COMMENTATOR (COMM.): Previously on Life . . .
PETER MARCUSE: I think São Paolo is a wonderful city. It's got a range of opportunities, a variety; a diversity that is very rich.
ED GLAESER: There are some cities that basically exist for sound economic principles. It doesn't mean that the poverty in these cities isn't distressing.
MARTA SUPLICY People from all social levels are giving their hands and saying we want to help. I think we can make a difference in this city.
COMM: This is a story from a city where the gap between rich and poor is greater than almost anywhere in the world. It is a story of six people in a city of fifteen million. It is the story of Dinha, of Paula, of Xand, of Du, of Fernando and of their quiet guru, Vander. It is the story of a group of friends trying to make the best of their lives when the odds are stacked against them. The friends who make up The Posse live in a favela - or shantytown - called the Jardim São Saveiro. They've built their friendship round rap music. They meet in the evening when they're not at school or university or working or trying to find work.
VANDER (TRANSLATION): The good thing about The Posse is that it keeps young people off the streets and away from drugs and violence. People who haven't got anything to do all day - if they take part - well, at least they have something to do. We invite people to be part of The Posse to keep them away from violence and off drugs.
DINHA (TRANSLATION): We get together on Sundays. Our organisation - The Posse - is linked to the hip-hop movement, and the idea is to develop projects to help our community. Part of the idea is to talk to people living here - to raise awareness about problems in our community. After all, you don't need money to talk.
COMM: The Posse have just launched a campaign to try and clean up the river of filth that flows through the favela's heart and close to Dinha's front door.
DINHA (TRANSLATION): People who live here are the same as everyone else - they have their dreams - they throw their rubbish where they shouldn't. Not because they're bad, but because everyone else does -and there isn't a culture that says 'You shouldn't do it!' - so everyone just goes on doing it.
COMM: Still, it's time for another tough talk between The Posse and some of the people who live round here.
DU (TRANSLATION): We're not just looking for a hand cleaning all this up. We also want to give you some leaflets to pass round the people here to get them to stop throwing their rubbish in the stream - and we want you to talk to them.
MAN (TRANSLATION): But they all know that the garbage truck only comes once a week and whenever I try to talk to people they get offended and I don't want to lose my friends.
DINHA (TRANSLATION): Vander is our president, he started The Posse. He is very quiet but that's because he's thinking of lots of different solutions for every problem - that's why he's called the President.
COMM: Today Vander's joined a march through the city centre with teachers, university professors and landless workers. They're marching down the Avenida Paulista - the business avenue through which seventy per cent of Brazil's wealth is said to flow. Their message for Brazil's financial authorities: too much of that wealth goes to too few people. As usual Vander has a solution.
VANDER (TRANSLATION): I think we have to create a new tax for those earning a lot of money. A big portion of public money has to be redistributed to those in need - to the poor - and with that money there'll be a better distribution of resources.
COMM: Back in the streets of the favela, it's not hard to see how these problems began. Few in the Posse are more observant of social trends than Dinha's friend, Paula.
DINHA (TRANSLATION): Paula is my mate and partner in a study group. We got into University of São Paulo at the same time. She's going to be an anthropologist and she's my favourite singer.
PAULA (TRANSLATION): When we are walking around Jardim São Saveiro we often notice little cultural things like music from the north of Brazil. That's because for ages a lot of people from the north east of Brazil have been coming to SÒo Paulo to try and get a better life. They started coming after industrialisation because of all the problems in the north-east. I think that the music we hear come from people trying to bring back and preserve the things they left behind when they came here to try and make a better life.
COMM: What stops the landless migrants making a better life in the favelas for their children is education. This is the state school in the Jardin São Saveiro - where some of the Posse members were educated - and where some of Dinha's friends like Ferdinando still take classes.
DINHA (TRANSLATION): Fernando is part of a band called Angels of Rap. He is fifteen and he's just about to finish high school. He is an angel of rap and he's also very quiet . . .
