It’s not a scene from a new wave of Brazilian science fiction flicks, but a snapshot of the second edition of the Amazonas Adventure Film Festival, which touched down in Manaus this month.

Thousands of Brazilians passed through the Largo São Sebastião during the week-long event to pour over a selection of international and national films – and perhaps also to meet the stars.

"I can’t remember her name, but she’s from overseas, isn’t she?" wondered one local teenager, as she waited, clutching a biro and an autograph book, ready to pounce on an unsuspecting Alicia Silverstone, one of the jury members.

"She’s the one who did As Patricinhas de Beverly Hills (Clueless), right?" she added, as British actor Christopher Ecclestone stepped out into the square. "But I’ve no idea who that is. Never seen him before. Do you think he’ll give me an autograph?"

Also amongst the host of stars on parade in Manaus was Roman Polanski, the French film maker, whose film Oliver Twist closed the festival.

"The festival is a great thing because it promotes the Amazon," he explained at Manaus’ luxurious Tropical Hotel, where the members of he jury enjoyed front row seats over the murky waters of the Rio Negro during the week long festival.

"Not enough is being done to protect this area [or] to recognise the destruction," he said. "I came here 14 years ago and have seen the damage done."

True to form Polanski spoke of the comparisons between Dickensian London and the capital of Amazonas.

"Maybe Manaus [is like London] less than other cities in Brazil. [But] London, like Manaus, was a fast growing metropolis at the time, drawing people in from the provinces who found themselves homeless and without work contrary to their expectations."

The festival’s Franco-Brazilian organizers do not shy away from their aim to change that. Nominally the Amazonas Adventure Film Festival is about cinema. Eight "adventure"-orientated films fought it out for the top prize whilst documentaries and shorts from Brazil and around the world disputed other prizes.

Yet this festival is about more than celluloid and popcorn. The promoters make no secret of their desire to use cinema to boost tourism and help protect the environment.

State governor Eduardo Braga, one of the brains behind the festival, says the aim is to lead Manaus back to its "glorious past", without damaging its comparatively preserved surroundings.

"Our biggest challenge is to promote development without destroying nature," he said.

"For that reason sustainable development models are now our main goals."

With a battle currently raging over the resurfacing of the BR-319 that links Manaus and Porto Velho, the dilemma of balancing development and preservation could not be starker for Braga.

Neighbouring states, principally Pará, have seen their rainforests ravaged in recent years by illegal loggers and soya and cattle farmers, egged on by the growth of road networks in the state. Many fear a reconstructed BR-319 could precipitate the same kind of destruction in Amazonas.

But such concerns were not always at center stage during the glitzy film sessions at Manaus’ Amazonas Opera House, a spectacular theatre built at the height of the rubber boom in 1896.

In fact, the cinema goers who crammed into the velvet-carpeted theatre each night found themselves transported to all parts of the world: from the killing fields of Rwanda, in Shooting Dogs by British director Michael Caton-Jones, to the snow capped hilltops of Tibet in Dreaming Lhasa, by Ritu Sarin and Tenzing Sonma.

But although Shooting Dogs eventually scooped the top award, the film on everybody’s lips here was from closer to home.

Released this month in cinemas across Brazil, Cinema, Aspirina e Urubus (Cinema, Aspirin and Vultures), the debut film of Brazilian director Marcelo Gomes, recounts the improbable, though partially true story, of Johann, a German immigrant who embarks on a gargantuan journey across the arid Brazilian sertão during World War II, selling a new wonder drug known as ‘aspirin’.

Johann (played by German actor Peter Kethnath, to whom the northeastern state of Bahia is now home) is no ordinary salesman. Using malandragem (cunning) of which any Brazilian would be proud he uses cinema to sell his wares, scouring the gruelling interior of Paraíba in search of willing customers.

And just as Johann was a hit in the villages of the sertão (backlands), so too has the film begun garnering praise the length and breath of Brazil.

This week Walter Salles director of Brazil’s best-known road movie Central do Brasil (Central Station) lavished praise on the film in the Brazilian press.
 
And just as Gomes’ flick now seems a certain box-office hit in Brazil the festival too promises to be back with a vengeance next year.

