Tim Lopes (born Arcanjo Antonino Lopes do Nascimento; November 18, 1950 – June 2, 2002) was a Brazilian investigative journalist and producer for the Brazilian television network Rede Globo. In 2002, the media reported him missing while working undercover on a story in one of Rio's favelas. It was later learned that Lopes had been accosted by drug traffickers who controlled the area, was kidnapped, driven to the top of a neighboring favela in the trunk of a car, tied to a tree and subjected to a mock trial, tortured by having his hands, arms, and legs severed with a sword while still alive, and then had his body necklaced – a practice that traffickers have dubbed (in allusion to the microwave oven).
The details of Lopes's death received substantial attention in Brazil's media because of the barbarity of the crime and due to it highlighting the existence of (parallel power) within Rio—meaning criminals controlling areas of the city with impunity.
Early life and personal life Arcanjo Antonino Lopes do Nascimento was born in Pelotas, Brazil, the fourth child of a family of twelve. When he was 8 years old, his parents moved the family to Rio de Janeiro, where they lived in humble circumstances in the Mangueira favela in a three-room shanty.From documentary "Journalists Killed in the Line of Duty" (2005); sponsored by The Committee to Protect Journalists; Produced by Feature Docs; Narrated by Anderson Cooper
Mangueira is home to the samba school, Mangueira and is located on a hill near Maracanã football stadium.
Years later as a journalist, Lopes produced a piece about Mangueira samba and one of its founders, the Carioca sambista Carlos Cachaça. Cachaça saw the story and commented to a sambista friend, Monarco, of the Velha Guarda da Portela, that Lopes's reporting was "the best material that he had ever seen" on Mangueira. In 2002, Lopes was co-writing a book, about Mangueira samba school and his experience growing up there, with Alexander Medeiros.
Lopes was one of the founders of the carnival block "Simpatia é quase amor" ("sympathy is almost like love"), of Ipanema, and had served as an official judge of the annual carnival procession at the Sambadrome Marquês de Sapucaí. He was a dedicated fan of the professional Rio football club, Vasco da Gama.
Lopes lived with his wife Alessandra Wagner and her son Diogo. Lopes also had a nineteen-year-old son, Bruno, from a previous marriage, with whom he maintained a father-son relationship. Although Lopes was born Gaucho (native resident of Rio Grande do Sul), "he was a stereotypical Carioca" (native resident of Rio de Janeiro), always smiling with a friendly disposition and knowing every corner of Rio. He was at ease hanging out with wealthy residents in Leblon or with those living in poor areas of the city or on the street, and in speaking street slang.
Career Tim Lopes attended journalism school at the Faculdade Hélio Alonso (FACHA) in Rio de Janeiro and during his career wrote for the Rio newspapers O Globo, O Dia, and Jornal do Brasil. As part of an investigative piece in 1978, Lopes worked at a construction site on Rio's underground Metro to highlight difficult working conditions in the stifling heat. Lopes won a Brazilian journalism award called the Prêmio Abril de Jornalismo in both 1985 and 1986 for feature stories involving football in the sports magazine Placar.
Tim Lopes's journalism colleagues described him as an old-school type reporter who gleaned his stories from researching on the street as opposed to sitting in an air-conditioned office browsing the Internet for ideas. A consistent theme of Tim Lopes's reporting was to show how low-income citizens living within Rio's favelas could be subjected to terror and powerlessness under the 'law of the traffickers.' Lopes felt that the government had ceded control of poor neighborhoods to violent drug traffickers. An example of this was the series he wrote for the Rio newspaper O Dia in 1994 entitled, "Funk: Som, Alegria, e Terror," (Funk: Sound, Joy, and Terror). The story described certain baile funk run by traffickers (baile funk are dance concerts held in favelas featuring live performers singing a style of rap called Rio Funk).
His first foray into broadcast journalism was for the popular newsmagazine program Fantástico on the Globo network. During one assignment in 1995, Lopes posed as a street vendor while concealing a camera within a cooler. His aim was to shine a journalistic light on the risks posed to ordinary citizens of Rio of being mugged or assaulted by thieves, as this was a particularly acute reality at that time. During the course of the investigation, Lopes witnessed a dramatic scene which was all caught on camera: A group of teenagers mug a pedestrian couple in Rio's Centro business district, with one of the thieves wielding a large knife. When a taxi driver scares the mugger off by firing a revolver, the boy runs into heavy traffic on Avenida Presidente Vargas and is violently killed when he is hit by a city bus. Several Globo cameras were filming the entire episode from different angles, which was shown during the report (a black bar covered a portion of the frame at the moment the boy was killed). The scene weighed on Lopes's mind for a long time.
