Rio de Janeiro's Dual Reality

My bright yellow helicopter swoops low over one of Rio de Janeiro's 600 or more favelas, the slums that house some of the most violent, heavily armed gangsters in the world. For all of his many years of flying choppers in the city where he was born and raised, Ricardo, my pilot, has never been over these areas, let alone at such a low altitude above the mess of jerry-built brick and concrete houses, the tangled wires of stolen electricity and the potholed streets of Coreia, where 150,000 people try to survive grinding poverty and the urban war that surrounds them. The drug lord who controls Coreia is one of the main characters in my film, "Dancing with the Devil," a sort of "City of God" meets "The Wire" -- but all for real.

Ricardo is understandably nervous. The previous Christmas, some genius had the idea of flying Santa over the city in a helicopter to deliver gifts to kids in a slum; no one told the gangsters and the chopper was fired on. "Are you sure you have cleared this with the traficantes?" Ricardo's voice crackles on the radio over the racket of the motor. The answer is a firm "yes" as I would never be so foolhardy as to go anywhere near any of these places -- whether in the air or on the ground -- without firm guarantees for my safety from the gangsters who are the de facto authorities in these slums. They house an estimated 20 percent of the 11 million souls who call metropolitan Rio de Janeiro home -- that's nearly 2 1/2 million people, all living under the rule of the semi-automatic weapons of the traffickers.

Memories of my chopper ride came flooding back recently as news came through of gunbattles in Rio's Morro dos Macacos slum. To date, More than 40 people have been killed, three of whom were military policemen who died as a result of their helicopter plunging to earth after the pilot had been shot in the leg by traffickers.