I have departed from my usual fare of green issues to write about a remarkable phenomenon arising from the current violence in Rio. A version of this article is published on the BBC News website.


For the past few days, the Brazilian public has watched transfixed as scenes more reminiscent of Iraq or Afghanistan than of their own “marvellous city”, Rio de Janeiro, unfolded live on TV screens.

 

Smoke rising from burning buses, armoured vehicles moving into the sprawling favelas or shanty-towns, heavily-armed drug traffickers fleeing across wooded hillsides to escape the advancing forces – all were beamed directly from helicopters into living rooms across Brazil.

 

In the studios, a succession of security experts, sociologists, lawyers and anthropologists have helped presenters fill the time and interpret what was going on in the “morros” or hills, as the steeply-sloping favelas are known.

 

The voices of the people living inside the favelas themselves have been largely absent from most of the mainstream coverage.

 

 Viewers could only wonder what it was like for residents of the notorious Complexo do Alemão, or German’s Complex, hidden from the view of the flak-jacketed reporters crouching in front of the armoured military vehicles poised at the entrance to the final redoubt of the drug traffickers.

 

Users of Twitter, however, did not have to wonder.

 

A remarkable, improvised real-time news service was being beamed out of the favela, and gathered followers exponentially in a classic “viral” explosion of interest.

 

The user @vozdacomunidade, or Voice of the Community, started sending tweets out at lunchtime on Saturday describing minute-by-minute the bursts of gunfire, sounds of explosions and helicopters flying overhead. By Sunday evening it had attracted more than 20,000 followers.


 

What makes this community micro-blog all the more extraordinary is that none of its “reporters” is over the age of 17.

 

At its heart is an aspiring journalism student called René Silva, co-ordinating the operation from a PC in his grandmother’s house in the Morro de Adeus (Farewell Hill) within the Complexo do Alemão, helped by a small network of teenage “correspondents” based at strategic points around the favela, each tweeting independently.

 

At 17 years of age, René is no novice when it comes to community journalism. Ironically, this weekend was to have seen the fifth birthday party of a monthly newspaper, also called Voz da Comunidade, which he founded at the tender age of 11. The party was postponed.

 

Acting as reporter, photographer, printer and advertising sales manager, René has used the paper to highlight the issues facing residents of the troubled favela, and it soon became a focal point for the community. Local businesses supported the newspaper with advertising, and it attracted sponsorship from one of the Brazilian mobile phone operators.

 

Voz da Comunidade currently has a print run of around 5,000.

 

As it became clear his community was the centre of national and international attention with drug traffickers fleeing from neighbouring favelas to hide in its sprawling alleys, René started tweeting. It did not take long for the Brazilian “twittersphere” to take notice.

 

“Intense gunfire now in Complexo”, “Machine guns and blasts all around”, “People hanging out white cloths calling for peace” – these were the kind of eye-witness reports unavailable to the main broadcasters reliant on distant camera shots the briefings from police spokespeople.

 

While the tweets reflected the fear and tension, there was humour mixed in. “The pizza shop is closed! Saturday night isn’t Saturday night without pizza!”

 

At some points during the drama, René even rigged up a live video stream from the roof of the house using a mobile phone, showing the helicopters buzzing overhead and giving a sense of the terror of the besieged community.

 

The intensity and immediacy of the reporting soon attracted the attention of some of Brazil’s best-known journalists who “retweeted” from their own sites and helped René pile on the followers. By Sunday, after a night of little sleep interrupted by the constant crackling of gunfire, René was becoming a national celebrity and was interviewed live on mass-audience TV shows.

 

The tone of responses to René’s tweets showed that the massive interest was  based on much more than curiosity about the events he was reporting.

 

The Brazilian public, notoriously divided on social issues, seemed uniformly moved in admiration of these young reporters showing such initiative, bravery and professionalism in the most adverse circumstances.

 

They defied the stereotype view held by many middle-class Brazilians about favela-dwellers, and René found himself bombarded with complimentary tweets praising his courage, pleading with him to be careful and even saying he was starting a revolution in journalism.

 

Whatever the truth of that, Brazil is certainly at the forefront of the social networking revolution. That was evident from a scan of the “trending” topics registered by Twitter in recent days.

 

For most of the period, at least half of the top ten “hashtags” trending worldwide related to the police operations in Rio – tags like #paznorio (peace in Rio) and #bope (initials of the elite police unit involved in the operation) showed that the Brazilian conversation was being held at an intensity and volume high enough to dominate global Twitter traffic.

 

A survey in October by the comScore digital research company showed that Brazil had the world’s highest rate of Twitter use , accounting for 23 per cent of internet users compared with just 12 per cent in the United States. Google’s Orkut is still the most popular social networking site in Brazil, with 36 million users, but with both Facebook and Twitter, each with some 9 million users, climbing up fast behind it.

 

Social media generally in Brazil account for some 20 per cent of time people spend online, making it one of the most popular online activities. Various explanations have been put forward – one being that the relatively restricted ownership and variety of traditional media leave Brazilians open to the new networks of information-sharing.

 

Another is that Brazilians are intensely social people, so these forms of interaction fit perfectly with the clubbable exuberance of the national character.

 

Whatever the explanation, social networking has thrust 17-year-old René Silva into the national limelight in a way that would have been unthinkable just a few months ago. For many he has become a symbol of hope for what might emerge out of the smoke of the battles with the drug gangs.

 

At one point in the intense Twitter conversation of the past hours René explained he was hoping to train as a journalist at university. The reply came back, “You already are one, my dear.”

 

 

Below: News report from April 2010 (in Portuguese) profiling Rene's work as a community journalist in a Rio favela.