Wellington joined the list of more than 6,000 Brazilians under 18 who, according to police statistics, have been murdered in the past four years. More than half are being killed by the country’s increasingly powerful drug gangs. The rest are victims of death squads hired by local merchants wanting to “clean” the streets of criminals and Artful Dodgers like Wellington. Investigators have identified 180 such squads in Rio de Janeiro state alone. A Brazilian congressional human-rights report recently named 103 alleged gunmen, more than 70 of them police officers. “Adults have been killing adults since Cain and Abel,” says sociologist Herbert de Souza. “But adults killing kids is new. I never thought I would live in a country where this happens.”
Why does it happen? One might also ask why an estimated 200,000 Brazilian kids live on the country’s streets in the first place, why 60 of every 1,000 babies born annually die before the age of 1 or why 7.4 million haven’t finished grade school. The answers lie in Brazil’s Dickensian social disorganization and poverty. Thirty years ago, 70 percent of the country’s 70 million people lived in the countryside; today the population of 146 million is 70 percent urban. The gigantic shift has overwhelmed both the government’s ability to deliver services and the mismanaged economy’s ability to create jobs.
Coping with 20 percent monthly inflation and a $120 billion foreign debt has forced the government to cut social services to the bone; the 1992 budget for Rio’s Center of Infancy and Adolescence, the main state child-protection agency, is less than half what it was in 1991. It is no coincidence, according to many children’s advocates, that most street kids-and more than 80 percent of young murder victims–are black. Afro-Brazilians have been consigned to society’s bottom rungs ever since the days of slavery.
For many kids in Brazil’s sprawling favelas, or slums, the dangerous anarchy of the streets is liberation compared with the despair and abuse of home. At 6, Celina Peres dos Anjos (a pseudonym) fled a stepfather who used to beat her with anything he could get his stonemason’s hands on. For the next seven years, she ran with a pack of street kids in a poor suburb of Rio. They did drugs in the alleys and time in the reformatory. Last November, six of Celina’s best friends were hogtied, tortured and shot in the head by a notorious local death squad.
The favelas are also the breeding ground of a crime wave that has intimidated (and often corrupted) Brazil’s police, scared away tourists and injected fear into the lives of the middle class. More and more violent crime is perpetrated by minors. In Rio, the recently ended beach season was dubbed Wilding Summer, because of dozens of attacks on bathers by young thieves.
Ironically, the surge in youth crime is attributable partly to Brazil’s protective Child Statute, which says that children under 18 may not be arrested unless caught red-handed. To the drug gangs who rule the favelas, the kids’ impunity makes them ideal avioes (“airplanes,” or couriers). Then kids are often killed by the gangs because they know too much, steal too much or get caught in a cross-fire.
The killing of children has both scandalized and polarized Brazilian society. There are more than 600 private groups in greater Rio alone which tend to the needs of street kids. Of the dozens of street kids interviewed by NEWSWEEK, each had made some contact with a nongovernmental aid organization. As a result, most kids are not totally abandoned; some even exploit the system for four or five soup-kitchen meals a day. One advocacy group, Ibase, reports that only about 700 children sleep all night on the streets of Rio. Some find lasting help. Several months ago, Luis Carlos Oliveira, 17, made contact with the National Children’s Crusade. By promising to stay off drugs and return to school, he landed a spot in the Crusade’s halfway house and a job at a hotel. Now he dreams of buying his own home. “Anybody can do it,” Oliveira says. “It’s a matter of desire.”
But at the other end of the political spectrum, the movement to protect children is being met by an even louder cry for law and order. Vigilantes enjoy considerable support. “Government is not giving any solutions, so civilians have to take matters into their own hands,” says Samuel Correia, whose pro-vigilante radio show “Crime Patrol” is so popular that he won a seat in the Rio State Legislature last year.
President Fernando Collor de Mello must try to please both sides. Collor appointed a children’s minister, pushed for specialized all-day schools to keep kids off the streets and set up a national fund to finance internships and literacy programs. Police forces in several cities have initiated programs that serve both as job training for kids and sensitivity training for the cops. Since February, police have dismantled five private “security companies” that officials suspect doubled as death squads and are investigating 36 others. In Rio, tips received on an “exterminator” hot line have led to the capture of 48 alleged deathsquad members in 1991; 33 were active military police. After five straight years of increases, the number of children murdered fell in 1991-though the figure remained at 306.
Still, the worst reputed offenders and their financial backers have not been caught, largely because they enjoy the protection of some judges, lawyers and police officers. So far, Collor’s proposed children’s fund is not operating; only four of a promised 3,000 all-day schools have been inaugurated.
On the eve of next month’s global eco summit, the government is desperate to clean up Rio’s streets, offering help for the kids where it can and using force where it believes it must. Rio de Janeiro Gov. Leonel Brizola promised to find shelters for hardcore street kids. Meanwhile, police have prevented kids from gathering in central plazas. And in February, army troops cleaned out the kids and street vendors camping in Rio’s Saens Pena Plaza. Rio’s public defender, children’s rights advocates and even some police called the action illegal. But residents of the plaza area loved it: 91 percent told a local poll the troops should stay.
Why, then, did Wellington Barbosa die? The precise reasons may lie buried with him in a paupers’ graveyard outside Rio. Friends swear he had nothing to do with drugs. Antonio Manuel de Oliveira, a social worker who knew Wellington for five years, thinks his death may have been the settling of a personal score. Perhaps the best answer is that Wellington Barbosa was a victim not only of his killer but of the cumulative afflictions of a society riven by lawlessness and inequality.
