At noon, beside a putrid canal in Rio's Vila do João shantytown, half a dozen teenagers join hands, bow their heads and begin to recite the Lord's Prayer. The nearby streets are all but empty; block after block of local businesses have their shutters down.

At the center of the group, a crimson smudge stains the turf where 11-year-old Carlos Henrique Ribeiro da Silva died just hours before, shot in the head as police invaded the community, during a public festival.

Around them in the square a Fair Ground lies abandoned. Wind sweeps plastic cups from the previous night's festivities across the street. 

"They were coming back to the fairground from a party at about 11 pm," explained one of the group, motioning to two rubber gloves, discarded by the forensic team, lying on the road.

"There was a festa junina (June celebration) going on here. Carlos Henrique was in a new car [with his father] and the police must have thought it was a vagabundo (crook). The armoured vehicle began to shoot."

When the shooting began, Vila do João's Praça da Paz (Peace Square) was crowded with hundreds of people. Locals enjoying a drink scattered frantically in search of shelter.

Seeing his son wounded, Carlos' dad, Carlos Alberto da Silva, who was also shot, jumped out of the car and ran to his son's aid. He was already dead.

"I saw the boy's father bleeding with his kid in his arms," recalled Jacqueline Rocha, 28, who was in the square at the time.

"There was lots of shooting. Everybody was running for cover. The kids were trying to get off the rides, screaming for help."

"When the police saw they'd killed a kid they did a runner," she said.

Carlos dreamed of being a football star. He trained with Botafogo's junior team in Urca, and hoped eventually to move his mother out of the favela in which he was raised.

Instead he has become another statistic in an increasingly long list of civilians killed by Rio police in their fight against the cocaine trade.

According to human rights group Justiça Global the number of civilians killed by the city's police nearly doubled between 1999 and 2001 from 289 to 592. By 2003 the figure had rocketed again to 1,195.

Like others before him, Carlos now lies beneath a concrete slab in the São Francisco Xavier cemetery in Caju, a tatty Flamengo football shirt draped over his small body.

Death is nothing new to the Complexo da Maré, a labyrinth of breezeblock housing on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, of which Vila do João is part.

Since the 1980s the favelas and impoverished outskirts of Rio have been ravished by armed violence, involving traffickers and police.

And as the conflicts in such communities have intensified so too have the number of civilian casualties, like Carlos Henrique. 

"It could happen at any time, on any day, at any moment," explained 27-year-old Júlio César, a local resident, who knew Carlos Henrique.

Terrorised by an almost daily routine of violence, many favela residents feel they are left with little option but to side with the traffickers.

"They [the police] say they're here to defend the people. They're not," said Carlos' grandmother, Lúcia Helena Ribeiro Reis, in the sitting room of her nearby home in Vila dos Pinheiros.

"The crooks don't mess with anyone. It's the police that muck you around. They beat you again and again and this creates a revolt," added Mrs. Reis, who has lived in the community since it was founded 22 years ago.

Other favela residents go even further.

"One day I was arriving in the community and the police were carrying out an operation. I went to get my wallet out to show my work documents, and they slapped me in the face," said Júlio César.

"If I had the courage to join the traffickers I would and I'd kill lots of police. I hate them; I hate their race. I'm not here to defend the traffickers, but I detest the police for what they have done to my community."

Police claimed Carlos Henrique was caught in the crossfire between traffickers and members of the 22nd Battalion, who were pursuing a stolen car into the favela. But family and members of the community said there was no such confrontation.

Normally when police enter Vila do João, children employed by the local drug traffickers set off fireworks to warn the community. This time there was no warning, they said.

"The people there said there was no shootout," stated Carlos' grandmother.

Police also claimed Carlos was the nephew of a local drug trafficker, Sassá. Carlos' family denied the 11-year-old was involved in trafficking. "My grandson was innocent," Mrs. Reis said.

Human rights groups now fear some police are deliberately blurring the lines between civilians and traffickers in order to justify accidental deaths, or even executions.

"We have a trend of killing children and then alleging they were involved in drug trafficking," said Ricardo de Gouvêa Corrêa, from the Bento Rubião Human Rights Foundation.

"The Military Police (PM) have frequently used this rational to justify what are often summary executions. The central problem is the vision of society. The vision of society and of the newspapers is that this is reasonable, just because he might have been the nephew of a trafficker."

Last week, when a 15-year-old boy was shot dead on the roof of his house in the Rocinha shantytown, police chief Marcos Reimão issued the following warning:

"When the police are in the community don't stay on your roofs, stay inside your houses. The lookouts, the traffickers, are the ones that stay on the roofs. When the police shoot, whoever is on the roof might be shot."

The police too are feeling the pressure. On Monday - the day of Carlos' funeral - the Military Police's commander in chief, Hudson de Aguiar Miranda, announced the construction of a bullet proof observation tower in the Complexo da Maré, set to cost up to US$ 83,000 ( 200,000 reais).

Plans to build a concrete wall between the community and the motorway that links Rio's international airport to the south zone meanwhile were recently presented to Rio's Parliament.

But as politicians row over the controversial scheme, denounced as 'apartheid' by a banner hanging from a bridge on the Linha Vermelha motorway that runs past Maré, the bloodshed continues.

It's afternoon in Vila Pinheiros and a stream of rusty white vans are pouring out of the community to Carlos' burial, filled with people. 

A police 'caveirão' - a jet black armoured vehicle, with two rifles protruding menacingly through thin slits in its rear - approaches our van, and the driver swerves out of its way into an alleyway.

After a tense 5-minutes deciding the best way to exit Vila dos Pinheiros without hitting a police blockade, the van stutters onto the main road and on towards the cemetery.

"I can't remember how many times I've been here. At least twenty," explained William da Costa, a social worker in the Jovens Pela Paz project in Maré.

"A couple of times the people died of natural causes but most were violent deaths, and often involving police."

"This happens almost everyday here...I have already lost one son," added Mrs. Reis. "We are poor and we have no rights."

As the sun goes down over the cemetery Carlos' coffin is led slowly along the bumpy concrete passages that link thousands of simple concrete graves. A police helicopter hovers overhead.

Friends from Carlos' football team stride ahead in fits of tears. One holds a placard, with a simple message scrawled onto it in orange felt-tip: "They killed the dream of a young boy, just 11 years old, to be a football player. Justice."

Tom Phillips is a British freelance journalist who has lived in Brazil for two years. He writes for the "Independent" and the "Sunday Herald" and has had his work published in newspapers around the world. You may visit his blog at http://globalnoticias.blogspot.com or contact him on atphillips@gmail.com.

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