FERNANDO (TRANSLATION): Education is good because it keeps you away from crime. It's like a support for everything in life, without education we can't get a job. That's what education is good for. The education that other people receive is completely different from our education - our education is inferior. They learn a lot more than we do. We learn a lot less. Their education is more advanced because they have more money.
COMM: Dinha is one of the very few young people in the favela who's beaten the odds of an unequal education system and made it to a top university. She still lives at home with the rest of her family, even though the campus is a two-hour bus drive away.
DINHA (TRANSLATION): In the beginning I thought: no, I won't be able to go to one of the state universities - I had never even thought about going, and everybody round here always thought it was impossible - at least for people like us. And then one day I thought more seriously about it and just started studying straight away. I began by getting together all the books that I'd already studied to read them again. I started to read the books at home and at night I organised a study group with people in the area. I was the only one from high school who's been able to get into university so far. The inequality is really huge. When I started studying in my class it was a great shock - everybody was talking about mobile phones, inviting me to go out with them. But I don't have money, never had money - while they go to the cafeteria in the university, to fancy dress parties. Here in Brazil we encounter a lot of inequality and when I leave the favela to go to university, I come across lots of things that are out of my reach: restaurants, shops - always very busy. And then I think how come if I don't have anything - if lots of people don't have anything - other people have so much? I wasn't that conscious of that before. I could see it on the television, you know, but the television isn't your world, so when you see it live it's a shock.
COMM: From the downtown skyscrapers you can see São Paulo in a way Dinha still never sees it. The favelas, the pollution, even the curvature of the earth. All reminders that this is one of the world's megacities - its economy fuelled by globalisation. But with only a small minority of São Paulo's fifteen million people able to afford a decent education, few can aspire to the salaries available to the city's professional Úlites - the bankers or international lawyers like Alexandre and Fernando.
ALEXANDRE: This is the most prestigious law firm in Brazil. We have many, many people that are candidates to do a traineeship programme here. And when we recruit them we look not only at the college that they are in but also at the school that they attended before. And in a way we are creating élite here because ninety per cent of the people here come from the same schools and the same universities.
STEVE BRADSHAW: People say that Brazil is a very unequal society; are you conscious of that in your everyday life?
ALEXANDRE: It definitely is, yes. Here you see people that are driving fancy cars; that have $2000 watches, and they drive those cars with the watches very very careful because they are afraid in the streets. And you are almost sad to see that, at the same time there are people on the streets that don't have shoes to wear but on the other hand it's difficult, it's so big a problem that unfortunately I don't see a solution in my generation.
STEVE BRADSHAW: Is it possible for a kid in the favelas to do as well as you've done?
FERNANDO: Instead of saying that it's possible I would say that it's almost impossible. I mean, it's really, really very difficult. We should do something to make this country better and we try to do that, you know, with people that surrounds us. That's not a critique to other people, it's a critique to myself as well - I mean, I think the élite is too, I would say, comfortable with the situation and, and tend not to do things to change. Because the Úlite is responsible for the situation as it is. And the élite is now waking up to the problem more effective to the violence and not to the sadness that is the problem. I would say that if, if we did not have any violence problems maybe we wouldn't be thinking about that as we are nowadays.
COMM: In the building where São Paulo's lawyers like to lunch is the trading floor of the city's Stock Exchange. Brazilian companies have prospered under the country's neo-liberal economic regime. Globalisation, a de-regulated economy and technology have meant a stable economy and huge fortunes for some of the city's entrepreneurs.
MARCOS DE MORAES (Director Zip.net): I started Zip.net in 1996 - four years ago. And we recently have been purchased by Portugal Telecom.
STEVE BRADSHAW: Can I ask for how much?
MARCOS: Oh, it's in the papers!
STEVE BRADSHAW: Tell me.
MARCOS: Er, the price was three hundred and sixty five million dollars.
