorpion on her left arm, surrounded by letters, the first of the names of her three daughters, mother, sister, a niece and a nephew, all of whom are closest to her. people. When Iada was one year old, her father left her mother. My mother used to be an alcoholic, "but she's quit now". Now, her mother is an evangelical. As a child, Iada played football well enough to play with the pros - she mentioned several famous players by name. Iada has even been on TV. But her brother always beat her. "He said I was gay."
At 14, she joined the local branch of Pure Third Directive. "Slowly, I'll protect myself from my brother's beatings and have his respect," she said. "As soon as I joined the gang, he didn't dare to do anything to me." Iada's brother is now locked in Bangu prison on the west side, where most of the Brazilian gang members lived, and this prison is also controlled by the gang. "He's been in the shift six times," she said, "drug dealing and robbery."
Iada's eldest daughter, 14, came up to tell her something. She was wearing a pink T-shirt and shorts. After she left, Iada said proudly: "She is obedient and responsible. She even scolds me."
As a female gangster in the Parkroy slum, Iada can earn 500 Reis a week. $250, plus a share of drug sales. Usually she earns 1,000 Reese a week: "If the goods are good, more people will buy them." That's enough money to support her family. "The only problem is that I love smoking weed." She laughed. "If I made my own decisions, I would only smoke four times a day; but the problem is that as soon as I go out, someone always pulls me to smoke."
She said she had "retired" a year ago. But after her successor was shot dead, Fernandinho's man, Gilberto Olivarda (known as "Jill") told her to go back to her old job, and she accepted. Gil and Fernandinho have been best friends since childhood, and he is said to be stronger than the latter.
Iada doesn't think much about the future. The most perfect life she could think of was "alive, with my daughter".
After a pause, she volunteered to talk about being raped when she was the age of her eldest daughter (the one I just met). "I was very young at the time, so he cut my vagina with a knife," she said. "I had seven stitches and was in the hospital for a week." After that, she ran away from home and lived with another man—"whose daughters of mine were born to." But he was addicted to drugs and had After a while they broke up. Now she supports her own family.
I asked Iada if he was religious. She said she didn't believe it, but sometimes she accompanies her aunt to church. She likes Pastor Sidney, an evangelical preacher well-loved by the locals, “because he likes to chat with everyone; if someone is put to death, he’s going to run and negotiate with the boss,” she said. "Everyone knows that if something goes wrong, the person you can go to and intercede is Fernandinho."
(ii)
Parkroy is located on the island of Governado, the largest in the Gulf of Guanabara. of an island. The name "Governado" is in honor of a Portuguese governor during colonial times who founded a sugar cane plantation here, but now it is part of Rio City, connected to the mainland by bridges and elevated roads. Rio's main airport, Galeão International Airport (named in honor of the father of Bossa Nova music) is on the island, and is also crammed into an air force base, a nature reserve, a shipyard, Several petrochemical plants and nearly 500,000 residents, about 20% of whom live in slums.
The word favela (favela, in Portuguese) comes from a fast-growing weed, and Rio's first favela dates back to 1888, the second year of the abolition of slavery in Brazil. Freed slaves had nowhere to go, so they built shacks on open hillsides or in partially drained mangrove swamps. Then came the unemployed veterans, and then the poor from the countryside who flocked to the cities to escape the perennial drought and poverty. Twenty years ago, there were said to be about 300 slums in Rio; 10 years ago, that number had risen to 600. No one knows how many slums there are in Rio today, but estimates put it at more than 1,000; perhaps 3 million of Rio's 14 million people live in slums.
Looking out from both sides of the airport highway in Rio, there are slums. Sometimes, any time there's a gangster on either side of the highway, bullets will fly over your head. Many people have heard that they also go to the highway to rob people who are driving at gunpoint. Most tourists travel directly from the island's airport to the beachfront hotel in Rio's South City Nassau district, on the other side of the mountains of Dijuca National Park. But there are also slums in Nassau, and it is impossible to completely escape the tragic side of Rio.
Like the rest of Rio, the inhabitants of the island of Govenado live under the rule of a gang leader and his private arm. Fernandinho is a drug dealer, 31 years old, whose full name is "Fernando Gomes de Freitas". There are a total of 18 slums on Governado Island, and the Palm Tree slum, which occupies an entire mountain, is the largest of them, and one of the largest in Rio, where Fernandinho lives. He controls 17 of the slums here on behalf of a "pure third directive". In addition to running the island's drug trade, he also receives commissions, or protection fees, from legitimate businesses such as bus companies, cable operators, gas suppliers, and others. In 2007, police estimated that Fernandinho was earning $300,000 a month from the drug trade, but they estimated that other sources of income could be far greater. He issues orders, which are carried out by an armed force. He is a fugitive and one of Rio's most wanted men. On a police warrant, he is described as "the underworld boss of Palm Slum and Governado Island, a dangerous man with weapons who will kill anyone who goes against him or doesn't obey him. ". His other aliases include Lopez, Onion, Lion and Fernandinho Guadabe — a name in honor of the slum where he was born. Fernandinho's father, a mason, was an alcoholic who abused him and his mother. Now he is no longer alive. Fernandinho's mother, a cashier, is said to be adamant she doesn't want Fernandinho's money.
