DOES Brazil’s Christ shed a tear looking down over the sadness below him? It’s a question Rio de Janeiro’s residents ask as they gaze up to what has become the most dangerous wonder of the world. Last Friday the steep 4km Corcovado jungle trail to the giant Christ the Redeemer statue was closed the day after a Polish man was stabbed, one of 58 people to have been robbed along the trail in just 10 days. More than 150 people have been robbed this year. Young, armed criminals f

"A good criminal is a dead criminal." That’s the meaning of the Portuguese words “um bandido bom é um bandido morto” on the lips of people from one end of Brazil to the other. But it’s not often it’s caught on camera, City of God style, where police officers shoot criminals dead, expediting the court process and laying down a death penalty not allowed in the country’s constitution. Machine gun fire between police officers and drug traffickers outside a high school in Morro d

An Italian tourist who took a wrong turn into a favela and wound up dead with a bullet in his head today is another reminder of the ever-present danger bubbling below the beauty of Rio. The 52-year-old, Roberto Bardella (on the left above), was riding a motorcycle alongside his cousin Rino Polato, 59, to the beach when their GPS led them into the Morro dos Prazeres favela with totally unforeseen and grave consequences just before midday. Wearing professional riding clothes

A newspaper front page with a little girl covered in her dead mother’s blood declared “Terrorism in Rio is everyday”. In the grisly story from July, Cristiane Andrade, 46, was stabbed in the neck in her car's front seat sitting next to her daughter in a supermarket carpark. The girl ran to a nearby taxi who raced them to hospital where the young mum died. Afterwards the driver recorded a short movie of the little girl, 7, distraught, blood-soaked next to his taxi, a police

Brazil has turned its big time crime problem into prime time television. Taking the lead expertly from the USA, cameras chase Brazil’s machine-gun carrying police as they swerve and run through dingy streets capturing criminals. Hours-long news programs dedicated to reporting on crime across the country dominate primetime viewing. And it’s not car hoons and out-of-control teenage house parties. High quality footage of robberies and shootings is regularly captured through th