Drug traffickers, militiamen and policemen, one armed group against another: in the favelas of Rio it is now war. Fifty-two dead and thirty-three wounded in five days. This is the balance sheet in a megalopolis that is getting ready to confront one of the most difficult periods of the year—carnival.

The latest. From February first, the day that intensified the guerrilla war for control of territory in the hottest areas of the outskirts of the karaoke capital, an hour doesn’t pass without dead, wounded, or corpses found in the most remote corners of the expanse of houses from the perennial docksyards.
The last hours count three victims. Anderson Lima was 24 years old: he was killed with pistol shots during the night between Sunday and Monday at Nova Iguaçu, a neighborhood on the outskirts of Rio. The other two, very young, don’t yet have names: their bodies were found this morning by the military police. One was on his back on the steering wheel of a car at Riachuelo, the other in the middle of Sete Street, at Piratininga. Both bodies were severely beaten.

The counter of  bodies. The site is Riobodycount, begun February first in order  to put an end to indifference, to the habit towards death that characterizes the Brazilians of Rio, until now too accustomed to violence. Taking inspiration from the American site that keeps count of the victims of the war in Iraq, two Brazilians—Vinicius Costa, 25 years old, and Andre Dahmer, thirty-two—decided to shake up public opinion with the very upsetting count: the dead of the urban war that daily shakes Rio de Janeiro. “Violence here has become a common thing,” the 25 year old Costa explained. “No one realizes the dimensions of the tragedy that we are living every day.” The city is hostage to criminal bands of narcotraffickers, who run about in a reality that emerged from decades of inequality, poverty, and corruption.

In the light of the sun. A complex web in which private militias are inserted. Bodyguards, ex-agents, and even policemen in service play in a kind of paramilitary army of anti-narcotraffickers and move illegally like guardians of order in the most dangerous favelas.
Everything is behind the payment of a tax that every family of the area is constrained to pay. With the years, these militias have succeeded in monopolizing great tracts of territory, snatching them with gunfire from organized crime. Slowly, however, the cord has broken, and if at first the settling of scores took place in a more sporadic manner, in a kind of low intensity war, now the conflict has erupted in all its tragedy.

Towards carnival. In the meantime the city gets ready for the most anticipated time of the year—carnival. The country is in turmoil: from north to south, from east to west, in large and small, carnivalesque joy will explode in thousands of colors and thousands of manifestations. Often theater however, among beautiful women and allegorical floats of the tragedies of the criminal life and the settling of scores. This is the fear of the originators of Riobodycount, who are, however, receiving attestations of esteem and solidarity from every part of the world.

The volunteers of Riobodycount. “It is much more than we imagined,” André Dahmer has commented frankly. “We have received hundreds of messages of encouragement, offers of patronage, all, however, rejected politely. We will never become a group that profits in the marketplace of fear and violence in Rio. We have already seen some mass media make use of our site in order to prove the need of a police state, but we have already settled accounts. Here, once again, the press and public opinion call for more rigorous laws, to reeducate people by means of punishment. Some ask again for the death penalty. Here are the other symptoms of the war. We don’t believe in an armed peace made from maximum security cells, weapons, and tanks. We want an intervention from Brasilia, but at the social level. We want people capable of locating the pockets of misery of Rio.”