Brazil Nuts : Notes from South America by Tom Phillips

Slave hotels of the Amazon

Tom Phillips — 2009-06-06

Day and night the men roll up outside the Correntão supermarket, a roaming army of impoverished workers, searching for a better future and for work. Any work.

Wearing rubber flip-flops, ragged T-shirts and carrying their possessions under their arms in plastic bags, they gather at the meeting point on the outskirts of Marabá, a gritty Amazon city, at Kilometre Six of the Trans-Amazonian highway and wait.

Some are picked up almost immediately and transported to remote jungle camps and farms where they are often forced to work by cattle ranchers and illegal loggers in dangerous and squalid conditions for little or no pay.

Others string hammocks up around the local bus station, waiting for a possible employer to arrive. The rest pile into dozens of tatty boarding houses, known in the Amazon as "pioneer hotels", where they await recruitment.

"They are adventurers," says farmhand José da Costa, 49, as he sits outside one of the many pioneer hotels at Kilometre Six, or "Six" as locals call the area.

"They come from all over [Brazil] - all of them looking for work. People say, 'If you are looking for a job go and look for a farmer at Six."

While some pioneer hotels are legitimate flop houses, human rights activists believe many are effectively slave houses; places where impoverished workers are exploited by unscrupulous hotel owners and middlemen known as "gatos" or cats, who force them, to work until they have off paid their debts for food and housing.

Last year the Brazilian government's anti-slavery taskforce freed 4,634 workers from "slave-like conditions", about 600 of them here in the often-lawless Amazon state of Pará. Officials believe many of the men began life in slavery in such hotels; cramped, mosquito-ridden dens that can be found in most corners of the Amazon. The government calls such places "pontos de compra" or "buying points".

"People say, 'Go there because you'll find a job'," Claudio Secchin, a work ministry labour inspector, said during a recent anti-slavery operation in Marabá. "They put themselves up in these guesthouses and people take advantage of their fragility and trick them [into going] to the farms where they find a hostile environment of abandon and exploitation."

In recent years, Brazil's government has made efforts to stamp out modern-day slavery, sending teams of inspectors on regular missions to the Amazon accompanied by rifle-carrying federal police officers.

Secchin said progress was being made: the raids were helping the government gradually claw back control of a region that had become a place of "virtual anarchy".

But the practice of debt slavery continues across the Amazon and Brazil's midwest. Activists say there could be as many as 40,000 workers living in slave-like conditions across the country and hundreds of pioneer hotels continue to operate. In 2007, the owner of one pioneer hotel in the Amazon town of Paragominas was charged with involvement in a slavery network but activists say few such cases are ever heard.

"[These workers] go anywhere they hear there might be a chance of work to support their families," says José Batista, a Marabá-based anti-slavery campaigner from the Pastoral Land Commissionof Brazil's Catholic Church. "They are people who arrive thinking there is work for everyone, drawn by the propaganda. But they arrive, can't find work and don't have anywhere to go and they end up staying in the hotels waiting for someone to hire them."

There is little that can't be bought on the muddy streets around the Correntão; satellite dishes, mobile phones and truck tyres, toilet seats and goats, class A drugs and underaged prostitutes. Day and night battered open-backed trucks clatter past, packed with supplies, spattered with terracotta-coloured mud and carrying migrant workers to surrounding farms.

"The only people here who are from Marabá are our children," says João, a former gold miner and the owner of one of the city's pioneer hotels where bunk beds cost between 5 and 15 reais (£1.50-£4) a night.

Walmir dos Santos, 39, a migrant worker from Maranhao state, began his path into slavery at Kilometre Six.

"I went out looking for a job and I met this guy and we went off," he recalls. Dos Santos says he arrived at the Correntão one morning, found work in a charcoal furnace by noon, but had to wait a month to be rescued from his heavily-armed employer by the anti-slavery taskforce.

"They said Pará was good for work. It hasn't been very good so far," he says.

Eugenio Pereira da Silva, an illiterate chainsaw operator who was also recently freed by the government, says many of his fellow workers started life in pioneer hotels. "People come from all over and stay in the hotels. When they find a patrao (boss) they can get out and go and work for him. This kind of thing happens a lot."

The hotels are one part on a chain of exploitation that took root in Brazil in the 1960s as the government sought to occupy the world's largest tropical rainforest. Hundreds of thousands of Brazilians poured into the Amazon region and landowners looked to the impoverished northeastern workers as cheap labour to help them profit from the rainforests destruction.

"We were treated like slaves," says Francisco Raimundo Mendes, a 48-year-old from the northeastern state of Maranhão, who claims his employer had refused to provide him with medical treatment after he suffered a hernia while loading tree trunks onto a truck for 7.50 reais a day. "It was the greatest suffering in the world."

But Da Silva is upbeat after being told by government officials that he would receive several thousand reais in compensation from his former employer.

"We were drinking the water from the river and the animals drank there too," the father of five recalls. "If they [the government inspectors] hadn't turned up we'd still be working there now,"

What would he do now, without his job? "I don't have any studies, I can't read and things just keep getting more difficult for me," he sighs. "I have to work. I'll have to find another job in a farm or something."

- This article was first published in the Guardian

Gold miners return to Yanomami lands

Tom Phillips — 2008-02-19

One by one they emerge from the thick, green tangle of rainforest; tiny brown specks, flecked with red paint, fluorescent green parrot feathers and with tiny bamboo sticks jutting out from below their mouths.

They pause, suspiciously eyeing their visitors, before continuing their descent down the steep ravine, across a small creek and into the jungle clearing. Up close the specks form a queue of men, women, children and even emaciated dogs all painted in identical tribal colours and nearly all with white feathers pasted across their foreheads.

These are the Yanomami; a group of just under 30,000 indigenous people who live in one of the most remote and mysterious regions of the Amazon, a Portugal-sized area of almost pristine jungle, straddling the border between Brazil and Venezuela. For thousands of years the Yanomami have inhabited the region living in an almost identical way, hunters and gatherers, bound by age-old traditions and isolated from the modern world, deep in the world's largest tropical rainforest.

But for how long? In the 1980s, some 40,000 illegal wildcat miners poured into the Yanomami's ancestral lands in search of gold. The tribe was decimated by illnesses brought by the white man and by a violent physical assault aimed at expelling them from their territory. Many died from the flu or a malaria epidemic that swept the region. Others were simply shot. Human rights groups labelled what followed a "genocide". According to some sources, before the government expelled the miners in 1992, up to 20% of the Yanomami people died in just seven years.

Now the Indians fear history may be about to repeat itself. At the end of last year, the indigenous rights NGO Survival International reported that hundreds of illegal miners - known in Brazil as garimpeiros - were again flocking into Yanomami lands. Activists fear that the miners are likely to unleash a new wave of destruction in the region; bringing violence, alcoholism, disease and prostitution to the region's virtually untouched indigenous villages.

In October 2007 the world-famous Yanomami leader Davi Yanomami travelled to London to make a personal plea to the prime minister, Gordon Brown.

"My Yanomami people are suffering and our future is threatened," he wrote in a letter to the British leader. "Our land is being invaded by gold miners who pollute the rivers and bring in diseases.

"Yanomami," he concluded, "are starting to die."

For Yanomami Indians such as 25-year-old Graciano Yanomami (many of Brazil's indigenous people use their tribal name as their surname) the consequences of such an invasion are as predictable as they are terrifying. In the late 1980s, Graciano saw his tribe almost destroyed by the arrival of the wildcat miners, who came carrying both shotguns and illnesses to which his people had no natural immunity.

"When the gold miners came, my mother died. My father died. My sister died," he says matter-of-factly, sitting in a small jungle clearing deep in the Amazonian state of Roraima, a two-hour flight from its state capital Boa Vista.

"They died from malaria, the illnesses of the gold miners," he adds.

The Brazilian authorities too are beginning to admit the partial return of gold miners to the Yanomami's lands. At the end of last year the Sunday Herald flew over the region with the Brazilian Air Force, who are tasked with locating the illegal miners, hidden deep in the jungle and operating with the help of secretive runways carved into the rainforest.

During one of the flights the mission's commander, Colonel Jose Hugo Volkmer, a 49-year-old former fighter pilot, discovered one such mine. Volkmer spotted the mine - known as the Pista do Helio or Helio's Runway, after the miner who built it - to the left of his Cessna aircraft.

Volkmer's flying map of the region is scattered with dozens of red felt pen dots, representing illegal runways mainly used by illegal miners. Several are located in the Yanomami territory.

The prospect of a new gold rush has left those who have fought to protect the Yanomami Indians, such as Sister Alessia Pereira Leite, fearing for their future. The 71-year-old Brazilian nun first came to the region in 1988 as part of a Catholic humanitarian mission called SOS Yanomami. The mission had a simple goal: saving the Indians from extinction.

Leite never returned to her home, thousands of miles south in Minas Gerais. Instead she set up a medical centre that now offers treatment to hundreds of Yanomami families spread across around 30 local malocas, the communal wood houses where they live.

Since the last gold rush ended relief workers such as Leite have battled to rid the Yanomami territories of illnesses such as malaria. Now she fears that a new influx of miners could undo all her team's work to protect this ancient people.

"They the Yanomami are very scared of the farmers, of the loggers and principally of the gold miners," she says, sitting on a small concrete step outside the cramped wooden clinic she runs for the Yanomami. "They already know the consequences."

But the impoverished and nomadic hordes of Brazilian garimpeiros - who spend their lives scouring the rainforests of Brazil, Guyana and Venezuela for gold - are not the only concern in Yanomami villages such as Xitei.

Indian rights groups are also showing increasing fears over the possibility of a government-backed invasion of indigenous lands, such as those of the Yanomami. A government bill, by which multinational mining companies would be allowed to operate in indigenous areas, currently illegal under Brazilian law, is being discussed by politicians in the country's capital, Brasilia.

"Brazil is about to witness a new gold rush," the business pages of one major Brazilian newspaper warned last year. "This time in indigenous lands."

The Yanomami lands, believed to be on top of one of the world's largest untapped mineral reserves, are expected to be at the centre of this gold rush.

"The most desired mineral resources are located inside these indigenous areas, principally gold," warns Pierlangela Nascimento Wapichana, an outspoken representative of Brazil's National Indigenous Commission and herself an Indian from the state of Roraima.

The mining industry says opening up such areas to large-scale mining projects will help stamp out illegal mines, of which there are officially 192 in Brazil, mainly extracting diamonds and gold.

"The government bill is a way of putting an end to illegal mines, which are extremely damaging to indigenous populations," said Miguel Nery, director of Brazil's national department of mineral production, in a recent interview.

But activists such as Wapichana are unconvinced, describing the proposals as another step towards the eradication of indigenous cultures, languages and people in Brazil. When the Portuguese "discovered" Brazil in 1500 there were as many as six million Indians already living there. Today, according to government figures, there are less than 400,000.

"There are social consequences that must be taken into consideration Illnesses could arrive, money will arrive, bringing bad things such as alcohol."

"In Brazil, we have already seen these problems happen with the Yanomami. There was a genocide here, and it nearly finished off the Yanomami people," Wapichana warned following a recent presentation in the indigenous village of Manalai, where she had travelled to discuss the government plans with members of the Ingariko tribe who share the state of Roraima with the Yanomami.

"Brazil wants to be a big power. But this does not give it the right to steamroll over the rights of the Indians," she said. "The development of our country cannot be achieved through the extinction of its indigenous people and the disrespecting of their rights."

With so much money at stake such strong words may not be enough to fend off the advance into Yanomami lands.

Already signs of the white man's presence can be seen in the Yanomami villages of Roraima state; in the football shirts sported by young, Portuguese-speaking Yanomami, in the Western-style underpants which many Yanomami men now prefer to their traditional clothes and, most worryingly, in the STDs (or simply "penis" as many Yanomami generically refer to such illnesses) that have invaded such communities. In Xitei, Yanomami Indians based here on the Brazilian side of the border whisper nervously that Yanomamis in Venezuela have begun using shotguns rather than the tribe's traditional bow and arrow.

Nor does one need to look far for signs of the miners recent presence here. At Xitei, a rusty tractor used to flatten the runway and a burnt out helicopter serve as a reminder of the area's gold-mining days. It is something that orphaned Indians such as Graciano Yanomami never want to see again.

"Things are getting better here now," he says. "Before things were really bad, we had malaria, we had river blindness, we had flu and lots of other illnesses. Now we have health, there's less diarrhoea.

"Before, we had nothing. It's been five years since the gold miners have left and these problems are going away," he insists.

Flying out of Xitei is a terrifying and depressing experience. The plane rattles down the mud airstrip before being catapulted through the thick white mist that hangs low over the community and quickly swallows up the ground below.

It takes only a few seconds for the clusters of Yanomami Indians standing below to disappear from view. And as the plane climbs up into the skies above, it is impossible not to wonder if those last few lingering seconds, gazing down at these ancient, virtually untouched indigenous men and women will be your last.

- This article was first published in the Sunday Herald

Flying over the burning Amazon

Tom Phillips — 2007-11-09

Veteran Amazon pilots such as Fernando Galvao Bezerra are hard men to shock. During 20 years in aviation Mr Bezerra, 45, has ferried prostitutes and wildcat miners to remote, lawless goldmines. He has taxied wealthy loggers between ranches, lost countless colleagues to malaria and once survived when his plane plummeted out of the sky.

But as his 10-seater Cessna banked over a vast expanse of burning rainforest in the state of Mato Grosso, the pilot, who now works for the environmental group Greenpeace, was virtually speechless. "Holy shit," he blurted over the plane's PA system, as the plane swung sharply to the right towards an image of destruction which owed more to a scene from Apocalypse Now than the Amazon rainforest. "Just look at the size of what this guy is burning."

It is burning season in Brazil, and across the Amazon region, where illegal loggers, cattle ranchers and a growing number of soy producers continue their advance into their world's largest tropical forest, similar scenes are taking place. In August government satellites registered 16,592 fires across Brazil, the overwhelming majority in the Amazon.

For environmentalists the fires are one of the first indications that deforestation is once again on the rise. Over the last two years fears for the future of the Amazon have been tempered by news of a reduction in deforestation. In August the Brazilian government heralded a 30% drop in rainforest destruction - the result, it said, of a government deforestation plan launched in March 2004. The plan outlined the creation of conservation units and 19 anti-deforestation units in deforestation hotspots such as Novo Progresso and Apui.

Marina Silva, Brazil's environment minister, claimed the drop was a clear indication that the Action Plan for Amazon Deforestation Prevention and Control was working. "It is a great achievement for Brazilian society," she said.

Many, however, believe the good news is about to run out.

Already there are signs that rainforest destruction is gathering speed. Deforestation in the states of Mato Grosso and Para is reportedly rising, with chainsaws and forest fires levelling thousands of hectares of pristine forest. Figures released last week by Brazil's space agency, INPE, show that between May and July of this year there was a 200% rise in deforestation in Mato Grosso.

Further north, in the Amazon state of Para, local ranchers and environmental activists claim a similar process is under way. Flying over the south-western corner of Para the tell-tale signs that logging continues at a staggering rate are everywhere: in the illegal dirt tracks that trail through the forest and the trucks that are dotted along them; in the charred trees that litter the landscape; and most strikingly in the newly deforested areas, which have turned the landscape into a messy patchwork of dark green and dull brown.

"It [the level of deforestation] is definitely going to rise," said Agamenon da Silva Menezes, the president of the Rural Workers Union in the Amazon town of Novo Progresso and one of the region's most powerful farmers.

"Lula [president of Brazil) says what he says because it is beneficial for him. But this year they have chopped down much more. What I am supposed to say to the guys [to stop them?]" added Mr Menezes.

Mr Menezes compared the illegal actions of the loggers to the American invasion of Iraq. If George Bush could attack a country out of financial interest, why could the loggers not do the same to the rainforest, he wondered.

"If you were stood next to your house and there was a mahogany tree next to you which would be worth R$5,000 (£1,360) if you chopped it down and your son was there crying out with hunger what would you do?"

Activists claim that the spike in deforestation is a sign that the government's action plan has been largely ineffective. They argue that the recent reductions owe more to external economic factors such as the market price of soy and beef.

