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by Andrew DellaRocca
I live almost directly on the 21 line. The 24 Divisadero is also close to
my house; less than a block away. I went to see an art exhibit at the Yerba
Buena Center not too long ago. I don't remember who the artist was, but he
built a structure in an empty room striped with bright fluorescent colors.
I read about his exhibit, and apparently a component of it was a Muni bus,
which he had decorated in the same colors as the large structure he
constructed in Yerba Buena, and which is currently zipping around the
streets of San Francisco. Nothing could be "more proletariat" than the city
bus, the description of the exhibit stated. I took a picture of the 5
Fulton once. It was part of a series of what only turned out to be 6
photographs of the city of San Francisco, which I had taken to show my
girlfriend, my daughter's mother, what where I lived looked like. They live
in Brazil. I showed the picture I had taken, which could be viewed on a
viewscreen on the back of the camera, to her brother, Ti. The camera has a
neat component that allows you to zoom in, and so I zoomed in on the arms
that extended from the bus's top, and explained to him that some of the
buses, there, in San Francisco, are powered by electricity. He seemed
impressed, having never heard of such a thing.
On Monday, I took the 22 Fillmore to the Roxie cinema. A movie was playing
there called Bus 174, a Brazilian documentary which I was about to see for
the second time. I sat in the almost empty theater and watched the film
scroll over the skyline of Rio de Janeiro. I love Rio, spent a month there
once, and get an almost juvenile set of butterflies in my stomach whenever I
see images of it. But this time, like the first time I saw the film, the
aerial footage provoked in me a feeling not of excitement, but of anxiety.
I knew what the film was going to be about. As the camera cruised over the
city, the favelas (slums) came into view, dripping down the mountain slopes,
as they do, like the wax of a burning candle. And the scroll continued,
small, simply constructed houses, by the tens of thousands, covering most of
the land, with a few patches of green protruding every now and again, upon
which the grade of the slopes was too steep, even, for desperate squatters
to build. And then beyond that appears the Zona Sul, where the money is,
and its well-kempt apartment buildings, and the beaches, and the famous
Jesus Christ statue atop the Corcovado, and the famous "Sugar Loaf" rock
which emerges out of the ocean as if in a rage.
During my first month in Salvador, in 2000, I stayed at a small hotel in
Barra owned by a Chinese couple. I was given a musty corner room, in order
to save space for a large group of college students, who were there
attending a symposium. They were Cariocas, from the city of Rio, and
arrived on a bus. During that week, an incident occurred in Rio that was
broadcast live on the national news. A man had taken a bus and it's
passengers hostage. The ordeal lasted through the afternoon and into the
evening. I remember seeing the face of the hostage taker and wondering to
myself "how'd he get so angry?"
Bus 174, in Rio, passes the Botanical Gardens, in Zona Sul. This was the
bus that was taken hostage in 2000, the situation that I watched live on
Brazilian television, and twice again in the form of documentary cinema.
After the man had taken the bus and a half dozen of its passengers, all
female, hostage, the police arrived on the scene, disorganized and
unprepared. The media followed soon after. The perpetrator had, in the
mean time, already fired a round out of the bus's windshield, in the
direction of some of the officers. He ordered a hostage to write messages
on the windows with her lipstick. "Ele vai matar agente," one of them read.
The situation began during the day, but came to a conclusion several hours
into the evening, passing live on television for everyone in Brazil to see.
Bus 174, the documentary, explored the root causes of what happened that day
in the botanical gardens. Through interviews and filmed documents, I
learned about Sandro, the perpetrator. He had grown up on the streets after
his mother was murdered in front of him. At Candelaria, a square where many
street kids used to gather and sleep, Sandro found a place of refuge and
community. One evening, two men appeared with guns, and mowed down several
of the children that slept there. Sandro survived. The children claimed
that the two men were police officers. Sandro's life, mirrored in Brazil by
so many other lives, tells a dark tale.
Candelaria was not an isolated event. For decades, Brazil's city
governments had been accused of direct involvement in massacres and
disappearances of street kids. There had been talk of police death squads,
and not all of this talk had been condemnatory. Many, Padilha's documentary
demonstrates, applauded the massacre at Candelaria. Street kids were viewed
as thieves and criminals, deserving no better. Mainstream Brazilian culture
often did not acknowledge their status as victims.
