The Strongest Drug
A video from August 2020 on the YouTube channel of the missionary Nilton Pereira shows the evangelical preacher holding a bible in his hands. He is wearing a T-shirt with the words “JESUS TRANSFORMS” written on it, standing next to a hooded youth. The young man wears a gold chain with a pistol-shaped pendant, and in his right hand, he holds a gun resting on his leg. The missionary says:
“The peace of Our Lord Jesus be with you, brothers and sisters. I am Missionary Nilton preaching to you under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. I’m here among the drug traffickers in a Rio slum, a place where many churches would be afraid to come and seek out the soul of this armed young man, who comes from the world of trafficking. So, brothers and sisters, what’s going on? Many people are wasting time inside the churches, wasting time just keeping the benches warm because the soul of this lad is the soul of his pastor. The soul of this young man is my soul seeking forgiveness from the Lord. I am leaving this video here to incentivise you […] Come to the traffickers, come to the slums, go to the hospitals. […] You might say: ‘But, missionary, you were a dealer yourself, it’s no biggie for you […]’ But nothing is stopping you from coming here too, not the gun or the trafficking. The command that Jesus gave to every believer was this: Seek out every creature and preach the gospel… The word of God is most welcome here. You can come and preach. Amen, brothers and sisters! Jesus is the strongest drug.”
Nilton is a thin, agile man with a deep voice. He is 45 but looks younger. In the slum where he lives in Niterói, people greet him on the street, bid him good morning and seek out his prayers. He tells his neighbours that today, he is with a writer and a photographer who are going to help him tell the world the story of how he found God. Nilton sees our conversations—and this essay—as part of his mission as a preacher.
From our very first online meeting, I quickly grew accustomed to his exalted tone and his wish to tell his stories in detail. When describing an attack, he mentions the colour and the weight of the gun he was carrying; when he describes the cells he was imprisoned in, smells and architectural details are brought to life. When talking about the bullets he took, he lifts his shirt or takes off his trainers to show me the scars. Sometimes he cries when recounting moments he nearly died. But then his voice quickly rises again, and Nilton looks up to heaven and preaches the word. He is no mere storyteller: he turns his narratives into spoken theatre, which makes me wonder whether he developed that skill at the pulpit where he now preaches the gospel or if he became a preacher because he found storytelling so easy. In the missionary’s words, each trivial, commonplace detail takes on the air of a parable.
In addition to our long online conversations and a face-to-face meeting when he took me to visit his house in the Atalaia slum, Nilton likes to send me voice notes—some over 50 minutes long, like when he told me he feared his son might start using drugs again.
Before visiting his neighbourhood, he assures me there will be no problems, having already secured permission from the local crime boss for our visit. “Everyone knows me here, I get on fine with the traffickers, as a missionary I talk to everyone, not just those already on Christ’s path.”
Nilton’s body bears scars: bullet marks on his hands and abdomen, signs of his time at “war”—as he calls the long period he spent as a drug trafficker. But the missionary is primarily a man of words—his own, telling of his descent into hell and encounters with God; the words of Scripture; the words that fill his social media, sharing the Gospel and commenting on current affairs.
Nilton’s words intrigue me; sometimes they are shocking or enthralling, especially because they are so different from my own, which is why I decided to hear them almost without interruptions.
Three men
Nilton Pereira: “I was born in 1980 in Niterói, here in Rio state. We grew up in huts that my father built wherever he could because we always had to keep moving, expelled either by drug traffickers or by the government. My dad is from Sergipe, my mum is from Paraiba. They both came to Rio de Janeiro in search of a better life. My father went hungry in the Sertão and as a boy he was given to another family as forced labour. Not much more than a slave, right? He cleared weeds in the family’s allotment in exchange for food. When he was older, he started travelling, going from place to place, meeting women here and there, impregnating them.
He already had seven kids when he met my mother in Campina Grande. They had four sons together, but one died young. The other three, including me, all ended up getting involved in crime. My father sold mate and lemonade on Icaraí Beach from an iron cart: my old man would dress up as Charlie Chaplin to attract the customers’ attention. He did it at Carnival too. On the streets, he was known as ‘Baiano Piripiri’. My father’s trademark was his cry: ‘Baiano’s lemonade is a jewel!’