STEVE BRADSHAW: How much of that went to you personally, can I ask?
MARCOS: That's - I'd prefer to keep that private.
STEVE BRADSHAW: But - but quite a lot of it?
MARCOS: Significant, yeah.
STEVE BRADSHAW: But would that make you one of the wealthiest men in Brazil?
MARCOS: Oh, there are people with much more money than that.
STEVE BRADSHAW: Much more money?
MARCOS: Yeah. For sure.
STEVE BRADSHAW: But it's a lot of money.
MARCOS: It's a - still a lot of money - no doubt.
STEVE BRADSHAW: How do you feel about that? Does it make you feel that people can make it in Brazil or does it make you feel, in any sense, uneasy because it is such an unequal society?
MARCOS: No, definitely, people can make it. I think, if you are - if you don't have a home, if you don't have a lot to eat you cannot obviously be thinking on how to do something like this - and that's a thing, that's the basic thing society should be able to give them. And for me the goal now is to be able to help people with something like that. The money is to do things - after a certain amount of money, of course.
STEVE BRADSHAW: What can be done to make the city a less unequal place?
MARCOS: Well I think that stability has been a very very important first step. There are fewer people below the poverty line, there are still way too many but fewer people. We have to remind people that its not normal or expected to have people begging or robbing or having this kind of problem. People have to be awakened from their sleep towards this sort of problem. We should use very boldly the tools that technological development has brought us, like information technology, and of course invest in education.
COMM: Now Mr de Moraes wants his company to give computers away to schools in São Paulo's favelas.
MARCOS: We are trying to give education for free to everybody and they will become our clients in the future - use the liberal system in our favour - it's such a strong force there.
COMM: Even the favela's residents are trying a little trading of their own - the hopeful owner of this shack has put it up for sale - it's yours for a few hundred dollars if you're not worried about title deeds. But Dinha - the only university student from her year doesn't see her future in economic terms at all.
DINHA (TRANSLATION): My future is literature -Literature is about everyone's future! Many people write about stars - I mean this has been used many times - but when I write about stars I try and use them differently. I'm not really talking about stars at all. Behind the words there is a social, religious and sexual context. There is always literature in the poems I write - my poems are metalinguistic.
'They threw away the horizon line And I made a nest of it which lies in my hands. God, look at the horizontal buildings; The dirty dressing they've put on. And God have mercy on us! The seed of society's sterile. I come from the favela and I belong to it.'
COMM: But some of Dinha's friends are now trying to join the commercial world that beyond the favela. They're looking for jobs downtown. Du's been lucky. He persuaded a friend to find him a job at a TV music channel, MTV. Dinha always knew him as a good networker.
DINHA (TRANSLATION): Du is a very nice guy one of the co-founders of the Posse - he is a good conciliator and he's always talking.
COMM: Du works as an inventory clerk, surrounded by the glamour of the pop world - but what he wants to be is a teacher.
DU (TRANSLATION): I'm the kind of person that likes to pass on my experience to others. The little that I've learned I like to share around. I think teaching is one of the best ways to be close to other human beings. It's quite different round here. People at MTV do have a pretty liberal attitude, but I still feel like I'm very different, coming from the favelas. You know, people in the favelas are more humble and - I mean, a lot of people out there have never even seen a computer or a camera.
COMM: But another friend of Dinha's has not been so lucky trying to find work.
DINHA (TRANSLATION): Xand - he's a supporter of ours though he's not officially part of the posse these days. He doesn't want to take on the responsibility, but he's a very nice guy who's always busy like everybody else in the Posse.
COMM: Xand's going into town to look for a job. He knows it won't be well paid - Brazil's statutory minimum wages is only a hundred and fifty dollars a month. What's more, at the employment agency he and his friend discover most the jobs on offer are so far away from the favela they'd cost him more in travel than they'd cost him more in travel then they'd paid him. Inside, the clerk says his previous employers didn't give Xand papers to prove he'd had a job. She says they must have been trying to avoid paying social security. So he's sent away on a probably hopeless errand - trying to prove he's had a job, when the job was in Brazil's flourishing underground economy.
