The crime reporter said: 'They don't kill as many children here in Salvador as they do in Rio and São Paolo.' Salvador has a population of two and a quarter million, Rio de Janeiro ten million, São Paolo 17 million. He was a nice man, middle-aged, overweight, with a beat-up face and friendly eyes. We sat around his metal desk in the big bare city office of his newspaper, among other empty metal desks. As the top specialist on the leading local paper, he should have had all the facts and figures, but he knew no more than anyone could know. The murder of a homeless child or a child from a poor family who was on the streets for much of the time was not news: children had been killed at random on the streets of Brazil's cities since 1985.

LRB 22 August 1996 | PDF Download