Despite the wanted posters everywhere, Fernandinho swaggered in the palm slums, living in plain sight. He took control of Governado five years ago when his predecessor, Baizulay, an older gang member, was shot dead by the military police, who regarded Fernandinho highly as his most capable 's go-getter. In November 2005, Fernandinho threw a party to celebrate his 27th birthday and the opening of the swimming pool he had built for the community. On the first day of the party, police raided the Palms slum. Police did not catch him, but confiscated 10,000 cans of beer. In 2007, police took action again when Fernandinho threw another party, this time to celebrate the arrest of his nemesis Marcelo Solres de Maderos, who Often referred to as "Paratrooper" Marcelo. Fernandinho managed to escape again; police found a large cake nearly 1.5 meters high, with "Twenty-Three Psalms" spelled in icing. They also found a figurine of "Paratrooper" Marcelo, wearing red women's underwear and hanging from a lamppost.
"Paratrooper" Marcelo was once the boss of the Palms slum. However, after he was released from Bangu Prison, he lost his status in the arena, so he turned to a gang called "Red Order". He always wanted to kill Fernandinho and become the boss here again.
"Red Order" is the oldest and most powerful drug crime syndicate in Rio, and "Pure Third Order" turned out to be a branch below it. The Red Order was born out of a group of prisoners in 1979, when ordinary criminals and political activists were locked up in Candido Mendes prison on the island of Grande, west of Rio. This is Brazil's equivalent of Devil's Island, where the military dictators who ruled Brazil from 1964 to 1985 imprisoned the surviving guerrillas. More than two decades after Brazil returned to democracy, guerrillas in the name of Marxism no longer exist, although there are several former guerrillas in the government of current President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva. Get a job.
The founders of "Red Order" learned some organizational skills and a little social philosophy from the inmates, and they even used "peace, justice, freedom" as their organization slogan, which is still true today. But by the mid-1980s, the Red Order and its various factions had completely abandoned the political aspirations that previous leaders might have had. Today, these gangs are purely criminal organizations that exist to sell drugs to the Brazilian people.
Unlike the export-oriented drug gangs in Colombia and Mexico, Rio's gangs are both importers of drugs (cocaine from Bolivia, Peru and Colombia, and marijuana from Paraguay), as well as managers of retail networks. At least 100,000 people work for Rio's drug gangs, whose hierarchical structure resembles a formal business: the slum boss is like the general manager, their representatives are the deputy managers, and the mob boss is the owner of the business .
I also went to another favela on a hill north of Rio, where there is a small community center funded by a private NGO, the director of the center, Sinriad (pseudonym), told me, “Pure Article III The Command" controls the top portion of the mountain, and the hillside is the site of the "Red Command". (When I first got here, I heard machine gun fire; she said it happened almost every day.) "It's been 'Red Order' all the way," she said. "Here, we can't wear red. Clothes. If you see a fan of Flamengo (Rio's most popular football team), his T-shirt must be red and black; that's fine, you can't wear pure red. "Sinriad pointed to the clothes on his body, which were very safe black. She said that once, a girl in red came up the mountain. "Because she was an evangelical Christian, they didn't kill her, but they ripped her clothes." Last year, a group of drug dealers pulled out a girl's fingernails because she painted red nail polish. "So, we don't dare to put on nail polish anymore," said Singliard, adding that the gang boss at the top of the mountain graduated from a computer class at the community center, so his staff were generally polite to her.
The slums have almost become a vacuum of government power. Drug gangs have their own justice, policing and taxation systems, and their enforcement is armed with military guarantees. The black market for imported weapons has pushed violent crime to unimaginable levels. Like Mexico, many of Brazil's illegal weapons come from the United States, but in recent years, Russian-made weapons have begun to appear; and the weapons are increasingly powerful. Rio's gangsters were found to have military machine guns and anti-aircraft weapons. Semi-automatic submachine guns and grenades are more commonplace. Fernandinho's warrant warns that he is in possession of a "Madison machine gun" (a gun that fires 500 rounds per minute).
