Sports
RIO DE JANEIRO — It’s a Sunday afternoon in Vila Alianca, a favela, or slum, on the western edge of this Brazilian city. V.A. Clube and Bacardi Futebol are competing in the semifinal game of the Vila Alianca Cup, an amateur soccer tournament organized here. The score is tied 1–1.
Rowdy fans whistle and yell while guzzling large bottles of pilsner beer from makeshift bleachers of plastic bar chairs and car hoods. A nearby Evangelical church holds bible lessons; its hymns mix with loud curse words shouted from the field.
V.A. Clube’s players race across the field in canary yellow Nike jerseys, replicas of the Brazilian national team’s uniform. Anderson Nascimento, V.A.’s team captain, attacks through the center and sets up a play for his teammate Little Marcos, who scores the winning goal. The crowd erupts in applause, and 40 gunshots are fired into the air.
The young man who fired the shots stands and smiles, an AK-47 rifle in his hand. He is the owner of V.A. Clube, the leader of the region’s illicit narcotics trade and the most powerful person in the favela.
Vila Alianca was settled in 1964 by families displaced from other favelas in Rio’s southern zone. It was named after “Alliance for Progress,” President John F. Kennedy’s economic-development program for Latin America. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, cocaine from neighboring Bolivia arrived in Rio. Vila Alianca became a strategic location for many of the gangs who ran the drug trade. Thirty years later, the trade here is dominated by a gang known as Third Pure Command (TPC), one of the largest organized-crime groups in Rio.
Small dime bags of marijuana and cocaine are sold in a part of the favela known as “boca de fumo,” or smoke mouth. Young men, known as soldiers, guard the boca; most of them are barely taller than their semiautomatic rifles. Motorcycles come and go, some with shipments for delivery, others with armed boys carrying walkie-talkies. These are the lookouts, or olheiros, who are in charge of alerting those in the boca of police or rival gangs.
At the top of the pyramid is the dono, or owner. The targets of police and other gangs, the donos are often arrested or killed. For nearly two years, the man with the AK-47 on the soccer field, known as Padrinho, or Godfather, has been the dono of Vila Alianca and its five surrounding neighborhoods. (His name has been withheld for security reasons.) Born and raised in Vila Alianca, Padrinho is also a huge soccer fan.
In 2011, Franklin Ferreira, a local physical education teacher, decided to start an intramural league in Padrinho’s favela. Ferreira also runs Craques da Vida, a local soccer NGO that promotes sports and discipline for the favela’s youth.
“This is what keeps people motivated here on the weekends,” said Ferreira, as he stood on the sidelines with a clipboard and pen during Sunday’s game. “It is what brings joy to this humble community.”
Most people, he said, can’t afford to go see games in Maracana stadium, home of most of Rio’s professional teams and the venue for the 2014 FIFA World Cup final. It is roughly 30 miles from the small field in Vila Alianca; by train, it can take up to two hours to reach the arena’s entrance. Said Ferreira: “This is our own little version of that.”
In September, Franklin started the first official Vila Alianca Cup. Thirty-two teams signed up. Many of the owners and managers were affiliated with the local drug trade, while others were local business owners. To join, each team paid a registration fee of US$300, and an additional $44 on game days to maintain the fields and pay referees. The winner of the tournament will receive a cash prize of $15,000.
On game days, the field is surrounded by barefoot children and armed gangsters. Everyone seems to know each other.
The games can get rowdy. On Sunday, one drunken gangster, known as Falcao, stepped onto the field mid-game. Ferreira put his arm up to Falcao’s chest and said he couldn’t enter with that “shin guard” — referring to the gangster’s M16 rifle.
“I keep my eye on what is happening inside the game,” said Ferreira. “The things that happen outside are none of my business.”
In 2011, Franklin Ferreira, a local physical education teacher, decided to start an intramural league in Padrinho’s favela. Ferreira also runs Craques da Vida, a local soccer NGO that promotes sport and discipline for the favela’s youth.
“This is what keeps people motivated here on the weekends,” said Ferreira, as he stood on the sidelines with a clipboard and pen during Sunday’s game. “It is what brings joy to this humble community.”
Most people, he said, can’t afford to go see games in Maracana stadium, home of most of Rio’s professional teams and the venue for the 2014 FIFA World Cup final. It is roughly 30 miles from the small field in Vila Alianca; by train, it can take up to two hours to reach the arena’s entrance. Said Ferreira: “This is our own little version of that.”
In September, Franklin started the first official Vila Alianca Cup. Thirty-two teams signed up. Many of the owners and managers were affiliated with the local drug trade, while others were local business owners. To join, each team paid a registration fee of $300 USD, and an additional $44 on game days to maintain the fields and pay referees. The winner of the tournament will receive a cash prize of $15,000.
On game days, the field is surrounded by barefoot children and armed gangsters. Everyone seems to know each other.
The games can get rowdy, though. On Sunday, one drunken gangster, known as Falcao, stepped onto the field mid-game. Ferreira put his arm up to the Falcao’s chest and said he couldn’t enter with that “shin guard” – referring to the gangster’s M16 rifle.
“I keep my eye on what is happening inside the game,” said Ferreira. “The things that happen outside are none of my business.”
