CHAPTER 1
'My life is like the wind'
It is a simple, old, two-storeyed house painted yellow. The windows are protected by grilles and there is a patio at the front. There are no trees and no garden. Inside, there is no furniture and no household electrical appliances, only a table and formica chair. Visitors sit on the floor in one of the less sweltering rooms. The fridge is broken and there is no money to fix it. Despite the heat, which is often over 100 degrees fahrenheit, there is no fan. The place is clean, though it is impossible to stop the dust getting in. However, if you look out across the neighbourhood you realise you are in a comparatively imposing building. The view takes in a kilometre long pile of shacks separated by filthy roads; pregnant women carrying basins full of clothes; ragamuffin children playing with wooden sticks and chunks of metal, improvising games in pools of stagnant water.
The building houses the Catholic Church's Pastoral do Menor, the Pastoral Service for Children, in the diocese of Duque de Caxias on the periphery of Greater Rio de Janeiro, one of the most violent regions in Brazil, and inhabited by 3.5 million people. The Pastoral is situated in the Lixão (Big Tip) shanty town where rival gangs battle for control of the drug trade, and the inhabitants scrape a living from petty crime, odd jobs and badly-paid employment. The house is respected by the neighbours as though it was some kind of a temple. During the day the children in their filthy shorts play in the house's narrow corridors. Many of them may end up with their names inscribed in red letters on the rustic two-metre plaque with a white background, strategically placed in the entrance hall. It is the list of children murdered by the death squads of Duque de Caxias.
These days the list is not quite so carefully maintained. 'I have stopped counting. It wore me down. I found that each time we protested at the death of a child, more children were killed. It seemed like they were taking their revenge', says Volmer do Nascimento, 38, worker at the Fundaçao Nacional de Bem-Estar do Menor, the National Foundation for Child Welfare (FUNABEM), ex-leader of the Children's Pastoral Service and currently one of the coordinators of the Movimento Nacional de Meninos e Meninas de Rua, the National Movement of Street Children. Volmer, who spends part of his time at the Pastoral's house, adds sadly, 'We don't have any money to spare at all. We have just one paid worker and he gets the minimum wage. Even then, we can hardly manage to pay him. But I bet there would be plenty of money available in Brazil or abroad if an academic wanted to write a thesis on the problem of abandoned street children.'
Volmer is delicate and dark-skinned, a fast and physically expressive speaker. For the last four years he has brought the children of the shanty town together to discuss their lives and try and find solutions to their problems. In 1986 he began to realise, that dozens of the children who spent time at the Pastoral house were disappearing. He and his wife, Joana D'Arc, who have two children of their own, began to investigate. They soon discovered that the children were being exterminated by the death squads of Greater Rio de Janeiro with the discreet support of the police.
Supported by the Catholic Church, Volmer alerted the authorities to the systematic murder of children, most of whom were supposedly responsible for petty crimes. This provoked the wrath of the death squads and the police in the region. One day, a well-known killer approached him and, smiling, said, 'Volmer, it's your turn next, isn't it?' Dom Mauro Morelli, Bishop of Duque de Caxias, was also threatened. One of his diocesan workers answered the telephone one day and heard a cavernous voice say, 'Tell that lousy bishop that we have got him in our sights.'
Since Volmer publicly accused people by name, he has received a stream of anonymous threats over the phone. He named, among others, João Pedro Bueno, known as 'Pedro the Devil', and his son João Alberto Neves Bueno, both employed by the Justice Department. Answering the phone on one occasion, he received an even darker threat than usual. A voice said, 'I think the best way to get you to stop is to kill your two children.'
Volmer and his wife refused to give in as they felt that the killers ran too great a political risk if they tried to kill the family. 'I know that one day they will get me. They won't kill me now because I have pointed a finger at a lot of people and they would all be suspects. But the day my work leaves the public eye or if I stop working with children, I am a dead man', says Volmer.
A silent war
The case of Volmer and the children of Duque de Caxias is not an isolated one, nor is it the most dramatic. In the backstreets of the country's big cities, a silent war of extermination is being waged against young petty criminals. The war involves the use of beatings and torture. Although the exclusively police death squads of the 1970s have practically ceased to exist, this latest war is promoted and organised by members of the police force. The groups involved are often given names such as 'death squads' and justiceiros ('avengers'), and the police encourage their activities on the grounds that the children are dangerous and will never mend their ways. The police and death squads do not target children for the sake of it, but because they see them as criminals. Children are increasingly to be found among their victims because growing numbers are forced on to the street to make a living, to contribute to the family income or because there is no school for them.
