A step further away from you O'Lord:
Religious nut says his group won't back Bush on social security unless he bans
gay marriages.
A step closer from red states to red
Communist: White house has do not let in list to anyone disrupted to presidents events on
road and even planted a right wing reporter at white house briefings.
Wal-Mart agrees to $135,540.00 fine over
federal child labor charges.
The only time the police come into this neighborhood is when they enter in
an armored vehicle, assault rifles drawn, on a raid. Joel has tried to stay out
of the conflict as much as he can, but it's easy to get caught in the crossfire.
That's what happened, he said, to his 16-year-old cousin, who had been with a
large group of teenagers in 2004 when the police raided. He was fatally shot.
Like Marcos, Joel can't stand the police. But he said he has never been tempted
to join a gang. Instead, he hopes military service will deliver him from the
line of fire.
"I want to make my dad proud," said Joel, who hopes to graduate
from high school in 2009 if he is not drafted. "My dad says that in the
army they teach you things you can't learn on the streets, and that would be
good for my future, for my whole life."
If someone were to randomly pick 100 teenage boys out of his neighborhood, Joel
guessed that 30 of them would probably be gang members. That's higher than the
estimates of academics and social workers, but it still would mean that Joel is
a lot more representative of favela kids than Marcos is.
The Observatory of Favelas, a nonprofit organization that operates social
programs in various slums throughout Rio, late last year released a survey of
230 teenagers who had been involved with gangs; 46 of them had died during the
two-year research period, two-thirds of whom had been shot by police.
According to the Institute of Public Security, an average of 371 minors each
year were reported murdered in Rio from 2002 and 2006. Because some people
believe the officially reported figures of overall homicides in Rio are low, a
Web site -- http://www.riobodycount.com.br-- this year began compiling its own
count by collecting news reports of violent deaths. Overall, it has counted 675
homicides in Rio since Feb. 1.
"For young people, this is a genocide," said Raquel Willadino, a
director of violence-related issues and human rights for the Observatory of
Favelas. "And I don't mean that as a metaphor. It really is a
genocide."
President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, prompted by the crime in Rio, met Friday
with his military advisers to discuss the possibility of deploying troops in the
city to help contain the violence.
But Willadino and many other social workers in the favelas are against ideas
such as lengthening sentences for child-related crimes or lowering the
prosecution age. The prison and detention systems are already stretched beyond
capacity, and the police do not have a good track record in separating the good
kids in a favela from the bad ones, she said. On her desk, she had a copy of a
recent daily newspaper front page, with a large photo of a police officer
searching the book bag of an elementary school boy -- a good illustration, she
said, of law enforcement's indiscriminate approach toward favela residents.
Many police officials, meanwhile, express exasperation when they see things like
that. Allan Turnowski, state director of police special operations, said those
kind of pictures in the news media leave out an important part of the story.
Just before the officers searched the backpack of the child in the photo, he
said, they had found a gun in another boy's pack. The criminals force the police
to be cautious, he said.
"The media doesn't show the good things we do -- just the
sensationalism," he said. "They show the criminal the hero, and we
lose all authority in the minds of the young people. Then they see the police as
the bad guys."
Joel certainly does. He said he often feels like a target in the war between
police and the gangs, even though he has tried to go out of his way to avoid it.
Joel said that last month he was stopped by a policeman while riding a
motorcycle a friend had lent him. The police officer told him to hand over all
his money, Joel said, or else he'd be arrested and taken into custody for riding
a motorcycle he didn't own.
He gave him the money, he said, and collected another story to explain why he
wants the army to call his name.
"I'd like to be living somewhere else," he said. "Somewhere
calmer, where I can breathe easier."
Lent quote : It is impossible to get to heaven
with out loving your neighbor as yourself. "He who denies his neighbor
denies me and heaven." NEXT
The monument of a great man is not of granite or marble or bronze. It
consists of his goodness, his deeds, his love and his compassion.