Rio de Janeiro has the highest number of "deliberately violent" deaths in the world. Last year alone, there were nearly 5,000 murders, half of them linked to drug gangs, according to official figures. This figure does not include "rape deaths" or "riot deaths". Twenty-two police officers were also killed in the line of duty last year. In turn, police in Rio kill more people than police anywhere in the world; in 2008, police admitted to killing 1,188 criminals who resisted arrest, an average of at least three per day. By comparison, police across the U.S. killed 371 people over the same period in "justifiable homicide." At least one person is said to be injured or killed by stray bullets every day in Rio. The social security situation in Rio de Janeiro can be described as cataclysmic by any conventional metric.
"There are few cities in the world like Rio where there are large areas beyond the control of the armed forces of the government," said Alfredo Surges, a prominent Rio politician who once participated in the guerrillas. He added "Today, even in Rio's smallest favela, drug gangs have more weapons than we did when we were fighting guerrillas," he said. "We basically only had one rifle, two machine guns and two grenades. . So we are completely passive." Having said that, he shook his head. “But no one wants revolution now. Today, these guys with guns just want a piece of the pie in consumer culture. It’s so childish — morally childish, and they kill people like kids — —Like a child playing a game of war.” If they have an ideology, they can threaten the government, he said. "For now, they're all about a bunch of anarchic young people who have found a way to satisfy their desires for nothing more than clothes, cars, and the respect of others."
In a way, the problems facing Rio are also problems facing Latin America as a whole, especially in Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador and Colombia. Twenty years after the fall of communism, the guerrillas in the region under the banner of Marxism have disappeared, replaced by violent drug gangs.
Srgis, 58, a big man with long arms and legs with tousled blond hair, has been a four-time Rio city councillor. Srgis' parents were Jewish from Poland who immigrated here after escaping the Holocaust. He was born in Rio. While studying in the 1960s, he joined the "People's Revolutionary Vanguard," a guerrilla organization operating in cities. Srgis robbed several banks and also helped kidnap the Swiss and German ambassadors to Brazil, respectively. The diplomats were freed unscathed after the military regime agreed to release a total of 110 political prisoners. In 1971, his comrades were hunted down and killed, and he went into exile. Sirgis spent nine years in exile in Santiago, Buenos Aires, Paris and Lisbon before returning to Brazil after receiving an amnesty from the military regime. In his best-selling book Os Carbonários, published in 1980, he denied that he had ever engaged in political violence. Now an environmental activist, he is the leader of Brazil's Green Party, which ran for president in 1998.
On July 10, Srgis's son's best friend, a 22-year-old college student, was killed in Rio. He was found dead in a taxi, and he and the driver were shot; the whereabouts of his sneakers were unknown. Srgis wrote a letter of disappointment to the media, in which he said that the incident was so commonplace that even the media disdain to pay attention. He told me, “Rio has a ridiculously low crime rate, 90% of murders never end up being solved,” he said, in part because of Brazil’s “politically correct culture.” "It's like the Nordics come and talk about the realities of Iraq. Rio is completely crazy. Everyone is politically correct and thinks this violence is due to some social injustice. But at the same time, they want to use a shredder The ghetto turned to powder, like that sci-fi cartoon character Buck Rogers."
Srgis likens the spread of Rio's gang culture to the appeal of al Qaeda to young people who have lost their citizenship in Muslim societies. "There's a culture where you keep recruiting younger and younger members," he said. "It's a kind of self-affirmation. You have a social situation where it's constantly generating certain A certain type of person, creating a young role model for kids to learn from - a drug dealer with an AR-15 automatic rifle and Nike shoes. It's one way to be a man. He'll get the girls' attention; he To be able to fight enemies who are also young people like him. It inspires loyalty.”
The age of gang members is decreasing every year, and the youngest is now only 10 years old. Gangs “are like medieval feudalism and warlordism, where the sole purpose of subordinates is allegiance,” says Srgis. “The gang phenomenon is a non-violent, ideological insurgency.”