When I was 10, me and my brothers started helping him with work. The cops would always confiscate my father’s goods and often we’d return home with nothing. He was never involved in crime, he was a hard worker, but he liked to carry a gun. Sometimes he would shoot rounds in the yard at home; he was the one who taught me how to defend myself in a shootout.
And now, my own son… I can tell you his story if you like. He was shot like I was. He went to prison for two years for dealing in a slum here in Niterói. I managed to pay a lawyer to get him out. And the drugs… My greatest fear is seeing my son relapse with crack. I’ve already watched him become skin and bones, crawling around the house, hallucinating, selling everything he owned. Thanks be to God, today he’s got a regular job and he’s five years clear of that curse. My biggest fear is him ruining himself again. I know all about that.
My biggest regret in life is abandoning my studies and getting involved in crime. I dreamt of being a soldier, building a career in the Army or Police. I wanted to be an authority, to fight for something bigger while also defending people, my family…”
The smell
NP: “When I was ten, we lived in the Esso slum in São Gonçalo and I was playing with my dog—I always loved dogs, always owned them—when out of nowhere I saw a fire in Dona Ana’s hut where she sold sweets from, right by our house. In my naivety, I alerted the whole favela. Everyone quickly gathered and we managed to throw buckets and buckets of water over it. We saved that lady’s life. The smell of the smoke clung to my skin, I couldn’t get it off.
The next day, I found out that it was the traffickers who set fire to the hut, because that lady was said to be X9, an informant. The favela boss didn’t like that I’d told everyone about the fire. The dealers started threatening and following our family, and one day one of their soldiers saw my brother playing with a plastic toy gun and told the boss that ‘the northerners’, as they called us, were armed.
Then the men surrounded our house. ‘Pack up your stuff and leave by tomorrow, if you don’t go, you’ll die, we don’t care if you have kids.’ We left everything behind that same day and moved to another favela.
Another thing I can’t forget from my childhood is the first homicide I saw, when I was 12. Me, one of my brothers and two friends climbed up a tree to pick jambo fruit, a fair distance from the favela. While we were at the top of the tree, some older men came along, local criminals. They started smoking marijuana cigarettes right beneath us. We kept completely still—we were afraid of them and the smell of marijuana coming up through the tree.
One of the men went to piss in the forest, took a few steps, grabbed a stick, and began striking another boy on the head. I remember he was wearing his work uniform, that stuck with me. He was a worker, but he was hanging with the criminals. He took a blow to the neck. The stick, already rigged to kill with a protruding nail, drove the nail into the boy’s head.
How can a child witness something like that? The boy kept fighting, even with his head split open… until another man pulled out a gun and—pow! The smell of gunpowder mixed with blood. I can still smell it today. I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced it, but the smell of blood is unlike any other—it lingers.”
The Names
NP: “My father always warned me: ‘Drugs kill; if you use them, you’ll die.’ But the voice of curiosity spoke louder. First it was benzene, then glue, which we would put inside a milk carton, inflate it and then breathe in the vapours. It made us giddy, made us feel like adults. Then it was cocaine, which Russo, an older kid, introduced me to.
He was friends with Andrezinho, who sold snacks on Praça São Domingos, near Comunidade 94, where we lived. The first time I snorted, my nose burned, and a rush of euphoria hit me. The drug made me feel powerful—it pulled me out of my shyness, and for the first time, I could talk to girls. Despite how it might seem, I was always shy. The first day I snorted it, I managed to hit on a girl on the bus. I was growing. From there, dealing was only a short hop away.
I started earning money as a runner, selling drugs to users in the square. I was skinny and fast. I ran all over the place, so they called me Zazá de Niterói, from the show Zazá on TV Globo. I was also given another nickname later, in Jacarezinho. They called me Magrinho (Skinny) or MG because I only weighed 47 kilos and carried a gun that weighed half of what I did. I snorted a lot of cocaine; the real reason I snorted so much was so I could endure the war. I became an addict. Today there’s no Zazá, no MG: they’re dead, there’s only Nilton, Nilton the missionary. Instead of carrying a gun, I carry God’s word.”
