Dancing with death
In the craziest of crazes, to pounding music, Brazilian teenagers line up in nightclubs to beat each other senseless in choreographed fights: 60 children have been murdered in four years. Nicole Veash goes to a 'funk ball'
It's midnight on Friday in a nondescript suburban sprawl outside Rio. A dozen buses packed with youths from nearby slums pull up in a dusty car-park. Doors open and hundreds of teenagers spill out onto the pavement. Everyone is dressed in their best, the girls in tiny hot-pants and tight, revealing tops; the boys in Bermuda shorts, gold chains hanging down bare chests and bleached white hair cropped close to the scalp. This is Duque de Caxias, a poor, grey, industrial town about an hour's drive from the heart of Rio de Janeiro. The teenagers are waiting outside a squat, dirty-white club that nestles among a parade of discount shops and street markets.
Soon, nearly a thousand people are standing around. Some boys whistle at groups of girls, others eat hot-dogs from a van in the car park.
André, a thin young man with bleached-blond hair and sharp cheekbones, is waiting for his gang to be bussed in from the Dicke da Vila Alizira slum. Four kids riding motorbikes as if they belong to some kind of official cavalcade roar up, heralding the appearance of the bus. Surfing on top of this dilapidated vehicle are three young men, their sinewy bodies already streaming with sweat from the balmy night. The bus stops and they jump down from the roof. One lets off a firework and, with a signal from André, they bounce - like human Zebedees - towards the club. "It's going to be a f***ing good one tonight," smiles André. "I can feel it." He greets his gang, kissing the girls and hugging the boys. Two queues start forming at the entrance to the club. He points to one of them. "This is ours," he says. "This is for Side A." The club is called a funk ball. But the "ball" part is misleading: there's nothing elegant about it. It looks like a bad school disco with no fancy nightclub effects, just six giant sound-systems and banks of flashing red lights. But what it lacks in glamour it makes up for with a charged atmosphere of energy and danger.
A DJ puts on the evening's first funk record and the teenagers let out a yell of approval. Fourteen-year-old girls, dancing for groups of guys, simulate sex acts by thrusting their hips and suggestively sucking on their fingers. But the dance routines can't mask that this club is different. For starters, it has two of everything: two separate entrances, two sets of toilets and two bars on opposite sides of the club. And despite people being crammed in until the club is packed full, a seven-foot wide corridor is left in the middle. André's crowd stays well away from this gap. "There's no point being exposed right at the beginning," he says. "It's much better to save your energy for later on."
As he speaks, hundreds of people from Side B put white bandanas on their heads and start forming a huge human snake. They begin winding their way around the club and moving in front of the stage, close to the gap. In unison, they punch the air and begin a rhythmic, aggressive chanting. The atmosphere ferments with tension. The dancing stops and the girls hide in the shadows, while the young boys in Side A stand to face their bandana-wearing rivals. And then both sides wait - for the signal to begin. When teenagers from Rio's slums go clubbing they engage in organised gang warfare to music. Some 30 unlicensed funk balls have sprung up in poor sections of the city to provide the slums' teeming youth population with a place to dance. And kill. More than 60 young Brazilians have been murdered in the funk balls since they emerged in 1996. Dozens more have been seriously injured; some paralysed, others blinded. Although bouncers body-search each person when they enter, weapons are sometimes smuggled in. But fists are the prime weapons of choice and when multiplied by 10 or 20 at a time, they can be deadly.
Then there's death by trampling. With funk balls holding 1,000 to 2,000 youths at a time, being crushed underfoot is a regular occurrence. Yet, despite the danger, police estimate that some 200,000 youths go every weekend to the clubs.
Rio's funk balls are not about social posturing. They are not about bored professionals beating each other up in New York boxing gyms. This is not Fight Club. And in Brazil, where funk balls were invented, they are more popular than ever.
Located on the city's periphery, the balls operate along similar, curiously disciplined lines. The teenagers are divided into two large crowds: Side A and Side B - depending on which favela - or slum - they live, with each side containing gangs from around half-a-dozen different slums. The gap in the centre is called the Corridor of Death and it is here that the ball changes from being just another nightclub into a place of combat. The music is what really whips up the violence. It is the tum-tumtum of the hypnotic bass rhythm - an almost ritualistic repetition of noise - that inflames the hearts of the funkers. Despite its name, this music sounds nothing like 1970s US-style funk. This is a Brazilian sound: a mish-mash of influences, it uses the electronic beat of late 1980s pop, bass thuds and slithers of techno. An off-key rap, often sung live, overlays the rhythm that has a raw, infectious vigour.
