The teenage gangsters of Vila Aliança grow up in a world where death is ever present in battles with police and rival gangs

“Yeah, I want to get out,” says Ricardo, 21. Then, relaxing, he takes the hand-grenade he has been toying with on his lap and places it amid the beer bottles on the table. In Vila Aliança in Bangu, western Rio, this is not particularly unusual behaviour.

Outsiders rarely come to this lawless favela – a centre of the drugs trade in Rio de Janeiro – and the armed bandidos who guard the area from police raids and rival gangs had been monitoring my approach for miles. As our car wound through the narrow roads, smiling children and friendly teenage boys wearing shorts and flip-flops and carrying rifles appeared.

Vila Aliança is not on the list of favelas earmarked for “pacification” – military intervention that paves the way for a permanent Pacifying Police Unit (UPP) to move in to improve security before the 2016 Olympics. The UPP project has been credited with improving security in 38 communities, but this violent and dangerous favela remains beyond the pale.

Nanko van Buuren, a Dutchman in his 60s, has been coming to the city’s most marginalised areas for decades. His Ibiss foundation runs the Soldados Nunca Mais (Soldiers Never More) project. In Vila Aliança he is greeted as paitrao, a Portuguese neologism that combines the words for “boss” and “father”.

“Nearly all [traffickers] would get out tomorrow if they could,” says van Buuren. Most start in the drugs trade as young teenagers and four fifths are likely to die before reaching 21. Since 2000, the Soldados project has used sport, arts and peer counselling to help 4,300 “child soldiers” leave a way of life that guarantees early death or imprisonment. It also uses sport to build bridges between youths raised on hostility towards rival gangs.

“What interests me is seeing how people respond to social exclusion,” says van Buuren, referring to the resilience of people in the 64 favelas where 340 Ibiss staff work. For the former World Health Organisation psychiatrist, who came to Rio in 1985, it is the role of peacemaker of which he is proudest.

Building peace in communities like Vila Aliança, where a parallel power structure has evolved over decades of state neglect, is nightmarishly difficult, as residents are routinely caught in the crossfire between gangs and police: just one in 20 of Vila Aliança’s 12,000 residents are involved in the drugs trade, which deals mainly in marijuana and cocaine, and is run by the drugs faction Third Pure Command.

Ricardo shows where a bullet exited his arm in a shootout with police three days ago. The worst part of the trade, he says, “is seeing your friends die”. He joined a drugs gang at 15, because “I didn’t know what else I could do”. It is a common explanation in areas where gangsterism has filled a void of education and opportunity.

Keeping watch on a street in Vila Aliança.

Andre, now in his 30s, left the gang and runs football schools for youngsters for Ibiss, which employs ex-soldados as coaches and mentors, with support from the justice ministry. “We show them another perspective on life – that they have other possibilities,” he says. But he is haunted by the past: his three-year-old daughter was killed by a stray police bullet as she ran along the football pitch. Recent mapping by Ibiss in the favela complex of Penha found that of 32,000 children, only four had not lost a family member to violence.

Van Buuren is greeted by some youths in a passing car that carries a machine gun on a tripod. Early on, he says, the leaders made him wait hours to meet them, but not any more. What does he bargain with? Just trust, he says. “It might be individuals or groups. We wait until they are ready to leave. Often, it’s when they become a father and have responsibility. Then they want out.”

We enter another unpacified favela, Vila Nova (known as Lixão, or trash, because it was built on a landfill site), via cement speed bumps built to slow down the police. Edson, 35, was once number one in the Red Command gang that ruled the community in western Duque de Caixias. Recently, he has worked for the Lidar project for children traumatised by violence.

Van Buuren says: “On my birthday nine years ago, we had a barbecue and Edson came up to me and said, ‘I am your birthday present. I want to get out.’ But, having been seen as a leader who helped the community, he now faces pressure to return. Asked if Edson misses anything about the days of trafficking, his eyes well up. He blames himself for the death of a friend.

“Around 4% of those who leave return to drug trafficking,” says van Buuren. “It is always the men, because they find it hard to take orders in a job or face pressure to go back.” But the women stay out.

Jennifer, 23, ran drugs for a year from Vila Nova to São Paulo and Paraguay and left with the help of the Ibiss football programme Favela St, whose girls’ team won the Street Child World Cup. “My life has turned around because they helped me believe I could do something else,” says Jennifer, who is now working at a hotel.

A man armed with a rifle in Vila Aliança.

As we enter the Penha favela complex in northern Rio in a public minibus, Philip Veldhuis, who heads the Favela St project, recalls making the journey before the community was pacified in 2010. “Everyone went quiet when we came to this corner because this was where the shoot-outs took place with police,” he says. Residents seem split on the UPP presence: some are happy they can move around safely, but others feel that their community is “occupied”. There is concern that UPP units have created space for violent militias of serving and ex-police.

“The idea of the UPP was a good one but the structure is not good,” says van Buuren, who sits on the security council of Rio and lobbies for police reform. “They have three days’ training and half of that is shooting practice. That is not ‘community policing’,” he says. The UPP presence has enabled schools in Penha to reopen and made small businesses more accessible, but it has yet to achieve its aim of promoting social inclusion: “Of course, your community is separate from others if military police are always driving around it.”

There persists a deep distrust of police with roots in the military dictatorship. An NGO that monitors police violence recently found that Brazilian police kill on average six people a day.

Van Buuren says social inclusion will improve only if trade and industry shift to poor communities and schools mix 50% favela residents with 50% from the asfalto (non-favela) to remove stigma from favelas. It is particularly difficult to persuade employers to take on former child soldiers, he says.

One who has made the transition is Eder Sassar, now 31, the former number two in Penha who had to get out when his boss was sent to jail. He now works for Ibiss and will go to university next year to study radiology. “He [van Buuren] changed my life,” Sassar says. “Now I can have a life in society; I can go anywhere.”

The Dutchman, who himself has been thrown over a wall during a shootout and felt bullets fly over his head, shrugs off claims he is too close to the traffickers. His friendship with Sassar, as with other ex-child soldiers, is based on years of mentoring and financial and other support spanning generations in Sassar’sfamily. It is hard to see who else could take on a job he is not ready to relinquish. “This war is just too crazy,” he says. “It has to stop.”

Four days after our visit, the police raid Vila Aliança, seize weapons and arrest nine suspected traffickers after the body of a young military policeman is found near the community. This time no one dies.

Ricardo, Andre and Jennifer’s names were changed to protect their identities