(iii)
Fee After Fernandinho took control of Governado Island, along with Jill, they started making headlines for Rio's newspapers; they called themselves the "LG Gang," a reference to their nicknames "Lopez" and "Lopez". Gill" acronym. Fernandinho's generation of gangsters love to party. The gang leader is funk carioca - the main proponent of Brazilian gang rap. On weekends, they bring in DJs to throw bailes funk street parties full of young people from outside the slums — those legally constituted areas of the city, which they call the "tar world." They serve beer and sell drugs - mostly cocaine and marijuana. Fernandinho was caught on camera at a party with the "soldiers", drinking, singing and bragging about how he knocked out his opponents. At a baile funk party in 2005, he rapped and sang:
Bundle up, kill his madness
, go on, hack this sissy
hand me a sharp axe
and send him to see Hades ,
you'll see it now
LG won't cut him mercilessly,
cut him and
chop him
Let you betray me, you sissy
. In another scene from 2005, Fernandinho raps into the microphone at a party:
I'm full of hate
, I'm kind, but never Soft hand
I tell everyone I'm nice to the people around me, really nice
I hate Cordau, Marcelo "Paratrooper" and Nokha
I'll tear you to pieces if you're on their side You can talk to the
wrong person. But if I catch you, the "lion" will kill you
that year, Fernandinho was first wanted for murder. Two dismembered bodies were found in Rose Beach slum, near Palms slum. The victim was Nokha's man - Fernandinho mentioned in the lyrics above. A policeman was murdered in front of a dozen witnesses at a religious ceremony in 2007; a few months later, a man in Palms ghetto was arrested for taking part in a baile funk in a rival ghetto. He was beheaded at a party; in both cases, Fernandinho's men were prime suspects. There are many similar cases. A local resident told me that in the Rose Beach slum, Fernandinho's executioner was called "The Butcher." "They chop up the people they kill and throw them into the sea, and the crabs eat the carcasses," he said.
In a sweeping operation in March 2008, 100 armed policemen were shot in two gunships and a Under the cover of an armored vehicle, they tried to arrest Fernandinho. In a shootout, five of Fernandinho's men were cornered in a house; several others were injured and arrested. Police said Fernandinho was shot but escaped by jumping from roof to roof.
Reports about Fernandinho began to show a deification of him—a remarkable life of luxury, a penchant for dismembering the corpses of his opponents, and his miraculous escape like the Scarlet Flower. Later, it was reported that he became religious. On August 20, 2007, Rio's tabloid "Meia Hora" ran a banner titled "The Disobedient All Asked", which read "Fernandinho Guadabe, the boss of the Palm Favela. The victim was executed with an axe. The evangelical drug dealer even banned Macomba in the slums.” (Macomba, Umbanda, and Condompo are all practised by black Brazilians. religious form, which serious evangelicals regard as a cult) On the same day, in the large newspaper O Dia, there was such a news: "Despite the atrocities, the 'Word of God' will be spread, even if it is A radical approach. Guadab is believed to have banned Umm Bandar and Kondompo rites, as well as wizard seances. At 6pm every day the priest's prayers are narrowed The alley reverberates."
(iii)
It turns out that Fernandinho became friends with Pastor Sidney, and was thus given a new life. He plunged into the new faith with great enthusiasm. He had "Jesus Christ" in capital letters tattooed on one forearm, and the palm ghetto was soon filled with religious graffiti. Now, over the community pool he built, there is a sign that says, "This belongs to Christ Jesus." In addition, Fernandinho is said to have ordered his brethren not to commit "violent" crimes such as carjackings, armed robbery and murder, although the drugs are still sold.
Most of O Dia's reporting on Fernandinho was written by Leslie Leto, the newspaper's senior crime reporter. I visited him at the newspaper office. Leto is friendly and energetic; he is about the same age as Fernandinho, both 31. He said he was often on orkut, Brazil's most famous social networking site, which he said was also used by the police. Many gang members post messages, videos and pictures of themselves on orkut. The girlfriend of a big drug dealer sent all kinds of gossip and posted pictures of herself. Leto had never been to Palms ghetto, but he and Fernandinho spoke on the phone. "Of course, he denied some of what I wrote," he said. "But he was very polite and seemed to understand that it was my job."
Brazilian journalists have largely stopped setting foot in the favelas since the disappearance of Tim Lopez, a prominent reporter for the O Globo network, in 2002; Lopez took a covert camera to a favela for a baile funk party. A few days later, police recovered his body parts. He died of torture—a leader of the Red Order and his men beat him, cut him into pieces with a samurai sword, and burned him to death.
The dangers journalists face come from many sources. Last year, two O Dia reporters and their driver were kidnapped and tortured for hours in a slum. The perpetrators turned out to be police officers (later arrested) and they were members of a militia group. Ten years ago, police and firefighters formed a militia to fight drug gangs, driving them out until they were completely destroyed. Now, at least 100 slums are in the hands of these militias, which themselves have become gangsters. I met a member of a militia named Silva in a slum who helped control the area around the "City of God", and I asked him if there was a danger of people turning into gangsters, and he said, "They've already It's a gang." However, he said the militias would not sell drugs. I've been told that Silva's specialty is "destruction". The only slum on Governado Island not under Fernandinho's control is outside the military base, where it is controlled by the militia.