"I’d like to make a date with you," proposed the state’s Culture Minister, Robério Braga at the closing ceremony.

"November 2006, Manaus… to experience once again the enchantment of the forest, the most desired place on the planet."

Tom Phillips is a British journalist who has been based in Brazil for 3 years. He writes for a number of papers including the Guardian, the Observer, The Melbourne Age and the Sunday Herald. You may visit his blog at http://globalnoticias.blogspot.com or contact him on atphillips@gmail.com.

Divine. Moonlit. Magnificent. Elizeth Cardoso sprung from the stages of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo in the 1930s to claim her eternal place as part of the constellation of Popular Brazilian Music.

Discovered aged just 16 by Jacob do Bandolim her career spanned six decades and left an unrivalled musical legacy. In the worlds of both bossa nova and samba Elizeth was head and shoulders above the rest.

She was the first artist to record the suave bossa novas of Tom Jobim and Vinicius de Moraes on 1958’s ‘Canção do Amor Demais’. And her countless LPs also featured the debuts of samba legends like Nelson Cavaquinho and Paulinho da Viola, whilst Cartola’s acclaimed ‘Acontece’ was penned especially for Elizeth.

She was, in the words of Brazil’s revered composer Chico Buarque, “the mother of all singers”, inspiring every musical generation that followed.

This month – on the 16th of July – Elizeth, who died of cancer in 1990, would have been 85. To commemorate her birthday, two rising stars of Rio’s music scene, the singer Thais Villela and the guitarist Marcel Baden Powell, take to the stage in Botafogo to pay tribute to the ‘Divina Dama’.

Marcel Baden Powell had a guitar teacher like no other: the incomparable mestre Baden Powell, his father, a guitarist recognised as one of the world’s best.

Following these formidable footsteps Marcel, who began playing aged 9, soon achieved the dexterity, speed and sensitivity visible in his performances in Brazil and overseas.

Aged just 23, the guitarist has already shared the stage with legendary Brazilian divas such as Alcione, Maria Bethânia and, most recently, Leny Andrade, at Rio’s Teatro Rival, where he mesmerised the audience with a breathtaking solo rendition of ‘Berimbau’.

“For me it is a great honour to pay this tribute to Elizeth,” explains Marcel, at his family home in Rio de Janeiro, where some of the most important Brazilian music of last century was composed and performed by artists like Vinicius de Moraes, Tom Jobim and, of course, Elizeth Cardoso.

“The crop of guitarists that played alongside her were best around,” he says, “amongst them Rafael Rabello, João de Aquino and Baden Powell. And as if that wasn’t enough, she was also the godmother of my brother (Felipe, a pianist currently on tour with the Brazilian rapper Marcelo D2).”

“She was a marvellous singer,” recalls Marcel.

On stage alongside Marcel will be another of Rio’s most critically acclaimed young performers, Thais Villela. A singer of intense personality, Thais was first introduced to music through the church aged 6.

Since then she has graced the stages of some of the city’s most prestigious venues, amongst them Vinicius Bar, Sérgio Porto, Circo Voador, Clube dos Democráticos and the Comuna do Semente where, according to the Jornal do Brasil writer, Paulo Celso Pereira, she “makes up Lapa’s team of divas alongside Teresa Cristina, Maria Bernades and Aurea Martins”.

“Elizeth is an inexhaustible source for all of Brazil’s female singers, especially for like interpreters like myself,” explains 26-year-old Thais, the proud owner of at least 40 Elizeth Cardoso recordings.

“She never limited herself to musical genres – she sung what sent shivers down her spine. Elizeth was the perfect embodiment of an increasingly rare breed of singers, the interpreter. Paying this tribute is a way of honouring a singer who had such natural instinct in knowing exactly what to sing and how to sing it.”

The Tribute to Elizeth, which begins on Friday at the Armazém Digital in Botafogo, will include tracks such as “Chega de Saudade” (Vinicius de Moraes and Antonio Carlos Jobim), “Rosa de Ouro” (Hermínio Bello de Carvalho, Elton Medeiros and Paulinho da Viola), “Canção de Amor” (Chocolate and Elano de Paula) and O Inverno do meu Tempo (Cartola and Roberto Nascimento).