XAND (TRANSLATION): Well I can't stop. I need a job to sort our my life, to afford all the things I need. Without a job I will never be anyone. I need a job urgently.
COMM: In a society where there's no limit to the top and bottom, the penalties for not finding work can be severe. This is the Sentetem Homeless shelter. It's run by a charity. Its workers usual greetings: watch out for rats! Inside, over a hundred people live in a warren of room sharing two toilets and one shower. This is where you may end up if you can't afford a shack in a favela.
ZEFINHA (TRANSLATION): One day I was upstairs and I counted sixteen rats. And they were all fighting.
COMM: Inside this maze we found one man alone in his room with his books - he'd found them around the neighbourhood. Juan knows you need an education to better yourself in today's knowledge-economy. And he's still determined that somehow he'll get it. He used to work as a clown - his costume still hangs on the wall.
JUAN BORGES DA SILVA (TRANSLATION): This book is about mathematics - square roots. I enjoy reading and I think reading is important. I intend to be an engineer, if I study I'll have good opportunities in life If I start work in a company and I've studied, the company will be interested in me. I'll try to do my job honestly and I'll find someone who will appreciate my efforts to study hard. I leave all the books like this because I start with the easiest and go on to the more difficult. This book is about the search for freedom in Brazil in the time of slavery. I think history is repeating itself because of the lack of jobs and because when people do offer you a job it is just in exchange for a plate of food.
COMM: In the favela, Xand's back with his friends on the soccer pitch built by the SÒo Paulo authorities - a pleasant surprise to a group of young people who believe the politicians don't understand the life they sing about in the rap songs.
XAND (TRANSLATION): Whenever we compose a song we all do it together, we just link ideas from one to the other and the band is everybody - nobody is more important than anybody else. The ideas come day by day. If I experience violence during the day I talk about it - if it is about discrimination I talk about that. I talk about my days as they happen. I don't like talking about fantasy, I talk about the reality.
CAPTION (The Posse Rap): "I learnt through my life and my family always helped me in bad times and didn't let me just speak to a wall and then say 'you son of a bitch'... I keep the rhyme... only the favela knows what it's about..."
"...only the favela knows what it's about . . . always running around and I'm saying, 'hey, criminal I'm standing up on my own two feet!...' only the favela knows what it is about... hey, criminal, I'm standing up on my own two feet..."
"They say black is the colour and nigger is the race - the favourite colour for the police to notice... it's not like the whites say I don't want to go to prison. I don't want to end up in a cell like someone I know who used to live in the favela."
VANDER (TRANSLATION): If I was the President of the country I would direct a good part of the budget to social policies to cover education, health and housing - that's what's lacking in Brazil.
CAPTION: "Now brother try to save yourself... because after you're dead there is no need to cry... here comes the crazy gang... run run..."
DU (TRANSLATION): I would make agricultural reforms because I think if you don't have a place to live you have no dignity.
CAPTION (Posse Rap 2): "The commandment from hell is tempting me... revolt, misery, hate... we want peace... try to open your eyes... now you have to decide... brother to try to save yourself..."
DINHA (TRANSLATION): If I was the President I would look into education, because education here is very bad. But you have examples from other countries, by providing better education you are able to build up a nation. And I would also change all these neo-liberal policies.
COMM: At the end of another Sunday, the Posse back into the heart of their favela: a group of young people - often quarrelsome, sometimes combative - but still together in a world that doesn't make that easy.
CAPTION (Posse Rap): "One more dead body on the ground, one more mother who prays without forgiveness... and she prays for justice for the death of her son..."
SUPERIMPOSED: 'Will the world turn into one big Brazil, into countries with complete inequality and ghettos for the rich élite?