"The more you listen to funk," says André, "the more you f***ing love it. It has a hard, intense sound. It's music about our people, about poverty and drugs. The things we know." According to DJ Tubarao, or Shark, as his name translates from Portuguese, a good funk DJ is able to manipulate the clubbers' feelings of anger.
"A DJ gets to know his crowd because we play the same balls every weekend so we understand the rhythm of their fighting," he says. "I take great pride in controlling my crowd. If I see they want blood, I'll put on a fast funk tune, but if they need cooling down then I'll soothe them with something for the girls." The fights are not free-foralls. When the music reaches a crescendo the DJ gives a signal to begin. Only then do groups of 10 to 20 funkers cross the gap to drag their enemies - for some reason known as "Germans" - into the Corridor
of Death and over into their own side. If one is captured, they are beaten, often unconscious, unless a fellow gang member rescues them. This ritualised form of fighting is known as Mortal Kombat, after the notoriously violent computer game. No one knows who first used this name to describe funkball fighting, but somehow it stuck, not least because it is so apt.
Even the security guards - often moonlighting policemen - get involved. Officially, they're there to keep the crowd under control and in some semblance of order. But at the same time, they also stimulate fighting and pull the young men into this strip of no-man's land just for the fun of watching them get mauled. For many, funk balls are the only diversion in a life of poverty. Living in some of Brazil's worst favelas, these children grow up to face the bleakness of a life without hope and without money.
With no welfare system to support them, entire families can often be seen sleeping on flattened cardboard in the street. Rio is the most dangerous place in all Brazil, with an average of 20 murders a day. And in a city where police gunned down eight street-children in the Massacre of Candelaria in 1993; where firearms are easily obtainable and drug traffickers regularly conduct vicious turf wars in the streets, the teens who frequent the balls are inured to violence.
FUNK-ball fighting is a way for these youths to prove themselves, not only to their peers but also to their rivals. Like any gang warfare, it is a statement about the superiority of one neighbourhood over another and about ancient, long-forgotten grudges between favelas. But unlike much ghetto fighting, funk balls are not about gaining turf at the expense of another crew. Rather they are places for displaying physical prowess and, oddly enough, they are places of fun. Of entertainment. But what makes them so horrific is their organised barbarity, like that of the gladiatorial arenas of Rome - they are places where you go to kill and be killed. According to Manoel Riberio, a Brazilian who has studied the explosion of violence in the balls, the peer-group fights provide reprieve from the tedium of every day poverty.
"The funk balls are a way of venting frustration," he says. "It's widely accepted that socially alienated people fight to release anger. What they need is regulated fights, with protective headgear and proper firstaid facilities. That way their energy can be channelled instead of being pushed underground." Gang war in the underclass is nothing new and for a long time - as long as it happened in the favelas - Rio turned a blind eye. But in the early 1990s teenagers descended on the city's famous golden beaches to carry out their territorial struggles under the eyes of the wealthy living in their ocean-front apartments. Horrified at the violence, the residents demanded action.
After a wave of media attention, the police came down hard and swept the young off the beach and back into the shanty towns. That's when the fighting in the funk balls started. The clubs started out as discos in the 1980s. But in 1996, a promoter - no one is sure which one - allowed fighting in his club. The idea caught on fast.
Today, funk balls are so popular that even some girls fight. Once the sexy dance routines stop, they wrestle one-on-one. They punch; snap each other's fingers; and use their stiletto heels to mutilate the pretty face of their rival. Or worse. On July 4th last year, 16-year-old Cleice Suzi da Silva Abel asked her mother to baby-sit her newborn son so she could go to a beach party. Instead, she went to a funk ball. The next morning, friends found her in a coma in the club bathroom. She was covered in urine with clumps of hair yanked from her head.
They took da Silva Abel to hospital, where she was diagnosed as having a broken shoulder blade, fractured skull and a clot on the brain. She stayed in a coma for 15 days.
