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Angra dos Reis has seen job losses as a result of the scandal engulfing state-run Petrobas oil company and economic crisis in Rio de Janeiro state.
Angra dos Reis has seen job losses as a result of the scandal engulfing state-run Petrobas oil company and economic crisis in Rio de Janeiro state. Photograph: Kbarzycki/Getty Images
Angra dos Reis has seen job losses as a result of the scandal engulfing state-run Petrobas oil company and economic crisis in Rio de Janeiro state. Photograph: Kbarzycki/Getty Images

In Brazilian city that needs tourists, favela attack on UK family takes heavy toll

This article is more than 6 years old
Residents of Angra dos Reis condemn the link between state corruption, joblessness and rising violence

The flowery graffiti on the wall of the narrow lane that leads into this quiet rural community reads “Welcome to Água Santa” and “good vibes”. The name means holy water. But when the Dixon family from Bromley, south-east London, turned off the main highway around 4.30pm last Sunday afternoon, it turned into hell.

The Dixons – Eloise and Maxwell and their three young daughters – were looking for a rest and a restaurant on the long drive from Rio de Janeiro to Paraty, a colonial tourist town farther down Rio state’s “Green Coast”. They were nine miles from the port of Angra dos Reis, and had no idea that armed men were manning a drug sales point on the stone steps that climb steeply up a narrow alley that faces the graffiti.

The men opened fire, hitting Eloise twice, shooting out two tyres, and leaving bullet holes in her passenger door and headrest. She survived and, a day later, was eating, drinking and walking. The family declined to speak to media, and have since left the town. But Angra may take longer to recover.

“The shot that hit the tourist hit the whole population,” said Carlos Vasconcelos, president of the Angra Tourism Foundation.

The shooting opened wounds in this city of 191,000 people. Angra needs tourism – its industries are bleeding from Brazil’s crushing recession and endemic corruption, and its poorer communities, like many across Rio state, increasingly live in the shadow of drug gangs, like the one that opened fire on the Dixons’ silver Renault.

The repercussion was instant. The state governor rang Angra’s mayor, worried about the family’s health. They were put up in a luxury hotel and provided with a driver, a translator and a security guard. Now 40 new police officers are being hired and social projects planned for poor communities. The gang has left Água Santa, for now.

“What a shame it took an incident with a foreigner to call attention to the barbarity in the city,” said Samuel Assunção, 47, host of a local radio show.

Most tourists roll through Angra without incident. But others in Rio state have been attacked after inadvertently driving into gang-run areas.

In 2015, Regina Múrmura, 70, was shot and killed after she and her husband were directed by their satnav app to a dangerous favela in Niterói instead of a seaside strip with the same name. An Italian motorcyclist was shot dead after he rode into the Prazeres favela near Rio’s cobbled Santa Teresa neighbourhood last December. An Argentine woman died of gunshot wounds in February, after a carload of tourists made the same mistake.

Maxwell Dixon and his family had been looking for water – “agua” in Portuguese – said chief detective Bruno Gilaberte, leading police to believe a linguistic confusion could have led the Dixons into Água Santa.

In his handwritten statement, Maxwell Dixon wrote that they had put Angra into the GPS and had been directed down a narrow road “past two men who appeared to be pointing guns at us. We took the next left turn hoping it would get us back on to the main road. It was a dead end. We turned around and were slowed down by several men who then started shooting at us.”

Like many in Rio state, Dayna de Souza, 22, who works in a family-run corner store in Angra, knows how to drive into her gang-controlled community: slowly, car windows down, interior lights on, headlights off.

“You can’t hide from it,” she said. “It is our daily life.”

Gilaberte said his investigation has identified the three shooters. “The case is practically resolved,” he said. Superior offices had paid special attention to the case.“There is an impact not just in the perception of public security, but also an economic impact in the city.”

One bullet perforated superficial layers of Eloise Dixon’s thorax, another went into her abdomen and out the other side, but no major organs or veins were hit. The family were rushed to hospital in Angra, and within 40 minutes Eloise was in surgery.

