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The dark, dark side of BrazilFri Mar 06 07:44AM
Having missed the freeway exit, there was no choice but to cut through dark suburbs of windy roads, some of them just dirt, relying on a GPS to find the house tucked away in the nether regions of one of the innumerable satellite towns outside Sao Paulo.I was on my way to interview a couple, a New Zealander and his Brazilian common-law wife, who had lost their three-year-old daughter to a horrendous crime: a rape and murder while they were on vacation in a beach resort favoured by foreigners.But the driving through increasingly sinister zones, and the anxiety-bordering-on-panic demeanour of a Brazilian friend in the car suggested to me that horrendous crime was more commonplace than my upbringing in Australian and European neighbourhoods had prepared me for.Statistically, I knew that to be true. Brazil has around 45,000 homicides a year, a staggering number. Per head of population, only a handful of other countries rank worse in the world (among them El Salvador, Venezuela, Jamaica and South Africa). Armed robbery is rife, drugs are everywhere, police are ineffective, walls around houses of those who can afford it are high and topped with electric wires or broken glass.But when you live in the "safest" part of the city, where European prices exclude all except the well-heeled, you see little of all that. Until, that is, you move just a short distance in almost any direction and you see the cruel reality of Brazilian life.Night-time in unfamiliar terrain here conjures up images of mediaevel forests where villagers were afraid to tread because there be monsters.This week was exceptionally bad, with the perversity of several cases making them stand out from the drip-drip-drip of almost daily reports of violence.The couple I interviewed were doubly victim: first they lost their daughter, then they had to endure deliberate official inaction over the crime for more than two months.The police officer initially in charge of the case dismissed signs on the toddler's body that she had been raped, and blamed the couple for leaving her to play in the garden unsupervised for 20 minutes. The doctor at the hospital handling the body did little either. Eventually other, more professional police got involved (after pressure from the New Zealand embassy) and the case was cracked within days (a labourer at the couple's rented vacation villa confessed).Children were also the victims of two other crimes that came to light in the past few days, both similar. In both cases, young girls became pregnant after alleged abuse at the hands of their stepfather or adoptive father. The girls' ages? Nine and 11.The nine-year-old, who was pregnant with twins, had an abortion this week, prompting the furious, influential, pro-life Catholic Church to excommunicate her mother and the doctors involved.Then there was a case in Rio, where a gang of robbers grabbed a couple as they were leaving a restaurant in a chic part of town. After stealing all their valuables, the couple were driven to a cliff and pushed off. Both survived and managed to identify their assailants.The robbers themselves had been beaten beforehand by drug-dealers in their slum who were angry with them for attracting police attention to their lawless district.That last twist perhaps sums up the situation here best: this is a land where, all too often, the only law is that of the jungle. And night-time in the jungle can be a scary place indeed.
