Rio de Janeiro — home of Sugar Loaf Mountain, white sandy beaches, beautiful half-naked people, a magnificent statue of Jesus Christ that looms over the city, and some of the most violent slums in the world. In the favela (Portuguese for squatter or slums) that cling to the sides of the hills overlooking the city, thousands of people desperately eke out an existence in conditions that no North American can come close to understanding, while the hotels on the beach pretend they don't exist.

Rule of the favela is split between the drug lords and the police, with the other 90% of the population stuck in between and trying not to get squeezed out of existence. Between 1987 and 2005, when 467 minors were killed in both Israel and Palestine, 3957 people under the age of 16 died violently on the streets of Rio de Janeiro. The distance from the white sandy beaches to the favela is measured in more then inches and feet; they might share the same territory, but they are worlds apart.

When the police are even more dangerous to the citizens than the drug runners, when the police are the ones making the money from the drugs, not the kids who kill each other on the streets for the dime bags of coke, where can a people go to save themselves? Who can they turn to when the police exact vengeance on drug lords by coming into the favela and killing people at random as happened in 1993?

Twenty-one innocent people were killed by a division of police in retaliation for the death of four officers on the previous day. They had been executed by the drug lord of one favela, and the police exacted their own revenge with machine guns and hand grenades. Among the dead was the brother of Anderson Sá, a young member of the drug gangs.

Anderson was born and bred in Vigario Geral favela, affectionately referred to as the Bosnia of Rio because of the extreme violence and its similarity to an armed camp. Growing up in Vigario, a young person had the option of making $650 US a week working for the drug lords and probably dying by the age of twenty-five, or earning the average wage of a Brazilian adult, $13.00 US a week. There were no other alternatives.

When his brother died, Anderson's godmother feared that he would drift further into the drug culture; she was enough of a realist to know that not much else awaited a young man, especially a young man who would most likely want revenge on the police for the murder of his brother. But what she hadn't counted on, nor had anyone else, was that his brother's death would serve to change Anderson's life, and and the lives of hundreds and thousands of others through him.