Although not expected to live, she somehow this is a spare line
pulled through. In a testimony to police, da Silva Abel recalls her few scant memories of the evening. "The security guards were whipping our legs, which made everyone really angry. I was on Side A and suddenly Side B invaded us. Someone pulled my hair and dragged me across the Corridor of Death. I don't really remember anything after that." Da Silva Abel now suffers from permanent neurological problems. She is paralysed down her right side and can no longer hold her baby son. The beating of da Silva Abel did have one positive outcome; her police testimony in July provided a turning point in the first major investigation into funk ball deaths. Police now had an eyewitness account from a victim who survived a beating. Throughout the late 1990s dozens of teenagers were murdered in the balls, but their bodies were never found. A bouncer-turned-informant has since claimed to police this is because promoters instructed staff to dump the corpses in the city's sewers or rubbish tips.
With few resources, Rio's police have long regarded the funk ball murders as low on their list of priorities. Not only are the dead poor, but also, the police themselves can also be said to be implicitly responsible for the deaths. According to Dr Romero Lyra, a state prosecutor in Rio de Janeiro and one of Brazil's main crusaders against the funk balls, police are known to have taken bribes from certain promoters.
"We also know that many bodies of teenagers have disappeared altogether and we've really no idea how many people have actually died." So for years the ball deaths went unnoticed - until Julio Miranda Cavalcante died. During an evening at the Country Club in March last year, friends found the 15-year-old slumped in a corner, having been beaten by a rival gang. They took him to a nearby hospital but, according to police records, over-worked staff failed to administer medical treatment and instead parked him on a trolley in the corridor while they dealt with other late-night casualties.
When his mother, Eva, arrived at dawn she found her son still covered in congealed blood, urine and faeces. Someone had stamped on his face, leaving it swollen almost beyond recognition. Then she saw his right eye, or what remained of it, hanging from its socket.
"Are you alive?" she asked. Her son nodded, his last response to any question. Days later he was dead - three months short of his 16th birthday. Cavalcante was just an ordinary teenager, but he came from South America's largest favela, Rocinha. When hundreds of mourners from the slum turned up at his funeral the city's media took notice and the wave of publicity forced the police into action.
Until Cavalcante's death, they had treated each of the 36 discovered dead teenagers as individual murder cases. But that changed when Detective Cristina Lomba Pereira was put in charge of the Cavalcante file. For the past year, the 36-year-old has been trying to nail the people who killed Cavalcante and the other funkers. And she was the first to link all the deaths into one investigation. After spending months trawling round Rio's funk balls - which are openly advertised in local newspapers - she built up a picture of the underground scene.
Pereira's office, with its exposed electrical wiring and peeling plaster, is in a rundown suburb of Rio. She has no bullet-proof vest, no computer, no neat filing system - not even a telephone. She says: "These youngsters are devoted to funk balls. They treat the promoters like royalty despite the deaths of friends and always deny that violence actually occurs inside the club."
She says it is almost impossible to determine who is responsible for the murders because there are too many people involved in the fights. When Pereira decided that she had gathered enough evidence to warrant a wider investigation, her superiors contacted Dr Romero Lyra. Using her evidence, he initiated further inquiries and started to formulate the state's case against the promoters.
Lyra says: "The real problem is that the crowd is easy to manipulate and exploit. And that's what makes me really angry. We have teenagers dying every week because they are tricked into believing that funk ball fighting is a macho thing that will get them accepted. I've been gathering evidence on this case for nearly a year now. I've seen the devastation it brings to families who have lost their teenage sons in senseless acts of violence. But this is a crime where the guilty never get caught because it is almost impossible to find out who killed who.
"That's why I am trying to find a way to get the promoters and the DJs on related charges, like stimulating violence. Of course this will not carry as high a sentence as convicting someone for murder, but it is our only option. The real solution to this crime is to close the funk balls down."
In order to do that, he will have to deal with Romulo Costa. Immensely popular, Costa owns Rio's largest chain of funk balls, which are run under the brand name Furacão 2000 - "Tornado 2000". Each weekend, thousands of young funkers travel to one of his regular nights held in half-a-dozen clubs across the city. Since the start of the police investigation, Costa has been regarded as a key man to put behind bars.
He has been hauled into Pereira's police station for questioning several times and was once detained for more than a week, but later released without charge. Short and slightly tubby, the 46-year-old has a round, olive-skinned face with quiet eyes, a goatee and a teenager's haircut: long at the base of the neck with little rat-tails.
He comes across as a family man; as someone with an almost benevolent concern for the poor teenagers who inhabit his funk balls. But beyond questions that prompt bland denials (usually made on the steps of the police station) of: "I don't promote violence," and: "My balls are about peace and music," Costa is rarely asked to explain his association with funk.
