Brazil is at war’: election plays out amid homicidal violence

By Tom Phillips.

To The Guardian.

 

Francine Farias had just completed a census of her tumbledown favela on the outskirts of one of the world’s most violent citieswhen she heard a volley of gunfire and her count was rendered suddenly out of date.

One unpaved street away, her nextdoor neighbour, 17-year-old Ruan Patrick Ramos Cruz, lay dead in the dirt after being repeatedly shot in the head and chest by unknown assassins.

“First I heard four [shots], then two more,” recalled Farias, a community leader in Loteamento Alameda das Árvores, a rundown 288-home settlement on the southern fringes of Feira de Santana.

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