By Misha Glenny for the Sunday Times
Misha Glenny (Penguin Random House)
I was wandering just five minutes from the house where I was living in Rio de Janeiro when I stumbled across 12 young men armed with semiautomatic weapons and pistols. They were relaxed and their leader, maybe 10 years older than the rest, shook my hand warmly. Phew!
Writing a book about the drug lord who for five years ran the cocaine trade in Latin America’s largest slum posed a peculiar set of challenges. If I was going to write this book, I had to go and live in one of the favelas.
I first had to secure the cooperation of the man in question, known to all Brazil as Nem of Rocinha. He agreed to be interviewed by me. But that meant trekking 10 times deep into the Brazilian interior near the Bolivian border in order to visit him in one of Brazil’s four maximum security penitentiaries.
Altogether I spent 30 hours interrogating Nem about his life. He told me about the terrible autoimmune disease which his 10-month old daughter developed. He was forced to borrow money from the then drugs lord in order to pay for the treatment which would save her life. And to pay it back, he had to leave his respectable job and go work in the coke business.
Living in the slum was perhaps the trickiest aspect. Rocinha, as it is called, has 120 000 people packed into an area the size of a village. Air-conditioning is a luxury in the sweltering and chronically humid semi-tropical climate. And when you’re not baking, you are battling the sustained bouts of biblical downpours that bust open the modest roofs of the slum and come gushing through your bedroom at 3 AM. Worst of all was the permanent noise: howling dogs, the thud and screams of domestic violence, the unbelievably loud music and, of course, the occasional burst of gunfire.
If the threat from violence and natural disaster wasn’t enough, I knew that if I was to write about drugs, corruption, poverty and violence in Brazil, I had to make a serious stab at learning Portuguese. At my age (mid-50s), learning a new language poses serious problems even if you can already speak others. But nothing had prepared me for the discrepancy between the written word and how it is pronounced in Brazilian Portuguese. Tough doesn’t come close although I’m pleased to report that I can now muddle on through.
My abiding memory in writing this book, however, is about the destructive power of inequality. So many bright young people who are born into the extreme poverty of the favelas never have the chance to secure the education that would enable them to lead fulfilling lives, instead of picking up a gun to sell drugs.
Book details
- Nemesis: One Man and the Battle for Rio by Misha Glenny
EAN: 9781847922670
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