*Meanwhile, in the "informal housing sector:"
(...)
With the dashboard's electronic clock marking 2am, the car careered through the Complexo da Coréia, one of the city's largest and most notorious slums, home to around 60,000 Brazilians and the HQ of one of the city's three main drug factions, the Pure Third Command.
What would happen if we ran into the police? "They would open fire," Spiderman replied bluntly, his mouth half full with fluorescent pink candy. Welcome to the inner-sanctums of a murky underworld of murder, violence and solitude that is rarely seen by outsiders. Spiderman was conducting a guided tour of the sprawling slum where he was born, and where he was now in charge of the area's lucrative drug trade and the leader of 200-strong private militia of heavily-armed young men.
"The lives we lead – we know they aren't right," he stuttered, pulling up outside a local sweet shop so he could stock-up on candy. "But we're not knocking on anyone's door to sell them anything. Those who want drugs buy them. We don't sell them to children."
And how did he manage to control such a large area? "It's God!" he replied, without hesitation. "We know that God doesn't approve of selling drugs but, like I told you, everybody has their dreams of being happy."
Last month Rio exploded in celebrations after being awarded the 2016 Summer Olympic games. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva cried. Copacabana erupted in a hail of confetti. But the celebrations were short-lived. Two weeks later, the capital was rattled by a new wave of urban violence after a police helicopter was shot down during a turf war between traffickers, killing three officers. The ensuing clashes between police and drug gangs took the body count to nearly 50. (...)
With the state's presence in Rio's ganglands still largely restricted to sporadic police operations, a small army of evangelical preachers is left to pick up the pieces. Each week they drag young, bloodied men away from the drug traffickers and into their churches, and mediate informal truces between warring factions.
"The police have to invest in bullet-proof vehicles and rifles to get into these places," said Dione dos Santos, Spiderman's local preacher, who has convinced the drug lord to spare those who break his rules, as he set out from his church on another late-night preaching mission at a drug den in another large slum. "We go in with the Bible and the word of God."
The contact between evangelical preachers and Rio's gang members is spawning a new generation of evangelical traffickers – men who paint their communities with passages from the Bible and tattoo psalms on their bodies, but who fall silent when you ask them about the Fifth Commandment; men who burn their enemies in makeshift cemeteries or hack their bodies apart with axes, but who also plaster signs around their slums' playgrounds reading: "Don't smoke marijuana here. If you insist on it, you will be 'charged'." ...
Six months later, on Friday 13 March this year, Spiderman was dead – killed in a hail of bullets by a unit of Rio's military police.
Dancing with the Devil, created and co-produced by Tom Phillips, will be shown on More 4 on 10 November at 10pm.