The young musicians also promise a handful of the Baden Powell compositions immortalized in the voice of Elizeth Moreira Cardoso amongst them “Violão Vadio,” “Refém da Solidão,” “Queixa e Deixa” and “Samba Triste.” Divine. Moonlit and, of course, Magnificent.

Opening night of the Tribute to Elizeth Cardoso – Friday July 15, 8pm Entrance Free

Armazém Digital, Rio Plaza Shopping, Rua General Severiano 97, Loja 108, Botafogo, Rio de Janeiro Musicians: Thais Villela – Vocals / Marcel Baden Powell – Guitar / Leandro Junior – 7 string guitar / Tiago do Bandolim – Bandolim / Cavaquinho – Charles Costa / Percussion – Amoy Ribas

Tom Phillips is a British freelance journalist who has lived in Brazil for two years. He writes for the “Independent” and the “Sunday Herald” and has had his work published in newspapers around the world. You may visit his blog at http://globalnoticias.blogspot.com or contact him on atphillips@gmail.com.

At noon, beside a putrid canal in Rio’s Vila do João shantytown, half a dozen teenagers join hands, bow their heads and begin to recite the Lord’s Prayer. The nearby streets are all but empty; block after block of local businesses have their shutters down.

At the center of the group, a crimson smudge stains the turf where 11-year-old Carlos Henrique Ribeiro da Silva died just hours before, shot in the head as police invaded the community, during a public festival.

Around them in the square a Fair Ground lies abandoned. Wind sweeps plastic cups from the previous night’s festivities across the street. 

“They were coming back to the fairground from a party at about 11 pm,” explained one of the group, motioning to two rubber gloves, discarded by the forensic team, lying on the road.

“There was a festa junina (June celebration) going on here. Carlos Henrique was in a new car [with his father] and the police must have thought it was a vagabundo (crook). The armoured vehicle began to shoot.”

When the shooting began, Vila do João’s Praça da Paz (Peace Square) was crowded with hundreds of people. Locals enjoying a drink scattered frantically in search of shelter.

Seeing his son wounded, Carlos’ dad, Carlos Alberto da Silva, who was also shot, jumped out of the car and ran to his son’s aid. He was already dead.

“I saw the boy’s father bleeding with his kid in his arms,” recalled Jacqueline Rocha, 28, who was in the square at the time.

“There was lots of shooting. Everybody was running for cover. The kids were trying to get off the rides, screaming for help.”

“When the police saw they’d killed a kid they did a runner,” she said.

Carlos dreamed of being a football star. He trained with Botafogo’s junior team in Urca, and hoped eventually to move his mother out of the favela in which he was raised.

Instead he has become another statistic in an increasingly long list of civilians killed by Rio police in their fight against the cocaine trade.

According to human rights group Justiça Global the number of civilians killed by the city’s police nearly doubled between 1999 and 2001 from 289 to 592. By 2003 the figure had rocketed again to 1,195.

Like others before him, Carlos now lies beneath a concrete slab in the São Francisco Xavier cemetery in Caju, a tatty Flamengo football shirt draped over his small body.

Death is nothing new to the Complexo da Maré, a labyrinth of breezeblock housing on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, of which Vila do João is part.

Since the 1980s the favelas and impoverished outskirts of Rio have been ravished by armed violence, involving traffickers and police.

And as the conflicts in such communities have intensified so too have the number of civilian casualties, like Carlos Henrique. 

“It could happen at any time, on any day, at any moment,” explained 27-year-old Júlio César, a local resident, who knew Carlos Henrique.

Terrorised by an almost daily routine of violence, many favela residents feel they are left with little option but to side with the traffickers.

“They [the police] say they’re here to defend the people. They’re not,” said Carlos’ grandmother, Lúcia Helena Ribeiro Reis, in the sitting room of her nearby home in Vila dos Pinheiros.

“The crooks don’t mess with anyone. It’s the police that muck you around. They beat you again and again and this creates a revolt,” added Mrs. Reis, who has lived in the community since it was founded 22 years ago.

Other favela residents go even further.