With ranchers now looking to cash in on rising prices, Marcelo Marquesini, a former inspector for Ibama (Brazilian ministry of the environment's enforcement agency) who now works for Greenpeace, says the outlook for the rainforest is bleak. "Brazilian society has to celebrate the reduction of deforestation over these three years. It genuinely did fall," said Mr Marquesini, whose organisation will next month launch a report criticising the government's failure to control this notoriously lawless region.

But, he added, "everything now leads us to believe that deforestation is going to rise again".

On the frontline of the government's battle against deforestation are men such as Decio Luiz Motta, a fresh-faced 38-year-old environmental inspector from Rio de Janeiro who heads a six-man taskforce in the dusty frontier town of Novo Progresso. Sitting at a rickety wooden table in the unit's improvised HQ, Mr Motta said progress was being made, pointing to the apprehension of 13 lorries carrying illegal wood the previous day. "Just our being here reduces what is happening," he said.

"The infrastructure we have is much better, you have people who know how to use satellite imagery, GPS. It used to be much more about following your nose. The monitoring teams would see smoke coming from a certain area and head there to check it out. Now we are much better equipped for this work."

Yet the challenges facing such inspectors are clear. Mr Motta's team has just three cars to police a huge and remote area of rainforest, for example.

The collusion of local residents with the loggers also made tackling deforestation more difficult. Mr Motta claimed that after a recent seizure of illegal wood in the nearby town of Castelo dos Sonhos the local petrol stations began to boycott the government inspectors, putting their vehicles temporarily out of action.

The region's loggers meanwhile are adamant that as long as the government gives them no economically viable alternative to logging, the deforestation will continue. "It is a farce," said Mr Menezes. "How are you going to take an area that has been mine for 20 years and tell me it is a conservation unit all of a sudden?"

He described the idea that a policy of "zero deforestation" could be introduced as "the biggest load of rubbish I have ever heard". Mr Menezes asked: "Where is he [President Lula] going to get 30,000 soldiers from to police the insides of this whole forest?"

Three thousand feet over the burning forest Paulo Adario, the Amazon director of Greenpeace, let out a sigh of resignation. "It's like a scene from a world war," he said gazing down at the forest, which now more resembled the aftermath of a napalm bombing.

"It is forbidden to sell cocaine, it's illegal to deal marijuana and it's illegal to molest little children," Mr Adario added with mix of frustration and irony. "And, as you can see, it is also illegal to destroy the Amazon rainforest."

This story originally appeared in The Guardian

Fragile peace returns to the slums

Tom Phillips — 2007-11-07

NIGHT WAS closing in on the squalid streets of Cite Soleil as two white armoured tanks carrying members of the Brazilian army's Seventh Infantry Division rolled into Port-au-Prince's most notorious shantytown. Through the green and black haze of their night vision goggles the soldiers squinted out at their surroundings: crumbling shacks with gaping holes gouged out of them by automatic gunfire; stray dogs picking at fetid mounds of rubbish; the occasional kerosene fire flickering eerily in the darkness. A year ago this desolate setting might also have been accompanied by the crackle of gunfire. But tonight the streets were silent.

"They haven't shot at us since March," boasted Colonel Carlos Jorge, a hulking army veteran from the south of Brazil.

Until a year ago, UN peacekeepers such as Jorge were fighting street-to-street battles against heavily armed gangs in Haiti's capital. Now they talk of the end of an "operative" phase and the beginning of an "eminently preventative" one, meaning that, for now at least, the storm of violence is easing.

"We can't say that the violence problem is completely resolved," cautioned Ricardo Pilar, the commander of the Brazilian marines in Port-au-Prince. "There are still some focuses of violence to eliminate. But Haiti is moving forward slowly."

Few countries boast as turbulent a history as Haiti, the world's first black republic. Founded in 1804, this desperately poor Caribbean country has spent much of the past century immersed in bloodshed, ruled by corrupt, abusive regimes or occupied by foreign forces.

In February 2004, when president Jean-Bertrand Aristide was forced into exile, Haiti plunged once again into violence: roadblocks burned across the capital while rival gangs battled it out in scenes which would have shocked even the most hardened of Brazilian soldiers, accustomed to gangland shootouts back home in Rio's favelas.

Four months later, a Brazil-led UN stabilisation mission, known as Minustah, took over from an interim group of US marines and French soldiers who had been occupying the country since Aristide's departure.

Their task could scarcely have been more demanding: to contain the violence that had taken grip in sprawling slums such as Cite Soleil, where teenage gangsters roamed the streets with heavy artillery and killed with impunity.

But now, more than three years on, the Brazilians claim to have achieved a "pacification", however fragile.

An abandoned market at the heart of Cite Soleil that once served as a hideout for local gangsters has been transformed into a UN stronghold, circled by barbed wire and peace-keepers armed with Para-Fal assault rifles. In the nearby slum of Bois Neuf, a former kidnapping den has become a UN base.

Haiti also has a new president - Rene Preval, who was elected in February 2006 pledging to rid his country of the label "failed state" and now claims to be doing exactly that.

The question is how long can the "pacification" last? Robert Montenald, a 32-year-old social worker from Bel-Air, said that unless fundamental problems such as health care, unemployment and education were addressed, the peace was unlikely to last.

Less than two hours from Miami by plane, Haiti is one of the world's most miserable countries, with around 80% of the population surviving on less than £2 a day. Life expectancy is just 57 years old here, compared with an average of 69 in Latin America.

"It is about poverty, misery and illiteracy," Montenald said. "After so many years of war and violence we need to re-educate people."

Others fear that if the UN troops withdraw, the bloodletting is likely to return. While several gang leaders have been imprisoned or eliminated, many others are believed to have gone into hiding.

"There are still crooks out there that the UN can't get Our country has no army, just a police force that has no chance of fighting against the bandits. If the UN decide to send the Brazilian force away, the country will not do well," said Sailt Wilgels, 31, a community leader in the Cite Militaire slum.

In Port-au-Prince's slums - where pigs and naked children mingle in smouldering heaps of rubbish - the reminders of violence are everywhere; in the cinder-block houses pock-marked with bullets or in the sound of automatic rifles clicking to life as UN convoys approach a slum's entrance.

Marines such as Carlos Alberto Farage, a 25-year-old evangelical from Rio de Janeiro, say they remain constantly wary of the so-called "cones da morte" or "death points" in the city's shantytowns.

"They are the places they can shoot at us from and run away: windows, alleyways, rooftops," he explained.

Colonel Carlos Jorge admitted that Port-au-Prince's gangs still possessed a vast array of guns, among them Israeli assault rifles and AK-47s.

At Camp Charlie, the largest Brazilian military base in Haiti's capital, the only certainty most soldiers have is the number of days until they return home. Few are optimistic about the long-term future of the country they will leave behind.

"Those people who shot at us are still out there," said Colonel Julio Cesar de Sales, who commands the seventh contingent of Brazilian troops. "They don't shoot because there is no need. But if the reconstruction does not come, I really don't know what might happen."

Originally published in the Sunday Herald

Life and death in Brazil's Wild West

Tom Phillips — 2007-08-04

An unusual greeting awaits visitors to Castelo dos Sonhos, a former gold mining boomtown deep in the Brazilian Amazon. On the right, as you approach the dust-clogged settlement, a wooden crucifix sprouts from the undergrowth marking the spot where, in 2002, gunmen dumped the bullet-riddled body of a local human rights defender.

Just beyond the cross, at the town's entrance, a white sign looms ominously over the roadside. "Welcome to the Castle of Dreams. Love it or leave it."

The Castle of Dreams must rank as one of the most inappropriately named places in the world.

Located in the Amazonian state of Para - a region at the centre of illegal deforestation and which is also the Brazilian champion of rural violence - it was baptised by fortune-hunting goldminers who flocked from all over Brazil during the 1970s and '80s.

These days, however, the wealth has dried up leaving an impoverished, violent frontier town about which there is little to love or dream about.

Locals claim that the small town's cemetery is home to at least 100 bodies containing some kind of bullet wound. The town's main avenue, a dirt track built around what was once a goldmine airstrip, is now home to half a dozen squalid brothels where girls, some as young as 12, can be negotiated for as little as £5.

This is the Brazilian Wild West, a state where land conflicts rage and rural leaders who oppose those trying to tear down the world's largest rainforest are often executed.

According to Brazilian human rights group Justica Global, 772 activists and rural workers were killed here in Para between 1971 and 2004, while only three of these cases were ever brought to trial.

Bartolomeu Morais da Silva, the 47-year-old leader of the rural workers' union here in Castelo dos Sonhos, was one such victim. Da Silva, or Brasilia as he was known to his many friends, led the fight against the local ranchers who were trying to expel the poor from their land.

He was gunned down on July 21, 2002, and dumped beside the BR-163, a muddy highway that cuts 1000km through the jungle from north to south.

"For them the ranchers it was better to eliminate him like this He wanted justice for the poor, for the needy and they the ranchers were jealous.

"He was a clever guy," said his brother, Judas Tadeu de Morais, 51, picking his way through the undergrowth to the spot where da Silva's mangled body was abandoned exactly five years ago, filled with 12 bullet holes.

"He was a fighter He could have been elected mayor here and ordered them around.

"He was belly up, like this, with his head inside the thicket and his legs splayed out," he added, motioning to the ground.

Brasilia's execution was part of a 30-year wave of politically motivated murders in the Brazilian Amazon.

Similar assassinations continue to take place across this notoriously lawless region, where the advance of illegal loggers and cattle ranchers has triggered an explosive dispute for land.

Human-rights activists and environmentalists are routinely eliminated by those they oppose; threats against them are commonplace.

In the nearby town of Sao Felix do Xingu, the mayor recently banned motorcycle helmets after locals complained that gunmen were using them to hide their identities while carrying out their duties.

Meanwhile, environmental group Greenpeace has started using bulletproof vehicles in the region because of constant threats against its activists.

The Bishop responsible for Castelo dos Sonhos has been known to wear a bulletproof vest under his cassock because of threats against his life.

The best-known "rainforest martyr" was elderly American nun Dorothy Stang, who worked with the poor of Anapu, another small town in Para, and tried to fight off the loggers' advance.

On February 12, 2005, as she visited one settlement, Stang, 72, was confronted by two gunmen and shot at close range as she read to them from the Bible. "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice," she reportedly told her killers shortly before they took her life. "For they shall be satisfied."

Since Stang's murder in 2005 the Brazilian government has stepped up attempts to clamp down on the pistoleiros or hired guns of the Amazon rainforest as well as launching an offensive against ranchers who exploit slave labour. For a period after Stang's death, the army was even sent in to keep order.

The governor of Para, Ana Julia Carepa, also recently vowed to deploy police helicopters to counter the armed groups that are hired by powerful ranchers to defend their land and silence their critics.

"Our goal is to lose the title of Brazilian champion of violence to be the champion of human rights," she said in an interview earlier this year.

Yet visit small towns in Para like Castelo dos Sonhos - as lawless as they are isolated - and it is clear just how far off this target still is.

"I haven't been killed because of luck," said Antonio Ferreira de Almeida Silva, 47, who took on the thorny task of defending Castelo dos Sonhos's poor after the execution of his friend and colleague, Brasilia.

"They the gunmen say that if I go out anywhere I'm going to be killed, that I could be killed at any time To this day I don't have the courage to go to a party around here. I've never been and I won't go. It's heavy stuff."

Even the gunmen of Castelo dos Sonhos - themselves luckless, impoverished men, who can be hired for as little as £20 - are not immune to the violence.

"All I know is that he disappeared," said Antonia Ferreira, 49, whose husband allegedly worked for the ranchers as a hitman before mysteriously disappearing into the forest one morning. Locals believe his death was what Brazilians call a "queima de arquivo", literally an archive burn - he knew too much so he had to be eliminated.

"He left one day at 5am on his motorbike and never came back," added a weeping Ferreira who denied that her husband was a killer.

Father Jose Amaro Lopes de Souza, a Catholic priest who worked alongside Dorothy Stang in Anapu, is another of those whose death has repeatedly been "announced" by his enemies.

"The whole situation is coming back with force," said Father de Souza, at his parish home, a wooden shack located next door to Stang's old residence. "The threats are constant."

He pulled out a photo album containing dozens of pictures of the American nun lying face down in the mud, a bright crimson stain across her T-shirt.

With no government protection, Father de Souza instead keeps two ferocious dogs in his garden to ward off the gunmen.

"They the politicians come here and speak oh so beautifully, hitting the table with their fists, but the tape never changes, things just get more and more complicated and history keeps repeating itself," he said.

In towns like Castelo dos Sonhos and Anapu, one of the biggest problems is the near-total absence of the state. With a population of around 12,000, Castelo dos Sonhos boasts just seven policemen. In the rainy season it can take days to reach the nearest sizeable city.

Instead, locals say, such areas are effectively controlled by "consorcios" or "consortiums" of ranchers who pay off the police and distribute justice down the barrel of a rifle.

"It's a mafia, it's an organisation of the farmers," said Morais. "They get together and they pay the gunman. There were more than 10 involved in the killing of my brother. The guy who ordered it was arrested. But there were more involved. What about them?"

Tarcisio Feitosa da Silva, the prominent Brazilian environmentalist who received the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize last year because of his fight to defend the rainforest, claimed that the region was controlled by "criminal gangs" and an "illegal police force".

"The state must intervene in these areas to stop the land-grabbers," he said, adding that the region was currently "without law and without owner".

Marcelo Marquesini, a forest engineer and Greenpeace campaigner in the Amazon, defined the region as the "land of the Malboro Man the wild west".

Not everybody agrees with this analysis. Leo Reck, one of the founders of Castelo dos Sonhos, brushes off the idea that the town he helped create should, as many locals have suggested, be renamed the Castle of Nightmares.

"This is one of the calmest places I know," explained a softly-spoken Reck, who was reputedly nicknamed the White Panther during the 1980s because of his involvement in often bloody struggles for control of the area's goldmines.

"You can walk around at night. You can go wherever you want," he said.

After a few days in Castelo dos Sonhos, however, it is hard to agree with such a verdict.

It was approaching 10am but a relentless sun was already beating down on a shabby cemetery on the town's outskirts.

Morais was here to visit his brother's grave, a drab concrete slab nestled between dozens of rickety wooden crosses, many without names.

He strolled to the other side of the graveyard, pointing out the graves of several other murdered locals, and towards half a dozen empty pits that had recently been dug into the terracotta earth in anticipation of the next victims.

"Around here the level of crookedness is so high that they dig the graves before the victim has even died," Morais sniggered angrily, motioning to the holes.

He turned back to his brother's grave and wondered out loud: "Who'll be the next unfortunate soul?"

Originally published in the Sunday Herald

Rio's frontline preachers

Tom Phillips — 2007-07-30

It was just after midnight and outside a tatty corner bar on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro a dozen heavily armed drug traffickers were killing time with a game of cards, a bulging joint and a bottle of 12-year-old Ballantine's whisky.

From the shadows a muscle-bound hulk wearing a garish yellow shirt and with a bible wedged under his arm strode in and ushered the traffickers' leader into the bar. Ten minutes later the leader, an assault rifle laid across his lap, was in tears.

Sobbing, he told his visitor, known in these parts as Pastor Dione, he wanted to leave the gang but didn't know how. The preacher grabbed his arm and tried to comfort him.

"You might think that nobody cares about you," he said forcefully. "But Jesus loves you. And I am here for you. I am your pastor and I will help you."

It has been a violent year even for Rio, which annually registers about 6,000 murders. More than 50 police officers have died since January, while the latest clash between police and traffickers has claimed 16 lives in just over two weeks.

With no sign of the violence abating few are brave enough to reach out to the armed men on the frontline of Rio's 30-year drug conflict. A handful of support groups which aim to draw traffickers back into mainstream, law-abiding, society exists here. Among them is Soldado Nunca Mais (Trafficker Never Again) and Afro-Reggae. But for the most part such work is left to an army of Pentecostal preachers such as Dione dos Santos, the 33-year-old head of the God's Assembly, Restoration Ministry Church, in Senador Camara, a rundown district in west Rio.