Sandro, however, that day in the botanical gardens, had finally acquired the
pulpit. He brought attention to all of those details that nobody wanted to
hear about. He reminded people of the massacre at Candelaria, personified
the rage of years of invisibility as a homeless child. The footage of the
Bus 174 affair, vivid and abundant, and collected for the film, documented
that rage and the institutional response to it. The unprepared police force
had not been able to control the situation. Almost anybody had been able to
approach the bus, and many did, cameras in hand. The police, not having
radios, communicated using hand signals. The officer in charge had to
behave in a manner that contradicted all of his training, because city
officials, who were watching the drama unfold on television, worried about
how such action might be viewed on the television screen. They communicated
orders to him in an unenlightened effort to reduce the backlash that the
exposure might bring to the mayor's office. When Sandro finally walked off
of the bus holding a hostage at gunpoint, two bullets meant for Sandro from
one of the police officers entered the hostage's body instead, resulting in
her death. The crowd screamed for Sandro's execution. Their demands were
met immediately. The arresting officers strangled Sandro to death in their
car.
"The character of a society," said one of the officers interviewed by
Padilha, "is always revealed in a hostage situation."
The debacle in the botanical gardens brought attention to Brazil's inability
to care for the thousands of children that sleep on its streets. The
documentary charted the life of the normal street kid, as personified in
Sandro, his experiences not at all being unique. Sandro was often thrown
into the juvenile detention system and beaten. Sandro sniffed glue, as many
sniffed glue. When I walk the Brazilian streets, the vision of a young
shoeless adolescent, guarding a small bottle of glue underneath his shirt,
is a permanent backdrop. The glue supposedly diminishes the pangs that
accompany hunger. Sandro resorted to begging and thieving for a living,
like thousands of other children have done. Sandro slept on the street,
where many other kids have slept, and where passersby, on occasion, for
entertainment, drop boulders from a torn up sidewalk on the sleeping
children's heads, breaking their skulls. When Sandro was older, he was
thrown into a prison cell, where fifteen others had shared with him the
space designed to hold six. The cell reached temperatures of 120 degrees
Fahrenheit. There was so little space, that inmates had to hang hammocks
from the ceilings and remain suspended above their cellmates, who rested on
the floor below. And Sandro was subjected to the anonymity that falls upon
all of the street kids, until one day he decided to make himself known,
shatter his invisibility, and emerge from obscurity the way Sugar Loaf
bursts from the water.
Though the interviews with police officers, street kids, social workers, and
thieves, and the footage of the 174 affair were extensive, Padilha
effectively left out, despite my yearning for one, but to the advantage of
the film and its effectiveness as a whole, a villain. The documentary
angered and saddened me. My knees found their way to my chest. I sat there
in the theater hugging them, tense, wanting to point my finger, to allocate
blame, to know the villain. But, who was the villain that day? Was it the
police? But they were untrained, inexperienced, underpaid, and ill-equiped.
Was it Sandro? He had been a victim all of his life; witness to his
mother's brutal murder, subjected to the invisibility and brutality that
accompanies life on the streets and in poverty, survivor of a massacre. His
actions, though not justified, were a response to all of that. No, this day
could not be broken down so simply. There was no clear villain, this was
not a Brazilian novella. This was the real world: enormous in its
complexity, extensive in its conflicts, and absent of simple answers.
Despite it's profundity, the documentary was crushing.
This does not mean that the film was devoid of valuable lessons, however.
By establishing Sandro's life as a tragic series of cause and effect
relationships that led to the 174 affair, Padilha indicted many specific
components of Brazilian institutions and society. He did not paint a vague
picture of economic disparity and class struggle, but instead vividly
portrayed pieces of the larger pie that might be tweaked to lessen the
brutal reality of an impoverished subculture. By exposing the conditions
under which street kids are incarcerated and then released (often the result
of an uprising and subsequent mass escape), I was left without a doubt that
the juvenile detention system contributes to the violence of Brazilian
society instead of helping to alleviate it. The same can be said of the
overcrowding of the prison system and the composition of the police force.
Bus 174 portrayed Brazil as a country submersed in a snowballing series of
small conflicts, despite its official status as a nation at peace.
I took the 22 Fillmore home that night. I had to walk down 16th a little
until I reached the bus stop. The bars on the street were lively. People
bounced between them, laughing with friends and chatting on cell phones.
One girl I passed leaned against a parking meter, adjusting her stilettos.
I couldn't stand to look at her. I didn't want to talk to anyone, Padilha's
film still brewed inside of me. I only wanted to go home and sit down,
silent.
The Cariocas, a few nights after the incident, came back from a party and
saw their bus driver sleeping with a prostitute in the bus. They snapped a
photograph, which set off a flash. The bus driver, in a fury, pulled out a
pistol and waved it at the group of voyeurs. After that, most of them
decided against taking the bus home. They took a plane instead.
I take the 24 Divisadero to my job on the weekends. Many of us in the
neighborhood refer to the bus as the "phantom 24". You never know when it
is going to arrive. Each weekend, I worry that the 24 will not appear. I
can never be sure if I will get to work on time.
Buses can have such a profound affect on our lives sometimes. Bus 174, in
Rio, affected an entire nation.
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