Abusado - Caco Barcellos

What a great book!

I took almost two months to finish this book, not because it is bad or tiring, quite the opposite. It has so many details, characters and events that it is a book you need to read slowly.

Caco Barcellos made me feel inside the favela. In many moments, it felt like I was there in Santa Marta watching what was happening and understanding a little more about the relation between the residents, the drug dealers, the police and all that reality.

The book mainly tells the story of Juliano VP, the name used by Caco to tell the story of Márcio Amaro de Oliveira, the Marcinho VP from the Santa Marta favela. But the book goes far beyond him. It also tells the story of the favela itself, the wars, friendships, betrayals, the relation with the police and, mainly, the people who lived there.

One thing I really liked is that at no moment I felt that Caco was trying to transform a criminal into a hero. He tells the facts, shows the people, their stories and the place where everything happened.

The level of detail is crazy. Sometimes I needed to stop and go back some pages to remember who a character was, or even search for something before continuing.

After I finished, I started searching more about Marcinho VP and found an interview he gave to Trip magazine in 2001, when he was already in Bangu I prison. It was then that I discovered something curious I didn’t know: there were two drug dealers known as Marcinho VP.

The Marcinho VP from this book is Márcio Amaro de Oliveira, from Santa Marta. Márcio dos Santos Nepomuceno, also known as Marcinho VP, was another one, connected to Complexo do Alemão. I had also confused them some times when I heard this name.

For me, this is a book that doesn’t end when you finish the last page. After that, I kept searching about the characters, watching interviews and trying to understand what happened with each of them.

Without doubt, one of the best books I have read about the Brazilian reality.