Each week hundreds of these missionaries trawl the back alleys and drug dens of Rio's favelas armed with nothing but a copy of the New Testament, hoping to save both souls and lives.

"My function is to avoid deaths, brother, you get me?" said Pastor Dione during one "incursion", speaking in the same street slang he uses when addressing traffickers.

Alex Casemiro, another preacher, said: "Lots of pastors say they want to preach just so they can sit on their sofa. Very few do what we are doing." He was racing through another slum in his Ford Focus hoping to help free three young men who apparently had been kidnapped and sentenced to death by a drug gang from another favela.

Like the UN and Red Cross, Rio's frontline preachers possess a type of carte blanche to operate in the city's most inaccessible and dangerous corners. When Rio's police try to enter a favela, they are often received with gun fire; when the evangelists do so they are greeted with a slightly embarrassed smile or a hug from the gang members.

"No one here is so up themselves [that they reject the preachers]," one high-ranking trafficker from the Third Command drug faction told the Guardian during a recent visit to one of the group's HQs, a concrete shack manned by young traffickers armed with AK-47s and an anti-aircraft machine-gun capable of firing up to 500 rounds a minute. "The boys all know they are here to try and liberate us, to help us stop smoking, stop snorting and stop trafficking."

Many such preachers are former gang members who see the traffickers not just as violent killers but also as deeply vulnerable young men.

Pastor Dione, who said that until 10 years ago he was also in the drug "movement", often tells traffickers: "What you are, I once was. What I am today, you too can become."

On one missionary visit, and referring to Rio's four main drug factions, he told an AK-47-wielding trafficker: "A life is a life. It doesn't matter whether you are TCP, TC, ADA, CV or whatever. Think about it. Take two hours out for God and come to the church."

Not all of the preachers' beliefs are as progressive as their attempts to rescue gangsters might suggest. Many consider homosexuality the work of the devil and encourage their female worshippers to cover themselves with the roupao, a baggy body-length robe.

Yet the results of their highly risky visits to Rio's slums are impossible to deny. Pastor Dione claims to have convinced several hundred criminals to swap their weapons for the word of god.

"If it wasn't for the pastor I'd be dead already," said one teenage recruit, who claimed that before his conversion he had been employed to chop up corpses with an axe. A 21-year-old, Marcelo dos Santos, one of the youngest members of Pastor Dione's team, said: "My mum gets worried about the early mornings and the shootouts but this is our work, our lives are in the hands of Jesus."

A garage holding mattresses and wooden pews serves as Pastor Dione's church. At a recent gathering the immaculately dressed evangelist was on stage preaching at the top of his voice to a heaving audience. "Do you know what I say to the believers who are scared of evangelising in the drug dens?" he bellowed. "Stop clowning around! Today we are going out onto the streets. Today we are going to invade the drug dens."

"Hallelujah!" the worshippers screamed back.

After the service Pastor Dione and eight colleagues piled into a white VW van and went out into the night. Two hours later they pulled up at a roadblock in the Complexo da Mare, a slum near Rio's international airport. Half a dozen traffickers, carrying grenades, revolvers and automatic rifles, surged round the van to receive a blessing.

"Come with us now! Put your gun down and come with us back to the church," the preachers insisted, prompting an uncomfortable silence.

After several hours preaching, Pastor Dione's men were ready for bed. They gathered in a bar to discuss the night's events over Coca-Cola. It was nearly 5am. "Who else comes here and hugs the drug traffickers?" asked Pastor Dione. "[The traffickers] think 'the state doesn't care about me [and] the police come in here shooting, and these people come in here telling me I matter, that Jesus loves me' - this is our mission."

Originally published in The Guardian.

Pollution stains pristine beaches of Rio

Tom Phillips — 2007-07-12

Standing on the putrid banks of Rio's Cunha canal it is hard to believe that 30 years ago this was a favourite thoroughfare for dolphins, and that two centuries ago the Portuguese royal family swam here, surrounded by pristine strips of sand.

These days the burnt-out chassis of an abandoned Volkswagen pokes through the surface of the black sludge and the air is permeated with the acidic stench of sewage, which flows into the water from the Complexo da Mare, a vast shantytown not far from the international airport.

"There was white sand over there," says Waldeck Monteiro, 42, a fisherman. "You could swim in the water and there were fish all over the place. Now if you put your net in you'll probably end up pulling out a corpse."

The Cunha canal is one of the tributaries to the Guanabara bay, the centrepiece of one of the world's most naturally beautiful cities. Look to the right and the unmistakable Christ the Redeemer statue towers over the city's mountains.

Pollution is nothing new to Rio de Janeiro, but environmentalists say many of the city's waterways now represent a grave threat to public health and Rio's tourism industry.

In January a stretch of the Barra da Tijuca beach was cordoned off after toxic algae appeared in the water, and at the end of March authorities removed a tonne of dead fish from the Guanabara bay.

Dark stains known as "black tongues" periodically appear on Rio's beaches, and strips of white and yellow foam - the result of untreated sewage, environmentalists say - have started to show up off the upmarket beach neighbourhood of Leblon. After a large crimson stain appeared at Leblon government officials claimed the "red tide" was the product of harmless algae. Environmentalists are unconvinced.

"This is now a question of public health," said Mario Moscatelli, a biologist and prominent environmental activist, who says he has vaccinated his two young daughters against Hepatitis A and B so they can use the beaches. "The fact that we have to cordon off beaches shows we have gone over the limits," he said. "[Pollution] is coming from all angles."

Activists hope Rio's newly appointed environment secretary, the veteran environmentalist Carlos Minc, can achieve some success. His deputy, Izabella Teixeira, said the state government planned to spend R$140m (£35m) to clean up Rio's beaches and lakes; further money would be put into sewage treatment projects.

"In truth Rio de Janeiro always thought that nothing bad would happen because it was the capital," she said. "When it stopped being the capital [in 1960] it moved into the shadows ... it lost these investments to correct all of these problems."

The scale of the challenge facing Mr Minc can be seen from the fishing colony on the Cunha canal where sewage from the giant shantytown pours out into the Guanabara bay. The colony is home to Luiz Fernando de Queiroz Bispo, an odd-job man turned environmental campaigner, who has become a minor celebrity in Rio since word got out about his floating house made almost entirely from rubbish fished from the filthy water.

Authorities plan to turn Mr Bispo's home - which boasts a whirlpool bath and a floating garage on which his battered Chevrolet is parked - into an environment-themed museum as an example of how to preserve nature through recycling.

Mr Bispo, meanwhile, has become a spokesman in the city's fight against pollution. "This is about bad governance and overpopulation," he said, perched on the artificial grass porch of his floating home, which is supported by a mixture of plastic bottles, reinforced concrete and wooden crates. Last month, he says, he found a plastic bag containing three foetuses floating in the canal. "You can swim in it if you want, but it's not advisable," he said.

Environmentalists have welcomed plans for a "green revolution" in Rio, pointing out that Mr Minc is the first environmentalist ever to be put in charge of the state's environment secretariat. They warn, however, that 200 years of pollution cannot be undone in four years of government. "There's a sign above the road at the entrance to the city that says 'Welcome to Rio', and you just think, 'You're joking aren't you?'" said Mr Moscatelli. "In places where you could have tourism you have giant dustbins of litter and sewage. The city is still marvellous, but it is being trashed."

Originally published in The Guardian.

The Men in Black: The rise of Rio de Janeiro's paramilitaries

Tom Phillips — 2007-02-11

Nightfalls on the shadowy back alleys of Cidade Alta, and at the heart of the favela Gilberto Martins and his men are preparing for war.

At the back of a small, smoke-filled bar, a middle-aged man sits alone flicking through a thick wad of cash and occasionally fiddling with three revolver magazines stacked on the table in front of him. Outside a queue of teenage drug traffickers stare nervously down the road, with M16 assault rifles slung across their chests and their fingers clasped around the triggers.

It is just after 10pm in Cidade Alta, a rundown housing estate-cum-shantytown on Rio's northern outskirts, and there is hardly a resident in sight. The community is preparing for the invasion. This is the front line of Rio de Janeiro's latest 'war on drugs' - a battle between the drug traffickers and a growing army of paramilitary vigilantes seeking to drive their enemies,literally, into the sea. The shop shutters are down as the drug traffickers push out on to the streets. Cidade Alta, a normally bustling community that is home to more than 20,000 impoverished Brazilians, has been transformed into a ghost town.

Until recently Cidade Alta was best known for its fictional violence. It was here,amid the sprawling mishmash of tower blocks and breeze block shacks, that the Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles shot much of his Oscar-nominated film City of God, a tour through the violent underbelly of gangland Rio. The favelais now at the centre of its own drama - an explosive power dispute which could mark the beginning of a new cycle of violence.

With names like the Men in Black and the Galacticos, Rio's paramilitaries - now thought to control at least 92 of the city's 600-odd favelas - are a mysterious collective of off-duty police officers, firemen, prison guards and other volunteers, disillusioned with the city's growing lawlessness. Their aim, they say, is to drive the drug traffickers out of the slums, slash crime levels and impose law and order in a notoriously violent city. If the state cannot protect its citizens, they say, we will. 'All we want is for our children not to have to grow up seeing drugs and guns,' one militia leader said in a recentinter view with a Brazilian magazine.

By nighton the eerie back streets of Cidade Alta such social advances are hard to detect. Even in the darkness it is possible to make out thick punctures in several of the buildings - the result of a recent gun battle between paramilitaries and the traffickers from the Red Command faction that control the favela and are led by Gilberto Martins, a drug lord better known by his nick name 'Mineiro'.

Comparisons between Rio's death toll and that of official war zones are common. Last year there were around 6,000 homicides here, many drug-related. The city even nowboasts its own website - Rio Body Count - which models itself on the North American iraqbodycount.com and aims to document rampant levels of homicide across Rio de Janeiro state. 'The Brazilian government has made a big effort to saythat Rio is a place of beaches, beautiful bottoms [and] physical beauty,' its creator, Andre Dahmer, told The Observer last week. '[But] there are areas in Rio de Janeiro that are veritable war zones.'

Until recently the bloodshed in Rio was largely restricted to clashes between police and rival drug gangs. Now heavily armed vigilante groups are throwing a new factor into the equation. In Rio de Janeiro they are called the milícia

It wasearly on Saturday when the milícia arrived in Cidade Alta. According to locals,about 60 men, all dressed in black and many masked, poured up the hillside intothe heart of the community. They forced the area's drug traffickers - membersof the Red Command faction - to strip to their underwear and parade through thefavela before declaring the shanty town paramilitary territory.

Two daysafter the milícia seized control of Cidade Alta, the traffickers returned,expelling the Galacticos, as the paramilitaries had dubbed themselves, andkilling one. In all, seven men were killed in the struggle for the district andeight injured, among them several unarmed shanty dwellers.

Residentsnow believe that revenge will not be long in coming. Brazilian press reportssuggest that the vigilante group is recruiting a larger force to launch asecond offensive on Cidade Alta. So while the favela's drug bosses silentlystockpile weapons to help resist a second paramilitary attack, the local peoplestay nervously indoors.

Sittingin his small air-conditioned office inside Rio's Legislative Assembly, MarceloFreixo looks a worried man, with thick blue bags under both eyes. The newlyelected state deputy and veteran human rights activist says he fears the expansionof Rio's militia could 'create a whole new scenario of violence' in Rio,similar to the growth of right-wing paramilitaries in Colombia.

'This is very serious,' he says. 'It is starting to get very close to the situation inColombia.' Freixo compares the militias to mafia-style organisations, seekingto create their own 'parallel states' within Rio to make money. 'Militias arecriminal groups. They dominate territory, they take control of the sale of gas,of local transport networks, and they charge for security,' he says. 'And ontop of that they kill people who position themselves against them.'

After a series of recent clashes between traffickers and militia in which severalinnocent bystanders were killed, Freixo requested a parliamentary inquiry intothe groups. Yet he is pessimistic about the chances of such an investigationbeing approved. There are too many political interests at stake, he says,suggesting that many high-profile politicians in Rio are somehow connected tothe militias, which are becoming, he argues, a 'criminal wing of the state'.

'Themilitia is about the absence of the state,' he said. 'It solves nothing - it isa symptom of war. They are substituting for the state. This is the start ofwhat you could call a war.'

As Rio'sparamilitaries grow in stature and gain more public exposure, the authoritiesare beginning to speak out against them. Rio's governor, Sergio Cabral,admitted last week that the continued presence of such groups would be 'the endof the world' for his city. 'We will not tolerate it... In Bogota paramilitarygroups were accepted by communities and today there are numerous problemsbecause of this. We cannot tolerate a parallel state, whether it is that of the drug traffickers or the militias.'

Yet with the newspapers filled with graphic reports of violence and around 20 per centof the population living in slums ruled by ruthless drug lords, many view thevigilantes as a lesser of two evils - despite reports of the gruesome waysparamilitaries are said to have disposed of their enemies, dismembering themand throwing them into the Atlantic.

Severalleading politicians have even offered thinly disguised support to the militia.In a recent interview with the Jornal do Brasil newspaper, Rio's mayor, CesarMaia, said that 'compared to drug trafficking anything is better'.

'I don't think this persecution is fair,' state deputy Flavio Bolsonaro told Rio's Assembly last week. 'Should we condemn the policemen who are there trying to exorcise from the middle of their families criminals who will never berehabilitated? One cannot simply stigmatise the militias,' he argued. 'Thereare a series of benefits in this.'

One thingis certain: Rio's traffickers have been thrown on to the back foot by theparamilitary surge, at least temporarily. 'There were more of them and they hadbetter guns,' one drug trafficker recently expelled from a favela in western Rio by the Men in Black told The Observer. 'What could we do? We fled.'

It is nowjust after 2am and the Bar do Pretinho, a cramped shack at the heart of CidadeAlta, is filled with a handful of heavily inebriated men and two scantily cladyoung girls. It is the only place still open in the favela - even the 24-hourevangelical churches have shut up shop, fearful of new confrontations.

The edgy silence is broken only by the warm gusts of wind that sweep across the dustysquare and the roar of motorcycle engines as the Red Command's heavily armed'night watch' swings by to check everything is under control. 'This shit iscrazy,' says one resident, a former drug trafficker, leaning against the barwith a plastic cup of beer in his hand. He speaks quietly and quickly andglances constantly out into the street.

'They[the militia] are just waiting for the dust to settle in the media and they'llbe back. And if they do come back, I'll pick up a gun, too... If they try andinvade my community, I'll kill them. They come here and fuck with theresidents: what am I gonna do?'

Originally published in The Guardian (link)

"Everyone knew she was ill": The life and death of Ana Carolina Reston

Tom Phillips — 2007-01-14

Jundiai town, São Paulo, Brazil. A brown-haired teenage girl walks on to the stage at the local beauty contest. Below, her parents, wedged at the front of a cheering audience, clap enthusiastically as a judge slips a green and white sash over their daughter's head and pronounces her the Queen of Jundiai, 1999. Her mother wasn't surprised: 'The other girls were podgy and had bottoms,' she said later. 'She won because she was slim and elegant.'

It doesn't seem an earth-shattering achievement. But for 13-year-old Ana Carolina Reston Marcan it was one step nearer her dream of becoming a supermodel. It would take Reston (who dropped Marcan from her professional name) seven years to 'arrive', by which time she would be working as far afield as Hong Kong and Japan, for designers as well known as Giorgio Armani and Dior.

But it was on 14 November last year that she finally crossed over from being a successful catwalk model to appearing on the cover of every magazine and newspaper in Brazil, and making headlines around the globe. Not for her modelling, but for her agonising death, attributed to 'complications arising from anorexia'.

In a year in which both 'skinny chic' (wearing oversized clothes on tiny body frames) and the American size 00 (an emaciated UK size two, or a waist the same as a typical seven-year-old's) was the height of fashion in celebrity-land, Reston's demise seems all the more poignant. She was also the second model to die from an eating disorder during 2006. In August, at a fashion show in Uruguay, 22-year-old Luisel Ramos suffered a heart attack thought to be the result of anorexia. Although anorexia isn't the preserve of the fashion industry, it's hardly surprising that Reston's death has shone a spotlight on the way the business treats its models, and more significantly, on how destructive our current perception of female beauty can be.

