Arrival City_ How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World - Doug Saunders [135]
The great 1970s wave of rural–urban migration had been built around an industrial economy controlled and usually owned by Brazil’s military dictatorship in a closed economic system. In the 1980s, this all fell apart. The artificial economy collapsed in simultaneous currency, fiscal inflation, and banking crises, just as the military regime was launching a stumbling transition to democracy. For the entire decade, Brazil had very little economic activity and no government with the fiscal resources to support an emerging urban community. It was a time of decay. For Jardim Angela and hundreds of other new-formed favelas and squatter enclaves around São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, this proved a disastrous combination. The new migrants, who had just begun to build their houses, often using money they’d borrowed, suddenly found themselves without any means of employment or any resources with which to start their own companies. The communities had not yet become linked to the larger city in even the most rudimentary way, so there was no way for the suddenly jobless migrants to find work outside the favela.
“It became very bad very quickly—we had the fathers unemployed, so mothers had to become the primary breadwinners,” says Jucileide Mauger, who was a schoolteacher at Oliveira Viana in those years. “The dads started drinking, and we could only give kids four hours of school a day, so the second-generation kids were unsupervised, with nothing to do, and they were becoming teenagers. There became a huge problem with poverty, and there was no government at all to help. Kids would come to school without having eaten, with no uniforms; we had to provide for them. The families were falling apart, everyone was unemployed, and the situation kept getting a lot worse.”
Pedro Magalhães was one of those kids. He watched his classmates turn to crime. At first, it was mainly theft: They would rob the drivers of trucks that delivered water and fuel to the neighborhood—just about the only outsiders to enter the favela. Then, by the end of the ’80s, it became more serious: The older teenagers formed gangs inspired by American movies, the Bronx and the Ninjas, and they got involved in cocaine and went to war with one another. It became increasingly brutal. They were strictly local gangs, without links to international cocaine trafficking, and perhaps because of this they were both less organized and more violent than the big gangs. They would, and often did, kill for an outstanding debt worth a few dollars. “For a number of years, starting in 1992, we had kids killed every week, sometimes every day—their bodies would be dumped out in that square, and I’d see that they were our students,” says Ms. Mauger, who became head teacher of what was a 2,500-student school at the height of the violence shortly after her predecessor lost her teeth in a beating by gang members inside the school. “One family with seven brothers, five of them were killed one year. I knew something had to be done. I’d keep the school open in the evenings so they could play in the courts … I thought just keeping them in the building was important—never mind keeping them in classes, never mind what we were teaching, it was a matter of having them in here and not out shooting one another. The government wasn’t present, the police weren’t present, it was just us.”
Pedro hovered on the edge of the gangs, never quite joining but tempted. One morning on the way to school, his friend Chico approached him, feverish and excited: “I had a dream,” Chico said, “I’m going to kill Carlos.” Chico had become a paid killer. He murdered Carlos and dropped his