In 1966, the Brazilian government began moving thousands of displaced families from the hillsides of Rio de Janeiro to a swampy patch of land on the city’s western edge. The new neighborhood was called Cidade de Deus, City of God. It had no paved streets, no schools, no clinic, and no police station. Children walked to school through ankle-deep mud. The state had concentrated the city’s poorest residents in one place, stripped out all institutions, and walked away.
What grew in that soil was a war. By the late 1970s, the neighborhood had become one of the most violent places on Earth. The story of that violence, and the men who drove it, became a novel and then a film that shocked the world. But the real story behind City of God is longer, dirtier, and far less stylish than the movie made it look.
The man the world came to know as Zé Pequeno was born José Eduardo Barreto Conceição in 1957. The neighborhood called him Dadinho, little baby, a nickname he hated. As he grew older and more feared, he renamed himself Zé Pequeno, Little Joe. He was small and quiet, with a high-pitched laugh that sounded wrong coming out of him. He had been involved in crime since childhood, and by his early twenties, he was something the neighborhood had never seen before: a businessman who killed for market share.
Around 1979, when most of the drug sales points in Cidade de Deus were independent operations run by men who had grown up together, Zé Pequeno began to consolidate. He wanted every boca de fumo, every mouth of smoke, every corner house selling drugs. He started killing the owners. Some he ambushed, some he absorbed, some he simply walked up to and shot in front of their families. Within roughly 24 months, he controlled almost every drug sales point in the City of God. He had a monopoly, soldiers, money, and somewhere between 50 and 200 armed teenagers working for him.
He also brought a kind of stability, the stability of fear. Under Zé Pequeno, residents were not mugged, robbed, or raped. If a perpetrator was found, he was executed in the alley behind the church. Residents who remember those years tell a complicated truth. They were terrified of him. But they also knew that his rule brought a brutal order to a place the state had abandoned.
The war that defined the neighborhood began over a woman. Sometime in 1979, Zé Pequeno’s group seized and raped the girlfriend of a man named Manoel Machado Rocha. Manuel was 27 years old, a former army infantryman and one of the finest marksmen in his old unit. The neighborhood called him Mane Galinha. He was not an innocent. He had a record, carried a gun, and ran an armed crew. But the attack on the woman he loved crossed a line that even the cocaine money could not paper over.
Manuel did something nobody in Cidade de Deus had dared do to Zé Pequeno. He picked up a gun and went looking for the king. He struck first, killing two of Zé Pequeno’s men in the opening raid. Then he turned on the soldiers, then on anyone who sold for him. Within months, the neighborhood split in half. There was Zé Pequeno’s army and there was Manuel’s army. In the middle were tens of thousands of residents trying to keep their kids alive.
The two armies fought a guerrilla war inside a labyrinth of narrow alleys. The economics were brutal and simple. A drug sales point in 1980 was generating between 5,000 and 20,000 dollars a week in profit. Whoever controlled the most bocas controlled the most money. Whoever controlled the most money could buy the most guns. The arithmetic of the war meant nobody could stop. To stop was to die. Teenagers who had not finished fourth grade were carrying weapons of war, paid for by the cocaine appetite of the same Rio elite who had voted to push them out to the swamp.
Manuel was killed on September 30th, 1979. He had survived an earlier attempt on his life that year, but the second time, Zé Pequeno’s gang tracked down his home address and gunned him down in front of his parents and younger siblings. He was 27 years old. The neighborhood turned out for his funeral in numbers the police could not believe. He had become, in the months of his war, proof that you could fight back. The fact that he died doing it did not diminish that. In some ways, it amplified it.
The war dragged on into the early 1980s with weekly killings, houses burned, and mothers wailing over bodies in the street. Children grew up convinced that gunfire was the natural sound of evening. The state finally noticed, not because it cared, but because the bodies were starting to make the newspapers in the wealthy South Zone. Police incursions became regular. They were not peacekeeping operations. They were retaliations.
In 1985, the same year the military dictatorship collapsed, Zé Pequeno died. He had been arrested and escaped from prison, and he came back to Cidade de Deus to retake the drug sales points he had lost. But a new generation of traffickers had taken over in his absence, and they were not handing the empire back. Accounts of how he died differ. Some say a rival faction shot him. Some say his body carried no wounds at all and point to an overdose. What they agree on is the irony. The man who had killed his way to a monopoly was finished off not by the police and not by Mane Galinha, but by the next wave of younger killers he himself had helped create.
