The Grim Rules Of Gangland

Baiano is frying potatoes next to an open sewer in a district of São Paulo known as Campo Limpo (beautiful field). His van is plastered with election posters. Three girls brave the miasma of cooking oil and rotting waste to hand him leaflets for a rival. They’ve been paid to campaign — voting is compulsory 404 Not Found

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nginx/1.14.0 (Ubuntu) in Brazil so even slums are targeted when polling day approaches. Baiano has taken no money for his electioneering, and explains “this man isn’t the best candidate, but I owe him a favor.”

It’s dangerous to default in Brazil’s largest city — and in its prisons. Drauzio Varella, a jail doctor, regularly examined the corpses of inmates stabbed for failing to repay debts. In 1995, a body was brought for his inspection. “He was lying face upward,” says Drauzio Varella, “and when I turned him over, his head dangled. He had been almost decapitated. The guard told me this was the mark of [a gang called] the Primeiro Comando da Capital (First Command of the Capital).” Drauzio Varella had never heard of the pcc, but, he says, “this was just the first of many corpses marked in this way.”

Life behind bars, as described by the doctor in his bestselling memoir turned movie, Estação Carandiru, is defined by such brutal acts. With too few guards to keep order, prisoners establish their own forms of governance. The pcc, a prison football team that evolved into a criminal gang, has proved more ambitious than its rivals, not only seeking to control the cellblocks but also claiming to campaign for better conditions in them.

The prisons are a world far removed from the affluent residential districts of Brazil’s financial capital, but in May, even wealthy Paulistas discovered what had been brewing in their penitentiaries. pcc leaders, operating from their cells, orchestrated jail riots and assaults on police, public buildings and transport throughout the city and São Paulo state. There were 187 deaths the first week, according to officials. Further waves of violence followed, amid accusations that police reprisals were responsible for many casualties. Not surprisingly, the mayhem has become a hot issue in elections scheduled for Oct. 1, when Brazilians vote for their President as well as state and other federal leaders.

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a veteran left-wing labor leader, looks set for a second term. Ferréz, a prominent local writer whose latest novel, In São Paulo Nobody Is Innocent, was published last month, treats the prospect with guarded pleasure at best. “Lula opened a dialogue with the people,” says Ferréz. “But I’m not sure that will make a difference in São Paulo. The law serves the middle classes, not the periferia,” he adds, referring to the sprawling slums that surround São Paolo. “Now the law of the periferia is being visited on the middle classes.”

Lula came to power in 2002, promising to reduce a gap between rich and poor that sees 45% of national income going to 10% of the wealthiest households. His government has delivered programs such as the Zero Hunger initiative, which aims to put food on the poorest familes’ tables. Since 2002, Brazil has posted low inflation, rising gdp and a strengthening currency. But in the slums, signs of progress prove as elusive as the rats that dart between the shacks.

Wilson, 15, lives in the favela of Heliópolis, where half the 125,000 inhabitants are under 25. The vast majority come from Brazil’s hardscrabble northeastern states, drawn by the hope of work, though unemployment runs at more than 20% in the slums. And while jobs are scarce, says Wilson, “there’s no lack of opportunity to get into crime.” Despite dire prospects, the poor keep arriving in the city of 18 million. As joblessness, crime and violence continue to grow, the rich are beginning to take flight. Mariana Montoro Jens, who works for an antiviolence ngo called Instituto Sou da Paz, says: “People think of this as the country of soccer and samba. But this is a violent country.”

The rise of the pcc is one sign of that. Says Ferréz: “In a place where the state doesn’t care and the police are your enemy, this is what happens.” Drauzio Varella says that the only way to restore order in the city is to create opportunities for the poor. “Most of these boys can’t read. How can they find a place in the market? So they work for dealers. You need to give them an option.”

They certainly need something. Now retired from the prison service, Drauzio Varella, in May, celebrated his birthday in a bar run by a former guard and his wife. “We were drinking until 1 a.m.,” remembers Drauzio Varella. “The next day, the pcc entered the bar and killed my friends.” It will take more than campaign promises to heal a city as scarred as São Paulo.