“One day I was arriving in the community and the police were carrying out an operation. I went to get my wallet out to show my work documents, and they slapped me in the face,” said Júlio César.

“If I had the courage to join the traffickers I would and I’d kill lots of police. I hate them; I hate their race. I’m not here to defend the traffickers, but I detest the police for what they have done to my community.”

Police claimed Carlos Henrique was caught in the crossfire between traffickers and members of the 22nd Battalion, who were pursuing a stolen car into the favela. But family and members of the community said there was no such confrontation.

Normally when police enter Vila do João, children employed by the local drug traffickers set off fireworks to warn the community. This time there was no warning, they said.

“The people there said there was no shootout,” stated Carlos’ grandmother.

Police also claimed Carlos was the nephew of a local drug trafficker, Sassá. Carlos’ family denied the 11-year-old was involved in trafficking. “My grandson was innocent,” Mrs. Reis said.

Human rights groups now fear some police are deliberately blurring the lines between civilians and traffickers in order to justify accidental deaths, or even executions.

“We have a trend of killing children and then alleging they were involved in drug trafficking,” said Ricardo de Gouvêa Corrêa, from the Bento Rubião Human Rights Foundation.

“The Military Police (PM) have frequently used this rational to justify what are often summary executions. The central problem is the vision of society. The vision of society and of the newspapers is that this is reasonable, just because he might have been the nephew of a trafficker.”

Last week, when a 15-year-old boy was shot dead on the roof of his house in the Rocinha shantytown, police chief Marcos Reimão issued the following warning:

“When the police are in the community don’t stay on your roofs, stay inside your houses. The lookouts, the traffickers, are the ones that stay on the roofs. When the police shoot, whoever is on the roof might be shot.”

The police too are feeling the pressure. On Monday – the day of Carlos’ funeral – the Military Police’s commander in chief, Hudson de Aguiar Miranda, announced the construction of a bullet proof observation tower in the Complexo da Maré, set to cost up to US$ 83,000 ( 200,000 reais).

Plans to build a concrete wall between the community and the motorway that links Rio’s international airport to the south zone meanwhile were recently presented to Rio’s Parliament.

But as politicians row over the controversial scheme, denounced as ‘apartheid’ by a banner hanging from a bridge on the Linha Vermelha motorway that runs past Maré, the bloodshed continues.

It’s afternoon in Vila Pinheiros and a stream of rusty white vans are pouring out of the community to Carlos’ burial, filled with people. 

A police ‘caveirão‘ – a jet black armoured vehicle, with two rifles protruding menacingly through thin slits in its rear – approaches our van, and the driver swerves out of its way into an alleyway.

After a tense 5-minutes deciding the best way to exit Vila dos Pinheiros without hitting a police blockade, the van stutters onto the main road and on towards the cemetery.

“I can’t remember how many times I’ve been here. At least twenty,” explained William da Costa, a social worker in the Jovens Pela Paz project in Maré.

“A couple of times the people died of natural causes but most were violent deaths, and often involving police.”

“This happens almost everyday here…I have already lost one son,” added Mrs. Reis. “We are poor and we have no rights.”

As the sun goes down over the cemetery Carlos’ coffin is led slowly along the bumpy concrete passages that link thousands of simple concrete graves. A police helicopter hovers overhead.

Friends from Carlos’ football team stride ahead in fits of tears. One holds a placard, with a simple message scrawled onto it in orange felt-tip: “They killed the dream of a young boy, just 11 years old, to be a football player. Justice.”

Tom Phillips is a British freelance journalist who has lived in Brazil for two years. He writes for the “Independent” and the “Sunday Herald” and has had his work published in newspapers around the world. You may visit his blog at http://globalnoticias.blogspot.com or contact him on atphillips@gmail.com.

{mosimage}The execution of a TV reporter by a drug trafficker sent shockwaves through Brazil. Now, nearly three years on, the killer has been jailed.

They began with his feet. Armed with a hidden camera and microphone, the television reporter Tim Lopes had last been seen entering a slum in Rio’s North Zone, at around 9 pm.

He had planned to film drug traffickers flaunting their weapons and having sex with minors at a local rave, before making his escape.

Instead, the 51-year-old’s cover was blown.