Your Life Depends on this
NP: “The local boss at the time was Edu Caveira. He gave me a revolver and a bag of ammo, then asked: ‘Do you want to die or do you want to live?’ I said I wanted to live. I had never held a gun before. He handed me a .38 with a mother-of-pearl grip and said: ‘Your life depends on this now.’
People think that when you’re holding a gun, you become superman, but the truth is, the gun weighs down on you. Edu’s security guy led me to an open clearing on the hillside and taught me how to load and aim. ‘The best thing is to aim up from your stomach, because the gun lifts, so the bullet will get them in the chest.’ I fired a bunch of times until the ammo ran out. When I finished, he said: ‘Now you’re ready.’
The neighbours started dropping hints to my father: ‘Your son’s a tough guy now, huh?’ But my father only suspected I was involved in crime after the big shootout with a rival faction. As they advanced, I fired relentlessly at them, and they fell back. When Edu heard about it, he summoned me, promoted me, and put me in charge of the area. He gave me drugs to sell, weed and cocaine, and gave my brother a gun. We controlled that territory until 2007.”
The Body
NP: “I always loved going to war. Proper war, tonnes of ammo and heavy weaponry, sometimes staying up for days on end when you go seize control from another faction. And then, when you started to feel sleepy, you’d use more and more cocaine.
My body bears the scars of that war, as you can see. When I was 16, I took a bullet in my back, in Jacarezinho. I was in an alleyway when the cops started firing. The crack house was nearby, and a bullet got me. See those two marks there? That’s where the bullet entered and where it went out.
I pegged it, jumping over walls, the blood dripping as I ran. While I was escaping, I slammed my rib on the corner of a wall and fractured that rib. Can you see the mark here? The rib was sharp and protruded from my side. I ran into the house of a local resident who worked at a pharmacy and asked for help. He treated the wound and injected me with antibiotics, warning that if my skin turned dark, I needed to go to the hospital. I spent a few days in bed before returning to business.
Around then, I started to earn properly, while using a lot of cocaine. I became addicted, from then on, it was down, down, down. I was lost. I robbed someone outside the exit to the Yacht Club in Niterói. There was a stationary car with the warning lights on, an old man with his arms sticking out: gold bracelet, gold ring, an imported SUV. I have always liked gold because it is so easy to sell, especially when it is ready to go.
The moment I saw all those jewels, I pulled out a silver-plated Taurus .38-calibre revolver. I leaned through the car window, shoved it into the old man’s belly and said, ‘Take the key out of the ignition. Don’t react. Take off your chain, take off everything or I’ll put a bullet in your face.’ He took it all off. I stuffed everything into a bag and ran.
Just down the road the police caught me. To escape I would have had to run into an enemy favela, where the rival faction would have ended me on the spot. They apprehended me; I took a rabbit punch from the cops and another from the son of the man I’d robbed. I was sentenced to four years and eight months.
Rats and men
NP: “Due to the jewel theft, I spent one year and four months in the 76th District Jail in Niterói. The cell measured just 2.5 by 3 metres, holding fifteen prisoners. You’re probably wondering: ‘Fifteen prisoners in such a small space? How is that possible?’ Let me explain. There were three hammocks hanging from each wall, stacked one on top of the other. If one broke, the prisoner above would fall and bring down those below, breaking arms and ribs—it was a real nightmare.
The ones who didn’t fit in the hammocks shared the floor, they slept ‘knave’ style, like the jack in a deck of cards: one head down, one head up, buttock to buttock so they wouldn’t have their private parts shoved in another prisoner’s buttocks. Once you chose a side, you had to sleep on that side until morning, without turning. That hurt your pelvis, your shoulder, your elbow—you had to use your arm as a pillow.