PETER MARCUSE: I think São Paolo is a wonderful city. It's got a range of opportunities, a variety; a diversity that is very rich.
ED GLAESER: There are some cities that basically exist for sound economic principles. It doesn't mean that the poverty in these cities isn't distressing.
MARTA SUPLICY People from all social levels are giving their hands and saying we want to help. I think we can make a difference in this city.
COMM: This is a story from a city where the gap between rich and poor is greater than almost anywhere in the world. It is a story of six people in a city of fifteen million. It is the story of Dinha, of Paula, of Xand, of Du, of Fernando and of their quiet guru, Vander. It is the story of a group of friends trying to make the best of their lives when the odds are stacked against them. The friends who make up The Posse live in a favela - or shantytown - called the Jardim São Saveiro. They've built their friendship round rap music. They meet in the evening when they're not at school or university or working or trying to find work.
VANDER (TRANSLATION): The good thing about The Posse is that it keeps young people off the streets and away from drugs and violence. People who haven't got anything to do all day - if they take part - well, at least they have something to do. We invite people to be part of The Posse to keep them away from violence and off drugs.
DINHA (TRANSLATION): We get together on Sundays. Our organisation - The Posse - is linked to the hip-hop movement, and the idea is to develop projects to help our community. Part of the idea is to talk to people living here - to raise awareness about problems in our community. After all, you don't need money to talk.
COMM: The Posse have just launched a campaign to try and clean up the river of filth that flows through the favela's heart and close to Dinha's front door.
DINHA (TRANSLATION): People who live here are the same as everyone else - they have their dreams - they throw their rubbish where they shouldn't. Not because they're bad, but because everyone else does -and there isn't a culture that says 'You shouldn't do it!' - so everyone just goes on doing it.
COMM: Still, it's time for another tough talk between The Posse and some of the people who live round here.
DU (TRANSLATION): We're not just looking for a hand cleaning all this up. We also want to give you some leaflets to pass round the people here to get them to stop throwing their rubbish in the stream - and we want you to talk to them.
MAN (TRANSLATION): But they all know that the garbage truck only comes once a week and whenever I try to talk to people they get offended and I don't want to lose my friends.
DINHA (TRANSLATION): Vander is our president, he started The Posse. He is very quiet but that's because he's thinking of lots of different solutions for every problem - that's why he's called the President.
COMM: Today Vander's joined a march through the city centre with teachers, university professors and landless workers. They're marching down the Avenida Paulista - the business avenue through which seventy per cent of Brazil's wealth is said to flow. Their message for Brazil's financial authorities: too much of that wealth goes to too few people. As usual Vander has a solution.
VANDER (TRANSLATION): I think we have to create a new tax for those earning a lot of money. A big portion of public money has to be redistributed to those in need - to the poor - and with that money there'll be a better distribution of resources.
COMM: Back in the streets of the favela, it's not hard to see how these problems began. Few in the Posse are more observant of social trends than Dinha's friend, Paula.
DINHA (TRANSLATION): Paula is my mate and partner in a study group. We got into University of São Paulo at the same time. She's going to be an anthropologist and she's my favourite singer.
PAULA (TRANSLATION): When we are walking around Jardim São Saveiro we often notice little cultural things like music from the north of Brazil. That's because for ages a lot of people from the north east of Brazil have been coming to SÒo Paulo to try and get a better life. They started coming after industrialisation because of all the problems in the north-east. I think that the music we hear come from people trying to bring back and preserve the things they left behind when they came here to try and make a better life.
COMM: What stops the landless migrants making a better life in the favelas for their children is education. This is the state school in the Jardin São Saveiro - where some of the Posse members were educated - and where some of Dinha's friends like Ferdinando still take classes.
DINHA (TRANSLATION): Fernando is part of a band called Angels of Rap. He is fifteen and he's just about to finish high school. He is an angel of rap and he's also very quiet . . .