Trapped deep in the Vila Cruzeiro favela (shantytown), Lopes felt bullets tear into both feet. Still bleeding, he was bundled into a car boot by the traffickers and taken to the nearby Complexo do Alemão, a labyrinthine network of slums 10 minutes away.

There he was tortured with a samurai sword and dismembered before being set alight. When police found his charred remains in a shallow grave weeks later only a few bones remained.

The execution of Lopes stunned Brazil.

Last week, his spectre returned to haunt Rio de Janeiro as Elias Pereira, or Elias Maluco (“Crazy Elias”) as he is also known, one of Brazil’s most notorious drug traffickers, went on trial accused of his torture and execution.

A huge security operation surrounded the 26-year-old, as he arrived in court in Rio last Tuesday.

Fearful of an escape bid, police ordered seven cars and a helicopter to escort Pereira from his prison cell. Heavily armed police special forces kept watch outside.

By Wednesday morning the seven jurors had heard enough.

After 40 minutes of deliberation, Pereira was sentenced to 28 years and six months in prison for his role in the murder. Six other suspects will be tried next month.

The killing of Lopes on July 3, 2002, sent shock waves through Brazil.

A series of anti-violence protests took place across Rio de Janeiro, while graffiti artists in one favela designed a mural to salute the journalist.

In São Paulo, politicians even voted to name a square after Lopes.

Now, nearly three years after his brutal murder, the trial has again stirred up strong emotions.

A leading member of the Comando Vermelho (Red Command) drug gang, Pereira once presided over the cocaine trade in 30 favelas. Police claim he was responsible for over 60 executions in one year alone.

Lopes often worked in the favelas too, as a reporter for Globo, Brazil’s largest television channel.

One of the country’s best-known investigative reporters, he received several awards for his work, often donning disguises to infiltrate the city’s remotest and most dangerous areas.

He was killed shortly after angering traffickers with his exposé, Drug Market, which showed an open-air cocaine fair operating on Pereira’s patch.

Infiltrating the slums, many of which exist in a state of undeclared civil war, is dangerous work.

When international journalists touched down in Rio in 2003 to cover the conflict in the city’s biggest favela, Rocinha, many wore flak-jackets .

According to Reporters Without Borders, 15 journalists were killed in Brazil between 1991 and 2003.

The perils of life as a journalist in the “Marvellous City” are captured best in the lyrics of Proibidão, a controversial style of electronic music native to Rio’s slums.

“The smell of burning tyres [means] the grass has been toasted,” shouts the Rap do Comando Vermelho (Red Command Rap), alluding to the so-called “microwaves” in which enemies or informers, like Lopes, are burned. “Let’s burn the informer from head to toe,” boasts another.

When teams of journalists descended on the Complexo do Alemão to cover Lopes’s death in 2002, they were greeted with an equally morbid message from the traffickers: “There’ll be more Tims.”

Some believe journalists have been ordered not to film in the favelas since Lopes’s murder.

“Sometimes they call and ask me to take the kids out of the favela for them to film,” explained Yvonne Bezerra de Mello, a social worker in the Complexo da Maré, an area known locally as the Faixa de Gaza, or Gaza Strip .

Pereira’s trial is also a grim reminder of how rising levels of violence are affecting Brazilian society as a whole. Since the cocaine trade took root in Rio in the 1980s, heavy artillery has poured into many of its 680 breeze-block shantytowns .

The anthropologist Luke Dowdney – whose book Neither War Nor Peace, launched last week, examines the plight of children in organised armed violence in 10 countries, including Brazil – believes such violence can be traced back to the country’s military dictatorship.

“There is a whole history of this kind of violence and violent police tactics,” he said.

“But human beings have been violent since the beginning of time. It’s not just to do with Rio . It’s about social inclusion.”

Dowdney, who works in Rio for the non-governmental organisation Viva Rio and studied at Edinburgh University, also thinks such violence is often exaggerated by the media.

“The Brazilian press only represents the bad side of these communities. Favelas are not all about violence and guns. If you ask lots of these kids whether they want to leave, they’ll say they don’t.

“You cannot just represent favelas as violent enclaves of poverty. There is no war in Rio. A war involves two military groups attacking each other,” he added.

