'I ordered them to dig a hole and bury the guys alive': Confessions of a female cartel boss who was sold to a brothel as a child, given a gun at 11 and murdered rapist at 15

• WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT 
• Raquel de Oliveira rose up through ranks to become one of Rio's most feared drug lords
• She was sold to a brothel by her grandmother when she was a child
• Mother-of-three was given a gun by her 'godfather' and murdered a man who tried to rape her during a drug deal when she was 15  
• Former cartel boss said she buried her enemies alive and shot dead others
• She had it all but lost it after becoming addicted to cocaine she was selling
• Now she is lifting the lid on her criminal past as she releases her first novel

By Donna Bowater And Priscilla Moraes, Rio De Janeiro

Published: 10:52 EST, 21 October 2015 | Updated: 14:31 EST, 21 October 2015

She was sold to a brothel by her grandmother as a young girl, given her first gun aged 11 by a crime-lord 'godfather' and murdered a man in cold blood by the time she was 15.

This was all before Raquel de Oliveira rose to the top to run a bloodthirsty cocaine cartel in one of Brazil's toughest favelas, where she buried enemies alive and shot dead rival gang members on her turf.

And all before she became addicted to the deadly drug herself – and lost the lot. 

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Survivor: Raquel de Oliveira has lived her life in the Rocinha favela - the largest, and possibly most crime-ridden of the thousand favelas in Rio de Janiero. And in her time, she has done things which most could not ever imagine, including burying people alive, as she struggled to keep her head above water

Shot dead: Raquel killed her first man at 15, but it was the death of her boyfriend Ednaldo de Souza (pictured) which would have the most impact on her life, as it was then she took over his drugs business

Horror: Raquel doesn't know how many people she has killed in her lifetime - but says each was necessary to survive in the harsh world of the favela (pictured in 1988)

But now, a 54-year-old mother of three, Raquel has left behind her life of crime and lifted the lid on the underground world of drugs, sex and murder that blights Rio de Janeiro. 

In a new book, called A Número Um (Number One), which charts her life in the run down, crime-ridden Rocinha favela, she describes the brutal realities of a world, and events, which many struggle to believe could ever happen.

Only, it did happen to Raquel - starting with the moment her grandmother sold her to a gangster when she was just a child. 

Raquel revealed the gangster ran a notorious illegal lottery called 'jogo do bicho', which translates as 'the animal game'.

The little girl was taken from the life she knew, and was put to work in a brothel. She was only saved from a life of prostitution because, when she arrived there, the brothel bosses had some kind of 'spiritual awakening', which convinced the pimps not to force her to work as a prostitute.

They released her aged 11 back into Rocinha, the biggest favela in Rio, and she was given a gun by the gangster, who she called her 'godfather'.

'Things that happened to me as a child were common things, normal at the time, which take place even today,' she told MailOnline.

'Make no mistake because girls today, they sell themselves and are exchanged for a little line of cocaine. A line of coke is worth a sex act.... Girls of 10, 13. 

'Mothers nowadays put their own daughters on street.'

The turning point came at 15, when she killed for the first time. She describes the moment through her main character Bonitona's eyes in the book. 

In the book, she reveals how the man, who she was meant to buy drugs from, ended up 'lying on the sofa with multiple stab wounds to his body'.

'He thought giving me marijuana would get me high and then he could do things with me,' she explained. 

'But it didn't. So it was him or me.' 

Angelic: Raquel was sent to work in a brothel as a child - but was saved from life as a prostitute after the pimps had a religious vision which told them they must not sell her

Socialite: Raquel began dating Naldo when she was 25, and a mother of two. It brought her a certain fame in teh favela, and she has described it a bit like being a socialite 

Blood: But she had to leave her life of relative luxury behind and become involved in the violent and brutal drug industry after Naldo lost his life in 1988, along with two others (Pictured: Bodies in 1983)

Paid for in blood: As a drug lord in the 80s and early 90s, Raquel was partly responsible for keeping law and order in the favela, recalling on one occasion how she buried two boys alive after they were caught stealing. Pictured: A squatter village in Rio in 1987

Today, she shrugs off the killing - one of many in her lifetime. 

'To kill a man aged 15 meant nothing,' she told MailOnline. 'The guy wanted to rape me.' 

It would be another 10 years before the next man to change the course of her life would appear, in the form of Ednaldo de Souza, or 'Naldo', who worked beneath Denis of Rocinha, the boss of the whole favela

He had risen to fame in the slums of Rio de Janiero as the first person to use an assault rifle, flagrantly firing his HK submachine gun, called Jovelina, from the rooftops of the favela.

Raquel started dating him aged 25, when she was already a mother-of-two.

He was, it seems, the love of her life. Her one regret - of all the things which she has done and seen in her life - is not dying alongside him when Naldo was killed in a gun battle with police three years later. 

Instead, she kept a bullet to take her own life if she ever came close to being arrested. 

That evening she fled the favela. When she returned, she was determined to restart her beloved Naldo's operation. 

'Naldo left 300g of marijuana, I just had to receive it,' she explained. 

'Then I set up a place to package it with some people who offered to help. At first, I went to the street to sell it myself. I sorted a place free from police, because the favela was full of officers.

'It exploded. It was incredible. And I had these rules: no one could smoke nearby, no one could work high, no more than two people at a time and no way were any children allowed. I had an enormous list of things you couldn't do.'

From four people, Raquel's gang grew to six, then 10 and finally 19 traffickers were working under her.