The war on children is one of the least known aspects of Brazil's social crisis. According to the Ministry of Labour, unemployment is three times higher among juveniles than among adults. Official statistics also show that 44 per cent of children and adolescents are from families with a per capita income of half the minimum wage, while half of these families have a per capita income of a quarter of the minimum wage. There are 27 million children, therefore, living in a state of poverty which reproduces and cultivates violence, and provides an ideal climate for the growth of the death squads.
Although it is difficult to be precise, and the tendency is for underestimation, the number of children murdered by the death squads for their supposed involvement in petty crime reached an average of approximately one a day in 1989. Out of every 100 children in the country who are victims of a violent death, 33 are killed by the death squads. In Rio de Janeiro alone, from January to July 1989, 184 children and adolescents were murdered.
To get an idea of the scale of these killings, it is enough to remember that in the Lebanese civil war, when the whole country was in flames, 850 people were killed in the six months from March to August 1989. During this period, in Lebanon, according to official statistics and the Red Cross, 30 children died as a result of the war; this figure includes both bomb blast victims and murders.
'There is definitely a process of extermination of young people going on in various parts of the country. And I have to recognise that, unfortunately, there are members of the police force who are involved in the killing or who are giving protection to the killers', admits Hélio Saboya, head of the Justice Department in Rio de Janeiro, and a former human rights activist. 'When I look at the death squads, there are moments when I can't tell who are the crooks and who are the police', adds Almeida Filho, head of the Justice Department in Pernambuco, the biggest state in the country's north-east region. He is accustomed to reading reports of murders of young people in which the victims have suffered the most sadistic torture: genital organs severed, eyes poked out, bodies burned by cigarette ends and slashed by knives.
In Pernambuco, TV Viva, a video production company run by the Luiz Freire Centre, an organisation linked to the human rights movement, made a film about the killing of children by the death squads. They found that, in the first few months of 1988, an average of three children were killed by death squads every week. The video took a year and a half to make. When the film was ready, TV Viva had to include a final sequence noting the murder of some of the children who appeared in the video. Some of the mothers interviewed by TV Viva were able to give the names of police officers who were implicated in the murder of their children, but the producers preferred to edit out this information because some of the police officers mentioned were stationed in the same neighbourhood as the company in Olinda. The police would have inevitably taken revenge if their names had been mentioned in the film. One of the boys, nicknamed Rusty, was already on the police's hit list. He left on film a tragic prophecy of his own fate: 'My life is like the wind. Nothing can stop it blowing away.'
Other young people are also convinced that, sooner or later, they will be killed. Tiana Sá, or Aunty Ciata as she is known, used to be a teacher at a school for poor children in Rio de Janeiro. Now coordinator of the Rio de Janeiro section of the National Movement of Street Children, she has collected hundreds of children's statements. It took her some time to understand how the minds of the children worked. In 1985, she went straight from working at a high school for upper-class children to teaching the poor. The school was in the Sambodromo, the main street used for the annual carnival processions. On one occasion, she organised a trip to the Sugar Loaf Mountain, dividing her pupils into two groups, one of which would go on the following day. One boy said 'Aunty, I want to go today.' 'You will have to wait. There will be another group going tomorrow', she replied. 'But I must go', the boy insisted. 'Well, why can't you wait?', asked Tiana. 'I might be dead tomorrow', he said.
The boy was so insistent that Tiana ended up taking him with the first group. After a time in her new job, she realised that the boy was not as stupid as she had thought. Dozens of her pupils disappeared, never to be seen again. In many cases, she later received news of their deaths. Some of them fell victim to disease through lack of proper health care; others were killed in gang fights or road accidents, but there were always some who were murdered by the death squads.
On a hot January night in a central square of Recife, 'Gilson' tells our photographer, Paula Simas, 'I know I'll only get some peace of mind when I get killed.' Another boy is sitting a few metres away, his head in his hands, feverish, weak, dressed in a pair of shorts and a ragged shirt. When asked what is wrong, he replies, 'I've got a fever.' 'Have you got a cold?' 'No, I got hit in the leg by a bullet. The bullet's still in there', he says, showing his wounded leg. 'Why don't you go to the hospital?' 'I'm afraid that the police will find me if I go there.'
Adopting the dead
The activities of the Rio de Janeiro death squads have given rise to a bizarre and tragic phenomenon: the adoption of dead children. The child may not even be known by his adoptive parents but will be buried under their name. 'It is a sad irony, a macabre game. A boy who spent his life on his own gets a father only after he's dead', comments Maria Tereza Moura, ex-coordinator of Rio de Janeiro's Street Children Movement.