Nevertheless, the trial of Elias Pereira has served as a vivid reminder of the ongoing conflict between rival drug factions engulfing parts of the city.

“The sentencing of Elias Maluco will not change the routine of drug trafficking and violence in any way,” said Marcelo Friexo of human rights group Justiça Global.

“The sale of drugs and arms to Rio de Janeiro works within an immensely complex and lucrative structure, in which favelas represent merely the final point. Maluco didn’t hold a position of any importance in terms of this hierarchy”.

“Because of their increasing youth, the ‘drug lords’ and ‘soldiers’ who work in the slums are easy to replace,” added Freixo.

“Their destiny is generally prison or death.”

Outside court, members of Tim Lopes’s family described their relief at the trial’s eventual outcome.

“The verdict was satisfactory. Justice was done [and] the prosecution was brilliant,” said Tania Lopes, the journalist’s sister.

But while the trial lasted just 16 hours. the city’s social problems will take much longer to solve.

“Trafficking groups offer kids social inclusion in a way society does not,” Dowdney said.

“These kids are responding to various risk factors around them. They are an excluded and marginalised population.”

Tom Phillips is a British freelance journalist who has lived in Brazil for two years. He writes for the “Independent” and the “Sunday Herald” and has had his work published in newspapers around the world. You may visit his blog at http://globalnoticias.blogspot.com or contact him on atphillips@gmail.com .

This article appeared originally in Scotland’s “Sunday Herald.”

On his 13th birthday he was locked up in Padre Severino, a notorious young offenders’ institute. When he escaped, weeks later, he headed back to the city center, where he now lives, scavenging leftovers from local restaurants and trying to avoid the police.

“The police might arrive at any time and kill me if I’m not switched on,” explains the 15-year-old, huddled under the Lapa viaduct in central Rio.

Around him lie heaps of squalid mattresses, home to dozens of ‘colleagues’.

“Anything is enough for them to start giving us trouble,” he says.

Researchers say Jefferson is one of up to 3,000 street children living an increasingly dangerous existence in Rio de Janeiro.

More young Brazilians are killed here than in any other Brazilian state, according to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), with 128 deaths for every 100,000 15-24-year-olds.

Street kids, some as young as nine, are among the most at risk, trawling the city’s cracked pavements day and night in search of food and money.

During the 1980s and 1990s Brazilian ‘death squads’ made up of off-duty police officers routinely murdered street kids.

Udi Butler, a leading researcher into Brazil’s street children from the International center for Research and Policy on Childhood (CIESPI), believes these squads are now less common.

“Organized extermination groups specifically targeting children on the streets don’t still seem to be operating like they did in the early 90s,” he says.

But for street kids like Jefferson the threat seems no less real.

“The other day the police turned up here and asked if we had homes to go to. My friend said no, so he started attacking him with a stick. I said I was from the Morro dos Prazeres – a slum in central Rio – but he beat me anyway.”

The execution of seven under-18s in Nova Iguaçu last month again underlined the dangers facing young people in Brazil’s poorer communities.

“With the rise of the drug gangs, you have another kind of extermination,” says Butler.

“The boundary between police and the drug gangs has become very blurred and the killing of young people is happening all over the place, whether they are members of the drug gangs or not. People on the streets have been caught up in the escalating violence relating to this,” he added.

Yvonne de Mello, a campaigner and social worker, says most street children in Rio are fleeing the drug wars that plague many of its 680 favelas, or slums.

“This everyday violence makes favelas a constant source of street children,” she explains at her project in the Baixa do Sapateiro slum where drug traffickers recently cut the legs off a local boy before executing him.

“They come from the slums where you have shootings every day,” adds de Mello.

Life on the streets is seldom an improvement. At best, street kids are shunned or verbally abused by the public. At worst, they are threatened, sexually abused, or beaten by police.

Many, like 14-year-old Godói, turn to cheap hallucinogenic drugs like ‘thinner’ (paint stripper) as a means of escape.

Godói’s parents were always fighting, he says. Aged eight, he moved in with his grandma and, when she died, he chose the streets over the constant rows back home.

