Rescuing Brazil children from lives of violence and drugs

As the city celebrates being awarded the 2016 Olympics, a small army of preachers are on a mission to steer Rio de Janeiro’s poorest children away from selling drugs and towards faith and study. Last month Brazil’s second largest city broke out in celebrations at being awarded the games. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva cried. But the celebrations were short-lived. Two weeks later a new wave of urban violence shook the city after a police helicopter was shot down during a turf war between drug traffickers, killing three officers. Following skirmishes between police and drug gangs left nearly 50 dead. And if violence continues at its present rate, thousands more will die before the 2016 summer Olympics. There will be another 40,000 killings in the south American nation’s capital before 2016, local charity, the Observatório de Favelas, estimates. At least 6,000 people, mostly boys and young men, will be killed "resisting arrest" by the police, while more than 500 policemen are also likely to die,” the organisation told a correspondent for the Guardian newspaper. Dozens of innocent civilians will be killed in the crossfire.

While the police largely stay away from western Rio's shanty towns, or favelas apart from occasional police operations, a band of evangelical preachers is picking up the pieces in the ganglands. Each week they drag boys and young men away from the drug traffickers and into their churches, and try to instigate informal truces between warring gangs. "The police have to invest in bullet-proof vehicles and rifles to get into these places," said local preacher Dione dos Santos. Setting out from his church on another late-night preaching mission at a drug den in another favela, he said: "We go in with the Bible and the word of God." The preachers’ interaction with Rio's gang members is breeding a strange new generation of evangelical traffickers – men who plaster signs around their slums' playgrounds reading: "Don't smoke marijuana here. If you insist on it, you will be 'charged'." "The lives we lead – we know they aren't right," one big-time trafficker told the correspondent. "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. All the kids here need to study, not to kill and sell drugs. We know that God doesn't approve of selling drugs but, like I told you, everybody has their dreams of being happy."

By Hayley Jarvis for SOS Children