He had ruled the City of God for roughly six years. He died at 28. He left no fortune, no children who carry his name in public, and a body count that no historian has ever been able to fully count. His death did not end the trade. It just opened a vacancy. The Comando Vermelho, the Red Command, moved in fully. By the late 1980s, Cidade de Deus was a stronghold for the prison-born criminal franchise.
In the middle of all this was a young poet named Paulo Lins. He had grown up in Cidade de Deus, moved there with his family in 1965 among the early arrivals. He was small, black, and liked to read. While the kids he had played soccer with were graduating from shoplifting to armed robbery to selling cocaine, Lins went to school and started writing poetry and sambas.
In the early 1980s, a Brazilian anthropologist named Alba Zaluar came to Cidade de Deus to do doctoral fieldwork. She needed a local assistant, someone the community would trust, someone who could move between the drug corners and the church and the schools without getting shot. She found Paulo Lins. He started working for her in the mid-1980s, carrying a notebook and collecting testimonies. He interviewed former bandits, current bandits, mothers of dead bandits, priests, teachers, and cops. He went to funerals. He went back to the same alleys he had played soccer in as a child and asked the men who controlled them how the business actually worked.
What he discovered was that the war was not a series of random gunfights. It was a system. It had rules, ranks, and economics that could be charted on paper. The Comando Vermelho had given the traffickers a model, and the cocaine boom had given them the money to scale it. The state had given them an empty neighborhood with no police and no oversight, and they had filled the empty space with their own government, a government that taxed, ruled, and killed.
In 1986, Paulo Lins started writing. The book took eight years. He wrote the way people in Cidade de Deus actually talked, without sentimentality. He wrote roughly 300 named characters into one book, most of them based on real people, most of them dead by the time the book was finished. The novel Cidade de Deus was published in 1997 by Companhia das Letras, the most prestigious literary publisher in Brazil. It ran more than 500 pages. Critics didn’t know what to do with it at first. It was too violent for a literary novel and too literary for a crime novel. Then the reviews started coming in, and the book won awards.
A filmmaker named Fernando Meirelles read the book and saw the movie immediately. He partnered with screenwriter Braulio Mantovani and co-director Katia Lund. They made a decision that would define the project. They would not use professional actors. They would cast the kids from the favelas. The actor they eventually cast as Zé Pequeno, Leandro Firmino, was a young man from Cidade de Deus who only went to the audition to keep his friend company.
The film City of God was released in 2002. It earned four Academy Award nominations and is now routinely listed among the greatest films of the 21st century. For residents of the real Cidade de Deus, it was a mixed blessing. On one hand, the movie forced Brazil and the world to acknowledge that the favelas were war zones with histories. NGOs arrived, foreign journalists arrived, and social programs that had been ignored for 40 years suddenly received funding. On the other hand, the movie stamped a brand on the neighborhood. After 2002, putting Cidade de Deus on your resume in Rio meant your resume went in the trash. The tens of thousands of residents who had never held a gun found themselves represented globally by the killer on the screen.
In 2009, in preparation for the World Cup and the Olympics, the state government installed a pacifying police unit in Cidade de Deus. For a few years, the murder rate dropped. The Comando Vermelho went underground. Schools reopened. Then the Olympics ended, the funding ended, and the program collapsed across Rio. By the end of the 2010s, the traffickers were back. The rifles were back. The alleys were dangerous again.
Paulo Lins is still alive. He is still writing. He survived the neighborhood. Most of the men he interviewed did not. He has said that he wrote the book because nobody else was going to. Because if he didn’t write down what happened, the names of the dead would disappear, and the architecture of violence that killed them would be rebuilt somewhere else by people who never learned what had already failed.
The real story of City of God is not a story about gangsters. It is a story about what happens when a state decides certain citizens do not deserve to be seen. The cocaine, the wars, the kingpins, the funerals, all of it grew out of a single decision in 1966. Move them, hide them, forget them. The men with the guns just filled the empty space.