Brazil has one of the most skewed distributions of wealth and income in South America, itself one of the world’s most economically unequal regions. In Rio de Janeiro, inequality maps on to the landscape: prosperous neighbourhoods occupy the low-lying land, while slums cling to the mountains that loom over the city. The poor live above, the rich below; the great social divide separates “the Asphalt”, with its apartment blocks and paved roads, from “the Hill”, a collective term for the city’s densely packed informal settlements.
In Nemesis, the journalist and historian Misha Glenny focuses on the largest of Rio’s many favelas – Rocinha, “Little farm”. Originally a semi-rural community on the city’s outskirts, it grew rapidly in the second half of the 20th century, swelled by streams of migrants from Brazil’s northeast. Today, it is home to anywhere between 100,000 and 150,000 people. Glenny describes vividly its physical geography and architecture, its very real deprivation but also the tenacious local pride of its residents. This backdrop is crucial to understanding the story at the centre of the book, whose subject is one of Rocinha’s most notorious residents: Antônio Francisco de Bonfim Lopes, known as “Nem”. It is his journey from ordinary favela resident to kingpin of Rocinha’s drug trade that Glenny retraces in this well-paced, engaging account, which depicts Rio’s drug wars not from the point of view of officialdom, but from the other side of the battle lines.
This makes for a morally complex narrative. In Glenny’s telling, Nem’s transformation was driven by a family medical emergency: in 1999, his infant daughter was diagnosed with a rare form of histiocytosis. At the time, the 23-year-old Antônio was working in magazine distribution, and the treatment needed to save the child’s life cost far more than he and his wife could afford. Born and bred in Rocinha, Antônio had no way of getting hold of the sum required – except, that is, by turning to Lulu, one of a series of charismatic drug lords who have ruled Rocinha.
Glenny follows the ins and outs of their long-running battles for supremacy from the 1980s onwards, when the drug trade became increasingly lucrative. Varying combinations of brutality and paternalism marked the reigns of Rocinha’s successive dons. Lulu seems to have been what Eric Hobsbawm called a “social bandit” – considered an outlaw by the authorities, yet respected or even admired by their community. He clamped down on petty crime, helped his men to leave the drug trade and find legitimate jobs, and also provided Rocinhans with loans (as Glenny points out, this not only gained him the locals’ approval, but also helped launder the cash earned from trafficking).
It was in exchange for one such loan that Nem began working for Lulu in 1999. Initially kept away from the serious action, Nem soon became indispensable to Lulu’s operation, thanks to his level-headedness and gift for organisation (magazine distribution had given him a useful grounding in logistics). Business was good: the 2000s were a period of economic growth in Brazil, and Rocinha partook of the general prosperity – in part thanks to booming drug sales. Glenny charts Nem’s rise to the top of Rocinha’s trafficking hierachy, and from there to the top of the city’s most-wanted list. In 2004, after Lulu was killed by Rio’s military police, Nem found himself at the centre of a fierce struggle for control of Rocinha’s drug trade. Within a year or so, he had managed to outlast or indeed do away with his rivals, and was now the undisputed boss of the favela. Nemesis paints Nem as a relatively benevolent figure who sought to establish a kind of stability for Rocinha’s residents; for example, by reducing the number of guns on the streets. But Glenny also makes clear that he was capable of great violence, several times beating one or other of the women in his life.
Nem was finally arrested in November 2011. His organisation had long been under surveillance. Police investigators were able to map out his entire network of contacts thanks to some careless gang members’ posts on social media. He had already been thinking of fleeing or turning himself in. The book describes intriguing covert encounters between Nem and two of the police investigators tasked with bringing him down. Apparently held to negotiate the terms of his surrender, the meetings took place on Nem’s turf in Rocinha, and were, according to the participants, conducted with a great deal of mutual respect. But they seemingly came to nothing, and Nem was eventually caught while trying to bolt from Rocinha in the boot of a car.
Glenny’s portrait is based mainly on hours of conversation held in the federal prison where Nem currently resides – a context that, as the author admits, led him to develop an “intense relationship” with his subject. The result is a clearly sympathetic but nuanced view that sheds light not only on Nem’s individual decisions and experiences, but also the wider social forces that shape the life choices of favela residents. Some of the police investigators, in Glenny’s account, certainly understand these realities too. But he also describes the brutality with which Brazil’s different law enforcement agencies, many with roots in the military dictatorship of 1964–85, have so often treated the country’s poorer citizens. Together with pervasive police corruption, this official violence has helped to entrench a deep mistrust of authority in the favelas.
Nem’s arrest was followed swiftly by what the authorities termed the “pacification” of Rocinha – part of a wider crackdown on crime and drug‑dealing in the favelas, originally launched in 2008 but stepped up significantly in advance of the 2013 Confederations Cup and the 2014 World Cup, both held in Brazil. As many as 1,000 troops moved into Rocinha before daybreak, the use of armoured personnel carriers only confirming the sense that this was in many ways an army of occupation. Once the military police had established control, pacifying police units (UPPs) moved in, supposedly to pave the way for social programmes – the Brazilian government apparently aware that any attempt to deal with the drug gangs would have to have a positive component, offering the residents at least some of the many basics the state has thus far failed to provide. But, as Glenny points out, in Rocinha and in other favelas, pacification has all too often involved the continuing extortion, abduction and killing of residents by the police. An August 2015 Amnesty International report calculated that since 2010, one in six homicides in Rio has been committed by on-duty police officers; three-quarters of these victims have been black men aged between 15 and 29.
It is perhaps worth recalling here, as Glenny does early on in Nemesis, the origins of the term favela. In 1897, the Brazilian government sent an expeditionary force to the northeast to put down a popular rebellion in Canudos – eventually crushed at the cost of at least 15,000 lives. The troops returned to Rio, then the capital, but the government neglected to pay them. Camping out on the hills above the city to demand what they were owed, the troops named their settlement Mount Favela, after one of the Canudos rebels’ bases. Decades later, the settlements that sprouted across Rio’s landscape were given this highly charged name, and in the process preserved the memory of a campaign in which poverty and desperation were met with a brutal military response. The ongoing pacification of Rio’s slums, which will continue beyond the 2016 Olympics, displays a similar underlying logic, as if the consequences of inequality could be beaten back with tanks and guns. Nemesis tells us much about the favelas of contemporary Brazil, but the fate of Rocinha also fits all too well into a much older, and, tragically, unfinished story.
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