The roughest area of Rocinha in Rio de Janeiro, the largest favela in Brazil, is almost at the very top. Rua Um, Road One, is where Lulu has his office. Lulu is Dono do Morro, King of the Hill, head of the local drugs trade and political boss of the favela. His word is law.
Above Rua Um lies the district of Laboriaux, which not only boasts the most spectacular view over Rio, but appears cleaner and more ordered than the rest of Rocinha—the favela’s very own Mayfair. This is where Lulu actually lives.
Without funds, Antônio Francisco Bonfim Lopes thinks long and hard about his next step. He has never engaged with drugs, never taken them, and has no intention of doing so. He is revolted by the violence, which has been a backdrop to his life. None of his childhood friends are in the business. They are all, like him, workers—taxi drivers, builders, waiters.
But he sees no way out of his financial predicament. Unless he finds the money for a course of treatment, his baby daughter will die of a rare autoimmune disease, Histiocytosis X. He does not discuss his plan with anyone, not even with his wife, Vanessa. This is something he has decided to do alone.
It is two days before Antônio’s 24th birthday when, with trepidation, he starts the long walk uphill on Estrada da Gávea toward Rua Um. From this perch, you can observe almost the entire South Zone of Rio de Janeiro—to the east the opulence of Gávea, almost literally a stone’s throw away; then Lagoa, the lagoon at the heart of everything that separates the valley of Botafogo from the high-rises of Ipanema and Leblon; there is even a glimpse of Copacabana; and when you turn around to face south, if you look hard enough, you can spot some of the sumptuous villas of Joá camouflaged by the Atlantic Forest.
This is the ultimate lookout post. Here you can see everyone entering and everyone leaving Rocinha.
Antônio begins his longest walk. He is Faust seeking out Mephistopheles. But Antônio craves neither unlimited knowledge nor worldly pleasures. He only wants his daughter to survive, grow and prosper. He senses that his life is about to change and that things may not end well. But in his mind, he challenges anyone who would point the finger of blame at him: ‘And what would you do in my place?’
There is a sharp bend near the very top of Estrada da Gávea by a small marketplace. This is the start of Rua Um. Although a key thoroughfare, it can still only really accommodate people in single file, and a wheelbarrow can trigger a pedestrian traffic jam. Antônio walks down it, past the bars and the tiny grocery stores, then the fishmonger to the right and the butcher to the left, avoiding the dog shit, rotting fruit and sewers, until Rua Um forks.
Antônio comes to the end of his long walk up the steepest hill. Arriving at his destination, he enters by the front door. Never in his 24 years has he envisaged a change to his life so fundamental as this pilgrimage will trigger.
He goes up the hill as Antônio but comes down as Nem. Within five years, this unassuming young man will become the most powerful person among Rocinha’s population of 100,000. He will have 120 men under arms at his command. And he will be the biggest drug dealer in Rio.
Lulu, his boss, was assassinated in 2004 by members of Bope, Rio’s terrifying special police force, shortly after Easter. Rocinha was then plunged into 18 months of instability, a low-level civil war, as an insurgent drugs cartel, Friends of Friends or ADA, destroyed the influence of Rio’s largest and most powerful criminal organization, Red Command, inside the favela.
Within two years, Nem’s unusual skills had ensured his rise to become the unchallenged leader in Rocinha and one of the two most influential men in ADA.
The Gringo, Rocinha born and bred, explained how Nem “can look at a pile of drugs on a table and know straight away what it’s worth. He could do it just like that.” His opponents just didn’t have that capability. “They would spend two or three days selling on the corner and they had already lost track of the money. But Nem has it all accounted nice and neat within five minutes.”
Rocinha is geographically isolated from the majority of favelas in the city. After a brief gang war which saw Nem subjugate its smaller neighbor, ADA became the main supplier of drugs to the rich middle class children of Rio’s South Zone, home to all the most famous symbols of the city like the statue of Christ the Redeemer and Copacabana beach. The key to his success lay in his realization that the less violence there is associated with the favela, the better for business.
Rocinha became the safe favela. Nem ordered that the semi-automatics, pistols, and grenades be kept off the streets, only to be brought out at times of increased tension when his intelligence network suggested police might be planning a raid.
Soon that meant everyone wanted to visit the place. Tourists, soccer stars including more or less the entire Brazilian national football team, not to mention players from Nem’s beloved club Flamengo.
Jah Rule, the rap star, flew in from New York to give a concert and Ashton Kutcher stopped by for a visit. Then the politicians started coming, including two Brazilian presidents, aware of the significant number of votes locked up in the favela. The first, Lula, is currently under investigation for allegedly having perverted the course of justice. The second, Dilma Rousseff, is suspended pending a vote on her impeachment at the end of this month.