When a body arrives at the Instituto Médico Legal, the Legal Medical Institute (IML), with signs of violence, the death certificate must register the name of the victim before the body can be buried. If no member of the family lays claim to the body, the body cannot be buried. The social welfare organisations have found an imaginative way out of this dilemma. They find parents willing to adopt the child posthumously and give it their family name. In this way, the formalities necessary to get the body out of the IML and to a decent burial are complied with.
The mother of one murder victim in Nova Iguaçu told how she saw her son killed by two members of a death squad well known in the neighbourhood. The killers did not even bother to wear a mask. After killing the boy, they went into the house and warned the weeping mother, 'If you tell the police or any of these church people, we'll kill you and the rest of your family.' She did not go to the police or to the IML to identify the body.
These stories show the obstacles to establishing with precision the number of young people killed by the death squads. The statistics compiled by human rights movements and the National Movement of Street Children undoubtedly underestimate the problem, although they both show the rising tide of violence in the country.
According to the Ministry of Health, violent deaths among the 15-17 age group jumped from 54.3 per cent of all causes of death in 1979 to 65 per cent in 1986. In some of the country's biggest cities, murder is the biggest cause of death among children and adolescents. Other sources support this conclusion. According to a survey by Rio de Janeiro's Justice Department, there were 172 recorded murders of minors in 1985. The number rose to 204 in 1986, 227 in 1987 and 244 in 1988. The survey was done towards the end of 1989 and had already recorded 184 murders between January and July, more than for the whole of 1985.
O Instituto Brasileiro de Análises Sociais e Econômicas (IBASE), a human rights and research organisation directed by the sociologist Herbert (Betinho) de Souza, is the main source of information about the death squads and their bloody but undeclared war. The information provided by IBASE shows that the number of young people being murdered by the death squads is increasing — and fast.
'The statistics are shaky, incomplete', says Rodrigo Souza Filho, coordinator of the IBASE survey. This shows that the authorities are not really bothered about the deaths of poor street children and juvenile delinquents. You only have to compare the statistics that are available on AIDS, a disease which is closely monitored by the Ministry of Health. This is because middle-class people might get AIDS, but it is extremely unlikely that a middle-class child will be killed by the death squads', he adds.
Rodrigo works for the National Movement of Street Children, and is one of the people who inspired IBASE's research. His 'office', provided by a charitable organisation in Rio de Janeiro, shows just how few resources the movement has. The room contains an old wooden shelf full of papers, a table and two old dark wooden chairs. There is just enough room for three people to sit down. Anybody else has to stand outside the door. This tiny room contains much valuable information, especially a file on the death of children, but there is not enough money available even to put the material in alphabetical order, let alone computerise it. There is a real risk that the information will be lost.
CHAPTER 2
'I killed you because you had no future'
The shanty town of Calabar lies in the heart of a middle-class area of Salvador. It is the home of various gangs of crooks but it also has a history of community organisation, a process led by the journalist Fernando Conceição. The community wanted to try and stop its young people slipping into street crime, by creating other options to fill the vacuum left by the lack of schooling. The aim was to give the children basic training in a profession or trade, so they set up practical workshops to teach local children how to make bread, ice-cream, soap and so on. The end products were sold and the proceeds shared out between the workshops and the children.
The experiment has been successful, but has had to put up with competition from the local drug gangs who poach the children from the workshops. 'It is unfair competition. They earn five times more working in the drug trade than working in our bakery', complains Fernando Conceição.
There is strong evidence that gangs use children for criminal activities because, in law, minors are not held responsible for their actions. 'Juvenile crime is on the increase, and it's rising fast. Minors are now responsible for most of the robberies committed in Rio de Janeiro', says Liborni Siqueira, of the police children's department in Rio de Janeiro.
Children work for adults who receive stolen goods or as couriers in the drug trade. They are cheap, easily replaceable labour. It is common for the children to become addicted themselves and then run errands in exchange for a gram of cocaine or a pot of glue to sniff. Besides making them high, glue eases their hunger. The addiction further reduces the chance of going to school or getting a job.
When Rio de Janeiro University carried out some research on street children the subject of drugs inevitably came up. The psychologists involved in the research soon realised how difficult it would be to try and convince the children to give up drugs. A drug addict from a middle-class background could at least be offered the prospect of a better life once off drugs. There was little to offer somebody whose destiny is likely to be at best, scratching a living and at worst, a torture session at the local police station and a bullet in the head. When one of the university psychologists asked why the children sniffed glue every day, one replied, 'Well, have you got a better suggestion?'