FERNANDO (TRANSLATION): Education is good because it keeps you away from crime. It's like a support for everything in life, without education we can't get a job. That's what education is good for. The education that other people receive is completely different from our education - our education is inferior. They learn a lot more than we do. We learn a lot less. Their education is more advanced because they have more money.
COMM: Dinha is one of the very few young people in the favela who's beaten the odds of an unequal education system and made it to a top university. She still lives at home with the rest of her family, even though the campus is a two-hour bus drive away.
DINHA (TRANSLATION): In the beginning I thought: no, I won't be able to go to one of the state universities - I had never even thought about going, and everybody round here always thought it was impossible - at least for people like us. And then one day I thought more seriously about it and just started studying straight away. I began by getting together all the books that I'd already studied to read them again. I started to read the books at home and at night I organised a study group with people in the area. I was the only one from high school who's been able to get into university so far. The inequality is really huge. When I started studying in my class it was a great shock - everybody was talking about mobile phones, inviting me to go out with them. But I don't have money, never had money - while they go to the cafeteria in the university, to fancy dress parties. Here in Brazil we encounter a lot of inequality and when I leave the favela to go to university, I come across lots of things that are out of my reach: restaurants, shops - always very busy. And then I think how come if I don't have anything - if lots of people don't have anything - other people have so much? I wasn't that conscious of that before. I could see it on the television, you know, but the television isn't your world, so when you see it live it's a shock.
COMM: From the downtown skyscrapers you can see São Paulo in a way Dinha still never sees it. The favelas, the pollution, even the curvature of the earth. All reminders that this is one of the world's megacities - its economy fuelled by globalisation. But with only a small minority of São Paulo's fifteen million people able to afford a decent education, few can aspire to the salaries available to the city's professional Úlites - the bankers or international lawyers like Alexandre and Fernando.
ALEXANDRE: This is the most prestigious law firm in Brazil. We have many, many people that are candidates to do a traineeship programme here. And when we recruit them we look not only at the college that they are in but also at the school that they attended before. And in a way we are creating élite here because ninety per cent of the people here come from the same schools and the same universities.
STEVE BRADSHAW: People say that Brazil is a very unequal society; are you conscious of that in your everyday life?
ALEXANDRE: It definitely is, yes. Here you see people that are driving fancy cars; that have $2000 watches, and they drive those cars with the watches very very careful because they are afraid in the streets. And you are almost sad to see that, at the same time there are people on the streets that don't have shoes to wear but on the other hand it's difficult, it's so big a problem that unfortunately I don't see a solution in my generation.
STEVE BRADSHAW: Is it possible for a kid in the favelas to do as well as you've done?
FERNANDO: Instead of saying that it's possible I would say that it's almost impossible. I mean, it's really, really very difficult. We should do something to make this country better and we try to do that, you know, with people that surrounds us. That's not a critique to other people, it's a critique to myself as well - I mean, I think the élite is too, I would say, comfortable with the situation and, and tend not to do things to change. Because the Úlite is responsible for the situation as it is. And the élite is now waking up to the problem more effective to the violence and not to the sadness that is the problem. I would say that if, if we did not have any violence problems maybe we wouldn't be thinking about that as we are nowadays.
COMM: In the building where São Paulo's lawyers like to lunch is the trading floor of the city's Stock Exchange. Brazilian companies have prospered under the country's neo-liberal economic regime. Globalisation, a de-regulated economy and technology have meant a stable economy and huge fortunes for some of the city's entrepreneurs.
MARCOS DE MORAES (Director Zip.net): I started Zip.net in 1996 - four years ago. And we recently have been purchased by Portugal Telecom.
STEVE BRADSHAW: Can I ask for how much?
MARCOS: Oh, it's in the papers!
STEVE BRADSHAW: Tell me.
MARCOS: Er, the price was three hundred and sixty five million dollars.
