Rife with drugs, violence and murder, Rio de Janeiro’s slums are the subject of a new documentary - Tom Phillips, the film’s creator, takes us inside the lives of those caught up in one of the bloodiest urban conflicts on earth

Much was said about Marcio da Silva Lima, a Rio de Janeiro drug baron better known as Tola. “He kills kids. He kills young people,” claimed Carlos ‘Pitbull’ Cordeiro, a muscle-bound police inspector from Rio’s drug squad, nicknamed Vic by some colleagues because of a likeness to the lead character in the US TV series The Shield.

“It’s as if he gets pleasure out of killing people. Or maybe he just does it to control his community through terror.”

The Brazilian authorities accused Tola of running one of the biggest cocaine rackets in town and Rio’s tabloids carried regular stories about the brutality of his regime in the Vila Alianca slum. Those who lived under his iron fist recounted numerous tales of his ruthlessness.

But after two years’ frequenting the sprawling slums of western Rio de Janeiro, I had still to meet this elusive and notorious drug baron who was one of the city’s three most wanted men. Then, in October 2008, the call came through. Tola wanted a face to face.

Half an hour later, I found myself stood outside his home, an anonymous two-storey building with a towering metal gate.

“Come in, come in,” he beamed, motioning me inside past two heavily armed security guards. “My house is your house. Make yourself comfortable.”

He sat down on a cheap plastic chair, next to his dozing St Bernard rescue dog, and added: “Ask whatever you want.”

Immediately, it became clear that Tola saw the interview as a confession and after nearly 20 years of involvement in the Pure Third Command drug faction there was a lot he wanted to get off his chest.

“I know one day I’ll have to pay for what I have done,” he said. “Whether that means one year, 10 years or 30 years. I’m not kidding myself. I’m no saint but I’m a normal guy. I’m cool. Look around you, I have a family.” He pointed to a young boy playing next to us on his porch. It was his son.

“If I come home without any money to buy rice my wife will complain, just like your wife would. If I don’t pay my son’s school fees, who will? The government won’t, that’s for sure.”

Rio’s drug capos are often portrayed as wealthy mafia-style leaders with a penchant for fast cars, luxury homes and beautiful women. Tola did not look the part.

“This is no kind of life,” complained the sleep-deprived gangster, his shorts revealing a left leg that had been torn to shreds by automatic gun fire. “Having to kill people who were your friends, who have eaten off the same plate as you. Shit! What’s that? That is no life!”

“I’ll never tell my son to pick up a rifle,” he said. “F***! Just look at me: I haven’t had a bath in two days.”

Last month, exactly a year after our meeting, carnival touched down early in Rio de Janeiro with the announcement that the Brazilian city would host the first ever South American Olympics in 2016.

The celebrations, however, were cut short two weeks later when a police helicopter was shot down in northern Rio during a gun battle between rival drug-traffickers. Three military police officers were killed. It was the latest chapter of violence in a 30-year drug war that continues to claim thousands of lives each year, the majority young black men from the city’s slums.

“This will cause World War Three,” one policeman told me, shortly after the helicopter was brought down. The following week saw nearly 50 people killed in clashes between police and drug-traffickers.

If nothing changes between now and the 2016 Olympics, thousands more will die in a drug conflict that many believe achieves little apart from packing more and more bodies into Rio’s already overcrowded cemeteries.

One human rights group estimates there will be another 40,000 homicides in Rio state before 2016. Hundreds of policemen and dozens of innocent civilians are also likely to be killed.

Rio’s authorities say the city’s security situation will improve massively between now and the Olympics.

“Rio is not a violent city,” the state security chief Jose Mariano Beltrame said this week, claiming that some Rio neighbourhoods had “European” crime rates.

Authorities point to new “pacification projects” introduced in five of Rio’s 1,000 shanty towns, where armed drug-traffickers have been expelled and replaced by a permanent police presence. Another 37 favelas are set to be occupied under new plans to clean up the city before the world’s athletes arrive in seven years’ time.

But disarming Rio’s drug factions, who boast arsenals that include anti-aircraft machine guns and even land mines, is no easy task and for the meantime the task of peace-keeping is mostly left to a handful of evangelical preachers who mediate fragile peace treaties between rival gangs and attempt to convince the drug-traffickers to keep the killing to a minimum.

Among them is Pastor Dione dos Santos, Tola’s local pastor and a former member of his gang. Pastor Dione, a well-known and respected figure among members of the Pure Third Command, regularly embarks on late-night “rescue missions” to free young men and women who have crossed the gang and are about to be executed.