Lopes became a producer at Rede Globo in 1996. In 2001 Lopes and his team at Rede Globo received the Prêmio Esso (Brazil's version of the Pulitzer) for an investigative series entitled "Feirão das Drogas" ("Big Drug Fair"), in which he used a hidden camera to show dealers on the street openly hawking cocaine to passing pedestrians, yelling out the drug and its price. His footage also captured armed traffickers parading past on motorcycles with AK-47s. This footage was shot in a dense network of favelas in the Zona Norte called the Complexo do Alemão (German Complex); more specifically within the Complexo this particular area is known as the Grota.
One of the reporters working on Lopes's team to collect undercover footage for the same investigative report was Globo journalist Cristina Guimarães. She filmed in the Rio favelas of Mangueira and Rocinha during the same time period. The report was televised in Brazil on the program Jornal Nacional on August 3, 2001. The report got a lot of attention, which in turn caused Rio's political administration to take action. Police crackdowns followed, and dealers in the favela da Grota, and the other favelas featured were prevented from openly selling drugs on the street for a while, and some were arrested. Subsequently, the drug lords of the criminal factions controlling these areas were not happy with the decrease in revenues. One of the dealers arrested, known as Ratinho (literally, "Little Rat"), would subsequently be involved in Lopes's death.
Tim Lopes and his team were awarded Brazil's top journalism prize for the report which was titled "Feirão das Drogas" ("Big Drug Fair") - the first Prêmio Esso given for broadcast investigative journalism in Brazil.
In 2002 Lopes started working on a story about long-distance truck drivers that traverse Brazil () for Globo TV.
Death
Kidnapping On the afternoon of June 2, 2002, Lopes left his apartment in a middle class section of Rio's Copacabana neighborhood. He was heading to the Vila Cruzeiro favela after first stopping by his office at Rede Globo, where he had been a broadcast producer since 1996. César Sebra, the man who was Lopes's boss for six years at Rede Globo, recalled: "Most of the journalists working at Globo's offices are middle-class. Only a few people live like Tim used to live in the favelas."
Lopes had heard that the gang of drug traffickers who controlled Vila Cruzeiro were putting on a baile funk that night, at which local residents had informed him that traffickers were promoting child prostitution. Lopes had previously confided to colleagues that he was feeling tired and wanted to take a break from the agitation and violence of the city and find a rural retreat somewhere where he could recuperate. "The deeper in the jungle the better," he told them. His awareness of drugs and crime plaguing the city, and the lack of social services for youth to deal with these problems, seemed to drain him of energy.
Rio's poor communities, the favelas, had been neglected for decades and were considered outside the control of the State. Filling in this power vacuum were young drug traffickers, who patrolled the favelas with automatic weapons. In addition to drug selling, traffickers in certain favelas were sexually exploiting minors from the community at their baile funk, sometimes forcing girls to put on explicit shows by having sex out in the open against a wall at these events.
Residents were telling Lopes that girls from the local community who didn't participate in the baile funk were targeted for reprisals. Since residents could not seek redress from the police, they instead sought help from Lopes. Nassif Elias Sobrinho, president of the Rio journalist union, recalled: "Tim Lopes was called because there was no one to hear their problems. The community told the police many times and nothing was done."
After leaving his office that afternoon at the Rede Globo television studios, where he left his "cell phone, wallet, and dress shirt," Lopes went to the Penha Shopping Mall where he rigged himself with a hidden camera. He was using a micro-camera concealed within a small pack at his waist.Tim Lopes – Journalists Killed – Committee to Protect Journalists One of the purposes of this baile funk was to draw crowds from other neighborhoods, so Lopes's presence there would not have made him a target in and of itself. However, the "Feirão das Drogas" report from the previous year had received a lot of attention and led to numerous arrests. Furthermore, after Lopes and his team had been granted the Prêmio Esso, his image was subsequently broadcast all over Rio.
On the afternoon of June 2, Lopes decided to film at a drug-selling location () along (Eighth Street) in the Vila Cruzeiro favela. Lopes's aim was to obtain footage of drugs and weapons, as he had in 2001 in the favela da Grota within the Complexo do Alemão. It was later learned that before this night, Lopes had recently filmed in Vila Cruzeiro three different times.
Inside Vila Cruzeiro, Lopes went to a bar and bought a beer, then walked across the street and hung out on the sidewalk while filming armed traffickers driving by on motorcycles. Lopes was accosted by two members of the criminal faction who controlled Vila Cruzeiro and most of the Complexo do Alemão (often just referred to as "o Complexo"), André da Cruz Barbosa and Maurício de Lima Matias. As is common in the criminal underworld, the traffickers were known by their nicknames: André "Capeta" (André the Devil) and "Boizinho" (literally, Little Ox). A young boy had earlier approached Lopes when he was at the bar, and he did not know that the boy was a lookout for a drug dealer. The traffickers became suspicious when someone noticed a small light coming from the pack at Lopes's waist, where his camera was concealed, and reported it to one of the armed traffickers.