STEVE BRADSHAW: How much of that went to you personally, can I ask?
MARCOS: That's - I'd prefer to keep that private.
STEVE BRADSHAW: But - but quite a lot of it?
MARCOS: Significant, yeah.
STEVE BRADSHAW: But would that make you one of the wealthiest men in Brazil?
MARCOS: Oh, there are people with much more money than that.
STEVE BRADSHAW: Much more money?
MARCOS: Yeah. For sure.
STEVE BRADSHAW: But it's a lot of money.
MARCOS: It's a - still a lot of money - no doubt.
STEVE BRADSHAW: How do you feel about that? Does it make you feel that people can make it in Brazil or does it make you feel, in any sense, uneasy because it is such an unequal society?
MARCOS: No, definitely, people can make it. I think, if you are - if you don't have a home, if you don't have a lot to eat you cannot obviously be thinking on how to do something like this - and that's a thing, that's the basic thing society should be able to give them. And for me the goal now is to be able to help people with something like that. The money is to do things - after a certain amount of money, of course.
STEVE BRADSHAW: What can be done to make the city a less unequal place?
MARCOS: Well I think that stability has been a very very important first step. There are fewer people below the poverty line, there are still way too many but fewer people. We have to remind people that its not normal or expected to have people begging or robbing or having this kind of problem. People have to be awakened from their sleep towards this sort of problem. We should use very boldly the tools that technological development has brought us, like information technology, and of course invest in education.
COMM: Now Mr de Moraes wants his company to give computers away to schools in São Paulo's favelas.
MARCOS: We are trying to give education for free to everybody and they will become our clients in the future - use the liberal system in our favour - it's such a strong force there.
COMM: Even the favela's residents are trying a little trading of their own - the hopeful owner of this shack has put it up for sale - it's yours for a few hundred dollars if you're not worried about title deeds. But Dinha - the only university student from her year doesn't see her future in economic terms at all.
DINHA (TRANSLATION): My future is literature -Literature is about everyone's future! Many people write about stars - I mean this has been used many times - but when I write about stars I try and use them differently. I'm not really talking about stars at all. Behind the words there is a social, religious and sexual context. There is always literature in the poems I write - my poems are metalinguistic.
'They threw away the horizon line And I made a nest of it which lies in my hands. God, look at the horizontal buildings; The dirty dressing they've put on. And God have mercy on us! The seed of society's sterile. I come from the favela and I belong to it.'
COMM: But some of Dinha's friends are now trying to join the commercial world that beyond the favela. They're looking for jobs downtown. Du's been lucky. He persuaded a friend to find him a job at a TV music channel, MTV. Dinha always knew him as a good networker.
DINHA (TRANSLATION): Du is a very nice guy one of the co-founders of the Posse - he is a good conciliator and he's always talking.
COMM: Du works as an inventory clerk, surrounded by the glamour of the pop world - but what he wants to be is a teacher.
DU (TRANSLATION): I'm the kind of person that likes to pass on my experience to others. The little that I've learned I like to share around. I think teaching is one of the best ways to be close to other human beings. It's quite different round here. People at MTV do have a pretty liberal attitude, but I still feel like I'm very different, coming from the favelas. You know, people in the favelas are more humble and - I mean, a lot of people out there have never even seen a computer or a camera.
COMM: But another friend of Dinha's has not been so lucky trying to find work.
DINHA (TRANSLATION): Xand - he's a supporter of ours though he's not officially part of the posse these days. He doesn't want to take on the responsibility, but he's a very nice guy who's always busy like everybody else in the Posse.
COMM: Xand's going into town to look for a job. He knows it won't be well paid - Brazil's statutory minimum wages is only a hundred and fifty dollars a month. What's more, at the employment agency he and his friend discover most the jobs on offer are so far away from the favela they'd cost him more in travel than they'd cost him more in travel then they'd paid him. Inside, the clerk says his previous employers didn't give Xand papers to prove he'd had a job. She says they must have been trying to avoid paying social security. So he's sent away on a probably hopeless errand - trying to prove he's had a job, when the job was in Brazil's flourishing underground economy.
