I was poor and invisible and you ignored me.

This interview with a leader of the PCC, one of Brazil's largest prison gangs, is among the most chilling things I've ever read. Apparently it turns out to be fiction, but that doesn't matter. What it says is true enough that we all should be thinking about it.

Q. Do you belong to the PCC?
A. I'm more than that: I'm a sign of the times. I was poor and invisible. For decades you never bothered to look at me. It used to be easy to deal with poverty. The diagnosis was obvious: rural migration, income inequality, a few slums. But the solution never arrived. What did they do? Nothing. Did the federal government ever allocate funds for us? People only heard about us when the slums collapsed, or from romantic music about "the beauty of-the favelas at sunrise," stuff like that. Now we're rich, thanks to the multinational cocaine trade. And you guys are scared to death. We are the late blooming of your social conscience. You see? I'm well read. I read Dante in prison.

Q. Aren't you scared of dying?
A. It's you who's scared of dying, not me. In fact, you can't come and kill me here in jail, but I can send people to kill you out there. We're man-bombs. In the slums there are a hundred thousand man-bombs. We're at the core of what is beyond solution. You guys are in the right, and I'm in the wrong, and in the middle is the frontier of death, the only frontier. We're already a new species, a wholly different animal from you.

For you, death is a Christian drama: you die in a bed from a heart attack. For us, death is commonplace: we're tossed into a ditch. Didn't you intellectuals speak of "class wars", "Be an outlaw, be a hero"? That's right: here we are! Ha, ha. You never expected these cocaine soldiers, did you?

My soldiers are anomalies, products of this country's twisted development. There's no more proletariat, no pitiful or exploited masses. There's a third thing growing out there, cultivated from the mud, schooled on absolute illiteracy, graduating from prisons, like an alien monster hidden in the city's cracks. A new language has emerged.

We're on the edge of a kind of postmisery that has begotten a new murderous culture, propped up by technology, satellites, cell phones, the Internet, modem weapons. It's shit with chips and megabytes. My soldiers are a mutated social species, they're the fungus growing on a big dirty mistake.

Q. What changed in the margins?
A. Dough. We have it now. Do you think someone with $40 million doesn't run things? With that kind of money, prison is like a hotel, an office. We are a modern company, we're rich. You guys are a bankrupt state, dominated by incompetent people. We have agile management methods. You are slow and bureaucratic. We fight on our own turf. You're on foreign soil. We don't fear death. You're dying of fear. We are well armed. You have a .38 caliber revolver. We're on the attack. You are on the defensive. You are obsessed with human rights. We are cruel and merciless.

You have transformed us into superstars of crime. We have made clowns of you. The people in the slums help us, out of fear or out of love. You are hated. You are provincial. Our arms and drugs come from abroad--we're global. We don't forget you--you're our clients. You forget about us as soon as an outbreak of violence subsides.
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You can read the whole "interview" here.

Art from the brilliant movie City of God.