Devastated: Ednaldo was killed along with three others in a gun fight in 1988. Raquel had fled the favela. When she returned, mourning her loss, she began to rebuild the empire he had created. Pictured: Naldo's funeral

Violence: At 11, she was released back into the Rocinha slum in  (pictured in 2013). It was now that her 'godfather' gave her a gun to protect herself. The area was virtually a no-go zone for outsiders until 2008

It was then that she herself turned to cocaine to survive working non-stop from Monday to Friday.

'I spent all day and all night creating strategies to not spin or lose anything,' she said. 'Wrapping, selling, wrapping, selling: that was it. Drug trafficking enslaves a person's life. It's like working in a hotel or hairdressers.

'Your life is work. This was the routine, right? Doing the rounds at night, putting people to work, equipping weapons, cleaning the guns.

'Cocaine also helped with my libido. I had a few little affairs. It was interesting,' she smiled.  

But there were responsibilities, and in the favelas, it was the drug traffickers who maintained their own type of law and order, ruling through violence.

Drug lords were both feared and respected, and footage from the time shows how hundreds turned out to mourn those killed in confrontations with police.

'Drug trafficking is made of death, of blood,' she said. 'Traffickers were seen as heroes of the community, those who resolved everything. From the pipe a neighbour put on his wall to cases of death, rape, violence with a minor. There was a lot of this. So, I had to keep standards.'

Raquel knew her so-called responsibilities: in one case, she ordered three boys to be buried alive as punishment for stealing car stereos within the favela.

'I ordered them to dig the hole and bury the guys alive,' she said. 'And one of them, who I liked a lot, I left him with his head uncovered.

'His aunt came to appeal for him. I ended up letting him go. 

'A little later, he carried on stealing; he robbed in the upper part of the favela and died with a blast on his back. He was on a bike. 

'He and another died on the main road.'

Addiction: In the end, she herself fell victim to the drugs she was pedaling into the slums. Pictured: Police lead away suspects, tied together at the neck, during a 'blitz' police operation  in 1982 in one of  the favelas

But now, all that remains of her career as a cocaine boss is her memories and her addiction: she said she spent almost everything on her own drug habit.

She sold her four properties and her jewellery, and even carried out a robbery to blow $500 on cocaine.

'Everything I earned, I lost,' she said. 'My son's father taught me to drink and so I also became an alcoholic, and I taught him to use cocaine. We created a couple of monsters.

'I snorted through everything, and it was hell. And today, I just have enough to live off.'

It is an amazing tale, but the recovering drug addict's story would have disappeared into the crowded streets of Rio's favelas were it not for Flupp, the International Literary Fair of the Periphery.

It was with the organisers' help that Raquel managed to write the book. It was not easy - shortly after she began, she relapsed.

The realisation her father was a paedophile was one of many difficult truths the former drugs baron was forced to confront. 

'To summarize a book in a chapter was one of the hardest things I've ever done,' she told MailOnline. 

'Throughout the history of this book, the lesson I took from my life reaffirms everything I think today, that I made the best of the worst. 

'I don't think I could have done anything better. There were no alternatives. I had nothing, I knew nothing. I'm even impressed with things I'm learning today that are things I should have known a long time ago.' 

Julio Ludemir, organiser of Flupp, said Raquel's work was important for people to understand the reality of marginal communities like favelas.

Future: But Raquel has come out the other side, and with the help of a literary festival organised in the favela, has managed to write a book based on her life - although this one is a romance. Pictured: Police clash with youths in Rocinha in 1987, the year before Naldo's death

Respect: Being a drugs lord brings respect now as it did then. Pictured: The funeral of a drug trafficker from the favela in 2005

He said subjects like drug trafficking, murder and crime were often dismissed as apologia when they are produced by the lower classes but were considered 'culture' when produced by the rich.

'We will never understand what Rio de Janeiro is without understanding its own history, its own narrative,' Julio told MailOnline.

'We have a youth devastated by police violence, by the issue of drugs. We have a place where the military dictatorship still dominates.

'We are in a place where the fact you do not have money, being young and wearing board shorts, gives the right to a guy who has a police badge and a pistol in his belt to hit you in the face and even kill you.

'For Rio to have a future, it has to go back to its past.'

Since 2008, the security services in Rio have been carrying out a 'pacification' programme to try to secure the city's favelas from gang violence.

Special teams known as Pacifying Police Units (UPP) have been installed in around 40 communities, but some have faced heavy resistance.

For Raquel, who still lives in Rocinha, such a policy is not enough to win back the most troubled communities.

'People were used to responding to that type of power,' she said. 'If the power that comes to substitute it does nothing to win people's trust, it doesn't offer anything. What does the social system offer to people? Not a damn thing. Just oppression.'

Julio Ludemir told MailOnline like Raquel, people had to go back to their past to learn for the future. Pictured: A Brazilian Police Special Force member takes position during a violent protest in Rio de Janeiro in April 2014

Crime ridden: Many of the favelas around the Olympic park have been demolished, while special teams known as Pacifying Police Units (UPP) have been installed in around 40 communities to try to stop the violence

But would she go back to the life she once had? Raquel, who is already penning the second book of her trilogy, Depois de Tudo (After All), will pick up where she left off in Number One, with her leaving Rocinha and drug trafficking after a rival tried to kill her in a bar, shakes her head.

'I can't,' she said. 'It doesn't belong to me any more. I can't get involved in these things because drugs took me from the scene.

'My view is that everything I lived through was almost utopian. And drug trafficking, for me, at the time, was a philosophy of life. Unlike today. Today I really live.'

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