The fireman’s cry bellowed across the wasteland. ”Over here, over here! Can you smell it?”
He crouched down on the litter-strewn riverbank and plunged a four-pronged hook into the murky water, latching on to something beneath the surface. Grimacing, he hauled the hook back from the water — attached to a yellowing, apparently human, ribcage.
Denise Tavares, a local woman searching for her missing 16-year-old son, had been observing the scene from a distance. ”My son, my son,” she began to wail.
Seconds later a stunned silence fell on the crowd as the hook was pulled again from the swamp. Clinging to the carcass was not a human head, but the putrefying skull of a large dog.
Rio de Janeiro is a city of missing people. Since police records began in 1993, more than 10 000 people have vanished without trace here, while human rights activists say many more disappearances have gone unreported.
Recent reports in the Brazilian press suggested that at least 7 000 of these cases were related to killings carried out by drug traffickers, death squads and corrupt police officers.
Each week dozens of mothers such as Tavares trawl city morgues, police stations and occasionally clandestine graveyards seeking information about their missing children.
But like Tavares’ son Douglas, who was seized from his home in 2005 and never heard of again, many are never found. Instead they join the vast and growing register of Rio de Janeiro’s desaparecidos — ”the disappeared”.
The expression was coined in South America during the military dictatorships of the 1960s and 1970s. About 3 000 people disappeared at the hands of Augusto Pinochet’s regime in Chile, while Argentina’s military junta is said to have ”disappeared” between 11 000 and 30 000 opponents.
Brazil had its political desaparecidos too. About 485 political activists vanished or were killed during the 1964 military regime. Last week, the government published an official report outlining systematic torture, rape and disappearance of activists during the two-decade dictatorship.
Now, 22 years after the end of military rule, Rio de Janeiro is home to a new generation of desaparecidos, even greater in scale. ”The number of impoverished youths murdered or ‘disappeared’ in recent years should have put Brazil in the dock at the international court [of justice] in the Netherlands,” the social activist Yvonne Bezerra de Mello wrote recently in one Rio newspaper. ”We are worse than Bosnia or Serbia,” she added, describing the situation as a ”hidden genocide”.
Today’s desaparecidos are not political activists or left-wing dissidents. Roberto Cardoso, the head of Rio’s homicide squad, said they are largely impoverished residents of the city’s ”deprived communities”. Victims of rampant crime and chronic insecurity, they are vanishing off the map in droves.
Many are executed and incinerated by drug traffickers or the vigilante gangs that control a number of Rio’s poorest districts. Others have reportedly been the victims of the police themselves.
Authorities admit that official figures are unreliable since many disappearances are never reported. Cardoso said he had no idea how many bodies were buried in clandestine cemeteries. ”There must be a lot of them, especially in the middle of the banditry, because nobody even complains.”
Robson Fontenele, an inspector from the missing persons unit of Rio’s homicide squad, said the number of desaparecidos rose sharply after the end of Brazil’s dictatorship in 1985.
He argued that with the return of civilian rule, criminals sought to hide their crimes from the authorities. The result was an explosion in the number of clandestine cemeteries where thousands of anonymous Brazilians are believed to have been buried.
”In the old days the crook would kill somebody and put their body on the street corner,” said Fontenele, who has worked in homicide for 22 years. ”Things have changed. Today it isn’t interesting for the traffickers to put 10 or 20 bodies at the entrance to the shantytown, or for the mafia bosses to act like Al Capone during prohibition.
”[Their] secret [is that] … without material [proof] there is no crime.”
Fontenele said operations to locate clandestine cemeteries in Rio’s shantytowns were rare because of the risk of triggering a shoot-out with drug gangs.
Cardoso insisted Rio’s police were working hard to reduce the number of disappearances and murders. But he said the presence of heavily armed drug gangs and the lack of information made it ”difficult” for the police to solve many cases. ”We have to be careful,” he said of the increasing levels of violence. ”If we don’t pay attention we’ll wake up one morning and won’t be able to do anything about it any more. I think most people don’t realise the scale, or don’t understand, what is going on.”
The much-hyped release next month of Tropa de Elite (Elite Squad), a film about Rio’s special forces police that has been billed as ”City of God 2”, may change all that.
The film is expected to feature graphic images of the ”microwave”, an improvised grave made out of car tyres in which drug traffickers frequently incinerate their victims’ bodies.
Inside Rio’s most violent shantytowns, at least, such practices are no secret. ”Twenty-nine, 30, I don’t know. Only Jesus knows,” one drug trafficker, armed with a gold-plated Uzi submachine gun, said recently when asked how many people he had killed.
It was a rainy Wednesday afternoon in central Rio and in the corridor outside court room two, Tavares was waiting to give evidence in a homicide hearing against the man who allegedly ordered the killing of her son.
Nearly two years after her son vanished his body has still not been found. The only explanation she received came in the form of two witness statements, indicating that drug traffickers had chopped off her son’s nose and fingers before stabbing him to death.
”I’m just really, really lost,” she said, cradling her head in her hands. — Â