Reston's short life began in Pitangueiras private hospital in Jundiai on 29 May 1985. She was born into a comfortable, middle-class family; her father, Narciso Marcan, worked for a German multinational while her mother, Miriam Reston, sold jewellery. They were neither desperately poor nor offensively rich and lived in a small but elegant bungalow on the outskirts of town.

From an early age Reston wanted to be a model, partly in order to provide her family with a better life. It's not clear why she felt such responsibility, but in the early Nineties her father was diagnosed with both Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease and was later made redundant. Even before then, though, her mother remembers the young Reston spiriting bras and high heels from her closet and pirouetting around the house in them, asking people to take her photograph. Then one day in 1999, on the school bus home, she spotted a sign announcing a beauty contest for the Queen of Jundiai. She leapt off and signed herself up.

A few weeks later she took her mother on an all expenses-paid luxury trip to Rio - her prize for winning the competition. When they returned, a fashion agent offered to introduce her to Ford, one of Brazil's top modelling agencies, for a fee of £100. The family accepted.

Reston's career took off almost immediately and it soon became apparent that she had her eye on the big prize - becoming a supermodel, like fellow Brazilian Gisele. Reston's friends thought that for the more glamorous catwalk and editorial modelling she was, at just over 5ft 6in, too short. But she wouldn't be put off; she altered her height on her publicity shots and claimed she was just over 5ft 7in. And she seemed to get away with it. In July 2003, after four successful years at Ford, she signed to Elite, one of the biggest agencies in Brazil, a move which catapulted her from teenage wannabe to serious model.

Still Reston wanted to work abroad, and in January 2004 she finally made her first trip overseas. She was sent to Guangzhou, a Chinese city not far from Hong Kong, for three months. But although no one can pin an exact date on when she began to suffer from anorexia, one former booker, who refuses to be named, believes that it was here things started to unravel for the then 18-year-old. Reston, like so many other teenage models, travelled unaccompanied by either a personal friend or family member, someone who could help her negotiate a way through the lonely castings, where personal criticism came as standard. 'She arrived in China,' explains a booker, 'and the guys looked at her and said, "You're fat." She took this very personally.'

Her unhappiness was evident in the letters she sent home. In one to her mother, Reston describes arriving in 'that big place'. She goes on: 'I [felt] so small, the city so big. I didn't understand anything... It didn't go right. I failed.' Her confidence was being destroyed.

Back in Brazil, Reston's descent into anorexia (which ultimately resulted in her shrinking from 8st to 6st) became all too obvious. When Laura Ancona, a journalist at the Brazilian fashion magazine Quem, befriended Reston towards the end of 2004, she sensed immediately that something was wrong. Reston, she says, only ever drank fruit juice, and after her death was found to have survived on a diet of apples and tomatoes. As Ancona recalls: 'She said, "I can't eat any more." She told me she tried to eat but felt like vomiting. She knew she had a problem, but didn't know what she was suffering from. I think I was the first person to explain it to her - I knew she was anorexic, because someone in my family had suffered in the same way.'

According to Ancona, Reston's condition was common knowledge. 'Everyone knew she was ill,' she says. 'The other girls, the agencies, everyone. Don't believe it when they say they didn't.' Reston's aunt, Mirtes Reston, who plans to present a petition to the government demanding steps to monitor the modelling industry, is more direct. 'These girls are white slaves,' she says. 'We want models to have rights. At the moment they are given no pension, no support... They just take the person away from their family and abandon them far away.'

In his private clinic in Jardins, a leafy, upmarket neighbourhood of Sao Paulo, psychologist Dr Marco Antonio De Tommaso, who voluntarily runs a fortnightly drop-in clinic at two of the city's largest modelling agencies, Elite and L'Equipe, is preparing some notes on eating disorders. Tommaso has spent 11 years working with models and given consultations to nearly 2,000 of them, including some of the country's most famous faces. He also treated Reston.

Tommaso's take on the fashion industry, and what he calls the 'dictatorship of beauty', is bleak. He regards Reston's experience as typical, citing in particular the way in which 'new faces' are parachuted into the most demanding and adult of worlds when they are unable to cope. 'They experience lots of changes all at the same time,' says Tommaso. 'They move city, they move state, they start living alone, and the work is very demanding. Everything happens very quickly, and it is all so unpredictable.'

There are no official studies to prove the link between the fashion industry and eating disorders, but many experts point to a clear correlation between the two. In a letter from 40 doctors at the Eating Disorders Service and Research Unit at King's College London to the British Fashion Council last October, Professor Janet Treasure wrote: 'There is no doubt there is cause and effect here. The fashion industry showcases models with extreme body shapes, and this is undoubtedly one of the factors leading to young girls developing disorders.'

This is borne out by Tommaso's experience. 'If someone is just a tiny bit bigger than the industry demands,' he says, 'they are treated as if they were morbidly obese. This encourages a pattern of beauty that is absolutely unreal.' Such pressures, he continues, lead many such women to build up what he calls 'an arsenal of anorexia': special diets, prescription and illegal drugs, starving themselves. He remembers one young model even using pills for fighting intestinal worms in order to lose weight. Journalist Laura Ancona is not surprised: 'I've lost count of how many times I've seen models vomiting in the toilets [at fashion events], or sniffing cocaine, or 13-year-old girls fainting because they're not eating properly.'

Anorexia is obviously not an illness exclusive to the fashion industry, or Brazil. According to the Norwich-based Eating Disorders Association, between one and two per cent of young adult women worldwide suffer from the eating disorder and most, like Reston, are 15-25 years old. It kills somewhere between 13 and 20 per cent of its victims. It's not known exactly what causes anorexia, but Tommaso asserts that, for young models at least, professional demands can be a 'very strong factor'.

There are other pressures, too. As Tommaso points out: 'Often, low-income families begin to see their offspring as the chicken that lays gold eggs and expect them to support the entire household. The models, in turn, begin to push themselves harder and harder, placing greater demands on their bodies in the hope they will earn more money.'

Certainly Reston faced problems at home. The family's life savings had been stolen in 2002 and because they only had her sick father's pension of around £250 a month to live on, Miriam Reston looked increasingly to her daughter's income. 'She was my crutch,' she explains, sitting in the breakfast room of her sister's pousada, or guesthouse. By 2004, the 18-year-old Reston was supporting her entire family. And despite her experiences in China, she continued to dream of travelling the world modelling, in order to earn more money to help her mother build a new house.

In August 2005 Reston called her employers at the Elite fashion agency and told them she was leaving - she had received an offer from an agent to work in Mexico. They urged her to stay, arguing that the Mexican modelling market required voluptuous girls, whereas Reston was now an increasingly skinny model. 'She wasn't listening to anyone any more,' says her former booker. In Mexico things went from bad to worse. On her second day there Reston emailed home that she was sharing an apartment with 17 other models and was very unhappy. Other Brazilian models who bumped into an increasingly miserable-looking Reston at castings began to worry about her emotional state. One of them, Cynthia, left a note for her: 'Girlie, we're very worried about you. Please come out with us or stay at home and eat something - eat whatever you want, OK?'

Eventually, Reston became so unhappy that Lica Kohlrausch, the owner of L'Equipe, was persuaded by some of Reston's concerned friends and colleagues to pay for her to fly back to Brazil. 'We brought Ana back after she did some work for Giorgio Armani and a representative rang me to say she was too thin,' Kohlrausch told the press after Reston's death. 'It worried me and I acted immediately, but I didn't see any physical signs of anorexia when she came back.' On her return, Reston went to work in Japan for three months. When she came home again, in late 2005, she was barely recognisable - gaunt and colourless. As Miriam Reston recalls, 'I looked at her and said, "My daughter, what have they done to you?" I wish these people could see what they have done to her. She didn't deserve this.'

Now seriously worried about her health, Reston's family sent her to stay with an uncle on the Sao Paulo coast. He, too, knew that something was very wrong. On a note dated 19 January 2006, he set out a daily routine for Reston to follow as part of her recuperation. It read: 1 Wake up, pray. 2 Strong, positive thoughts. 3 Pray. 4 Always feed yourself. 5 Pray.

Despite the family's intervention, Reston continued eating less and less, and work opportunities began to ebb away. By the middle of last year, her career as a model had virtually ground to a halt. Instead, to try and make ends meet, she was handing out fliers advertising nightclubs in Sao Paulo, earning just over £10 a night. But there was some comfort - she fell in love with a 19-year-old model from Sao Paulo, called Bruno Setti. 'I didn't know what love was until you kissed me,' she wrote to him, just over a month before her death. 'Thank you for giving me the hugs that make me secure and the conversations that comfort me.'

On Friday 29 September, Dr Tommaso sat waiting in a room at L'Equipe, with a list of six models he was due to see that afternoon. Reston was booked in for her second appointment. But as the minutes ticked by, Tommaso got the feeling it would be another no-show.

'I thought it was a shame,' he sighs. 'The agency contacted her and she said she'd forgotten. Maybe it was true, maybe it was the anorexia. We can't be sure.' In Jundiai, meanwhile, Reston complained to her mother that members of the agency were pestering her to see a doctor. 'She told me they were going mad [saying she was ill],' recalls her mother. 'Everyone was telling her she was ill... But, like all these girls, she denied it was a problem.'

But her mother was pretty sure by then that Reston's health problems needed to be addressed sooner rather than later. And then suddenly, it was too late. At home on Sunday 22 October, Reston began to complain of a pain in her kidneys. Miriam Reston didn't know it, but for the last couple of months her daughter had been taking a cocktail of potent prescription drugs, for pain relief and slimming.

Reston was admitted to the Samaritano Hospital in Sao Paulo and two days later, on 25 October, she was moved to the Hospital Municipal dos Servidores Publicos, where almost immediately she was admitted to the intensive care unit, where she spent her last 21 days. Her demise was agonising, a plastic tube inserted down her throat, unable to tell anyone how she felt, although the tears in her eyes must have made that pretty obvious. Patches of her once long brown hair had fallen out, too. Her death certificate, for which relatives paid around 50p, cites her time of death as 7.10am and lists the cause of death as 'multiple organ failure, septicaemia, urinary infection'. Coldly it adds: 'Leaves no children. Leaves no property. Leaves no will.'

Within hours of her death Ana Carolina Reston Marcan was famous across the world. Her death made her a martyr in Brazil - her image was splashed across the front pages of virtually every newspaper and magazine, and across the international media. Jundiai's teenage beauty queen had become the emaciated model who had starved herself to death. Debate raged. There was an outpouring of emotion from other anorexic girls who saw in Reston a piece of themselves; and, simultaneously, a bitter rebuke from pro-anorexia communities, whose members see anorexia as a lifestyle choice. Reston's boyfriend requested her page on the popular Brazilian blog site Orkut be deleted after her death because it was targeted by anorexia supporters posting offensive comments.

Critics of the fashion industry, on the other hand, held her up as an example of how it was destroying the lives of young, would-be models, and in the weeks that followed, the deaths of two further Brazilian girls in similar circumstances, one a fashion student, brought further calls for the regulation of this notoriously mysterious business.

Already, changes seem to be taking place. Following Uruguayan model Luisel Ramos's death, models with a body mass index (BMI) of less than 18 - classified as underweight by the World Health Organisation (between 18.5 and 25 is considered healthy) - were banned in September from Madrid Fashion Week. In the wake of Reston's death, Brazilian models now require medical certificates in order to take part in catwalk events. The Italian fashion organisation Camera Della Moda Italiana is also considering introducing measures to prevent any catwalk models at risk appearing at Milan Fashion Week in February. More recently, the British Fashion Council, which organises London Fashion Week, has prepared similar guidelines that it will eventually send to all designers and modelling agencies.

It is late afternoon and in the cobbled centre of Pirapora do Bom Jesus, Miriam Reston Marcan pulls up the shutters of her new jewellery shop - recently named 'Ana Carolina Metals' - and goes inside. Weeping, she picks up a letter written by her daughter shortly before her death, but which was never sent. '"If I could, I'd like to go back to being four, clinging on to you as if I were still in your womb, so that nobody could harm me,"' it reads, in curly, teenage handwriting. '"But God wanted my life to change."' Reston sighs. 'I didn't know what my daughter had could kill, but I knew it had to be treated. But my daughter rejected me, she said she was OK.'

She stares up at a portrait of Ana hung at the back of the shop - part of an advertising campaign which has now become a sort of shrine to her deceased daughter. 'Do you know what I think at night time?' she asks. 'I think that she's in the ground and the ants are eating her. I don't know how I'm supposed to survive now, without my right arm.'

Originally published in The Guardian (link)

Life drains away from towns built on destruction of the Amazon rainforest

Tom Phillips — 2006-11-21

It was midnight at the Charlooe Drinks Bar and business was flagging. Dozens of prostitutes, some barely 12, were hovering outside the main avenue of Castelo dos Sonhos (the Castle of Dreams), an isolated town in the northern state of Para that until recently was at the centre of Brazil's illegal logging trade.

Scantily clad girls signalled nervously at the occasional pick-up truck passing by. The sound of competing jukeboxes from the street's brothels gave the false impression business was booming. In reality there was hardly a punter in sight.

Inside, leaning against the bar's garish pink wooden walls, its 41-year-old madame puffed her cheeks. "The city's finished," said Marina Ketts, an immigrant from the southern state of Paraná. "The thing that brought money to Castelo was wood. Now that's all gone."

During the timber boom, Ms Ketts said, the bar made up to R$2,500 (£615) a week in alcohol sales alone. Now it struggles to bring in R$100. "It used to be one big whorehouse around here. Today, as you can see, there is nothing."

The tale of Castelo dos Sonhos's economic decline is the downside of the Brazilian government's success in trying to protect the world's largest rainforest. Until recently, when authorities began clamping down on illegal deforestation in the region, the town was at the centre of a timber boom as lucrative as it was illicit. But the introduction of the national deforestation combat plan in March 2004 brought the industry almost to a halt, leaving thousands of immigrant workers unemployed across the region.

Widespread praise

Few question the effects on the region's ecology. When President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva announced recently that deforestation in the Amazon rainforest had fallen to its lowest levels since 1991 even the government's fiercest critics were united in their praise. "We are trying to repair, in a short period of time, the carelessness that existed for so long," Lula said, pointing to a 30% drop in deforestation since last year.

Illegal logging has not been completely eradicated. When night falls on Castelo dos Sonhos's potholed streets lorries laden with wood emerge from what is left of the surrounding forest and head on to the BR-163 highway, a dirt road cut through the Amazon rainforest in the 1970s by the military dictatorship. But it is on a much reduced scale - most of the 30-odd sawmills in Castelo dos Sonhos have stopped production. With no alternative economy and little support from the authorities, such communities are falling apart.

Nine miles to the north, down another dirt track off the BR-163, is Nova Brasilia, a community of landless peasants who scratch a living from a patch of land clawed from a wealthy owner. Ask them to explain the region's sudden decline and they respond: "Dorothy Stang". Stang was an American nun, known to some as the Angel of the Rainforest, shot dead on February 12 2005 because of her fight against illegal loggers.

Stang's death is seen as a watershed by many people. Spurred on by the massive international reaction to the murder, authorities stepped up the fight against Amazon destruction.

On February 18, six days after the killing, Lula's government ordered the creation of two vast conservation areas in Para and declared a freeze on logging in an area of 8m hectares around the BR-163, including Castelo dos Sonhos. Almost all of Nova Brasilia's inhabitants were employed by the loggers and with the new regulations they lost their jobs.

"The death of Dorothy was a disaster for us," said Eugenio Sibulski, 46, an immigrant from Rio Grande do Sul in the south of Brazil, who worked with his son Maicon, 18, in a sawmill in nearby Mil, earning around R$450 a month, and was sacked after the crackdown. In search of work he moved his family to Castelo dos Sonhos, to no avail.

Unable to pay their monthly rent of R$120, the family squatted on the side of the BR-163 before moving to Nova Brasilia, where they eke out an existence from a barren patch of cleared forest, flanked by field after field of charred tree stumps.

