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In Rio, Death Comes Early
Rocinha is Rio de Janeiro's largest favela, or shantytown, and occupies a hillside overlooking some of the city's wealthiest neighborhoods.
(Photos By Fred Alves For The Washington Post)
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The only time the police come into this neighborhood is when they enter in an armored vehicle, assault rifles drawn, on a raid. Joel has tried to stay out of the conflict as much as he can, but it's easy to get caught in the crossfire. That's what happened, he said, to his 16-year-old cousin, who had been with a large group of teenagers in 2004 when the police raided. He was fatally shot.
Like Marcos, Joel can't stand the police. But he said he has never been tempted to join a gang. Instead, he hopes military service will deliver him from the line of fire.
"I want to make my dad proud," said Joel, who hopes to graduate from high school in 2009 if he is not drafted. "My dad says that in the army they teach you things you can't learn on the streets, and that would be good for my future, for my whole life."
If someone were to randomly pick 100 teenage boys out of his neighborhood, Joel guessed that 30 of them would probably be gang members. That's higher than the estimates of academics and social workers, but it still would mean that Joel is a lot more representative of favela kids than Marcos is.
The Observatory of Favelas, a nonprofit organization that operates social programs in various slums throughout Rio, late last year released a survey of 230 teenagers who had been involved with gangs; 46 of them had died during the two-year research period, two-thirds of whom had been shot by police.
According to the Institute of Public Security, an average of 371 minors each year were reported murdered in Rio from 2002 and 2006. Because some people believe the officially reported figures of overall homicides in Rio are low, a Web site -- http:/
"For young people, this is a genocide," said Raquel Willadino, a director of violence-related issues and human rights for the Observatory of Favelas. "And I don't mean that as a metaphor. It really is a genocide."
President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, prompted by the crime in Rio, met Friday with his military advisers to discuss the possibility of deploying troops in the city to help contain the violence.
But Willadino and many other social workers in the favelas are against ideas such as lengthening sentences for child-related crimes or lowering the prosecution age. The prison and detention systems are already stretched beyond capacity, and the police do not have a good track record in separating the good kids in a favela from the bad ones, she said. On her desk, she had a copy of a recent daily newspaper front page, with a large photo of a police officer searching the book bag of an elementary school boy -- a good illustration, she said, of law enforcement's indiscriminate approach toward favela residents.
Many police officials, meanwhile, express exasperation when they see things like that. Allan Turnowski, state director of police special operations, said those kind of pictures in the news media leave out an important part of the story. Just before the officers searched the backpack of the child in the photo, he said, they had found a gun in another boy's pack. The criminals force the police to be cautious, he said.
"The media doesn't show the good things we do -- just the sensationalism," he said. "They show the criminal the hero, and we lose all authority in the minds of the young people. Then they see the police as the bad guys."
Joel certainly does. He said he often feels like a target in the war between police and the gangs, even though he has tried to go out of his way to avoid it. Joel said that last month he was stopped by a policeman while riding a motorcycle a friend had lent him. The police officer told him to hand over all his money, Joel said, or else he'd be arrested and taken into custody for riding a motorcycle he didn't own.
He gave him the money, he said, and collected another story to explain why he wants the army to call his name.
"I'd like to be living somewhere else," he said. "Somewhere calmer, where I can breathe easier."
Special correspondent Fred Alves contributed to this report.
