Brazil’s Top Criminal Is Slum’s Robin Hood

The police call him a killer, an armed robber, Rio’s No. 1 drug trafficker and, since his dramatic helicopter escape from a high-security island prison, the country’s most wanted criminal.

But to the folks on Morro do Juramento (Oath Hill), a shantytown of 15,000 that clings to a hillside on Rio’s poor north side, Jose Carlos dos Reis Encina is a Robin Hood. He is popularly known as Escadinha-- Little Ladder in Portuguese.

“Brazil would be lucky to have someone as wonderful as Escadinha as its president,” said Sonia Honorina, 31, standing outside her small grocery store on a winding dirt street halfway up the labyrinth-like hillside. “He provides medicine for the sick, and playgrounds for the children, and gives loans and building materials to hundreds of us here.”

The slim, 32-year-old Escadinha is seen as a Robin Hood because of his support for poor residents in his favela, or slum, where government services are few. The slum dwellers in turn warn him when police or strangers are around by sending up signal kites or using whistle codes.

“Before Escadinha arrived, crime here was terrible, with people getting robbed on the way home from work,” said Sister Ilea, a Roman Catholic nun who has worked on Oath Hill for the past five years. “But Escadinha and his men have stopped the crime completely. Now it’s probably the safest place in Brazil. You could literally sleep in the street and nothing would happen to you here.”