"Right now, if you're living in a palm slum, it's Fernandinho," Leto said. "If they arrest him tomorrow, No. 2 Gil will take over. Fernandinho is nothing but a drug dealer. How long will he stay in that position? 10 years? No more than that."
Leto It's also unclear if Fernandinho's religious beliefs are real or if he wants to create a new image. "Probably for two reasons."
To learn more about Fernandinho, I met up with a former drug dealer named Washington Luis Oliveira Limas, nicknamed "The Bean." "Bean" is a 33-year-old black, short, plump midwinter, wearing a cyan Nike tracksuit and a gold necklace; he once ran a ghetto for "Pure Third Order" , but later "washed his hands in a golden pot" and turned into a real estate developer. But the police did not let him go. In 2006, the police arrested him on charges of stealing arms. To save his life, Douzi spent most of his savings and was released after spending a month in prison. He originally wanted to "return to the old business", but he dismissed the idea after seeing a friend executed by the police. Now, Bean works for AfroReggae, a highly unusual NGO that tries to mediate between the government and gangs; in addition, he has formed a band.
"Bean" claims to have known Fernandinho for many years. "Fernandinho, he's a lunatic!" "He's savage. He's unreasonable. He smokes and drinks. He likes to party. But the thing is, he's wanted by the police. He's kind and cruel. On the one hand. He killed a lot of people and made them corpse on the street; he was frequently exposed in the media, and many media posted pictures of him dancing with a gun. He had many weapons, and he also stole cars." "Bean" added: "The problem is, if you do a lot of evil, the government won't let you go. If he gets caught, he will never come out again."
I asked "Bean", in his opinion, the rumored Fernandi Is Neo's religious awakening real? He thought about it and said, "I think he may really believe this, because in such a life, you will soon understand that only God will not betray you."
(iv)
Pastor Sidney Espino lives in the Parkroy slum, a few blocks from where Iada and his daughter live; I was told he converted Fernandinho. His home looked very simple and neatly arranged, a two-story building on a dirty street. Reverend Sidney, a short, stocky black man with a shaved head, welcomed me with a not unwarranted courtesy, and invited me in and sat on the second-floor balcony. He was wearing black trousers, a well-pressed beige shirt, and a striped tie around his neck. I didn't expect the priest to be so fit.
He said he didn't join the Catholic Church until he was 21 and later became an evangelical. When I asked him why he had converted to the religion, Pastor Sidney looked away. He said he used to be in a band and hang out with "a lot of women" and that he was "into a deep anxiety and despair." Pastor Sidney, 35, has been married for 15 years. He and his wife have three children together. A former paratrooper, he has spent the past 12 years mostly working on offshore rigs as a deck supervisor. He said he had been to Angola a few times, as well as Trinidad and Tobago. His last job was two years ago when he quit his job because of a bad relationship with an American colleague.
Pastor Sidney explained that he met Fernandinho in 2007 when some community leaders came to him. At the time, there were many shootings involving Fernandinho and his nemesis, believed to be the "paratrooper" Marcelo. "It was like a war zone," Pastor Sidney said. "Life here is dangerous and the whole community is scared." He had preached in some of the most dangerous communities on Governado Island at the time, which earned him some respect. "I was working among drug dealers. I went out and preached on the road. I treated them the same as if they were under the control of the devil; only to find out that they accepted me because something amazing happened. But I kept avoiding it. Drive Fernandinho. I've heard a lot about him and I don't like it."
He said, and finally, "Fernandinho came to me. He saw me preaching, and people collapsed to the ground. . He asked me to pray for him."
The spread of evangelicalism in Brazil, a traditionally Catholic country, has been phenomenal in recent years. In some of Rio's favelas, there are many chapels, and God is praised every night amid loud shouts and loud music. At Pastor Sidney's church, Assemblies of God at Mount Sinai, he sang chants and played instruments with church deacons, some of whom were former gang members, creating a mix of ska, a Jamaican Pop, Hip-Hop and Brazilian Consonant Swing. The people of the parish danced to the music and entered a state of trance, and after the exorcism, they collapsed to the ground.
Pastor Sidney explained how he saw the devil: "A person who is possessed by a devil will stare at a point coldly, without blinking, and look absent-minded." When he saw the devil, he It would "let Jesus take them away, and then the angels would come and take the devil out of these people." He said it also allows you to find God. "Traditional religious beliefs give you moral guidance and at the same time show the power of God."
