Word: rios
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...victims are often found lying in roadside ditches on the outskirts of teeming favelas, the makeshift slums surrounding Rio de Janeiro or industrial São Paulo. Their hands are usually tied behind their backs with nylon cord. The bodies often show signs of torture: cigarette burns, bruises, broken teeth, occasionally even castration. Almost all are riddled with gunshot wounds. Sometimes the corpses have been drenched in gasoline and then set ablaze, making identification impossible...
Those grisly scenes of execution are becoming alarmingly commonplace in Brazil's major cities. Hundreds of such deaths have been reported so far this year, over 150 of them in Rio's northern slum of Baixada Fluminense. On one typical day this month, Rio police discovered seven scarred and bullet-torn bodies. The victims included a suspected prostitute, a transvestite, a photographer and his girlfriend...
...responsible for the executions? The most frequent claimants are gangs of self-styled vigilantes who boast that they are fighting an underground war against the crime that infests the underpoliced favelas. Since 1965, the number of slum dwellers in Rio has risen from 450,000 to a staggering 1.7 million. Lacking adequate sanitation, schooling and jobs, the ramshackle favelas have become breeding grounds for crime and violence, out of which have come the countercrime and violence of the vigilantes. Explains Eduardo Fagundes, who is the present head of the Brazilian bar, "Ten years ago the death squads received open support...
...young think about here is their namorado, their boyfriend or girlfriend, and nobody does any schoolwork," a middle-aged parent lamented to me. "Sao Paulo is bad," he added, referring to the South American financial and industrial capital further to the south of the country, "but Rio is the worst place to go to school. Everybody goes to the beach after classes...
Summertime in the United States is wintertime in Brazil, but that doesn't stop scantilly-clad women from lying on the sands or men from exercising at one of the gyms that dot the beach. Snow is almost unknown except in the southern-most reaches of the country. In Rio the August heat and humidity can wear you out after one errand downtown...