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On 2 October 1992, a fight between inmates in Pavilion Nine of Carandiru prompted São Paulo's Military Police to storm the block. They killed 111 prisoners, many of them unarmed and inside their cells, and no police officer died. Varella reconstructs the day from survivors' testimony, and the case stands as evidence of what happens when a state treats a prison disturbance as a war against the people it holds.
Debts had to be paid. Informers and rapists were punished, sometimes by death. Visitors and family days were untouchable. Inmates marked for punishment escaped only by asking for transfer to the protective wing, the 'seguro', so formal authority survived by tacitly delegating governance to the governed.
Inside the prison, HIV spread mainly through shared syringes for injected cocaine and through sex, and it reached wives and girlfriends through conjugal visits. Varella argues that prevention got results only when it used the prisoners' own slang, spoke plainly about drugs and sex without moral judgment, and went through respected inmates rather than around them.
As a doctor, Varella makes a point of not asking what a man did to be imprisoned and instead listens to what he chooses to tell. This lets the prisoners appear as full people, with humor, loyalty, cruelty and fear, rather than as a list of offenses. The book's plain, unsentimental record of their stories is itself an argument against reducing people to the worst act they committed.