I told him that I heard Fernandinho was influenced by him to stop killing people. Pastor Sidney's expression did not seem to believe this statement. Does he really think Fernandinho truly believes in God? "Only God knows what's going on in a person's heart," he said. "But I think Fernandinho is far from accepting God. He has something - a little bit of a change in him compared to the past. He's not as violent as he used to be, he's not killing people, that's all. It's a fact. Back in the day, they came down from the palm slums and robbed houses or carjacked cars—now, they're all banned. Right now, he's mostly selling drugs."
However, he said the relationship between himself and Fernandinho is not as good as it used to be. "We like Fernandinho, but we want to get away from him so that he can see himself and the people and things around him." Several people were sentenced to capital punishment a few weeks ago. "The killing shames me," Pastor Sidney said. "So, now I'm extremely reluctant to go to the Palms slums. If I go there, I'll just visit the community. I don't want to convert drug dealers anymore. I only pray for them when they come to me. "It makes Pastor Sidney very angry that other evangelicals in a competitive relationship come to this community, and they're going to curry favor with Fernandinho. “Only say what he wants to hear, not what he needs to hear.” (Last week, when police visited Rose Beach slum, they found a backpack in a daycare center in a Pentecostal church. There was a rifle and bullets in the backpack.)
I asked Pastor Sidney if he would introduce me to Fernandinho, despite the tension between them now. He frowned. He said he still didn't want to see Fernandinho, but he would take me to Palms ghetto and take me to meet some people. The rest of the way is up to me.
(v)
One night, while waiting to meet Fernandinho, Ziglio (a pseudonym) and I drove through the northern suburbs of the city; he used to be a special forces commando. He works in a fire brigade department that collects corpses in a car on the road. (Later, Ziglio gave me the department's record for that day: 48 bodies were found.)
We drove to a neighborhood in Rio with dirt roads. Under the streetlights, we saw a few men in uniform struggling to move a corpse from the trunk of a sedan—the corpse was already rigid. We followed a car with several men and women, family members of the deceased. A woman got out of the car to identify the body. The dead man was young, wearing only a pair of red underwear. When the staff lifted the body, an arc-shaped column of blood more than two meters high spewed from the bullet hole in his back, and the bullet may have hit his lungs. More bullets went into his head. His hands and feet were tied tightly behind his back with white plastic ropes, and he died about three hours ago.
Judging from the appearance and the way of death, the deceased is likely to be a drug dealer. The executioner may have been a member of a killing team of police and firefighters -- Zillio's fellow men; but it could also have been the work of other drug dealers.
Beto is a member of the civilian police force, and he has no hesitation in admitting to me that the police are indeed executing criminals. He spread his hands out for emphasis. "Because we are human too!" he said. "We also have feelings, you know? These guys shot at us. I shot a few times to save people...I saw a friend..." Beto made the move that the police were about to execute, "I said 'don't kill He, let him go. Listen to me.' But at other times, I can't stop people from doing it. You know, a lot of times you can't stop people at all. And frankly, sometimes you don't want to, because it's not at all. It's none of your business."
During the day, Betoka was driving through town with his gun tucked between his legs, holstered open. The badge was his "death certificate," because if gang members found him wearing a badge, they would kill him. In their opinion, Rio's 10,000 civilian police are not much better than Rio's 40,000 gendarmerie. "Most of the gendarmerie are inexperienced and very bad, very corrupt, they are criminals themselves," Beto said. "People in the underworld will kill them without hesitation when they see them." As for himself, he said: "They may Will hesitate for a minute, but they will kill me anyway."
In March 2005, in a poor neighborhood in northern Rio, 29 civilians were killed by off-duty police officers. The reason why the police went on a killing spree was to protest the arrest of police officers who were filmed as they dumped their bodies after killing them. Of course, there are also organized attacks on the police. In December 2006, the leaders of the "Red Order" ordered the gunmen to enter the city to retaliate. Some police stations were attacked with machine guns and grenades; a dozen buses were set on fire. At least 19 people were killed throughout the incident.
Rio city councilor Alfredo Surges told me, "The underworld in the slums pays the police for protection, and the police who don't get the money go out and kill, and then hand over the management of the slums to the police. The other gangs. The police and the underworld formed a massacre alliance."
The key issue, Srgis said, is that police wages are too low. "Without exception, every police officer has a part-time job," he said. “The police work 24 hours a day and then take three days off, so there is no continuity, no regular work. They are all in patrol cars, they don’t patrol on foot, they don’t have contact with ordinary people. Among the policemen killed in Rio , 70% of them die after work. Do you understand what that means?”
Srgis said that 30 years ago, “It was rare for gangsters to kill police officers. If they killed the police, they would not be able to escape. Now the police are no longer respected, the underworld people see them as competitors in the same industry - so they will kill the police."