"People never ask why I promote funk," he says. "They just assume I enjoy violence. Well, I don't. I'm from the favelas myself. I've lived in a house without water, in a place where there was nothing to do all day. I've had jobs without prospects which didn't pay me enough to get by on. So I know all about poverty." And this is one of the reasons why Costa is so popular among the teenage funkers: he's the boy from the slums made good. He has a family, a beautiful, young wife and the trappings of a middle-class lifestyle.
Costa has built his life around funk. As a teenager, he worked in the clubs back when they were just about music and dancing. He carried records for the DJs and was eventually employed by a former owner of Furacão 2000. He worked his way up the ranks before taking over the business. He even met his wife, Veronica, on the funk-ball dancefloor. Costa has built a funk ball empire and now has a stable of DJs who, as well as playing live sets, regularly release funk compilation CDs. He is devoted to funk music, both as a way of making money and, it seems, as a form of self-expression for the poor. And each time he is summoned to the police station, a huge crowd of banner-waving kids accompanies him, pleading: "Don't close our balls."
However, as news of funk ball deaths becomes more public, Costa has come under increasing fire. The police claim they already have enough evidence to convict the promoter on grounds of inciting violence, but have so far failed to charge him with any crime. Seeking to pin a weightier felony on Costa, they have suggested he is involved in buying large quantities of drugs from a notorious trafficker. But again this charge lies unproven.
Despite the lack of hard evidence, his neighbours in the upwardly mobile district of Barra da Tijuca - about 20 minutes drive from Copacabana Beach - have exerted pressure on his family to leave their condominium. And parents at his children's private school have successfully petitioned the head teacher to force the two children out.
"People are scared of me. They think I am dangerous because I come from the favela and because I have money.
"Of course we get some violence at the balls, but," he pauses, "it isn't the organised violence that you read about."
Back in the Duque de Caxias funk ball, nearly an hour later, André is on edge. His eyes dart around the packed hall, watching, waiting for the first attack. Barking orders, he directs his crowd: those wearing mouthguards and protective nose-plasters to the front; the injured ones, with half-healed cuts, arms in slings and eye patches, to the back, next to the walls smeared brown with blood.
"Certain things are important to funkers," he says suddenly. "First, you've got to fight without fear because it's the only way to win respect. I was scared at the beginning but after that first punch in the face I lost my fear. Second, you need the right clothes. Then you have to have a girl with a big ass. But most important of all, you need a good crowd, one that'll back you up.
"A funker has got to have his trophies. A rival's blood is a trophy and so are his clothes. But if I see my own blood all I can think about is revenge. I remember once stamping on a German's head because he'd made me bleed. His girl was screaming and screaming at me to stop. But that only made me stamp harder." As he talks, a small group from Side A, unable to wait for the DJ's signal to begin, attempts to invade Side B. They try to break through a line of security men and into the Corridor of Death. One small boy, no older than 12 or 13, is immediately punched square in the face by a bouncer twice his width and age. He falls back into a web of Side A arms.
Another is less lucky. Three security men, erupting with anger at his pushing past them, drag him into the central aisle. They loop an orange plastic cord round his neck and yank him screaming and gasping for breath out of the ball and onto the street. André admits most funkers are wary of provoking the armed security guards. "You're not allowed to hit back. If you do they'll kill you. That's the rule." Once the excitement of the preemptory skirmish dies down, he continues: "I'm nearly 20 and that's old for a funker. Soon someone else will take over as leader because God gave me a warning to quit.
"It was about 3 a.m. in the morning a couple of months ago. I'd been fighting all night but still wanted more. The DJ played our chant and that made me go again. I went alone. I dropped two Germans and then one of crowd B came and slashed me across my arm with a razor. I could see right through to my bones. I saw death in front of me that night. e can no longer fully stretch his arm and some nights, when the city's tropical temperature drops, he gets a searing pain around the bones. This is one of many scars he'll carry for life.
"It's best not to talk about these things, though," he says, his eyes fixed on his rivals. "Better not to think about them. You have to be optimistic or you'd never fight again and tonight I want to fight." He turns to his crowd for reassurance. They start to chant: "We are the terror possessed by hatred. We will invade Side B and take the Germans. We want blood. We want slaughter. We want bodies on the floor." And then the DJ screams: "Attention Side A. Attention Side B. It's the time you've all been waiting for. Time for the Mortal Kombat." Moments later, the fighting begins.