He won’t be homeless forever, he says. He already plans to have two sons and doesn’t want them to grow up, like him, on the streets.

“There are only two things that take away the fear of violence: drugs and the presence of God,” explains baby-faced Godói, stashing a can of paint-stripper under his torn shirt. “With God by your side you don’t even feel hungry.”

“For them using drugs is like a survival strategy to forget stressful conditions where they come from or the hardship of life on the street,” explains Butler, whose documentary “Coming of Age on the Streets of Rio” examines the lives of the city’s street populations.

It’s impossible to ignore the clusters of scruffy street children who beg at traffic lights in cities like Rio de Janeiro, as much part of the landscape as the statue of Jesus Christ that towers above the chaotic city.

Butler describes these children as “a bitter fruit in a complex tree of poverty and inequality”.

Brazil is one of the most unequal countries in the world in terms of wealth distribution, with the country’s richest 10 per cent controlling nearly 50 per cent of its wealth, according to the World Bank.

For kids like Jefferson and Godói, trapped in a cycle of drug abuse and physical violence, there seems little escape.

“When I see kids going home from school with their parents at five O’clock, running along happily, I can’t understand why I don’t have this,” says Jefferson.

Some are lucky. Fábio Campos de Oliveira, 23, spent 10 years on the streets and still has the wounds to show for it. Five years ago his right leg was shattered by a bullet after a failed robbery attempt in Rio’s city center.

“There were five of us and we saw a man coming out of the Bingo Hall with a big bag. We started to follow him but a security guard came out and spotted us… We didn’t stop and another guard came out and began shooting,” he recalls, pointing to a thick bullet scar still coursing across his thigh.

After being taken in by social workers at the Madame Satã radio station in Lapa, Fábio turned his hand to DJ-ing.

“Lots of street kids get out but come back. But there are others who sorted themselves out. I don’t think I’m an exception,” he explains giving the example of his friend Renato de Souza, who starred as Marreco in the hit film “City of God.”

Fábio now hosts two radio shows and wants to go to college.

Butler believes cases like these show a growing determination on the part of the authorities to confront the problem’s roots, but accepts that such incidents are rare.

“There are positive things going on. There are a number of NGOs and government agencies trying to improve the conditions of the street population,” says Butler. “But Brazil’s social and economic problems will take longer to solve.”

“Unless these kids are given more alternatives and opportunities, the street can actually be a very attractive option. A number of people say it has an addictive quality – it’s a space of freedom… from being told what to do.”

Brazil’s estimated 18,000 street kids live by a complex set of codes.

“Life on the streets teaches you something being in school or university or the army never will – survival in the school of life,” explains Fábio.

“On the streets you learn to be humble, to share things and what friendship really means. It gives you the sensation of having a real family.”

It’s common for street kids to ‘marry’ as young as 12 in search of stability and compassion. But the underlying violence is never far away.

“If you see a girl with a cut face it’s because she stole someone else’s husband’,” Fábio says.

Twelve years ago vigilantes stunned Brazil, murdering eight street kids in Candelária, central Rio.

At the time, research by Human Rights Watch, an organization dedicated to protecting the human rights of people around the world, showed that 5,644 kids aged between five and 17 met violent deaths in Brazil between 1989 and 1991.

Academics like Udi Butler who thought ‘death squads’ had stopped targeting street kids are now more cautious.

“Until recently I would have said that the really bad things that happened in the early 1990s like Candelária haven’t happened to that extent since. But then recently several under-18s were murdered by thugs on the streets of São Paulo.”

At street level the vision is bleaker still. Fearful of being killed in their sleep, the kids clustered around Lapa’s viaduct keep a constant vigil until dawn, chanting rap lyrics and smoking cigarettes.

“Some of us sleep whilst the others stay awake,” explains Jefferson. “If everybody went to sleep at the same time you never know what might happen.”

Tom Phillips is a British freelance journalist who has lived in Brazil for two years. He writes for the “Independent” and the “Sunday Herald” and has had his work published in newspapers around the world. You may visit his blog at http://globalnoticias.blogspot.com or contact him on atphillips@gmail.com.

This article appeared originally in Scotland’s “Sunday Herald.”