Commuters ride their luck on Rio's 'Avenue of Death'

When Renato Oliveira boarded a bus down Brazil Avenue one morning last October it should have been a normal commute.

- Tom Phillips

Travelling along Rio’s most important motorway, it usually took the 48-year-old meat packer just under an hour to reach his factory - enough time for a nap. “Don’t let me miss my stop,” Oliveira told a friend.

They were his last words. Unbeknown to passengers on the number 493 bus, up ahead rifle-toting police were storming one of the scores of favelas that line the road, hoping to capture a notorious drug lord.

A gun battle broke out, sending motorists scattering for cover behind the concrete central reservation. Oliveira was hit by a stray bullet as he dozed. Soon after, a neighbour broke the news to his family. “We thought it was a lie,” said the victim’s sister-in-law, who asked not to be named.

When Brazil Avenue was built in the 1940s, during the Getúlio Vargas dictatorship, it was conceived as a patriotic statement of the country’s economic ascent, said Pedro Moraes, the author of a book about the motorway.

Eight decades later, the 58km highway - which bisects more than 25 neighbourhoods as it leads from Rio’s western outskirts towards its heart - has become an emblem of something else: the government’s inability to control urban violence.