The Financial Times describes the gang riots that have taken Sao Paolo by storm:

Life in S????o Paulo returned to something like normal by the middle of this week after prison riots and attacks on police and property orchestrated by organised crime left 132 people dead and 53 injured between Friday night and Tuesday morning.

But many wondered what kind of normality it was. The handling of events by authorities, and especially the way they were brought to an end, suggested a lack of control amounting to a crisis of governability.

Although for the families of the victims the impact was tragic, relatively few people were touched directly by the incidents.More wide-reaching was the fear that gripped the city on Monday, as public transport collapsed ???????? at least 80 buses were set on fire ???????? schools and universities closed, businesses sent staff home early and rumours flashed across the internet and telephone lines that schools were being machine-gunned, that a mass attack was being prepared for 6pm that evening, and that the police or the attackers themselves would impose an 8pm curfew.

Among hundreds of testimonies was that of Beatriz Segal, an actress, who sum????med up the mood: ???????I feel extremely vulnerable. It????????s obvious that we are not at peace. Things will only get worse.???????

Most eloquent of all was an interview broadcast on Radio Record of S????o Paulo on Tuesday evening. Reporter Dante Rodrigues made contact with Orlando Mota Junior, known as Macarr????o, a leader of the Primeiro Comando da Capital (First Command of the Capital, or PCC), the criminal organisation that orchestrated the riots and attacks.

Two things were remarkable about the interview. First, Macarr????o was speaking on a mobile telephone from inside prison. Second, he appeared to confirm what many feared: the attacks ended because the PCC called them off after reaching a deal with state authorities.

???????The whole situation has changed,??????? says Bruno Paes Manso, a researcher into organised crime. ???????For the government to negotiate and give way is the worst possible outcome. If I was a bandit, I would join the PCC immediately. They????????ve shown just how powerful they are.???????

The City of God was a favela (ghetto) built on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro in the 1960s, meant to be a public housing project of such superiority that poverty would be nonexistent and the drug kingpins would be out of business there. But the government ran out of money and abandoned it uncompleted, leaving it to be overrun instead by the ones it was trying to ward off.

It’s story was told through the movie Cidade de Deus, released in Brazil during 2002, which chronicled the favela’s spiral down into violence through three decades. Kids are handed AK-47s and draw their courage from cocaine; the courage to gun down other children recruited for rival drug gangs. Police forces were paid to stay away, and the slums slowly became the inescapable and impenetrable realm of drug kingpins.

For decades the druglords have been able to consolidate their power. Gangs like the PCC have tranformed from small ghetto groups into the influential power brokers that they are today. For a second, imagine how these killings actually began. Its leaders simply made a telephone call — from jail — and the gangsters went on a rampage. The story is that after the police went on their own crackdown, the violence finally stopped. This seems implausible, as not only are the police corrupt, but they are far outnumbered and outgunned.

Guerilla News Network, while not exactly high on my reading list, published an account by its co-founder in 2005 when he visited the Vidigal favela outside of Rio de Janeiro. He describes the experience, complete with machine-gun-wielding preteens and all. It is a ripping story of an endless cycle of violence that has only culminated in the further breakdown of the lowest rungs of Brazilian society.

I went into the Vidigal favela yesterday with a contact I made on the first night here. Vidigal is all built into a hill and controlled by a drug gang called ADA (Amigos dos Amigos). We went up the amazingly snaky paths and stairways until we hit a command point where young 17 year old drug soldiers were slinging AKs and 7.62 mm semis. One kid stood beside me scanning the lower reaches of Vidigal, looking for possible breaches of the perimeter by rival gangs. Our guide used some of the money I gave him to bang down a fat pile of cocaine bought from one of the soldiers. As the drug hit his system, he began to talk excitedly about the community and his commitment to the ???????whole.???????

???????I was born here and I will never get out of here. This is my place, there is nothing else for us to do but try to make it better for the community.???????

From the command point, the view of Rio was stunning. It was totally surreal to be in such a poor and violent place and yet to have that view, it????????s the complete inversion of how it is with slums in North America. Later we went to the small paths between houses where the ADA fights their main rivals, the Comando Vermelho (Red Command). The walls were full of bullet holes. After dark, we went back to one of the evening drug selling points and hung out with the core group of ADA soldiers, who are armed with huge semi-automatics and machine guns??????? one by one men came through to pick up little 10 reais ($5) packets of cocaine while young guards sat perched at strategic look-outs in case the Red Command ambushed them to take over the drug spot. I watched with careful eyes as kids came up and played with the soldiers and women walked past, on their way home, as the central dealer doled out his little plastic bags of cocaine.

The soldiers couldn????????t believe I didn????????t want to shoot a few bullets over the favela, but my companion, an adventure junked female photographer from Portugal fired a red-tipped 7.62 mm shell that is some kind of flare out over the city. As soon as she fired it, people started running for cover, thinking it was an attack. The soldiers quickly ran back yelling ???????Tanquilo! Tranquilo!??????? to let them know it was just a flare.

One interesting part of it all is that once the favelas were governed and run by the drug lords in some proto-socialist enterprise. In Escobar fashion, they provided everything from food to doctors from the profits of their business. But now, that socialist ideal has faded to a more purely capitalist infrastructure. It????????s not just in the North that the leftist Utopia of communtarian political and economic projects are dying??????? it????????s even here, in the favela. Ironically, the one great development of recent years is the N????s do Morro theatre school which is sponsored by a major Brazilian oil company, Petrobras. I met with the kids ???????? of which there are over 700 in classes for film, stage and post-production. It was actually really beautiful.

There are two ADA bosses who run Vigidal and they came to power by working very closely with the police, who are paid off to stay out of the major drug command centers. In fact, when we came in, we had to be cleared with the ADA operatives who would then tell the cops to let us through. Every time we entered a new part of the favela, we had to be cleared to shoot photos. They killed a journalist a few years ago who went in without permission. I saw one of the bosses for a bit??????? he was so young looking, and had this amazingly casual way about him. When I asked how much killing and Machiavellian scheming he would have had to engineer to get to the top, my guide told me that it was all very casual.

???????The factions don????????t use hierarchies. When the bosses are killed or put in prison, the new ones just rise up naturally. It????????s not like the mafia. This is Brazil. But most of them die before they reach 25.???????

Many people do not trust the police or the government to protect them from these criminals. And it should be no surprise that many are looking to the military to solve the problem. Even after the transition to democracy, the military has held virtual veto power over the civilian government against policies like property redistribution. It has also proven itself to be the only institution professional enough and ruthless enough to launch large-scale operations against the drug kingpins and purge their lackies from the government.

Brazil is only a couple decades into consolidation. Yet it still faces issues like poverty, corruption, and lack of security/healthcare/education on an epidemic scale, whether its Rioa de Janeiro or Sao Paolo. With the military still holding so much sway, and so many people living in fear of what the drug gangs will do if their power is threatened, it is possible that the future could bring about either a new military dictatorship or a government that relies heavily on military force. Think Colombia. And unless a solution is found, this may be seen as the only viable alternative.