Above all, it became the edgy place for the middle class kids to score their coke. And after a snort or two, they could dance the night away in Clube de Emoções at one of the legendary funk parties.
As Nem created Brand Rocinha, so he adopted some more regal habits. When he arrived at a funk, he would sport a large gold chain and disc with the word MESTRE[1] standing out in white gold. In front of him was his praetorian guard, armed and marching in formation; then came Nem himself, riding, somewhat incongruously, on a small motorcycle. Chico-Bala, his pet capuchin monkey, would be perched on his shoulder, dolled up in a waistcoat and hat. Behind these two was the second half of his security detachment. As he approached his camarote, the VIP marquee from where he would watch a concert, DJs would start rapping songs in his honor. His rule occasionally resembled the governor of some far-flung province of the Roman Empire.
But in fact like every favela leader, Nem’s power relied on three instruments: support among his own community; the corruption of the police surrounding the favela; and a monopoly of violence inside its boundaries.
In the many conversations I had with Nem in the Maximum Security Prison of Campo Grande, deep in the Brazilian interior, he, unsurprisingly, would emphasize the importance of community support. He described in detail the nascent social welfare system he created—paying for funerals, medicine, food baskets for the poorest inhabitants, and trips back to the families in Brazil’s poor north-east whose migrants make up these vast pools of unqualified labour. He built a five-a-side football pitch and injected some of the profits of the coke trade back into the local economy. Rocinha has one of the liveliest and most entrepreneurial environments among Rio’s informal communities.
The three officers from the Civil Police who investigated him for almost four years believed instead that his ability to corrupt police and other officials was his primary instrument. The first thing that the team leader, Bárbara Lomba, said to me was: “Nem would always prefer corruption to confrontation.” And she and her two colleagues remarked that to do this, Nem created a remarkable intelligence network, both in and out of the city.
“He wasn’t called the Master for nothing,” Detective Estelita explained. “He would see himself as possessing greater wisdom than the others. And he did. Apart from the power invested in him by weapons and fear, he had the power of intellect, which was allied to the power he accrued through his control of information.” A Master, they continue, is a character who has information and knows what he is doing. “If there were a police operation, he would order his assistants to tell kids not to go to school the following day as there was going to be a raid.” This of course meant that he had been tipped off. “So the others thought he was like God,” the detectives conclude. “So far as they were concerned, he just seemed to know everything. And he sort of did.”
When Brazil was riding high on the commodities boom that made it appear like its century-long history as a sleeping giant was coming to an end, it was awarded the soccer World Cup and then Rio de Janeiro was announced as the host city for this year’s Olympics, now underway.
In response to the problem of the violence plaguing the city (chiefly driven by a war on drugs that the authorities could never win), Rio’s government introduced a new policy called UPP. The first stage of UPP was to move into the favelas in a show of urban shock and awe. This was then supposed to be followed by Part II, known as Social UPP, when the state would finally get serious about putting in a proper sewage, health, and education system.
Organizing the introduction of police into the favelas was hard—across most of Rio’s favelas the police, with their record of exceptional arbitrary violence and extortion, were more feared by favela residents than the drug gangs. But the Rio state’s measured security secretary, José Mariano Beltrame, did a very good job on the whole. But the Social UPP—well, this has never really happened and disillusionment has set in.
Nem knew that the UPP regime would be imposed on Rocinha—it was simply too big a symbol of lawlessness for Beltrame to ignore. The two men entered into secret negotiations in an attempt to arrange his arrest and the peaceful occupation of the favela by the special forces. In the end these came to nothing. And yet, in one of the most curious and unexplained events in Rio’s topsy-turvy history, Nem was arrested in November 2011 on live television. Dazed and bewildered, he was pulled out of the trunk of a car by police officers. But this was not just about efficient policing—in fact that had nothing to do with it. Having interviewed almost every single person involved in the arrest, I am able to reveal in my book how and why the arrest was engineered. It is more unexpected and weird than you can imagine.
Since the onset over a year ago of a monumental political, economic and constitutional crisis in Brazil, budgets from federal authorities to the states have been savagely cut. Money for security in Rio has been slashed 30 percent. The UPP policing regimes are collapsing and the drug gangs are coming back. In Rocinha, a new leader has taken over, Rogerio 157, and clashes between his soldiers and the police are increasing. The fear index is creeping back up.
Things should be fine until the end of the Olympics. For the drug gangs, the descent of several hundred thousand tourists on Rio are a gold opportunity to shift vast amounts of coke and weed.
But for the blighted favelas of Rio as for the middle-class residents of the surrounding areas, the big question is what happens after the Olympics. Nem may have been involved in much morally dubious activity as Dono do Morro in Rocinha. But he kept the killings down as nobody else has ever been able to do.
Misha Glenny is the author of Nemesis: One Man and the Battle for Rio, published in 2016 by Knopf.
