Living with Insecurity in a Brazilian Favela by R. Ben Penglase

Author:R. Ben Penglase [Penglase, R. Ben]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780813565439
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Published: 2014-09-01T00:00:00+00:00

Tubarão and Seu Lázaro’s Dog

One Thursday morning, the morro was abuzz with talk about a shooting that happened the previous afternoon. When I walked out the front gate of my house that morning, I came across Seu Lázaro and Clara, the association’s secretary. They were having an intense conversation in the doorway of the association. From what I could piece together, someone had shot and killed one of Seu Lázaro’s dogs. After talking with Clara, Seu Lázaro had to rush off to a meeting at the mayor’s office, and I couldn’t ask him more about what had happened. But as the morning wore on, various people passed by the association and added their comments about what had occurred.

The previous afternoon, a man known in the neighborhood for being a viciado (addict), appeared in the morro. He was very drunk and said something that Tubarão, one of the soldiers of the local drug gang, took as an insult. The man who insulted Tubarão no longer lived in the morro. As someone told me later, he was notorious for fazendo besteira (screwing up, or causing problems): I was told that he had an uncontrollable cocaine addiction and had had an affair with an older woman. After moving in with her, he sold all her possessions to buy more coke. The final straw came when he got the woman pregnant and then refused to accept responsibility for the baby. He had so antagonized his neighbors, and had run up such large debts, that the drug dealers had expelled him from the neighborhood.

When the man reappeared this particular April afternoon, perhaps attempting to settle his debts, he had already incurred the animosity of both the drug dealers and many people in the neighborhood. It took little to set off Tubarão’s anger, and he took the man’s sudden presence in the neighborhood, challenging his expulsion, as a personal insult. Tubarão wanted to kill the man on the spot, but some of the other drug dealers who were there restrained him. The bandidos (drug dealers) told the addict to run away, and fired some gunshots at the ground to scare him off. As the addict began to run down the hill, Tubarão shot him, hitting him in the hip. Just then, Tubarão also shot and killed one of Seu Lázaro’s dogs, a large black mutt. After the shooting, the drug dealers grabbed the addict’s body and dumped him, still alive, on a street at the edge of the morro. The man was eventually taken to the hospital, but died the following day.

In the following days, stories about the shooting spread throughout the neighborhood, becoming the main topic of fofoca (gossip). Although people were concerned that Tubarão had killed someone—and were especially worried about how the police would react—the fact that he had killed a dog belonging to Seu Lázaro’s family was the center of conversation. People also wondered how Dê, at that time the man in charge of the drug dealing in the neighborhood, would respond to Tubarão’s actions.

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