He said the priority is "to end drug gangs' control of urban turf. Something like Like other cities, drug dealers hide in corners and sell drugs, but they don’t have control over the territory. It can be done, but first, the police must be strengthened.”
In July, I interviewed the Rio police. The bureau's new director, Alan Ternowski. I asked him if the security situation in Rio had reached catastrophic levels.
"Catastrophic?" he said. "Not yet. If it's catastrophic, it's out of the question. But safety in Rio is within our control. This isn't Baghdad or Mexico City yet. We can do it. Control any urban area we want to control. The problem is we can't just stay there and solve all the problems." Ternowski talks about police fighting against police-related militias; he plans to increase the number of officers; hopes to strengthen Training of police officers and raising their salaries. He mentioned the recent police presence in the slums of Santa Marta to fight crime and build a wall; the government's investment in infrastructure here, with a view to using it as a model for the future. I pointed out that Santa Marta is just one favela in Rio, and there are 1,000 or more favelas that still go unnoticed. He nodded and said, "It will take time."
(VI)
Pastor Sidney took me to his car, and he was driving a new Chevrolet Meriva. We are on Governado Island. After leaving a residential street, we came to a dim corner of some slum. The pastor turned on the lights in the car and rolled down all the windows so people outside could see us. At the first intersection, young men with pistols and submachine guns pulled over the car. They wore baseball caps, T-shirts with the team's logo, board shorts and plastic slippers. They came to the window, recognized Pastor Sidney, and gave us thumbs up.
What followed was this strange ritual. At each intersection, each gunman handed his weapon to a comrade and then came to the car window that Reverend Sidney had opened. He stood there with his hands by his sides and his eyes closed, as the pastor babbled aloud the prayers from the Bible to him in Portuguese, and he went into a trance. The priest then put his hand on the gunman's forehead and repeatedly shouted "Sai!" - "leave, leave". Finally, when the pastor blows hard at them or pretends to knock them on the head, they open their eyes in surprise and then give a silent smile of thanks to the pastor.
In the process, there is always a young man who sticks to his post at the entrance of the alley - it is a plastic chair and an oil barrel. The guards were also armed, and in front of them was a large open plastic bag containing packets of cocaine. This is "boca de fumo" - "smoke mouth", in Brazilian slang for a place where drugs are sold.
We drove slowly down the alley, past the men and women clinging to the wall for us to pass. I smelled marijuana, once or twice, and smelled like cracked rubber. We stopped again; Pastor Sidney repeated the exorcism. We pulled into a big dirty plaza - we had reached the Rose Beach slum, full of gangsters with guns. The air is tense, something must be happening. Later I learned that Wright, Fernandinho's deputy manager in another slum, came to Leo to judge (Leo was one of Fernandinho's managers and Iada's direct supervisor) because Leo One of his soldiers ran to his site and pointed a gun at him. Leo avoids a bloodbath by having his men apologize to Wright.
After three more checkpoints, we came to a fork and walked along a wall with the Gospel of Jesus written on both sides. We have come to the Palm Tree ghetto.
The dealers greeted Reverend Sidney with respect and asked him if he was going to see the boss. "No. I'm just here," he said. "He knows why." Those people looked confused, but nodded anyway. Pastor Sidney said he wanted someone "in charge" to bring me in to meet Fernandinho. After the men discussed it for a while, one of them stepped aside and said something to the radio. After that, a fat man in his forties walked out with his chest open. Pastor Sidney said to me, "Okay, you follow him. Don't hold back." Then he drove off.
The man took me down the steep street, passing some curious onlookers along the way. At the top of the mountain, he stopped and gestured for me to wait, after which he disappeared. There were several heavily armed young men in tracksuits across the road; someone approached them to buy cocaine.
(vii)
Fernandinho showed up. Six bodyguards with assault weapons fanned out around him. I saw him in the photo and recognized the words "Christ Jesus" tattooed in capital Gothic on his right forearm. He was wearing a baseball cap, shorts and a São Paulo football team sleeveless jersey with "LG" on it, the logo of the team's sponsor. He has a thick gold necklace with pendants around his neck, a huge gold ring on almost every finger, and a heavy gold watch on his wrist. Every piece of jewelry he wears gleams with diamonds.
He was white, boyish looking, of medium build, with short brown hair. He greeted me kindly and suggested that we come to his house to talk. His bodyguards followed us—all teenagers with AK-47s or AR-15s. We walked down the steps, then a narrow alley, turned a few turns, and entered a house, followed by a narrow corridor, into Fernandinho's bedroom.