In 2011, Franklin Ferreira, a local physical education teacher, decided to start an intramural league in Padrinho’s favela. Ferreira also runs Craques da Vida, a local soccer NGO that promotes sport and discipline for the favela’s youth.
“This is what keeps people motivated here on the weekends,” said Ferreira, as he stood on the sidelines with a clipboard and pen during Sunday’s game. “It is what brings joy to this humble community.”
Most people, he said, can’t afford to go see games in Maracana stadium, home of most of Rio’s professional teams and the venue for the 2014 FIFA World Cup final. It is roughly 30 miles from the small field in Vila Alianca; by train, it can take up to two hours to reach the arena’s entrance. Said Ferreira: “This is our own little version of that.”
In September, Franklin started the first official Vila Alianca Cup. Thirty-two teams signed up. Many of the owners and managers were affiliated with the local drug trade, while others were local business owners. To join, each team paid a registration fee of $300 USD, and an additional $44 on game days to maintain the fields and pay referees. The winner of the tournament will receive a cash prize of $15,000.
On game days, the field is surrounded by barefoot children and armed gangsters. Everyone seems to know each other.
The games can get rowdy, though. On Sunday, one drunken gangster, known as Falcao, stepped onto the field mid-game. Ferreira put his arm up to the Falcao’s chest and said he couldn’t enter with that “shin guard” – referring to the gangster’s M16 rifle.
“I keep my eye on what is happening inside the game,” said Ferreira. “The things that happen outside are none of my business.”
Padrinho and other drug traffickers first became involved with Vila Alianca by placing bets on teams with underground books. As the stakes grew, some of the wealthier TPC soldiers began investing in teams and recruiting the area’s best players to their rosters.
When Padrinho decided to form his V.A. Clube team, he reached out to Luis Cabral, a longtime friend and former soccer player who also knew Ferreira.
“Other traffickers who owned teams would intimidate players and tell them they either played with them or not at all,” Cabral said. “That is not the case with Padrinho. If you want to play, he will be good to you, but if you don’t, you’re free to go.”
One of Cabral’s main recruits was Nascimento, born in the favela, who once played soccer professionally.
“If you ask any teenage boy in the favela what his dream is, he will give you three answers: a football player, a famous samba singer or the dono of the favela,” Nascimento said recently during an interview in his home. “For me, the answer was always football. I love it, it’s what I do best.”
Anderson Nascimento
V.A. Clube’s star player
Nascimento started playing with Craques da Vida when he was 15. A year later, he was discovered by a recruiter and began playing professionally in teams throughout Brazil. The game sent him to Riberao Preto in São Paulo, to the northeastern state of Bahia, and to the coastal city of Angra dos Reis, in Rio de Janeiro state.
Nascimento quit the professional league last year, though, after the birth of his daughter, Allyce Naiara. Her name is tattooed on his right forearm.
“I would only see my wife on Saturday night and Sunday and would have to take the bus back to Angra on Monday,” Nascimento said. “When I found out she was pregnant, I knew I wouldn’t be able to stay away too long.”
A devoted husband and father, Nascimento is a force on the field. He’s ambidextrous and skilled in playing offensive and defensive positions. He also has a temper, which he occasionally unleashes on referees and other players.
At home on a recent day, Nascimento wore a bright yellow and red jersey. “This is the real deal,” he said of the jersey, which sells for $150 in stores here. “He gives us uniforms, gear. He even helps if I need medicine for my daughter or if I’m short on cash for the month.”
“He” is Padrinho, Nascimento’s sponsor and one of the most wanted men in Rio.
“They have their lives. I have mine,” Nascimento said of the drug traffickers. “If they invite me to have a beer, I go. I don’t see him as this bad guy. To me, he’s just a normal guy.”
While he lives nine feet from the boca, Nascimento says he has never worked in the local drug trade. Three of his four brothers were traffickers, and two of them have been arrested.
After his retirement from professional soccer, Nascimento started working as a contractor’s assistant and painter, earning $534 a month, just a little over minimum wage.
“I have never used drugs and have never touched the stuff,” he says. “I wake up every morning at 4:30 to take the train to work. I am a hard worker.”
When his wife, Natalia, was nine months pregnant, dozens of police officers stormed his home and detained him in the middle of the night. Nascimento says someone from the favela had informed officers that he was working as a security guard for Padrinho.
“They came in and handcuffed me immediately,” he said. “They saw a black man laying on the bed without a shirt on and assumed I was a criminal.”
As Nascimento, 6 feet 2 and of muscular build, recalled the story, his eyes welled up with tears. His wife almost miscarried because of the shock, he says, and his mother fainted when she saw her son in handcuffs.
In March, the Vila Alianca tournament was suspended after police and drug traffickers started engaging in frequent shootouts. Rio de Janeiro’s state security secretariat recently installed a police pacification unit in neighboring Vila Kennedy. Permanent community police posts have been set up in nearly 40 favelas throughout the city as part of the pacification program, an effort to crack down on drug trafficking in areas dominated by gangs ahead of the World Cup.
One trafficker, who played for the team America, was killed during one of the exchanges.
Despite the fears of violence, police brutality and discrimination, Nascimento said he will never leave Vila Alianca.
“This is my home. Is there drug trafficking? Yes, there is. Are there shootings sometimes? Yes. But I still would not live anywhere else,” he said. “I play for V.A. because it stands for Vila Alianca.”
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