Around midnight some unannounced guests show up. They are led by a sturdy man in a baggy T shirt and goatee. Standing in the Grota, the slum’s potholed main alley, Valdecir Baiense could pass for a drug hoodlum himself–except that his head is bowed in prayer. “My Lord!” he beseeches. “Let there be tranquillity here! Let there be peace!” At his back is a small group of Evangelical Christian missionaries. Hesitantly at first, almost timidly, a few street toughs venture out to greet the visitors. One gunman unshoulders his AK-47, leans it gently against a wall and clasps Baiense’s outstretched hand. Within a minute or two a human circle has assembled in the darkness. Hand in hand the outlaws and the missionaries pray together: “Lord, may there be no bloodshed tonight!”
Brazil’s 165 million people can only say a heartfelt “amen.” The country is suffering its worst plague of urban violence in history, caused largely by an epidemic of drug abuse and associated crimes. Drugs have become as much a part of Brazilian society–at all levels–as Carnaval and soccer. The rivalry between Brazil’s two chief gangs, the Red Command and the Third Command, is an all-out arms race of heavier and deadlier weaponry. Brazil already leads the world in nonmilitary deaths from firearms, with nearly 27 per 100,000 inhabitants. Rio’s total homicide rate is 59 per 100,000–among the worst in Latin America–and rising.
Physicians at Brazil’s largest public medical facility, the Souza Aguiar Municipal Hospital, have undergone special training to treat injuries from weapons usually confined to war zones: AK-47s, FAL rifles, M-16s and Colt AR-15s. On June 12 police fired at a drug-crazed bus hijacker but missed, hitting his hostage. The cornered criminal then emptied his revolver into her, finishing off the 22-year-old schoolteacher–while the whole country watched on live TV. Yielding to public demands for urgent action, President Fernando Henrique Cardoso unveiled a $1.6 billion anticrime campaign last week, including new gun restrictions. Whether it will help is an open question.
The crusade against this national orgy of violence has drawn some unusual recruits: former hardened criminals who suddenly saw the light and became born-again Christians. Roughly 70 percent of Brazil’s people remain at least nominally Roman Catholic, and some members of the church hierarchy are less than enthusiastic about the Protestants’ efforts. But the missionaries are winning converts in places where police seldom visit. Stiff-necked Baptists and rollicking Pentecostals alike, the Protestant missionaries have become the equivalent of Blue Helmets in Brazil’s war against drugs. “The evangelicals go where no one else will, in the favelas [shantytowns], in the prisons, in the back alleys,” says Regina Novaes, an anthropologist at the Institute for Higher Religious Studies in Rio. “They thrive in a culture of urgency.”
The urgency is palpable in Rio’s drug-poisoned slums, where roughly two dozen former narcobandits are working as Protestant missionaries. Now they rattle off psalms as handily as they used to empty ammunition clips. And their past reputations enhance their present credibility on the city’s meanest streets. Members of the drug underworld do not forget the exploits of the legendary criminal known as “Morreu.” Once he was among the city’s most notorious gangsters, specializing in bank robbery and kidnapping. He got his nickname–meaning “He’s dead”–after he threw the cops off his trail by planting a rumor that he had died. Many of his former partners in crime now know him as Brother Valdecir. Baiense says he lost track of how many lives he took during his 10-year criminal career. These days the evangelist is keeping a different kind of body count. Smiling, he says: “I’ve brought more than 500 people to Christ.”
One of his toughest allies is confined to a wheelchair. Demetrio Martins used to be the right-hand man of Orlando Jogador, reputed boss of the Complexo do Alemo. Martins quit school in fourth grade to become an apprentice in Rio’s drug trade. Many of the narcotraficantes he admired were nothing but pimply teenagers with guns on their hips and chemicals in their brains. But to Martins, they were gods. “They had power, they had money, they had girls,” he says. Martins wanted everything they had and more. He quickly rose from lookout to “soldier” to the gang’s top ranks.
The Complexo do Alemo is a vicious world. Martins says he went to bed every night cradling a rifle. When his paranoia got intolerable he would numb himself by snorting a dinner plate of cocaine, tracing the letters CV, for Comando Vermelho–the Red Command. That was before a policeman’s .45-caliber Ina machine gun cut him down. Left for dead with bullet holes through his lungs and spinal cord, Martins was dragged to safety by neighbors. Somehow they got him to a hospital alive.
Since then he has been catching up on the book learning he abandoned as a schoolboy. Paraplegic and with a damaged right arm, Martins depends on others to bathe and feed him. He belongs to Brazil’s largest evangelical order, the Assembly of God, and he says his favorite book is the Bible. “I especially like Job,” he says, opening to Chapter 33: " ‘He will deliver his soul from going into the pit, and his life shall see the light’. " The Red Command is nothing but a bad memory. “Today I belong to the CC,” he boasts. “The Command of Christ.”
His territory is the same as ever: the slums. Home to roughly 1 million desperately poor people, Rio’s shantytowns are a strategic part of the narcotics underworld–and fertile ground for missionary work. In these tangled alleys the bandits can travel freely, act with impunity and dash for safety. The traffickers have carved a place for themselves with a mix of fear and favors–clearing petty thieves off the streets, paying the tab for neighborhood barbecues, donating soccer uniforms. Such deeds can often earn something bordering on respect from communities that know authority mostly by its absence or at the end of a nightstick. The drug gangs thrive on converts, just as the evangelicals do.
