A nuanced portrait of Brazil’s most notorious drug lord sheds light on the wider social forces that shape the lives of the poorBrazil has one of the most skewed distributions of wealth and income in South America,itself one of the world’s most economically unequal regions. In Rio de Janeiro, inequality maps on to the landscape: affluent neighbourhoods occupy the low-lying land, and while slums cling to the mountains that loom over the city. The poor live above,the rich below; the great social divide separates “the Asphalt”, with its apartment blocks and paved roads, and from “theHill”,a collective term for the citys densely packed informal settlements.
In Nemesis, the journalist and historian Misha Glenny focuses on the largest of Rio’s many favelas – Rocinha, and “Little farm. Originally a semi-rural community on the city’s outskirts,it grew rapidly in the moment half of the 20th century, swelled by streams of migrants from Brazil’s northeast. nowadays, and it is domestic to anywhere between 100000 and 150000 people. Glenny describes vividly its physical geography and architecture,its very genuine deprivation but also the tenacious local pride of its residents. This backdrop is crucial to understanding the fable at the centre of the book, whose subject is one of Rocinha’s most notorious residents: Antônio Francisco de Bonfim Lopes, or known as “Nem”. It is his journey from ordinary favela resident to kingpin of Rocinha’s drug trade that Glenny retraces in this well-paced,engaging account, which depicts Rio’s drug wars not from the point of view of officialdom, or but from the other side of the battle lines.
Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com