The room wasn't that big, and the bed took up most of the available space; the sheets were still cartoonish. Glittering religious posters hang on the walls, along with a few framed hymns. In one corner of the room, there is a goldfish bowl; in another corner, there is an indoor exercise bike. On the wall opposite the bed, there is a large plasma TV. Fernandinho sat on the edge of the mattress and tucked his clothes away from the small sofa beside the bed so I could sit on it. His bodyguards were all left in the foyer downstairs.
Something to drink from a beautiful young pregnant woman. After she left, I asked Fernandinho if she was his wife and if she was carrying his child. No, she's just a friend - he says his wife isn't here, then corrects, "We can't even count as married." He has six children, and two are "coming soon." He said his wife (who was expecting their first child) did not know of any other children except that Fernandinho had an eldest son in elementary school in "Asphalt World". He looked at me suspiciously and said he'd been thinking about waiting for her to tell her there were other children after she gave birth. I said it would be wise to tell her after giving birth.
Fernandinho said his work in the Palms slum was similar to that of the mayor. "When everyone encounters problems, come to me, and I will take care of them." He handed me the gold pendant on the necklace. There is a palm tree on it, a hill, and a few houses on the hill. This pendant is a symbol of his position. "I designed it myself," he said. "It weighs a pound." Yes, he said he was indeed a drug dealer, but that was also because other people needed it. I mentioned the murders that brought him notoriety. He said he didn't have to kill himself at all - someone did it for him.
"As a kid, I wanted to be a football player when I grow up," he said. "Later, I found out that this was just an impossible fantasy." At the age of eight or nine, he joined the gang and did some smuggling and lookout work. I asked him if he could imagine another life he could live; if he still had the power to change his present life. "It's impossible," he said. "I've been wanted so many times, I can't even leave this slum." He hasn't left Palms for two years, and twice since 2003.
What crime made him wanted? He replied: "Whatever you want, even an unwarranted sin."
Fernandinho's TV was always on. The TV switched to the Brazilian version of Discovery Channel, which was showing a crime documentary about a so-called sleepwalking killer. A reenactment of a man walking into a bedroom and beating a couple to death with a stick has been replayed in slow motion over and over again. Finally, Fernandinho tuned the TV to a local news station that was broadcasting live a shootout between gangsters and police in Sao Paulo.
I asked, "Is it really like this?" Fernandinho said, "Sometimes it's like this." However, he said he would try to avoid a head-on confrontation with the police. When the police came to the slum, he and his men would hide whenever possible.
Fernandinho opened the closet and rummaged through it. Finally, he took out two bottles of unopened men's fragrances, one is Issey Miyake and the other is Givenchy. "Take it," he said, "and give it to you."
He said he prayed a lot, even for the enemy. As if to prove he wasn't lying, he closed the bedroom door, came to the bed and knelt down. He prayed like a child—hands clasped together, eyes closed, lips moving, but no sound. He found the Bible, sat on the bed opposite me, and turned to the page with the tassel bookmark, which was a quarter of the way through the Bible. He said to read it all.
I affirmed Fernandinho's efforts, but I pointed out the contradiction between his religious beliefs and his continued drug dealing. I asked, "Where, in your opinion, is the line between right and wrong?"
Fernandinho smiled and said, "Who decides?"
(viii)
A few days later, I returned to Parker Visit Pastor Sidney in Lowy Slums. He invited me to eat feijoada, a traditional Brazilian dish of braised black beans with pork, at a small restaurant in a slum plaza owned by the priest himself. He asked me how my meeting with Fernandinho was. I say Fernandinho talks a lot about faith.
The priest nodded. I had a hunch that he might elaborate on what kind of conflict he had with Fernandinho. "What happened? I think Fernandinho promised to stop killing people," I asked.
"He did, and that's why I fell out with him because he didn't talk. "
He blamed Fernandinho's deputy Gil. Jill was in the hospital, and things got better in his absence. But Jill later came back from the hospital. The priest said, "He was very cruel. I had expected what would happen, so I told Fernandinho that within a week, the killings would start again. Sure enough, within a week they started killing again. "Pastor Sidney heard that four whistleblowers had been arrested and sentenced to death. He hurried to the Palm Tree slum to try to save their lives. He went to see Fernandinho, but the bodyguard said the boss was resting and could not be disturbed. He inquired about those who had been arrested, and the bodyguards told him, "Don't worry." So he walked away.
Later, when he heard that those men had been executed, he felt betrayed. "I went to Fernandinho and told him we were done. For the past two years, they swore not to kill. I reminded him, look at the time you're not killing, among you No one was killed or arrested." The priest continued: "I reckon that some of them will be killed soon."
I asked, "What did Fernandinho say?"
"He didn't respond. In his eyes, I saw the devil come back."
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