"All of the sawmills shut because suddenly there was monitoring," said Mr Sibulski, who lost his means of supporting two children and a grandchild virtually overnight.

Immigrants who had benefited from the logging also suddenly found themselves out of pocket. "If they hadn't killed Dorothy maybe we'd still have a piece of land. But the economy has all gone," said Joao Zemnichaq, 58, a lorry driver who says he spent R$12,600 on land near Anapu, where Stang was killed, only to have it confiscated by the government.

Isolation

The knock-on effects were not unforeseen by Brazilian authorities. In March 2005, as the ban extinguished much of the logging around Castelo dos Sonhos, such concerns were outlined in a white paper promoting plans to pave the BR-163 as a means of bringing development to an isolated and notoriously lawless part of Brazil. The paper outlined the urgent need for "social inclusion", in particular job creation, healthcare, education and social services.

Yet in Castelo dos Sonhos and its surrounding area there is little sign of such aid - not for the landless peasants or their children who are almost all out of school, not for the elderly men who eke out a perilous existence in the area's goldmines, and least of all for the luckless prostitutes, who act out the same dismal spectacle each night.

Immigrants continue to arrive looking for work. Some don't stick around, while others find themselves forced into slavery on the region's farms, earning as little as R$10 a day, or prostituting themselves for a similar price. With seven police, one understaffed health clinic and two state schools, Castelo dos Sonhos, a once wealthy town of 12,000, has been brought to its knees.

With 2am approaching, the Charlooe bar was still without a single customer. "If these people who won the elections paid a little bit of attention, Castelo wouldn't be this misery you are seeing," said Ms Ketts. "I came here because of the fame this place had. I thought this would be a city of dreams. Now just look around you. There is nothing here."

Originally published in The Guardian (link)

Triumph for common touch as Lula heads for victory despite scandals

Tom Phillips — 2006-09-26

They call it the "red community", and in less than a week, when the world's fifth largest democracy goes to the polls, there is little doubt how Vila Irmã Dulce will vote.

Giant photos of a grinning President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, or Lula as he is universally known, are plastered onto most shacks in this dusty squatter settlement in northeastern Brazil, home to 20,000 of the leftwing leader's most avid fans. Red stars flap from virtually every street corner.

"No president has ever done as much for the poor," said 40-year-old Edileusa da Rocha, sitting outside the red-brick shack she shares with her husband and three children. Vila Irmã Dulce, a sprawling settlement on the southern limits of Teresina, one of the hottest and poorest corners of Brazil, is where Lula's presidency began.

It was here, on the first stop of his inaugural presidential trip, that he set out his project to haul millions of impoverished Brazilians out of the chasm of poverty.

"You can be sure that we will define our priorities in the poorest regions of the country, because it is the poor people who need the government and not the rich," he said during the so-called "misery tour" in January 2003 - a pilgrimage through the underbelly of Brazil on which he led 29 of his ministers.

In Vila Irmã Dulce, the tour's first stop, Lula received a hero's welcome, as he promised an ethical revolution, redistributing land and wealth and eradicating corruption from government.

Nearly four years on, however, and many Brazilians are starting to wonder if there was anything ethical or revolutionary about Lula's first term in office. Allegations of corruption, bribes, tax evasion, intimidation and blackmail have blighted the Workers' Party (PT) for much of Lula's presidency, costing him his chief of staff, finance minister and, last week, his campaign manager.

Those who accept Lula was unaware of such shadowy dealings accuse him of gross omission in not detecting what his "companheiros" (comrades) were allegedly up to. Critics complain too that conservative fiscal policies have stifled Lula's quest for social justice and that land reform - another key election promise - has occurred at snail's pace.

Before his victory Lula was a seen as a radical, a bogieman for foreign investors and a poster boy of the left. He threatened to default on Brazil's foreign debt and constantly railed against the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

Disillusioned

In power the reality has been less dramatic. Lula has honoured debt repayments, reined in spending levels and subsequently been labelled a traitor by disillusioned supporters who expected more from what Lula called his "peaceful revolution".

Yet despite the criticism, Lula now looks assured of a second term, possibly even winning the election in the first round. His reputation as an ethical crusader may be in tatters, but in places such as Vila Irma Dulce the streets are still decked in bright red propaganda.

"I'll vote for him forever," said Antonio da Silva, a 64-year-old resident, who received an unexpected visit from his namesake two years ago, when the president came to check up on the social projects he put in place as soon as he came to office.

"Before [Lula came] all of the houses here were made of mud. People would come to your house and wonder how someone could live like that," he said, motioning to a newspaper cutting in which he appears on his doorstep next to the besuited president. "How can you speak badly of someone who does all that?"

Lula's re-election has not always been a foregone conclusion. Mired in a succession of corruption scandals, for periods last year there were even doubts as to whether he would run for a second term.

His ability to bounce back, says historian Denise Paraná, author of Lula: The Son of Brazil, the only authorised biography of the president, is down to his talent for speaking the language of the masses.

"He says things that wouldn't be appropriate in the mouths of the elite, but he says exactly what the people want to hear and what metaphors they want him to use and when," she said.

"Lula is a perfectly finished portrait of Brazil," she added, arguing that the poorer sections of society could identify with the president's life. The son of an impoverished family, Lula's family has experienced every kind of misfortune common to the country's poor: alcoholism, infant mortality, industrial accidents, disease, a broken home, child labour and gun crime.

"Lula really knows the soul of the people better than any theorist because he has lived this all," said Dr Paraná. "There is no social drama that you don't find in his family."

Since the election campaign started in June, Lula's adversaries have been working hard to destroy this reputation as the "father of the poor".

Rivals have repeatedly attacked him over corruption levels, with Heloisa Helena, a former PT member now third placed in the race for power, referring to the president as a "gangster" at the head of a "criminal organisation".

Lula's main rival, Geraldo Alckmin of the Social Democratic party, has chosen to focus on what he describes as economic stagnation.

"Brazil has not grown," he told the Guardian during a recent visit to the Rocinha shantytown in Rio de Janeiro. "It has grown a third as much as other emerging economies," he said. Brazil's growth rate of about 2.6%of GDP is about half the South American average and less than the other so-called Bric countries, Russia, India and China.

Yet in Lula's key electoral bases in the shanty towns and land invasions such as Vila Irmã Dulce, voters are more concerned with the price of rice than they are with global economics.

Central to Lula's success in such places has been the Bolsa Familia, a benefit system by which families receive a grant of R$65 (£15) a month on the condition that their children attend school.

Figures from the Social Development ministry claim that more than 11 million families, some 45 million people, have benefited from the scheme.

"They will vote for Lula because of the Bolsa Familia," said Isabel das Dores Costa, a health worker in Vila Irmã Dulce, whose 20,000 residents have just one health clinic, one school and 12 police officers. "The unemployment rate is huge and very often it is a family's only source of income ... There are people crying from hunger here."

But even the "red community", has its dissidents. Ms Costa said that the construction of social projects in her area owed more to Lula's skills in marketing than to significant achievements in social reform. "Of course everything was lovely when Lula came back here to visit; they spent seven days doing all the roads up with tractors for the cameras to see," she said.

"We are living in a fantasy world, not reality ... By the time winter came all the roads had fallen apart again."

Teflon candidate

Yet Ms Costa is virtually a lone voice in this part of the world. Lula remains a hero, she said - albeit for what he represented not what he had achieved.

"People think: if Lula isn't doing it, it's because it wasn't possible. If there's corruption it's because politicians always steal," said Dr Paraná. "He has an aura of honesty - [he's] what they call a Teflon candidate."

Ms Da Rocha points to a series of concrete houses - the result of a housing project put in place after the president's first visit to Vila Irmã Dulce in 2003. "After he came here things got much better,"she said. "It was a 100% improvement. People could never have lived like this before."

Originally published in The Guardian (link)

Blood simple: The rise of the PCC in São Paulo

Tom Phillips — 2006-09-17

The taxi driver squints uncomfortably. 'It's like fire there,' he warns ominously, as I pass him the address on the eastern limits of Sao Paulo.

We cut through block after block of grimy, graffiti-clad housing. Ahead, ragged shantytowns cling to the hilltops; behind us a trail of abandonment stretches back towards the city centre, in the form of empty warehouses and cracked windows. As we begin the descent towards our final destination, the driver looks nervously into his rear-view mirror. A police car's flashing siren ushers us to a standstill.

Under the gaze of their Taurus revolvers we are hauled out of the vehicle, told to place our hands on the car roof and given an invasive frisk down. When we are finally sent on our way, after a 10-minute interrogation, the driver is apologetic. 'I had to pull over,' he mumbles. 'If you don't, they open fire.'

Welcome to the periferia of Sao Paulo; the impoverished outskirts of one of the world's largest cities, where hundreds of thousands of immigrants who came to the megalopolis in search of gold-paved streets have been abandoned to their own dismal fate.

We have come to Jardim Santo Andre to meet 23-year-old Maria Dinauci de Lima, until four months ago a happily married mother of two from Ceara, in the northeast. When Sao Paulo exploded into violence in May, temporarily bringing her adoptive city to a standstill, she found herself at the epicentre of the storm.

The driver drops us at the entrance to the shantytown where she lives, alongside a concrete, pollution-stained housing estate. Reluctant to go any further, he directs us vaguely down a series of dirt tracks which lead out on to a sprawling urban wasteland. The area was once a landfill site, but now houses thousands of immigrants fleeing poverty in the northeast. Multicoloured political propaganda clings to the drab houses, makeshift constructions of plywood and cardboard. To our right a fetid swamp dribbles through the community, a muddy stream of excrement. It has taken us just over two hours to get here from the glamorous centre of Sao Paulo, but the contrast is so great it seems as if we have made the journey from Liverpool Street to the West Bank.

Maria is changing the nappy of her four-month-old son when we arrive. She climbs the concrete steps that lead to her small house and directs us into her sparsely decorated bedroom. A neatly made double bed and two cots are her only furniture apart from a new TV, from which President Lula - himself a northeastern immigrant to Sao Paulo - is waxing lyrical about his attempts to aid Brazil's dispossessed.

'I didn't even know what was going on in Sao Paulo,' she remembers, seemingly confused by our interest in her husband's death. 'I just heard shots and everyone here started shutting their doors. I closed mine, too, I was so scared. But I never thought it had to do with him.'

She soon found out from neighbours that, in fact, it did. Maria left her house in panic and headed for the hospital, where she was barely able to recognise her 29-year-old husband, Lindomar Lino da Silva, the owner of a hairdressing salon. He had been shot twice in the forehead, at point-blank range.

'When I got there,' she says, her sobs mixing with the unknowing giggles of her two children, 'he was still warm.'

Sao Paulo has, in just over four months, been transformed into a city of fear. The four-day offensive in May by local gangsters temporarily turned one of the world's great financial capitals into a virtual ghost town. Armed criminals went on the rampage in both the city and the interior of the state, touting automatic rifles and machine guns, hunting down policemen and prison officers and hurling petrol bombs at public buildings. Hundreds of buses were set alight, leaving the streets virtually empty and the transport system in chaos.

In a matter of days, 23 law enforcement officers were gunned down across the state of Sao Paulo - more than in the whole of 2005. And when the attacks began to subside on 15 May, the police reaction began.

Human rights groups have since demanded a thorough investigation into police actions after nearly 200 people died in suspicious circumstances that week. Many believe that a systematic revenge campaign was sparked by the attacks - that, stunned by the assault on their colleagues, members of Sao Paulo's police force took to the streets with the intention of exterminating the new enemy.

A few days after the attacks I am confronted by a furious policeman at the entrance to one Sao Paulo prison unit.

'All you journalists do is defend the vagabundos [crooks],' he shouts, with thick gobbets of spit flying from his mouth. 'People go on and on about masked men killing people - what else can we do?' he asks, in heavy Sao Paulo slang. 'Tem que matar mesmo, meu!' ('You've got to kill them, bruv.')

The violence was unprecedented in scale, even for a city like Sao Paulo, renowned for its high crime rate. So bloody were the attacks that politicians, media outlets and academics alike have, in its wake, begun describing the start of an 'urban guerrilla war'. It is a drastic and problematic conclusion - yet one which is in many ways borne out by numerical comparisons with official war zones. During the recent 34-day conflict between Israel and Hizbollah, just over 1,000 civilians are thought to have been killed in Lebanon. In Iraq, 117 British soldiers have been killed since the country was invaded in 2003, while 23 have been killed since the beginning of August in Afghanistan. In Sao Paulo, the figures are no less startling. According to coroners' reports, at the height of May's violence at least 492 people died of gunshot wounds in Sao Paulo state in just over a week.

Among the dead was Maria's husband Lindomar, who one neighbour (too scared to make any type of statement) believes he saw being executed by a military policeman. The distinction between war and organised crime means little to Maria, perched on the bed she once shared with her husband. 'All I know,' she says, with an air of resignation, 'is that I'm on my own now and I have to raise these two alone.'

To understand the recent wave of violence in Brazil's economic capital you must visit the so-called 'Park of Monsters'. Located in Taubate - an unremarkable town in the interior of Sao Paulo best known until now for its manufacturing industry - the Parque dos Monstros is the birthplace of the group behind May's attacks: a crumbling sky-blue prison complex, number 746 Marechal Deodoro Avenue. These days the tiled roof of a picturesque white chapel peeks over the barbed-wire perimeter fence, offering little hint of the bloodletting from which Brazil's most feared crime group was born.

It was mid-morning on 31 August 1993 and, here at Taubate's Casa de Custodio (Custody Centre), a now legendary football match between two rival prison gangs was about to commence. The atmosphere was tense as the convicts limbered up in the jail yard.

Even before the whistle was blown, the slaughter began. Geleiao, the hulk-like captain of a team known as the Primeiro Comando da Capital (First Command of the Capital, or PCC) grabbed the head of an opponent and snapped his neck, killing him almost instantly. His team-mate Cesinha pulled out a cut-throat razor and slit the throats of several others. In the ensuing fight, more lives were lost.

With the dusty pitch now clogged with blood, the prisoners looked for a way to defend themselves against reprisals from the prison guards. Their solution was safety in numbers. When the guards arrived the remaining prisoners grouped together behind Geleiao and his team mates, fearful of the inevitable punishment.

The PCC - a sprawling criminal association that claims to fight for the rights of Sao Paulo's prisoners - was born. Geleiao and Cesinha, who came to be known as the group's fundadores (founders), had taken the first steps in creating a Frankenstein-like criminal faction which, 13 years on, would control most of the prison system in Sao Paulo as well as large tracts of the city. It took its name from Geleiao's football team, the First Command of the Capital.

For the following eight years the PCC remained relatively unknown in Brazil, despite gradually taking root in much of Sao Paulo's prison system, through its brutal rule of law. Those who signed up were spared. Those who resisted were often subjected to the most brutal beatings or simply killed.

Then in 2001, the so-called 'mega-rebellions' began. It was 8 February and simultaneous riots broke out in 20 jails across the state. When the dust settled at least 20 prisoners had lost their lives - beheaded, burnt or mutilated, as members of rival factions such as the PCC and the lesser-known Seita Satanica (Satanic Sect), jostled for dominance.

Even then, Brazilian authorities shied away from admitting the existence of what is now described as Brazil's largest, most dangerous crime faction - so powerful, in fact, that its leadership are said to enjoy personal visits from high-class prostitutes, even behind bars.

In 2002, the director of DEIC, Sao Paulo's organised crime squad, declared that the group had been almost completely dismantled by the police. 'We have the PCC crying, to our surprise,' he told reporters. By May this year, however, it was the security forces, not the PCC, who were in tatters.

News of the attacks spread like wildfire across Brazil, stamped on to the front page of every newspaper and with rolling, 24-hour television news reports providing frantic updates about what the media branded 'Brazilian terrorism'. Parts of Sao Paulo lay completely abandoned, with a 95 per cent reduction in traffic in some of its busiest thoroughfares as residents took refuge in their own homes and bus companies pulled their fleets off the streets. It was as if a hurricane had battered the city, leaving its stunned population stranded indoors, watching the violence unfold on television, accompanied by the kind of cinematic, spine-chilling soundtrack which the country's sensationalist news programmes so enjoy.