“She really could have died. She was very lucky,” said Rodrigo Mucheli, medical director of Angra’s Japuíba Hospital, which deals with a couple of gunshot wounds a week and has a 24-hour surgery.Despite a few resorts, Angra’s tourist industry is concentrated around its port, where boats take swarms of people to the beaches of Ilha Grande, a tropical island. Many richer Brazilians have holiday homes along this lush, forested coastline. But the city is grittier. Outside its narrow central streets, Angra clambers up steep hillsides. According to Brazil’s 2010 census, 35% of its population live in favelas – Brazil’s ramshackle, unregulated, low-income communities.

“There is a social divide,” said Natalia Guimarães, 18, who works in a town centre art shop. “It is a place to pass through.”The fishing industry is concentrated on sardines, while a small port serves the offshore oil industry. The shipyard has shed two thirds of its workforce since the oil price fell and its prime customer, Brazil’s state-run oil company, Petrobras, was engulfed by an enormous corruption scandal, while a similar investigation has halted work on a new nuclear reactor.

Graciela Juliani, president of Agua Santa residents’ association, and Washington Drumond, an unemployed shipworker. Photograph: Dominic Phillips

Lounging around near the port, one unemployed man, 21, wearing a fake gold watch and a baseball cap described how his friend joined a gang for a week after losing his job, but was then talked out of it. Another four gang members he knew were killed by police; a fifth left in a wheelchair.

“This is the life of a bandit. One dies, another enters, it never ends,” he said, having avoided the temptation himself. The Observer has withheld his name for fear of reprisals.

Mayor Fernando Jordão said crime had increased in the city when gangs came from Rio de Janeiro, after armed police bases were installed in gang-run favelas there in the run-up to the World Cup and Olympics.

“Today it suffers with a problem of violence,” he said.

Washington Drumond, 44, lost his job as a boilermaker at the BrasFELS shipyard after Petrobas slashed its investments. Three oil rigs it ordered sit rusting in the yard, and 6,000 workers have been let go.

“It’s us, the workers, who pay the bill,” said Drumond, who now does occasional shifts as a security guard.

He scoffed at Rio’s political leaders. The crisis-racked state is so broke it is months behind with salaries, leaving police short of fuel and ammunition. The murder rate for the first six months of this year was the highest since 2009. Yet governor Luiz de Souza – known as Pezão, or “Big Foot” – has opened a £610,000 bid for a private jet contract. His predecessor Sérgio Cabral is in jail, accused of creaming off $100m in bribes.

“Unfortunately, that’s the way it is – high unemployment, our leaders stealing,” said Drumond.

Shopkeeper Graciele Juliani, 31, president of the Água Santa residents’ association, found out via Facebook.

“It was unbelievable,” she said. “We are very sad. We too have children. We feel the pain of the couple.”

The neighbourhood is not even a favela, she said. Just a humble community of a thousand people, a few streets between the highway and the forested hills. A few boys flew a kite on a grassy soccer pitch, near a stream black with sewage, and two sorry table tennis tables.

“Nobody steals here,” she said. “This is a quiet neighbourhood.”

Neither she nor Drumond would talk about the gang. One resident, speaking anonymously out of fear of reprisals, said three years ago armed drug traffickers from the Red Command, a notoriously violent Rio gang and one of three operating in Angra, set up drug sales here, just a few yards from the busy highway. Residents kept out of their way, in the knowledge that many communities in and around Angra dos Reis were suffering similar incursions.

Down at the Metalworkers’ Union, policy director Manoel Sales drew a clear parallel between the layoffs and the city’s rising crime – with gangs moving into communities and invading others. “Unemployment has consequences and one consequence is violence,” he said of the shooting. “It is the reflection of all this.”

More on this story

More on this story

  • Brazilian police question suspect over shooting of British tourist

  • British woman shot in Brazil favela named as Eloise Dixon

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