XAND (TRANSLATION): Well I can't stop. I need a job to sort our my life, to afford all the things I need. Without a job I will never be anyone. I need a job urgently.
COMM: In a society where there's no limit to the top and bottom, the penalties for not finding work can be severe. This is the Sentetem Homeless shelter. It's run by a charity. Its workers usual greetings: watch out for rats! Inside, over a hundred people live in a warren of room sharing two toilets and one shower. This is where you may end up if you can't afford a shack in a favela.
ZEFINHA (TRANSLATION): One day I was upstairs and I counted sixteen rats. And they were all fighting.
COMM: Inside this maze we found one man alone in his room with his books - he'd found them around the neighbourhood. Juan knows you need an education to better yourself in today's knowledge-economy. And he's still determined that somehow he'll get it. He used to work as a clown - his costume still hangs on the wall.
JUAN BORGES DA SILVA (TRANSLATION): This book is about mathematics - square roots. I enjoy reading and I think reading is important. I intend to be an engineer, if I study I'll have good opportunities in life If I start work in a company and I've studied, the company will be interested in me. I'll try to do my job honestly and I'll find someone who will appreciate my efforts to study hard. I leave all the books like this because I start with the easiest and go on to the more difficult. This book is about the search for freedom in Brazil in the time of slavery. I think history is repeating itself because of the lack of jobs and because when people do offer you a job it is just in exchange for a plate of food.
COMM: In the favela, Xand's back with his friends on the soccer pitch built by the SÒo Paulo authorities - a pleasant surprise to a group of young people who believe the politicians don't understand the life they sing about in the rap songs.
XAND (TRANSLATION): Whenever we compose a song we all do it together, we just link ideas from one to the other and the band is everybody - nobody is more important than anybody else. The ideas come day by day. If I experience violence during the day I talk about it - if it is about discrimination I talk about that. I talk about my days as they happen. I don't like talking about fantasy, I talk about the reality.
CAPTION (The Posse Rap): "I learnt through my life and my family always helped me in bad times and didn't let me just speak to a wall and then say 'you son of a bitch'... I keep the rhyme... only the favela knows what it's about..."
"...only the favela knows what it's about . . . always running around and I'm saying, 'hey, criminal I'm standing up on my own two feet!...' only the favela knows what it is about... hey, criminal, I'm standing up on my own two feet..."
"They say black is the colour and nigger is the race - the favourite colour for the police to notice... it's not like the whites say I don't want to go to prison. I don't want to end up in a cell like someone I know who used to live in the favela."
VANDER (TRANSLATION): If I was the President of the country I would direct a good part of the budget to social policies to cover education, health and housing - that's what's lacking in Brazil.
CAPTION: "Now brother try to save yourself... because after you're dead there is no need to cry... here comes the crazy gang... run run..."
DU (TRANSLATION): I would make agricultural reforms because I think if you don't have a place to live you have no dignity.
CAPTION (Posse Rap 2): "The commandment from hell is tempting me... revolt, misery, hate... we want peace... try to open your eyes... now you have to decide... brother to try to save yourself..."
DINHA (TRANSLATION): If I was the President I would look into education, because education here is very bad. But you have examples from other countries, by providing better education you are able to build up a nation. And I would also change all these neo-liberal policies.
COMM: At the end of another Sunday, the Posse back into the heart of their favela: a group of young people - often quarrelsome, sometimes combative - but still together in a world that doesn't make that easy.
CAPTION (Posse Rap): "One more dead body on the ground, one more mother who prays without forgiveness... and she prays for justice for the death of her son..."
SUPERIMPOSED: 'Will the world turn into one big Brazil, into countries with complete inequality and ghettos for the rich élite?