Virtually overnight the PCC became a household name. Its leader, Marcos Willians Herbas Camacho, or Marcola, a convicted bank robber under lock and key in the Presidente Bernardes maximum security prison, 590km from Sao Paulo, became a South American bogeyman enveloped in a thick mist of fear and mystery.

Television screens flashed up black and the first hypnotic whirls of the Chemical Brothers' 'Block Rockin' Beats' kicked in. Rapidly, the camera panned across a prison yard before a grisly sequence of images was thrust on to the screen: first a decapitated head sandwiched between two bloodied ankles. Then dozens of other corpses, each with the vague glaze of death stamped on their face. Finally came more mutilated bodies and gun-wielding gang members, waving PCC flags from the rooftops of burning prison units.

I have been invited to watch a short film produced by members of the police force about the PCC. Family viewing it is not. For five minutes the film takes you on a Dantesque tour of the Sao Paulo prison system, introducing you to its inmates - both the living and the dead.

The PCC's reputation as a ruthless, bloodthirsty mob is not without basis. Frequent shows of mind-boggling brutality mean the group is famed, above all else, for its muscle. But the PCC is far more sophisticated than many government officials have been prepared to admit: a highly organised criminal network, made up of prisoners and drug traffickers, it even has a team of lawyers, as well as tentacles that stretch right across South America. Its sprawling, Mafia-like chain of command makes dismantling the group a complex task. Orders come from inside Sao Paulo's decaying prison system, where the omnipresence of mobile phones and corrupt lawyers means the ruling council is able to issue instructions even while under guard.

Outside, a second tier of faction leaders known as torres (towers) act as the representatives of the PCC's incarcerated bosses, controlling their lucrative drug-distribution points which are scattered across the state of Sao Paulo. Beneath them come the pilotos (pilots), who co-ordinate the activities of the group's 'soldiers'. Finally, at the bottom of the pile, are the so-called 'Bin Ladens' - criminals who owe favours to the faction and can be called up as a kind of reserve force for specific missions.

The PCC's expertise too often gives it the edge over the authorities. Among the party's collaborators are master criminals such as the Chilean kidnapper Mauricio Norambuena, also being held in Presidente Bernardes's 160-cell maximum-security compound.

The PCC has no lack of funds or weapons. Investigators believe its 'business interests' (principally drug trafficking and lucrative robberies or kidnappings) stretch well into the millions. It is thought to have been involved in the snatch of R$165m (£40m) from a bank in the northeastern port of Fortaleza in August 2005, while earlier this month Paraguayan police seized 591 machine guns and rifles on the border with Brazil, which they believe were partly destined for the PCC in Sao Paulo.

The PCC's sheer size has given it a virtual monopoly on drug trafficking within the prison system. Some estimates say that around 80 per cent of Sao Paulo's prison population either sympathise with or are full-blown members of the organisation, paying a monthly subscription fee of around R$150 (£38). Such prisoners see membership as a form of protection from prison guards and rival factions and, perhaps, a way of fighting for better jail conditions.

Yet while the PCC undoubtedly basks in its reputation for violence, it is also keen to paint itself as a revolutionary guerrilla group, modelling itself on the struggles of Che Guevara. It has its own set of 16 'laws' and is divided into independent cells that can be activated by jailed leaders with one simple phone call. Those who have met the group's well-spoken leader, Marcola, describe him as an intelligent, chillingly poetic man, whose reading list is said to include Sun Tzu's The Art of War, Machiavelli's The Prince and Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist

And like all guerrilla groups worth their salt, the PCC even boasts its own marketing department, which seeks to portray the group not as a criminal faction but as either a human rights group fighting to improve the lives of Sao Paulo's 142,000-strong prison population, or a rebel army leading a revolucao dos pobres (revolution of the poor).

One man accused of being at the forefront of this marketing campaign is Ivan Raymondi Barbosa, a former police investigator who himself spent five months in a Sao Paulo jail (he was implicated in an international smuggling ring) and who now heads an NGO called Nova Ordem. Nova Ordem, he claims, is engaged in the battle against torture and violence in the state's hellish prison system. Authorities, however, are investigating its links to the PCC. Brazil's media describes Nova Ordem as the political wing of the faction, something Barbosa rejects. 'Nova Ordem is here is to defend the whole prison population,' he says. 'It is for everyone - not just the PCC.'

What is clear is that Nova Ordem carries considerable clout with what is described as Brazil's largest criminal organisation. Back in May, when the first round of PCC attacks were halted, one of the key negotiators was Iracema Vasciaveo, Nova Ordem's legal representative, who was flown into Presidente Bernardes with high-ranking members of the Sao Paulo government to meet with Marcola.

We meet Barbosa at the group's HQ in a smart office block in Sao Paulo. He is charming, talkative and clad in thick gold jewellery (one stamped with the group's initials, NO).

'We want to draw attention to corruption and physical abuse in prisons,' he says. 'The abuse is so reminiscent of concentration camps that, in slang, prisons are referred to as Alemanha, or "Germany".'

He clicks open an archive of photos on his desktop and begins a gory tour through a series of images that he says were smuggled out of high-security prisons using mobile phones. First a deformed, swollen hand appears, with a thick line of stitches running across it. The guards, Barbosa claims, set dogs on the prisoner. Next appears a man's back, with a series of bullet wounds. Again, he says, the guards were responsible.

'They [the prisoners] aren't asking for beef with cheese and tomato sauce, but they do want dignity,' says Barbosa, who is said to have come into contact with Marcola during his time as a prisoner at the Avare prison.

Outwardly at least, both Nova Ordem and the PCC claim to fight such human rights abuses. Their respective political agendas - against prison violence, abusive searches of visiting relatives and solitary confinement - are almost identical, as are their catchphrases.

The PCC - in a nod to Rio de Janeiro drug faction the Comando Vermelho, in many ways the grandfather of Brazilian organised crime - employs the strapline Paz, justica e liberdade (Peace, justice and liberty). Nova Ordem, on the other hand, uses the red, white and blue colours of the French revolution on its eagle-shaped logo. It is, Barbosa explains, an allusion to the revolution's famous battle cry: 'Liberte, egalite, fraternite'.

On the other side of town, in the library of Sao Paulo's public prosecutor, 42-year-old Marcio Christino laughs off the idea that the PCC has anything to do with peace, justice or liberty. A playful, chubby-faced attorney, Christino has been doing battle with the PCC since 2001 - during which time he has come into regular contact with Marcola. He views the idea that the PCC has a genuine political agenda as pure fantasy. 'This is an image they want to sell to justify what they do,' he says.

In trying to secure convictions against members, Christino claims to have heard more than 30,000 hours of phone-tap conversations between PCC operatives.

'There isn't one minute, not even 30 seconds of any talk about prison conditions. They talk about four things: coke - how much came in, how much went out; death, money and sex.'

Rather than an attempt to form an alternative, leftist state, he sees the attacks as a reaction against police action designed to crack down on the group's criminal enterprises.

'When they feel the police are squeezing too much they react,' he says.

Christino's understanding of the PCC is as impressive as his contact book. He has recorded a four-hour video interview with Geleiao (now a sworn enemy of Marcola), and is in charge of a vast archive of evidence against the faction. Yet despite his scorn for the group, he does concede that Brazilian jails - under-funded, under-staffed and often massively overcrowded - provide the PCC with the ideal recruiting ground.

Overcrowding is perhaps the biggest problem. A recent Human Rights Watch report pointed out that: 'Severe overcrowding and institutionalised violence - such as beatings, torture and even summary executions - are chronic and widespread in Brazilian prisons.'

Faced with the barbarity of both criminal factions and prison guards, many offenders look to the PCC for support - sometimes even before they are sent to jail. Aware that sooner or later they are likely to go to prison, many teenage offenders decide it is safer to go in with at least some connection to the group.

With little sign of prison reform and with drugs and arms continuing to pour through Brazil's sparsely policed borders (a recent report claimed that if Brazil's entire border protection force was to line up along its western frontier, each officer would have to cover 10km) many in Sao Paulo see only one possible solution: defence. Desperate to protect itself from this previously little-known enemy, Sao Paulo's wealthy are silently stockpiling an arsenal of their own.

It is 30 August 2006, the eve of the anniversary of the foundation of the PCC, and a group of six policemen, armed with rifles, huddle nervously inside the entrance to our hotel. Sao Paulo police have warned of another 'mega attack' to mark the faction's birthday.

As we drive into the city that evening, through a series of heavily manned police road blockades, the sky is illuminated with the red flicker of sirens. We have been told to expect a repeat of May's violence. Instead, what we find is a security showcase.

In an air-conditioned conference centre on the south side of Sao Paulo, business executives and security experts are busy hobnobbing over cappuccinos and shortbread, surrounded by stall after stall of cutting-edge security technology. The International Security Conference and Exposition is a roll call of the world's top protection companies. The North American EADS Defence and Security is there promoting 'global responses' to 'homeland security' threats, while Bosch has also put in an appearance, peddling top-of-the-range surveillance monitors to, among others, the Brazilian Security Secretary. Sao Paulo's multi-million pound defence industry has boomed since the beginning of the year, with organisers claiming the city will spend more than $1bn protecting itself in 2006. The reason?

'In one word,' deadpans Mauricio dos Santos, a Bosch sales representative, 'the PCC.'

The fear that has taken hold of Sao Paulo is not hard to grasp. Threats of new attacks appear in the Brazilian media on an almost daily basis. Sometimes they come in the form of reports of 'police intelligence' indicating the chance of further violence. Occasionally, however, they come directly from the PCC's very own propaganda division.

On 12 August, members of the faction kidnapped 30-year-old Guilherme Portanova, a television reporter from Globo, Brazil's largest media network. His captors demanded the television station transmit a video and, at 12.30pm the following day, the channel yielded. Normal programming was interrupted as a hooded spokesperson for the gang appeared on screen, against a white backdrop daubed with the phrase 'Peace and Justice' in black spray paint.

'The Brazilian penal system is in truth a true human deposit where human beings are thrown as if they were animals,' the man said, quoting almost word for word a recent human rights report on the state of Rio de Janeiro's youth detention centres, themselves dominated by other drug factions. 'All we want is to not be massacred and oppressed. We want measures to be taken, since we are not prepared to remain with our arms crossed with what is happening in the prison system.'

Finally, as the four-minute video drew to a close, the PCC's representative issued a stark warning: 'Our fight is with the governors and the police,' he said. 'Don't mess with our families and we won't mess with yours ...'

Several weeks later another journalist - this time from a rival broadcaster - was badly assaulted in Sao Paulo. At the time, press reports made no link to the PCC, but The Observer understands that police believe this was another attempt to terrorise the country's media and force the PCC's message on to the airwaves once again.

Back in Barbosa's smoke-filled office, I ask if and when he believes Sao Paulo will see more PCC attacks. He furrows his brow at the question and lets out a dismissive chuckle, as though the 'if' part of the question has completely missed the point.

'Today, tomorrow, in half an hour,' he says. 'It is uncontrollable.'

Several weeks later I am handed a copy of the PCC's most recent piece of propaganda, a tatty manifesto on A4 paper being distributed a few blocks from my hotel by a group of homeless people.

'The First Command of the Capital notifies in the name of the truth that ... we will give our lives if necessary,' brags its opening line. 'We will go to the final consequences in this war for justice.' Further down it adds: 'We are in favour of peace but we also have the disposition for war.'

'What is the PCC going to do next?' asks Barbosa. 'I don't know. I'm scared of a civil war.'

Originally published in The Guardian (link)

The white city

Tom Phillips — 2006-04-01

It took Isaac just over three hours to swallow all 85 of the capsules. With his pregnant wife waiting back home in Brazil, he was in a small house in the Bolivian town of Puerto Quijarro, preparing to make the hazardous cross border journey 500km home.

An odd-job man from TrÍs Lagoas, a small town in the interior of Mato Grosso do Sul, Isaac was struggling to pay his monthly rent of R$120 (£33). Now there was a child on the way.

He thought life as a drug mule would be an easy option. As arranged, he arrived in the run down city just before 10am. From there he was led to a tatty, one-storey building and by 1pm had left for the airport in Corumb·, a city just over the Brazilian border with a pre-paid plane ticket in his hand and his stomach packed with pure cocaine.

"I don't think I really felt very much," says Isaac, a talkative 24-year-old who stood to earn around R$400 (£111) for delivering the drugs, with a street value of at least £50,000 in the UK if sold pure, or much more if diluted with other substances.

"I never thought I looked like a trafficker. But then I realized a long time ago that traffickers don't just have one look."

Corumb·, a city of around 100,000 residents perched on Brazil's border with Bolivia, is known in these parts as the cidade branca or white city - a reference to the high calcium levels in the land around it. The city's inextricable links to cocaine, however, have lent the nickname an altogether grimmer significance in recent years.

Corumb· is now one of Brazil's cocaine capitals, a city at the centre of the international drug trade, which the UN estimates as being worth between US$300 and $500 billion each year. Little, if any, cocaine is produced in Brazil yet the country is a key transit point for the drug as it makes its way to Europe and the US.

Sat at the start of the BR-262 - the highway on which Brazilian police make the highest annual number of cocaine apprehensions ñ Corumb· is of vital strategic importance to South American and European drug traffickers. It is along this crater-ridden road that much of the cocaine snorted in Europe passes before being put on ships and airplanes in the country's southeast.

Young Brazilian and Bolivian men like Isaac are some of the first players in this international circuit, risking their lives by kicking off cocaine's grim pilgrimage towards Europe. Silent operators, they receive none of the media attention given to the bloody drug conflicts of Rio's favelas. Their fates, however, can be no less cruel.

Sat in his air-conditioned office at the Federal Police HQ in Corumb· police chief Guilherme de Castro Almeida clicks on his mouse and begins a morbid tour through his extensive photograph and video collection.

The first shot is of an operating theatre, with three men stood around dressed in surgical gowns. Gradually the camera zooms in, until a sausage-like intestine is clearly visible through an incision in a man's chest. A chain of dark blue capsules glows through the intestine's pink lining, like rifle cartridges in a balloon. The man is a Bolivian drug mule, explains Almeida. Unable to excrete the 99 capsules he had swallowed he was taken by police to have them removed in the local hospital before one ruptured.

Others are less fortunate. Almeida recalls several recent cases of capsules that split in the carrier's stomach whilst in transit. Death in such cases, he says, is almost immediate

"The guy who sniffs this stuff isn't thinking about what happened before it went up his nose. He wants to buy it, sniff it and enjoy his night. He doesn't think about the poor guy, who was roped into it, who did it out of need, who almost died and is now in prison," adds Almeida, pulling out a box of "trophies" he keeps in his office cabinet - kilos and kilos of seized cocaine wrapped in condoms and surgical gloves.

"This one was being hidden in a guy's anus," he explains, reaching for a bulging black capsule, measuring 12 cm in length and 8 cm across. "They try everything."

The long path through Corumb· and on towards European nostrils begins thousands of miles away in the forests which surround Cochabamba and Santa Cruz de La Sierra, Bolivia, where much of the country's cocaine paste is produced from the coca leaves that have been grown in the region for thousands of years.

From there the drugs are shipped to the eastern limits of Bolivia; shabby, wild-west style ports on the border with Brazil, where sewage runs unchecked through the dirt track streets and underage prostitutes can be bought for as little as R$15. Police believe that in Puerto Quijarro and neighbouring Puerto Suarez around 100 kilos of cocaine paste are delivered each day.

Then come the "engolidores" or "swallowers", young men and women like Isaac, who smuggle the drugs into Brazil. Once safely inside Brazilian territory the drugs pass onwards, either to the slums and outskirts of Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, or further a field through the port of Santos or the country's international airports to Europe.

Corumb· hasn't always been on the frontline of Brazil's war on drugs. Until recently the preferred route in was by plane, from Colombia, Peru and Bolivia and drugs continue to trickle in through these routes.

But since a law authorizing the Brazilian air force to fire on suspect planes was introduced in 2004 the traffickers have taken to using the roads.

