Brazil: The Law of the Favelas

Rio de Janeiro’s favelas are the dregs of a city, teeming slums where the crime rate makes Harlem tame by comparison. The pastel-painted shantytowns with their deceptive names—”Pleasure Hill,” “Peacock,” “Heaven”—breed hoods with monikers like “Tidal Wave,” “Uncle Horrible” and “Dried Meat.”

The cops are helpless, always patrol in groups and only during daylight. Except one. For the past 25 years, favela law, or what there was of it, largely rested on City Detective Perpétuo de Freitas da Silva.

To win authority in the slums, Perpétuo had to be good, clever—and lucky. He never bothered to arrest small-timers, passed out candy to the kids, found jobs for dozens of ex-cons, personally sent food and clothing to mothers widowed by killers he had not caught up with in time. He could draw his .45 faster than any thug, could shoot so straight that crooks often surrendered when they heard he was after them. Bullets missed him so often that it seemed they would never learn the way. He once climbed unscathed up a hill through a hail of slugs to collar two pistol-happy punks, another time managed to arrest a gunman who emptied his revolver at him from point-blank range.

By Mistake. Three weeks ago, “Bulletproof” Perpétuo’s luck finally failed. His downfall began when a convicted murderer, “Horseface” Manuel Moreira, got a parole “by mistake” and, once out of jail, shot a close colleague of Perpétuo’s. Enraged by the bureaucratic sloppiness that released Horseface in the first place, Perpétuo dropped everything and went after the killer. Though the rest of the force was stymied, he had a good lead within two days. But while he was waiting in a bar for Horseface to show up, two cops from another district wandered in. Jealous of Perpétuo’s fame, they argued over who had jurisdiction, started fighting. Suddenly one of them pulled a gun, while the other pinned Perpétuo’s arms. Then, as he stood helpless, Bulletproof Perpétuo, 51, was shot dead by one of his fellow policemen.

His funeral drew the high and mighty. But Perpétuo belonged to the favelados, and 5,000 of them turned out to march in the procession, and crowd around his coffin for a last look, or touch, or tear. After the burial, leaders of the “Skeleton” favela solemnly met to discuss changing the name to “Perpétuo” favela. “He would have liked that,” was the explanation.

By the Mob. If favelados were saddened by the loss of the only policeman they ever liked, the cops were left completely at loose ends. Though Perpétuo’s killer was quickly captured at the scene, Horseface was still at large, and a milling, uncoordinated hunt for him was mounted. In the last two weeks police have pulled in 500 smalltime hoods for their own brand of “questioning,” have descended en masse on dozens of favelas. Brandishing machine guns, they burst in on one surprised family and so frightened the father that he died of a heart attack. Last week the police said they were still searching. But the word around the favelas was that the cops had found Horseface all right, had killed him and hidden the body rather than risk judgment in Brazil’s notoriously lenient courts.