[Reader-list] an imagined dialogue from the favelas of Brazil

[Rana Dasgupta]

THE BOYS FROM BRAZIL (from Harper's Magazine, December 2006)

 From a column by Arnaldo Jabor, in the form of an imagined interview 
with an unnamed Brazilian prisoner, published May 23 in the newspaper "0 
Globo". The interview was believed genuine by some readers, and the 
interviewee was widely assumed to be Marcos Willians Herbas Camacho, 
known as Marcola, or "Playboy," an inmate in a penitentiary outside Sao 
Paulo and the leader since 2002 of the Primeiro Comando da Capital, a 
prison gang founded in 1993. Brazil's prisons house approximately 
360,000 inmates, the fourth largest total in the world. Over four days 
in May, the PCC staged riots in Sao Paulo resulting in more than one 
hundred deaths. Translated from the Portuguese by Valeria Mogilevich.

Do you belong to the PCC?

I'm more than that: I'm a sign of the times. I was poor and invisible. 
For decades you never bothered to look at me. It used to be easy to deal 
with poverty. The diagnosis was obvious: rural migration, income 
inequality, a few slums. But the solution never arrived. What did they 
do? Nothing. Did the federal government ever allocate funds for us? 
People only heard about us when the slums collapsed, or from romantic 
music about "the beauty of the favelas at sunrise," stuff like that. Now 
we're rich, thanks to the multinational cocaine trade. And you guys are 
scared to death. Weare the late blooming 'of your social conscience. You 
see? I'm well read. I read Dante in prison.

But the solution would be ...

There's no solution, man. Even the idea of a "solution" is a mistake. 
Have you seen the size of the 560 slums in Rio? Have you flown over Sao 
Paulo's outskirts in a helicopter? A solution would require economic 
growth, a revolution in education, general urbanization - all executed 
by an "enlightened tyranny" that would leap over the paralyzed secular 
bureaucracy, its legislative accomplice, and the judiciary that 
obstructs punishment. This would cost billions of dollars and imply a 
deep psychosocial change in the country's political structure. Which is 
to say, it's impossible.

Aren't you scared of dying?

It's you who's scared of dying, not me. In fact, you can't come and kill 
me here in jail, but I can send people to kill you out there. We're 
man-bombs. In the slums there are a hundred thousand man-bombs. We're at 
the core of what is beyond solution. You guys are in the right, and I'm 
in the wrong, and in the middle is the frontier of death, the only 
frontier. We're already a new species, a wholly different animal from you.
For you, death is a Christian drama: you die in a bed from a heart 
attack. For us, death is commonplace: we're tossed into a ditch. Didn't 
you intellectuals speak of "class wars"-"Be an outlaw, be a hero"? 
That's right: here we are! Ha, ha. You never expected these cocaine 
soldiers, did you?
My soldiers are anomalies, products of this country's twisted 
development. There's no more proletariat, no pitiful or exploited 
masses. There's a third thing growing out there, cultivated from the 
mud, schooled on absolute illiteracy, graduating from prisons, like an 
alien monster hidden in the city's cracks. A new language has emerged.
We're on the edge of a kind of postmisery that has begotten a new 
murderous culture, propped up by technology, satellites, cell phones, 
the Internet, modern weapons. It's shit with chips and megabytes. My 
soldiers are a mutated social species, they're the fungus grow¬ing on a 
big dirty mistake.

What changed in the margins?

Dough. We have it now. Do you think someone with $40 million doesn't run 
things? With that kind of money, prison is like a ho¬tel, an office. We 
are a modern company, we're rich. You guys are a bankrupt state, 
dominated by incompetent people. We have agile management methods. You 
are slow and bureaucratic. We fight on our own turf. You're on foreign 
soil. We don't fear death. You're dying of fear. We are well armed. You 
have a .38 caliber revolver. We're on the attack. You are on the 
defensive. You are obsessed with human rights. We are cruel and 
merciless. You have transformed us into superstars of crime. We have 
made clowns of you. The people in the slums help us, out of fear or out 
of love. You are hated. You are provincial. Our arms and drugs come from 
abroad-we're global. We don't forget you - you're our clients. You 
forget about us as soon as an outbreak of violence subsides.

But what should we do?

I'm going to let you in on something, even if it's not in my best 
interest. Hit the coke barons! There are representatives, senators, 
generals, even former presidents from Paraguay involved in cocaine and 
weapons traffic. But who will catch them? The army? With what money? 
They don't even have money to feed the recruits.
I'm reading Clausewitz's On War. There's no success in sight. We are 
ravenous ants with access to antitank missiles. The only way to finish 
us is to drop an atomic bomb on the slums. Can you imagine, a 
radioactive Ipanema?
You can succeed only if you give up defending normality. There is no 
normality anymore. You must be critical of your own incompetence. But, 
to be frank, you don't have an out. Just shit. And we already deal in 
shit. Listen, brother, there's no solution. As the divine Dante wrote, 
"Abandon every hope." We are all in hell.

-- 
Rana Dasgupta
www.ranadasgupta.com