The BR-262, a winding highway that cuts a 441km path through the Brazilian Pantanal wetlands between the Bolivian border and state capital Campo Grande, has become their road of choice. One of only a few routes leading to Sao Paulo from the west, the road is policed by a skeleton security force, spread out across eight police check-points, mostly unmanned during the Sunday Herald's visit to the region.

Authorities openly admit that the chances of being caught are minute.

"What we have found is really very little," says Alcidio de Souza Araujo, another Corumb· police chief involved in combating the "narcotraficantes", who cites police corruption and understaffing as the main explanations.

"Expecting policemen who earn R$800 a month not to be corrupt is hypocrisy on the part of the state and of society," he says.

Isaac was one who didn't get through. Spotted by police at Corumb· airport, he was taken for X-rays in the local hospital and promptly thrown into jail where he awaits sentencing and faces a minimum of four years in one of the state's overcrowded prisons.

"My mum didn't have a clue [what I was going to do]. I reckon if she'd have known she'd have tied me up to the bed post," he says, through the bars of a damp cell which he now shares with 16 other prisoners, almost all drug mules caught on their way from Bolivia to Brazil. The prisoners here are only allowed out to see daylight once every two weeks, and most carry a yellow tinge, a result of chronic sun deprivation.

"It was [supposed to be] a quick one. Come here and be back the next day," he jokes. "It's just that I ended up staying."

Yet for every Isaac caught, dozens of other mules slip through the net. Police believe traffickers often employ fall-guys, offered up to the police to give cover to other mules with bigger cargos. One might get caught, the reasoning goes, but 10 will make it through.

As a result huge quantities of "pÛ" (literally dust) continue to flow into Brazil and onwards to foreign markets where the drug is repeatedly cut , pushing up the traffickers' profits.

Security chiefs in Rio and Sao Paulo say that until Brazil is able to effectively control its thousands of kilometres of virtually abandoned border the drug-fuelled conflicts in its big cities will rage on ñ and the cocaine will continue to pour out into Europe.

"This is a national situation," Rio de Janeiro's outgoing Public Security Secretary, Marcelo Itagiba, told the Sunday Herald recently, during a night-time visit to one of the city's favelas, after an attempted invasion by rival drug traffickers left half a dozen dead.

"The country has a serious problem ñ the problem of a country with frontiers with countries that are drug producers. We have to have a consistent policy... above all to avoid drugs coming into our territory."

Brazilians and Bolivians aren't the only ones trying their luck in the local cocaine trade. With big bucks to be made, a steady trickle of autonomous "gringo" traffickers are also making their way to cities like Corumb·.

Corumb·'s police station has recently played host to Israeli and Italian nationals, and last week a 36-year-old British dancer was arrested trying to embark from Rio to Europe with 44 kilos of cocaine.

Amongst the seventeen inmates currently in Corumb·'s squalid, stale-aired prison is a Swiss citizen, who was caught last month on his way to Sao Paulo, with two towels soaked in liquefied cocaine, weighing around 6 kilos.

It's a scorching Thursday afternoon and at Corumb·'s bus station the federal police are searching for cocaine on the last buses of the day, to Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.

They heave open the holds and begin to sift through stacks of bags and packages. One pulls out a pen-knife and slices into a bundle of green and red Bolivian peppers, before pulling it out and running his finger along the blade.

"Sometimes they put it in potatoes and then glue it back together," says one police 'agent', who says that in the past he has come across cocaine stashed in fake leg plasters, frozen fish, anal cavities, safe deposit boxes and even dissolved into towels.

Next comes the interrogation. The three policemen clamber into the buses and begin questioning the passengers. Where are you going? Where did you come from? What do you do? Who's your boss? How did you meet him? Have you got any other bags?

Eventually they set their sights upon a nervous looking Bolivian, who is seen turning away from the bus station on seeing the police blitz. He is handcuffed and carted off to the Police Headquarters, arrested for trying to enter Brazil with fake documents.

"You see," says Almeida, stood next to the 18-year-old Bolivian, who is now shackled to a chair by his left wrist. "Every time you go out you find something."

Prayer time is sacred in Isaac's pokey, cockroach-ridden jail cell. With family visits a rarity (most mothers can't afford the journey to see their imprisoned sons), the evangelical pastor who visits each morning, serves as a rare point of contact not just with God, but with the outside world also.

Poking his palm-sized copy of the New Testament through the bars, 27-year-old Juninho ñ also imprisoned on drugs charges - begins to recite his favourite excerpt from the Bible: Hebrews, chapter 13, verse 3.

"Remember those in prison as if you were their fellow prisoners and those who are mistreated as if you yourselves were suffering." He repeats the line twice.

"The guy who receives this drug over there [in Europe] doesn't even know 5 per cent of what happens before it gets there. He thinks just about getting it and consuming it," says Isaac. "And then he thinks about the next lot."

Back in his office Araujo flicks through a thick pile of blue folders; all unresolved enquiries into Corumb·'s escalating drug-boom. He remembers an elderly woman who was arrested last year, carrying a shipment of cocaine and with R$700 in her purse.
"I asked how long it took her to earn all that money and she said 4 years."

"She was offered US$1,000 to do the drug run," he adds. "It's logical."

(The Sunday Herald, April 2006)

Politicians spin to beat of Rio's carnival drums

Tom Phillips — 2006-03-01

It is the world's largest, most scantily clad street party. But what Rio's annual carnival has lacked in clothes it has made up for in politics.

The 70,000 revellers who have crammed into the city's sambadrome each night since Saturday have been served a feast of political propaganda, ranging from a Venezuelan-sponsored effigy of the revolutionary SimÛn BolÌvar to samba themes glorifying Brazilian politicians in the run-up to elections.

"We're in an election year, and they're all opportunists," said Wilson das Neves, a respected Rio sambista who has taken part in processions since 1976. "They get involved in the processions to see if they can hoodwink the people."

Mr Neves's school, Imperio Serrano, whose theme this year dealt with Brazil's religious diversity, was the exception in what is being described as the most political carnival in recent history.

Lisa Shaw, of the University of Liverpool and author of The Social History of the Brazilian Samba, says the mixing of samba and politics dates back to the dictator Getulio Vargas, who legalised samba parades in the 30s. "Vargas was instrumental in co-opting popular culture, particularly Afro-Brazilian, for political purposes," she said. "Certainly his brand of populism contributed a lasting legacy to Brazilian politics."

The world-famous Mangueira school led the political celebrations, performing a tribute to the Sao Francisco river, the subject of a controversial water distribution project that the government says would provide water to six million north-easterners in a drought-stricken region. Thousands of participants chanted this year's homage to irrigation - sponsored by the Ceara state government: "Thanks to irrigation, the ground became an orchard, and has first-class fruits for the tasting."

In the nearby city of Campos, no fewer than six schools dedicated their themes to the populist presidential would-be Anthony Garotinho, who models himself as a protector of Brazil's poor and evangelical communities.

In Sao Paulo there was controversy after the city's mayor and governor appeared in the form of two giant statues on one school's multi-coloured float.

Yet the peak of this year's political display came on Sunday when a huge effigy of BolÌvar, with a golden sword thrust into the air and angels' wings streaming off his back, rolled out on to the walkway, raising a flashing neon-heart into the air. Part of the Vila Isabel school's procession, the parade was sponsored by the Venezuelan petrol company PVDSA and featured a reference to Soy loco por ti, AmÈrica, (I'm crazy about you, America) a 60s anthem dedicated to the Latin American left.

Hugo Ch·vez's Venezuela was not the only international player to find its way into the most Brazilian of parties this year. Also on show were images of Saddam Hussein and Martin Luther King, whilst Osama bin Laden carnival masks were once again best sellers in markets.

Neves said he feared that increasingly political performances threatened the true message of samban social justice. "During carnival politicians go out kissing everyone ... Then after the elections they forget about them all," he said. "But Brazilians aren't stupid; they know what's going on."

(The Guardian, March 1, 2006)

Brazil's roofless reclaim the cities

Tom Phillips — 2006-01-23

Every day at 4am, 18-year-old Julienne Cunha wakes to fetch water for her family. She climbs from her bed in the poky, plywood shack she shares with six relatives and collects her bucket.

In the remote northern fishing village of Alcantara where she was born, it would be nothing out of the ordinary. But these days, Julienne lives on the 20th floor of a tower block in one of the wealthiest districts of Sao Paulo, the world's third largest city.

A resident of Prestes Maia, a colossal abandoned clothes factory that towers over central Sao Paulo, Julienne is one of the youngest members of Brazil's sem-teto or "roofless" movement - an urban coalition growing in cities across the country. Water doesn't reach Ms Cunha's part of Prestes Maia, so every day she treks down its spiralling staircase to collect it for relatives including her brother, sister and two-month-old son.

The roofless movement is the urban equivalent to Brazil's Movimento dos Sem Terra (MST) or Landless Movement, which has spearheaded the campaign for land reform since the 1980s. The MST defends Brazil's impoverished rural workers and reclaims unproductive land for the dispossessed. The Movimento de Sem-Teto do Centro, MSTC, on the other hand, reclaims buildings for the urban homeless and for low-income workers, many of whom work in the informal economy.

Eight years after its foundation, the MSTC is part of an ever growing coalition fighting for the rights of Brazil's urban poor, under the umbrella of the Frente de Luta por Moradia or Pro-housing Front.

Prestes Maia, Sao Paulo's biggest occupation with 22 storeys in total, is home to 468 families; around 3,000 people from all over South America cram into improvised shacks constructed in what was once office space.

Walking through Prestes Maia is like taking a road trip through Brazil. On every floor a different accent hangs in the air; the exaggerated vowels of the baianos, who swapped Salvador's favelas for the bustle of Sao Paulo; the staccato consonants of the pernambucanos who fled the arid backlands of Brazil's north-east in search of work; and, on the sixth floor the portunhol of Bolivian immigrants who flick between Spanish and Portuguese as they describe their fight for survival in the ocupacion.

"There are lots of people here with different cultures, different ways of life," explains 49-year-old Jomarina Abreu Pires da Fonseca, an MSTC coordinator, at her home on the 11th floor of Prestes Maia. "Someone has to try to keep order," she adds, grinning.

At first glance Prestes Maia, which sem-teto members occupied in 2002, resembles a chaotic, multi-storey shantytown; cardboard spews out of its cracked windows, graffiti litter its walls and children rattle through its wide corridors on bicycles. But the community is meticulously organised. Residents contribute R$20 (£5) a month to the upkeep of the building, and a rota system exists for cleaning each floor's communal bathroom. Ms Fonseca holds weekly meetings at which representatives from each floor discuss house rules, new arrivals and future occupations.

Sao Paulo, like many of Brazil's large urban centres, is a city crying out for housing reform. According to the UN it has 39,289 abandoned buildings. At the same time, says the Sao Paulo-based Social Network of Justice and Human Rights, there are an estimated 15,000 homeless people here with many thousands more unable to afford decent housing outside the city's favelas, where around 2 million are thought to live.

Before becoming president, Luiz Inacio da Silva of the Workers party promised this would all change. Now, three years on and mired in an ongoing corruption scandal, Mr da Silva is coming under fire for backtracking on his promises to Brazil's social movements. Although Workers party propaganda still adorns many of Prestes Maia's plaster walls, anger is growing that the "shoeshine president" has not done more to help the country's poor.

"We are petistas [supporters of the Workers party], but we have to say that he has done nothing for the social movements. We've tried to put pressure on him but what we hoped for hasn't happened," says Ms Fonseca, as two delivery men haul the occupation's latest acquisition - a new washing machine - up the last of 10 flights of crumbling stairs.

Another critic is Ivone Maria Santana de Souza, a 45-year-old immigrant from a shantytown in the north-eastern city of Olinda, who lives on the squat's 19th floor. Along with her daughter and four grandchildren, Ms de Souza spends her days separating tiny plastic hangers for a sock company. She receives 80 centavos (20p) for every kilo of hangers and the family survive off the monthly income of about R$500.

"If we could find work [in the north-east] we'd never have come here in the first place," she says, dressed in a white nightdress bearing the words "life is good" in English. "The money situation is horrible. If you work in the centre where do they expect you to live?" she asks. "What do they expect you to do?"

The area's housing secretary, Orlando Almeida, told a magazine recently that the centre's poor should be relocated from inner-city tenements to the city's outskirts. A new project to revitalise parts of central Sao Paulo, including one neighbourhood known as Cracolandia (Crackland), aims to redevelop the area almost exclusively for the middle and upper class. Human rights groups say the plans will marginalise further Sao Paulo's ever-growing underclass.

Looking out from her 11th floor window at the skyscrapers across the horizon Ms Fonseca talks of the sem-teto's plans to carry out a wave of occupations across Sao Paulo in the coming months. "But our fight isn't just for housing," she says. "It's for healthcare, old people's rights, employment, leisure and schooling. People don't know their rights. And our fight is to make sure they do."

Originally published in The Guardian (link)

Turning the page on literacy

Tom Phillips — 2006-01-01

Standing on the dirt track outside his battered red-brick home, Carlos Leite can still remember the encyclopaedias that changed his life.

An odd-job man from Jardim Catarina, a sprawling bairro-cum-shanty town in S„o GonÁalo, 50km from Rio de Janeiro, Leite had never had much time for books. He dropped out of school in the third grade and at 51 is functionally illiterate.

But two years ago, when he clapped eyes on three dusty red encyclopaedias abandoned on a construction site in southern Rio, he knew immediately what he would do.

"I told the guys from my bicycle club, 'I'm going to set up a library'," says Leite outside the shack that was once his home and which has become the only library serving Jardim Catarina's estimated 100,000 residents. S„o GonÁalo itself, with about 830,000 residents, has just two libraries.

"They told me I was crazy. Then I went around asking everybody if they had any books to donate and started putting them in my bedroom until there was no space to sleep."

The Biblioteca Comunit·ria on Rua 18 (Road 18) quickly grew, with Leite scouring his neighbourhood on his bicycle in the hunt for resources. Donations rained in from the wealthy employers of Jardim Catarina's workforce, predominantly porters and maids who work in the glitzy south of Rio de Janeiro.

When there was no more space for books, Leite moved his mattress into a small shack at the back of his house. The books continued to pour in. Three years on, schoolchildren and pensioners crowd into rickety chairs in what was once his bedroom to peruse its 6,000-strong collection. Stacked on the shelves is a bizarre collection that ranges from George Eliot to Jeffrey Archer, as well as Brazilian greats such as Machado de Assis and Monteiro Lobato.

Leite's achievement is all the more remarkable in a country where less than 10% of the 240,000 state schools have their own libraries.

As part of his election campaign in 2002, Luiz In·cio "Lula" da Silva vowed to wage war on illiteracy. Yet despite a 2% reduction in illiteracy levels under his presidency, Brazil still has one of the highest levels of functional illiteracy in South America. It is estimated that 7% of the country's 180 million citizens cannot read. This means that even when books are available, many people - such as Leite - are unable to understand them fully.

"It's not just about teaching someone to read a book, it's about teaching them to understand it," says Ana Claudia Maia from the NGO Leia Brasil (Read Brazil), which is leading the pro-book campaign.

"Lots of people can read the words but cannot process them properly . . . There is no point in democratising books unless you also democratise the ability to comprehend."

Maia concedes, however, that she faces an uphill battle in a country where the nightly television soap operas have been known to attract more than 80% of the population.

In an attempt to boost reading levels, a number of pioneering schemes have been rolled out across Brazil in recent years. In the southern city of Curitiba, 30 farois de saber or "lighthouses of knowledge" were introduced in 1995. Modelled on the Egyptian library in Alexandria, each building contains about 5,000 books and separate reading rooms.

Yet such projects represent the exception. In a country where more than 25% of the population lives on less than $60 a month, community development is nearly always left to local initiatives such as Leite's.

"Sure, we need [the help of] politicians," he says. "But it's better to do these things just with friends. When politicians are involved, you get something and then four years later the children lose it again."