“This is our work,” Dione said one evening following the rescue of two teenage boys who had stolen from a resident of the favela. “We received an anonymous phone call and when we got there the call checked out. These boys were there (being held by the traffickers) and for robbing in the community their sentence was death. Automatically I managed to convince the traffickers to release them.”

Bruised, burned and terrified, the young men lay at Dione’s feet in the “rehab centre”, a damp room above his church, filled with tatty yellow mattresses and the sleeping bodies of those he has saved.

“Now of every 100 (who cross us), 99 survive,” said Tola, a self-professed evangelical Christian who makes his foot-soldiers wear black caps bearing his initials – MTL – alongside the phrase: “God Exists”.

Encouraged by Pastor Dione, Tola, who frequently claims he wants to become a pastor himself, has painted dozens of walls in his slum with extracts from the Bible.

Other gang leaders in the region say they have also embraced the word of God, despite their reluctance to discuss the Fifth Commandment and their regular use of extreme violence.

“I’ve got a reputation as a killer,” said Juarez Mendes da Silva, the drug boss in the Complexo da Coreia, the favela next to Tola’s, who is better known as Spiderman and attaches stickers of the comic book super-hero to his soldiers’ rifles.

“They say I chop people up. But I know that if I keep trying to trick God and keep killing and killing that when the judgment day comes I’m done for.”

Known too for his brutality – he was accused by Rio’s tabloid press of torturing his enemies with two small alligators – Spider-man was simultaneously a vulnerable and lost young man who also sought solace and advice from Pastor Dione.

“How many friends have I lost? How many dreams?” he once said, sat in Dione’s garish green vestry.

“You have to try (to get out), brother,” one of Dione’s missionaries, himself a former trafficker, told Spider-man. “It’s not easy. But you have to work hard.”

Spider-man sat silently listening to the advice. Minutes later, he made his way out of the church and hugged Pastor Dione before getting into his metallic-blue convertible Peugeot and turning on some evangelical music at top volume. Sat behind the wheel, he started to cry.

“We’re like this on the outside,” said Leonardo Fragoso da Silva or Vascao, Tola’s deputy, with an AK-47 slung over his shoulder and a sticker of Bob Marley wrapped around its butt. “But our hearts are normal. We are normal. We have children, we have families too. We can’t just wait for something to fall out of the sky.”

The young police officers on the other side of the battle lines are unconvinced by the excuses of Rio’s drug-traffickers, but do agree that those most to blame for Rio’s drug wars are those sniffing cocaine not the young gang members selling it.

“They (the traffickers) are there, wrong in their way, and that is what we combat,” Inspector Cordeiro said. “But they are selling it. And if they are selling it that’s because someone is buying it… it’s complicated.”

Several nights later, after another of his regular police operations into a slum in northern Rio, Cordeiro and a group of other officers gathered in a bar in the city centre to unwind over a bottle of whisky and can after can of Red Bull.

“I used to see the police cars going past my house and I’d shake with excitement,” he recalled. “I thought, ‘F***, I have to be part of this shit’.”

As night closed in, Cordeiro predicted that Tola would not be in drug-trafficking for much longer.

“We’re after him and, God willing, we will catch him. If he reacts, we’ll kill him. If he hands himself over, we’ll arrest him.”

They did. In August this year Tola was arrested in a small countryside hideout tucked away in the mountains of Minas Gerais state, some eight hours’ drive north of Rio.

Spider-man and Vascao were less fortunate.

In February, I took Dancing with the Devil, the film we had been making about the traffickers’ lives, to show them.

We watched it together at Spiderman’s home in the Complexo da Coreia, over warm ham and cheese sandwiches and plastic cups of Coca-Cola. Spiderman and his soldiers left their rifles outside, propped up next to his front-door alongside their plastic flip-flops.

Within days, Vascao was dead. Pictures of his corpse, leaked to one Rio journalist, appeared to show he had been shot in the head with a high-calibre rifle. The bullet had ripped the entire back section off his head, twisting his boyish face and trademark smile into a ghoulish grimace.

One month later, Spider-man was also gunned down by military police, his scrawny arm nearly ripped off by the force of the shots.

Hundreds of friends and family turned up to a cemetery in west Rio for his funeral. “Saudades,” read one floral tribute left on top of his concrete tomb. “We’ll miss you.”

Pastor Dione stood next to the grave and wept.

Dancing with the Devil, created and co-produced by Tom Phillips, will be shown on More 4 on 10 November at 10pm

I know one day I’ll have to pay for what I have done