Brazil evangelicals target drug lords
Pastor Dale Morgan
Brazil evangelicals target drug lords*
By BRADLEY BROOKS
The Associated Press
Saturday, May 9, 2009 3:14 PM
RIO DE JANEIRO -- It is the scene of an old-time revival, with Pastor
Andre Assis laying hands on the young man and diving deep into a
religious chant.
"Burn! Burn! Burn all the bad, all the evil, all the demons inside this
boy, in the name of Jesus we're burning it ... HEY!" Assis yells. His
right hand flies off the youth's head as if to physically expel the evil
inside.
The young man sways, eyes closed, knees weak, caught in rapture. But
throughout, Alessandro never lets go of his 12-gauge shotgun _ the one
he used an hour before to fend off police trying to enter this slum. He
is a foot soldier for one of the drug gangs that control most of Rio's
more than 900 shantytowns.
"I'm divided, between receiving the word of God while at the same time
doing something bad, something that destroys lives," says Alessandro,
24, standing amid a half dozen other heavily armed youth in the "boca de
fumo," the spot in a slum where packets of cocaine, marijuana and crack
are sold at a rapid clip. "Would I prefer not to be in this life? Of
course. But everybody has a family to support, and there is no other
work here."
This is the challenge facing Pastor Assis, 36, and the countless other
evangelical preachers, whose growing presence in Rio's violent slums
provides the only organized entity aside from drug gangs. Assis is
trying to do through God what Brazil's police have yet to do through
guns _ bring peace across the vast shantytowns that house about 30
percent of Rio's 6 million people, thousands of whom die in gang wars
each year.
Brazil is the world's most populous Roman Catholic nation, with about 70
percent of its 191 million people following that faith. But there are
now about 30 million evangelicals in the country, three times as many as
in 1980, according to government statistics and scholars.
The evangelical churches battle it out for new members and converts.
Preachers like Assis walk into the most dangerous slums and recruit
daily within prisons in their thirst to go after every segment of
society, in the belief that every person has a soul worthy of being saved.
___
The local leaders of the Comando Vermelho drug gang _ or Red Command _
allowed Assis to have an Associated Press reporter accompany him on a
recent Saturday to their slum, on condition that the names of the
shantytown and its leaders not be disclosed.
The slum is surrounded by enemy drug factions ever looking to invade.
And some of the local drug lord's top lieutenants have been nabbed by
police in past months, increasing the tension.
During the drive west and the journey on foot into this shantytown's Red
Command headquarters, the luxury cars and well-groomed beachgoers of
Ipanema give way to a flat, dusty slum with horse-drawn wagons. Coked-up
boys ride dirt paths on roaring motorcycles, and barefoot kids idly
throw pebbles at a sow and her piglets. Young drug sellers sit in lawn
chairs, plastic bags filled with cocaine, marijuana and cash at their
feet, high-caliber rifles and 9 mm pistols in their waistbands. Each
time a seller dips his hand into a bag to pull out a one-gram packet of
cocaine for a customer, a puff of coke dust rises, glinting in the sun.
A boy, no more than 16 and accused of stealing from a slum store, is
being beaten with a two-by-four, 20 meters (60 feet) from where the drug
lord sits for an interview. After the first few whacks, the boy is
dragged behind a wall. Brutal sounds of wood on bone are heard.
Assis jumps to his feet, hustles over, looks around the wall, winces and
looks back at the drug chief, a plea in his expression. He looks back to
the beating and slowly returns to the drug lord's side without intervening.
"It's the criminal tribunal, it is how it functions," Assis later
explains. "First infraction _ they are beaten, but not killed. Second
time, they 'correct' him by shooting him through both hands. If he
messes up a third time, he is executed."
It's the fine line the pastor walks _ knowing where to intervene, when
to press his luck with an unpredictable drug boss to try and spare a
life. Assis says he has managed to halt executions in the past, save
some lives.
Saving souls is an entirely different matter.
___
Carlos Agusto sits on a roughhewn homemade wooden pew in Assis' humble,
robin-egg-blue Assembly of God church in the Vila Carioca slum. Four
months removed from his role as a foot soldier for the Red Command in a
nearby shantytown, he laces his rail-thin arm through the pastor's,
staring at him intently as Assis tells of saving the 19-year-old.
Carlos gently rubs his hands together, one over the other, as if to warm
them or conceal them or comfort their wounds.
He says he was shot through his right hand during a gunbattle with
police. A fellow trafficker fired a bullet into his left hand after a
slum court decided he was guilty of skimming profits from his allotment
of cocaine to sell.
Assis was contacted by one of the youth's relatives. He found Carlos
during one of his regular visits to a nearby hospital.
"I was almost dead when I first saw him," Carlos says of the pastor.
"The first thing he told me was that I would live and that I would leave
that hospital a saved man."
Carlos, who now wants to be an evangelical preacher, was one of 20 young
men taken in by Assis during the past two years. He finds shelter for
them, or they live in the church itself.
He pulls up a shirt sleeve to reveal a rough tattoo of Christ. He got it
at age 15, he says, the same day his gang name _ Gugu _ was tattooed
lower down on the same arm.
His bullet wounds faintly resemble the holes that marked the hands of
Jesus nailed to the cross. Asked about this, Carlos gazes at them,
shakes his head with a crooked grin and says, "These are not the signs
of salvation, but the stains of a life of crime."
___
Back in the drug den, the 26-year-old Red Command gang leader explains
why he allows Assis and other evangelicals into his territory.
"If one of my soldiers decides the church can give him a better life,
fine. The pastor can come and take one and there will be 20 kids waiting
to take his place," he says. "If they can't cut the life of crime, then
the pastor is helping me by weeding out the weak."
About a dozen of his foot soldiers stand about, warily keeping an eye on
entry points to the slum, waiting for police to return a half hour after
trading rounds with them.
Most appear high on marijuana or cocaine. The gang leader, however, is
lucid and relaxed, sporting a Sean John fisherman's hat, black Nike polo
shirt and two new 9 mm Israeli-made Cherokee pistols tucked inside his
shorts.
"I don't see the church as a competing power. In fact, the majority of
our faction's leaders accept the word of God and the doctrine of the
church," he says.
His explanation is simple.
"You have to understand it like this: Just because I lead this life
doesn't mean I don't believe in God. I have no doubt it is God who saves
me from the bullets that come my way," he says, pointing to bullet holes
in the concrete wall he leans against. "Shots have come close enough to
put holes in my shirt. But I keep on living. I sincerely recognize that
it is God who is protecting me."
___
The sun is setting, and after four hours inside the slum, it is time to
leave. "At night, there are more guns than men here," Assis notes.
As he tours around the slum, Assis talks about why he goes into places
many other preachers would not even think of entering. "We try to bring
the word of God to the traffickers because that is where the violence
begins. If we can calm them down, we can slowly begin to end the bloodshed."
Walking out of the slum, Assis continues to greet everyone, residents
and drug dealers, with handshakes, back slaps, smiles and questions
about their kids and families. He ends most conversations with the same
request, a hopeful plea.
Everyone responds with the same answer.
Sure, they promise, they'll see him next Sunday in church.