Netflix series tells story of Brazil’s notorious police massacre of street children | Brazil

For some inhabitants of Rio de Janeiro, the most significant cross of the city’s most famous church, Nossa Senhora da Candelária, does not sit on the altar or atop the grand baroque church built in 1775, but outside.

In front of the Candelária church, a wooden cross about 2m (6.5ft) tall bears eight plaques with names.

It is the fifth cross placed in the same spot, as the previous four were destroyed. “They’ve set them on fire, torn its arms off,” said Patrícia de Oliveira, 50, one of the leaders of the group Candelária Never Again, which has rebuilt the crosses each time they have been vandalised.

Despite the surveillance cameras in the area, no one has ever been held accountable for destroying the tribute to victims of one of Brazil’s most horrific cases of police violence.

“They destroyed them because the authorities and people in Rio believe that the massacre was necessary to ‘clean’ society of the undesirables,” she said.

At aabout 11pm on 23 July 1993, eight young people aged between 11 and 19 who were sleeping on the pavement outside the church were killed by three police officers and a former officer in what became known as the Candelária massacre.

Now, 31 years after it happened, the massacre has become the theme of a new Netflix series, Children of the Church Steps.

The fictionalized four-episode show follows four children and adolescents in the 36 hours leading up to the massacre. The characters were inspired by accounts from the victims’ families and survivors, such as Erica Nunes, 42, who was 10 at the time.

“On the day it happened, I’d gone to the Metropolitan Cathedral [another church in central Rio, 1.6km away] to eat because they were giving out food there. When I got back, everyone was dead,” said Nunes, who inspired the character Pipoca (Popcorn), played by nine-year-old newcomer Wendy Queiroz.

Before the massacre, Nunes lived in Rio’s Maré favela. “My mother had to go to São Paulo to work and left me with my grandmother and an uncle, who beat me a lot,” she recalled. “That’s why I ran away to live on the streets. At that time, most street kids ended up at Candelária,” added Nunes, who recently created a social project that trains young people to become barbers.

At the time of the massacre, dozens of children – reports range from 40 to 70 – were sleeping outside the church. The killing itself was allegedly retaliation for a stone thrown at a police car that day, though some believe local shopkeepers ordered the executions because they thought street children were bad for business.

Four people were arrested as the perpetrators, but as they were about to go to trial in 1996, a police officer came forward to confess to the crime and identified his actual three accomplices. One has since died, and three were convicted, but today they are all free.

“I was a teenager when the massacre happened,” said series creator Luis Lomenha, who directed it alongside Márcia Faria. “When I saw the images of those black bodies lying on the ground, it made a deep impression on me. They were children who looked like me [all of them were Black, as is Lomenha] in a state of complete vulnerability,” he said.

Lomenha decided to tell the story from the victims’ perspective to “restore to these children the childhood and humanity that were taken from them”. In the series, the characters are sleeping – and dreaming – when the police arrive and start shooting.

But the director says the policemen are not the only guilty ones. “It’s easier to just blame them because Brazil’s police forces are generally made up of poor Black men, but they serve an oppressive white agenda that makes them commit these crimes as a survival strategy,” he said.

Rio’s police have gained notoriety as one of the most violent forces in the world, responsible for killing thousands of young Brazilians over recent years – of whom the vast majority have been Black.

The anthropologist and former national security chief Luiz Eduardo Soares says that Rio’s current military police force has inherited “a 200-year tradition of behaviour and values stemming from its origins in hunting down enslaved people and protecting the elites”.

Despite the outcry triggered by the Candelária massacre Soares believes there has been no change in the mindset, structure, or training of the police to prevent something similar from happening again.

And massacres by law enforcement agents have never stopped occurring in Rio. Just over a month after Candelária, police killed 21 people in Vigário Geral, in Rio’s North Zone. In 2021, 28 people were killed during a police operation in the Jacarezinho favela.

Oliveira’s brotherWagner dos Santossurvived the Candelária massacre despite being shot four times, and he was a crucial witness in securing the killers’ convictions. A year after the shooting, he was targeted again and has lived abroad ever since.

Oliveira, who became an activist for victims of state violence, said the societal attitudes which enabled the killings have not changed: she often sees comments on social media from people calling for a “new Candelária massacre”.

“Every day, we come closer to something like this happening again because society and the authorities believe that when the police enter a favela and kill, they are in the right, as ‘the only good criminal is a dead one’ ” she said.