'Avenue of Death' Rio motorway where violence and chaos exist alongside pride and resilience

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

- Tom Phillips

Rio de Janeiro When Renato Oliveira boarded a bus down Brazil Avenue one morning last October it should have been just another commute.

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 before nodding off against the window.

They were his last words.

Unbeknown to passengers on the 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, like many caught up in the bloodshed blighting Rio.

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

Eight decades later, the 36-mile 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.