Instead Leite's project seeks to offer a local solution to a national problem. "I was brought up here. I know the place's needs," he says. "My dream is to take all of this and make the best library for the community. The important thing for a community like mine is that it learns about the culture of Brazil and about other cultures and about politics through books in order to defend itself in all sorts of ways . . . Then they'll be able to debate and pass it on to their kids."

Jason Prado, the director of Leia Brasil, laments the way that previous governments consistently sidelined the question of literacy, concentrating in the 1960s and 70s on technical colleges, allowing Brazil to become one of the least literate countries in the developing world.

"What we need in Brazil is an educational revolution," he says. "Brazil woke up very late to the idea of literacy. When it did, the indices of functional illiteracy were around 75%, unlike 20%-25% in places like the US, UK and France."

And although projects such as Jardim Catarina's community library represent a ray of light at the end of the tunnel, educationalists know there is no quick fix to Brazil's literacy problem.

Leite, however, is upbeat: "Today, even if I wanted to close it, I couldn't. It belongs to the people, not me."

(The Guardian Weekly, January 2006)

Brazil's first black television channel tackles legacy of 300 years of slavery

Tom Phillips — 2005-11-21

"Is it on air? We're on the air!" With the push of a button and these hesitant words, Brazil's first black television channel came into existence yesterday.

TV da Gente, which means "our TV", has been heralded as giant step forward in the country's fight against discrimination, and to mark the broadcast high-ranking politicians, celebrities and civil rights activists gathered at the Casa Verde studio in north Sao Paulo.

"This will turn out to be the most important development ever in terms of communication for black communities all around the world," a veteran American civil rights activist, 72-year-old James Meredith, told the Guardian. "Unlike the United States and South Africa, Brazil established a system of white supremacy without the obvious signs like segregation or apartheid. Until Brazilians start to face up to this reality the legacy of slavery will continue."

Mr Meredith's ideas are far from universally accepted in Brazil where, despite the social chasm between Afro-Brazilians and their white counterparts, many still insist on the idea of a "racial democracy", first expounded by the anthropologist Gilberto Freyre in the 1930s.

Statistics tell a different story, of a country split along racial lines. Afro-Brazilians form almost half Brazil's 180 million strong population yet account for 63% of the poorest section of society. The 2000 census found that 62.7% of Brazil's white population had access to sanitation compared with just 39.6% of its Afro-Brazilians, while a new UN report found that black men earned on average 50% less than their white counterparts in Brazil. Human rights campaigners underline the racial dimension behind Brazil's staggering murder rates. The majority of victims are young black men aged between 15 and 24.

The sprawling redbrick favelas that engulf large urban centres are predominantly, if not entirely, inhabited by black Brazilians. And barring a few high-profile politicians such as the culture minister, Gilberto Gil, Afro-Brazilian faces remain a rarity in politics.

In the nightly blockbuster soap operas - perhaps the best indicator of how things stand in Brazilian society - black actors are generally restricted to playing the roles of maids and porters who work in the glitzy apartment blocks inhabited by the wealthier, white characters. Indeed, while slavery was abolished more than a century ago in Brazil, many believe its legacy is harder to shake off.

This week a leading economist estimated that for Brazil's black population to have access to the same standard of public services as their white counterparts the government would have to invest 67.2bn real (£17.6bn).

TV da Gente's aims to change at least part of this. Its mission statement, mimicking the former president Juscelino Kubitschek, is to achieve "50 years progress in five" in black Brazil's fight for visibility. The man behind the media revolution that seeks to overturn this divide is Jose de Paula Neto, better known as Netinho de Paula, a media-savvy 35-year-old who rose from the housing estates of Sao Paulo to become a household name, first as a samba popstar then as a television presenter.

In recent years Netinho has become the favela's answer to Jimmy Saville: in his weekly show Dia de Princesa he roams Brazil's deprived periferia (outskirts) in a limousine, bestowing gifts upon impoverished families while dressed in his trademark dinner-jacket.

Netinho says his latest project - which sports a logo of an eye in the yellow and green shades of the Brazilian flag - aims to redress the racial imbalance in Brazilian television and society as a whole. "Our country is marked by racial mixtures. But the actual model of TV does not represent the majority of Brazilians. We are trying to help our own people, given that nobody else seems to want to do it. This is where the real fight starts. Those who say they want an integrated Brazil will really have to start showing their faces now," said Netinho.

Some believe it will be an uphill battle. For Joel Zito Araujo, campaigner and director of the documentary Denying Brazil - the Black Man in the Brazilian Soap Opera, the widespread exclusion of black actors from television reflects deeply ingrained prejudices in society.

"The [Brazilian] soap opera carries as its aesthetic and cultural discourse the ideology of whitening. This denies that which should be our greatest heritage: our cultural and racial diversity," he said. "The inclusion of black actors has improved with each decade. However, Brazilian society, in the main part, remains very prejudiced. Television and society are connected in terms of these racial taboos."

Yet despite the startling racial gulf, many point to recent advances for the black population, notably the partial introduction in 2002 of university quotas for black students. "Securing university quotas was the first real achievement of black society in Brazilian society. For the first time in our history being black brought some kind of advantage," said Araujo. "Only by developing talent within the black population, and them achieving positions of power will we be able to bring about structural change."

Initially the new channel, in which around R$12m has been invested, will be broadcast for six hours a day on terrestrial television in Sao Paulo and the north-eastern city of Fortaleza. People in other areas will be able to tune in via satellite, while viewers in Angola, from where a quarter of the investments have come, will be able to follow daily programmes, which include news, sport and a Brazilian hip-hop slot.

As Brazil marked its annual black pride day yesterday, black activists at the launch of TV da Gente celebrated the new channel. "TV da Gente will reproduce, for the first time, the true image of the people," said Netinho de Paula. "It's a huge victory for us all: for the black movement, for the white movement, for the red movement and for the Brazilian people."

(The Guardian, November 21, 2005)

High and dry on vanashing Amazon rivers

Tom Phillips — 2005-11-05

Horacio Ramos knew what was coming when butterflies began flocking to the river banks near his home. Droughts are nothing new to the backlands of the Amazon basin, but when the butterflies arrived in such numbers, he knew from experience it would be bad.

By September his worst fears were confirmed. Stranded in the barren port of Manaquiri, 30 miles from his village in the small settlement of Nova Canaa, he had been forced from his home, like hundreds of other river-dwellers. It is the worst "seca" or drought the 37-year-old carpenter can remember.

"It's been a gigantic drought," he said, sitting by the cramped houseboat he shares with his wife and seven children. "There's no way back home, all the rivers have dried up. As soon as the water rises again we'll go back. But only God knows when that will be."

Experts describe the droughts that have ravished the state of Amazonas this year as the worst in 40 years. Last month a state of emergency was declared in four municipalities by state governor Eduardo Braga. And now, although rain is slowly beginning to fall again, the situation in places like Manaquiri - one of the first areas to be declared an emergency zone - is scarcely less bleak. Forty schools have closed in the region since the drought began, while polluted water has reportedly made diarrhoea rife.

The Guardian travelled six hours from Manaquiri into the interior of the state to visit some of the most drought-stricken communities - many of them inaccessible until this week, when rain began once more, allowing water levels to rise. Most of the people in the Manaquiri area fled long ago, environmental refugees forced to move to the city by the severe drought. House after house lies abandoned along the riverside, chains clinging to the rickety wooden doors, pans and empty bottles discarded outside. The floating homes common to the region that normally rise and fall on the broad river sit stranded on banks of cracked red earth. At the Sao Raimundo dwelling a red-eyed dog keeps a solitary watch over its master's house.

Environmental groups such as Greenpeace say the problems in Manaquiri and in the Amazon region are a direct result of deforestation and global warming. They blame the drought on warmer ocean temperatures, a possible result of global warming. They say changes in patterns of rainfall in the region is caused by warm air rising over the north Atlantic.

"If you compare the rainfall averages over the last five years, you see that there have been growing rain deficits each year," said Greenpeace activist Carlos Rittl, who is based in the state capital Manaus. "It will be extremely worrying if this becomes a tendency."

"This drought has to serve as an alert. If the problem of deforestation isn't resolved it is possible these droughts will get worse every year and ... there will be a greater susceptibility on the part of the forest to fires."

Global warming is the last term you will hear in and around Manaquiri, a town of 36,000 inhabitants on the banks of the Rio Parana, a tributary of the Rio Solimoes, 90 miles from Manaus. The main worry here is the effect on the local economy, particularly its fishermen who have seen their livelihood snatched from them by the shortage of rain. Until recently the riverbed was cloaked with a thick layer of dead fish. Now, although the waters - and with them the fish - have started to return, vultures pick at the remains of dead piranhas along the river bank.

At a small creek three hours by canoe from Manaquiri down shallow, winding canals, fisherman Elvis de Souza Silva, 44, is struggling to rebuild his life after two months without work.

"There hasn't even been enough to eat," lamented the father of two, floating in his battered wooden boat. "We used to take home 300-400kg of fish every three days. Now for more than a month there's been nothing. Absolutely nothing. What else can I do to survive? This is my only profession."

"I'll sleep here tonight," he added, motioning to the river bank, which he will share with the region's ever-present caymans and vultures. "I'll only go back when there are enough fish to sell."

A minority have profited from the drought. Business for the motorbike taxi drivers is booming in Manaquiri: with boats unable to access the main port, the local taxi association has set up a pick-up point in what was once the Rio Parana. "I've never seen a drought like this in my life," said its 49-year-old president, Milton Carvalho da Silva, at a wooden bridge balanced precariously over the riverbed. "But at least it's good for something."

There was laughter, and then anger, as those waiting at the taxi-rank reflected on the recent drought.

"It says on TV that the government is sending medicine, but I haven't seen any," said Luiz Carlos Matos, 40, from Cai na Agua (literally Fall in the Water) 10 miles from Manaquiri. Since the drought, the village has earned the grim nickname of Cai na Lama or Fall in the Mud. "People in the interior are the real problem," Matos added. "Here life's been difficult but we manage to scrape by. There they have nothing."

As the fish supplies ran out, he explained, food prices also rocketed. The price of a bag of manioc flour - a staple in the Amazon region and across Brazil - has rocketed since the drought began from 35 reais (£9) to 120 reais. As with much else, there is no water to make it.

Back at Manaquiri's virtually waterless port Horacio Ramos is still waiting for the rivers to rise so he and his family can return home. "I don't know what caused all this. Maybe it was the sun," he suggested, pouting in confusion as his son Orlando, 5, whose school has been shut for more than a month, toddles up to his side.

"Global warming? I don't even know what that is. But God is big. He'll help us through this."

That night, torrential rain poured on to the port's stranded boat owners and, as sun rose, they awoke to find their boats partially submerged in the murky river. "Thank God the rain has finally come, but it's done a lot of damage," said Altemir da Silva Lima, 42, a fisherman from the nearby Bom Tento village.

"Now we know the floods will be big this year as well. That's how it works when there's a big drought ... And after that we'll just have to wait for next June's drought."

Originally published in The Guardian (link)

The Day Grief Came Home to Brazil - The Story of Jean Charles de Menezes

Tom Phillips — 2005-07-31

Maria Otoni de Menezes, mother of Jean Charles, the Brazilian mistakenly killed by British police, is no stranger to suffering. Years ago she lost another son, in childbirth. In Córrego dos Ratos, the isolated rural community where her family lives without notion of time or date, nobody knows exactly how long ago that happened. But it was the first event in a sequence of relentless misfortunes that has plagued the Menezes family ever since. The cancer Maria thought she had beaten has returned and she is dying.

'Yes, it's a lot of tragedy for such a small number of people,' said a heavily sedated Matozinho Otoni de Menezes, Jean's father, slumped in the sofa of his house near Gonzaga.

It's a tragedy visible in the deep lines cut into the 66-year-old's face, wrinkles from hard work and suffering in the rural community where he struggled to raise his family.

Maria also knows hardship. In her three-bedroom home, the only income came from the couple's sons: Jean, in London, and Giovane, his elder brother in São Paulo.

'The only thing we buy in this house is salt,' she said proudly, showing The Observer around her home, where all food is planted, tended and, in the case of the chickens which scurry around her backyard, killed.

Even the house was built as a favour: by the husband of Jean's second cousin, Maria José. Last Thursday, the eve of her son's funeral, Maria received The Observer in her home in what Brazilians call the roça, or back-of-beyond.

She was on her feet again, after two days spent heavily sedated. She remembered the English lessons Jean tried to give her over the phone

'I couldn't make head nor tail of it,' she smiled, pouring a glass of traditional sugary Brazilian coffee. She recalled the British tastes of the 27-year-old: he drank black, unsweetened coffee and had stuck a Union flag sticker on to his motorbike, left in Gonzaga.

The smile vanished as she levered herself awkwardly into a chair: 'I've got problems with my back. Sometimes I can't stand up. I had an operation on my throat to remove a tumour a few years ago but the problem has come back.

'But God knows what He is doing. I have to let go now and pass Jean into the hands of the Lord.'

Lost in the arching hilltops of Minas Gerais state, life in Gonzaga and the surrounding family farms is a daily struggle. The average monthly wage is around £50.

Jean hoped for a different life. In 2002 he went to London to try his luck as an electrician, a passion he had since he was eight, scribbling diagrams of circuits in notepads and fiddling with broken transistors.

'He was a battler. In London he used to carry around two mobile phones in case one didn't get reception,' said his cousin, Alex Alves Pereira. 'He didn't ever want to lose work.'

He wasn't alone. Crippled by the collapse of the mining industry, the north-east corner of Minas Gerais has long been famed for its high levels of emigration. Thousands of young people such as Jean make pilgrimages to the US and Europe each year in search of work, usually manual labour or in bars.

In the city of Governador Valadares, 90 kilometres (about 56 miles) from Gonzaga, known as the terra do dólar (land of the dollar), the federal police estimate that 250 passports are applied for each day. Of Valadares' 300,000 inhabitants, around 40,000 work overseas.

In Gonzaga, according to the mayor, Júlio Maria de Souza, 1,500 of the town's 5,700 natives are currently outside Brazil.

Another member of the de Menezes clan, 20-year-old Geirton, died in 2001, when a bridge he was building in Portugal collapsed.

'Jean promised he would come back in three years to take care of us in our old age,' Maria said. 'How can that happen now?'

On Friday, in the São Sebastião church, a poster near Jean's coffin read: 'Whose fault is all of this? The lack of jobs in our Brazil.'

Many youngsters seek out the local people smugglers, who traffic thousands of young Brazilians through Mexico to the US each year.

'I think she paid about $10,000,' said Maria Madureira Dias Da Silva, 41, referring to her 20-year-old daughter who was arrested in America last week after crossing the border with the coyotes. 'It's so dangerous I didn't want her to go. But she came to me and said: "Mum, I'm going, God willing." I won't let my other kids go now, after all this. You never know what might happen.'

It's Friday afternoon and around her thousands of Brazilians have gathered, clutching red and white roses, to pay their last respects. Loudspeakers blare out a dramatic anthem of the kind common in Brazil's poorer communities. 'I've seen things I never thought I'd see,' proclaim the lyrics. 'Everyone has the right to happiness.'

In Brazil the poor are buried on the hillsides, land without value. So it is in Gonzaga. As Jean's family and friends assemble on the dust-choked incline, the mood has subsided into dejection, and hundreds perch on the walls around the cemetery, staring vacantly out across the hills.

'I still can't understand it. Why didn't they [the police] stop him earlier? Why didn't they identify themselves? They didn't have to do this,' said his cousin Rubens de Menezes, after helping carry the coffin up the steep path.

Around him graves crept up the hillside in a mishmash of stone headstones and rotting wooden crosses. When it rains, water cascades down this slope. Coffins and bones have been known to appear in the muddy rivers, says the mayor.

Maria is trying to fight off tears, but repeatedly her pale face buckles into sharp bursts of sobbing.

'I don't know if I'll ever find happiness again,' she said, before being interrupted by Monica, another member of the sprawling Menezes family.

'You can't say that, Maria. You have to be strong. You have to fight. You have all your family around you,' she said.

Maria looked at her: 'I was born for my family. I wanted them all to be happy. I was born to be a happy person. A happy mother. Not any more.'

Originally published in The Guardian (link)