Wrapped in a Persian rug caked in dirt, a man addicted to crack
cocaine listened as Elizeu Dias tried to persuade him to take the last
spot available in an old Volkswagen van that is taking addicts to drug
treatment."When I hug them, they're shocked," says Dias, 37, a former addict who is working with the Catholic Belém Mission.
"Most people don't want to hug someone who has been living on the streets, but when you're a recovering addict, you've been there," Dias says.
Cheap and easy to come by, crack has become a plague to a country that has been envied by other South American nations for its stable economy and job creation.
President Dilma Rousseff committed $2 billion to drug prevention and treatment in 2011 but the Cracolândias, or cracklands as the open air drug markets are called, have grown still.
Desperate for answers, Sao Paulo's state government has taken an unconventional approach: It has sought a solution from the Catholic Church.
Sao Paulo officials hired the Catholic Belém Mission to do what the state has thus far struggled to do. The mission's volunteers — all recovering addicts previously helped by the Belém — had been working Cracolândia a few times a month before being contracted by the government to be there every day.
The state government, Public Ministry, courts and Brazil's Order of Attorneys recently agreed to terms that allow the mission to carry out its work. In one month ending in early January, the mission's 50 volunteers and Dias persuaded 398 people into going into treatment, and 168 remained in the program.
Though the government recently empowered police to use force to get addicts off the streets in Rio, the Belém Mission center takes a pastoral approach. Faithful Catholics work to persuade people to come with them to homes and farms that are not the typical sterile drug program environment.
"They're not clinics where you arrive and end up drugged," says triage center coordinator Givaldo Silva, 31, a former addict who has been clean for a year and a half. "We're a family house."
"If God gave me this house, it's not just for me; it's for you too," Silva explains. "If you feel in your heart that you want a change that all of us here have already searched for, then you can come with us."
Brazil has become the world's No. 1 market for crack cocaine with at least 1 million regular users, the Federal University of Sao Paulo says. Located next to the world's biggest cocaine-producing countries, Brazil's lengthy borders in jungle terrain are easy for smugglers to cross.
With the crack epidemic comes crime, similar to the violence that the United States saw during a crack explosion controlled by gangs that swept major cities in the 1980s.
As host for soccer's World Cup next year, Brazil will be in the media spotlight and the crack problem threatens to tarnish the nation's image.
In the central neighborhood of Luz,
hundreds of bedraggled addicts roam and sit and smoke crack in daylight
in a narrow street behind Sala Sao Paulo, where the Sao Paulo State
Symphony Orchestra plays to the city's upper class. The government sent in the military here to clean it out, but the fix was temporary. The Belém Mission believes that getting clean is about hard work and prayer.
Religion is at its core, and after a short stay of a few days in triage, those being treated move on to one of the mission's farms just outside the city, where they take care of their home and the animals that live there.
The routine and the religious community built during this time, those helped by the mission say, are what make the difference and give people the strength to stay off the streets and away from crack.
João Henrique is at the Belém Mission's downtown men's triage center run by Silva for the second time. Sitting on a couch in the living room of the simple house along with six others who arrived two days beforehand, he says he knows this is the time he gets better.
"I had a bit of a setback," he says, "but I came back."