Their competition seems hopelessly lopsided. On one side is the drug trade, with its promises of easy money, swashbuckling adventure and bold camaraderie. For every drug soldier who falls, Brazilians say two or three eager recruits are waiting for a chance to fight for a drug gang. Against them stands an unarmed, ill-funded alliance of street-corner sermonizers commonly known as crentes–“believers.” The latter can offer little earthly comfort beyond a clean conscience and loving fellowship.
But if the believers ever feel any qualms, they don’t let it show. “There is no one we love more than the traficante,” Baiense declares with a grin. His own band of worshipers, the Evangelical Congregational Church, is just one of many denominations that have taken root in the slums surrounding Rio. In the Complexo do Alemo alone, dozens of congregations have set up shop, from the grand, brightly lit halls of the Universal Church of the Reign of God to the tiniest sects with countertop altars and folding chairs for pews. Day and night, processions of clean-cut crentes take to the streets in their Sunday best, forming spiritual dragnets for Christ.
Baiense says he has a personal calling to proselytize the same streets he used to terrorize. He pounds a beat no cop will walk, armed only with his street smarts and a “PT-66.” The term is evangelical street slang for a Bible: the Pentecostal 66, for the 66 books of the Old and New Testaments. Baiense hasn’t held a paying full-time job for four years. Lately he has been working part time as a watchman at a construction site. He gets no payment for his street ministry other than a profound sense of satisfaction. How does it feel to convert a drug trafficker? He blissfully replies: “Better than robbing a bank!”
Some Catholic leaders question such conversions. They deride evangelical Christianity as “emergency-room religion”–a desperate spiritual remedy that converts tend to abandon as soon as their crisis is over. Still, no one disputes Rio’s need for emergency care. The authorities of Brazil’s postcard city have tried just about every tactic they could think of in the war against drugs and drug merchants. Swarms of prominent citizens have marched for peace along the sparkling beachfront. City planners have tried transforming the favelas with streetlights and paved streets. The governor, confronted with rising public anger, has ordered a seismic shakeup of his badly discredited police force.
But in some ways they are struggling against Brazil itself. The country’s continental expanse and sinuous, permeable borders have turned the country into a vast way station between the Andean coca growers and the rest of the world. Rising local consumption–and the hedonistic strain in Brazilian culture–have added to the flow as Rio’s trendsetters made cocaine their party favor of choice. According to one Rio socialite known for hosting wild soirees, a popular door-to-door service known as “powder delivery” is catering to the needs of the city’s penthouse dwellers.
The no-win war drives some Brazilians to despair. Col. Rosemberg Rodrigues da Silva commands the 22d Military Police Battalion in one of Rio de Janeiro’s most dangerous sectors. “Between chasing the drug smugglers and the arms smugglers, the police do almost nothing else these days,” he complains. “It’s a battle with no glory–only victims.” The colonel’s job is made even tougher by the public’s distrust of the police. He has tried to improve community relations by speaking to schoolchildren and church congregations. But it’s an uphill task. He still hasn’t gotten over an encounter he had during one recent school visit. He bent over to say hello to a kindergartner, and the terrified 5-year-old asked, “Are you going to kill me?” The colonel shakes his head at the memory: “That tore me apart.”
Da Silva, a born-again Evangelical himself, is almost a teddy bear compared with some of the favela street preachers. Baiense has a gospel-music group called Chama Viva (Living Flame). When they perform in public, the introductions sound like a nightmare hybrid of liner notes and rap sheets. “On percussion, brother Jonas, who supplied weapons to drug gangs, until a hair-trigger .357 magnum went off in his pocket and nearly destroyed his leg… On guitar, Ricardo Salles, once a member of a death squad… On vocals, brother Nivaldo, who spent 10 years running drug sales in Vila Pinheiro.” Worshipers sometimes fall to their knees to receive the band members’ blessings at the end of a choir session.
No drug gangsters have renounced Satan this night in the Complexo do Alemo. But Lucky desperately wants to. As a kid 10 years ago he used to sell candy and fruit at a traffic light in downtown Rio. He dreamed of becoming an auto mechanic or even a chauffeur for the sharp-dressing men who rolled their car windows shut in his face. Last year he laid down his weapons and turned to his Christian friends, hoping to start a legitimate business with a minivan bought from his drug savings. But he had no resume and no skills but narcotics wholesaling, and even with the missionaries’ help he couldn’t qualify for an operator’s license. With six children to feed and his bank account dwindling, he finally told his church friends he was returning to the Complexo. “He was in tears,” recalls Baiense. “A bandit–in tears!”
Now Lucky is working for the Red Command again. “What can you do?” he asks near the end of Brother Valdecir’s prayer service. “You got to make ends meet.” As he speaks a company of some 30 armed men approaches, their combat gear clanking as they march. Their leader is wearing two silver-plated 9mm pistols in hip holsters, and a hand grenade dangling from his belt. The man is Lucky’s boss. Before going back to work, Lucky takes Baiense’s hand for a final prayer. “Watch over this place tonight, dear Lord,” Baiense asks. The evangelicals compare their faith to water dripping on stone. Eventually they are sure it will make a mark. Lucky prays they are right.