A year and four months there, only one toilet for fifteen prisoners, always open, just that one hole for fifteen men all living on top of each other, the smell of shit. We would fight with the rats that always came into the cell, we called them Master Splinter, after the rat from Ninja Turtles. They crawled over us while we slept and when they bit us, it would hurt bad for days and days.
After that period, I was transferred to Bangu, which was much better. More space, an outside yard where they sometimes allowed you to play football all day. Lots of people paid to leave the district jail for Bangu, but I was broke at the time, I had to wait, I was only transferred when the prison chief saw my good behaviour in the district jail. I spent one more year locked up in Bangu before I was moved to an open prison.”
Closing the body
NP: “After years in the crime world, I began to be hunted—threatened by a rival faction and by former friends who had switched sides. I’d already been shot at, already followed once while walking with my wife. They were going to kill me. I had to close my body. I thought to myself, I can’t do that ceremony with any old priest, I need to find a proper guy who will actually close my body, even if it was the most expensive pai-de-santo, since back then I had a lot of money from dealing. I was told about a man in the Fazedinha favela who closed the bodies of the dealers over there.
I won’t go into the details of the ritual, just remembering it sends shivers down my spine. All I’ll say is that I had to go to the cemetery and dig up a grave. I went and did it, and I swear I saw images swirling together in the sky like apparitions. A goat appeared in the middle of the cemetery, and a black cat crawled out of a tomb. There was a foul smell that turned my stomach, a stench of death rising in the middle of the night.
I started to feel dizzy, broke out in a cold sweat. I looked at the grave beside me and saw the headstone of a pastor’s wife, a believer buried there. A Bible was carved into the stone, along with a fragment of a psalm. In that moment, I understood it as a sign. I felt a presence in my heart unlike anything before, and a chill ran through my entire body. I ran.
From that day on, I began to seek out God. Even as I continued to use drugs for a long time, I started reading the Bible. At the beginning, when I prayed, I would often hear in my mind: ‘God won’t hear you, you’ve done so many bad things, he won’t protect you.’ But I kept going. I started going to church, with time I started to bear witness, I lost my awkwardness about speaking in public and preaching the word. That was when I left behind spiritism, candomblé, got rid of my amulets and gave myself entirely to the Christ of the gospels.
When I decided to leave crime behind once and for all, I went to talk to my boss in the slum. I entered looking completely different, holding my Bible, and said: ‘My life has changed. I want to know if I can pray for you, ask God to protect you, so that one day you might escape from this life.’ They realised right away that the way I spoke had changed, because when we are searching for God, it is He who speaks through us. I prayed right there, in the middle of more than twenty armed men, gave out some leaflets and went away. After a few steps, I heard the boss say to another guy: ‘See Zazá over there? I give him three months max, he’ll be back, sniffing blow with a gun in his hand’ But I’ve held firm for ten years, praise the Lord. Today, I bring this word to the dealers, and I tell them: ‘Crime doesn’t pay.’”
The word
NP: “A man can worship anything or nothing, but when the time comes and there’s a gun pointed in his face, when the barrel is pressed against his mouth and he’s about to die, he calls out for God. I am still a sinner, I have my failings, I still get angry. When I’m provoked on the street, I can feel that rage boiling up, but I put my head down and I choose to walk on like it’s nothing, I just keep going. As an ex-criminal, it’s hard to let it go—only the strong, only those whose faith is fierce can withstand. I’ve been humiliated and attacked, but I kept going forward, because the Bible teaches you to turn the other cheek.
To this day I still preach at the First Baptist Church in Niterói, as well as practising my mission on the streets, which is separate. Apart from my mission, I work as a cleaner at a condominium in Niterói, next to the favela where I worked as a trafficker for a long time.
My son works as a pharmacy receptionist, on a full-time contract, thanks be to God. My granddaughters are about to turn two years old. And I’ve been with my wife since I was 18—she was still a virgin when we met. We’re the same age, 45. She didn’t like people involved in drugs, she didn’t want to be with me for that reason, but I won her over, eventually.”
The void
NP: “I mainly preach to youngsters involved in trafficking and baile funk. At the dances, I go straight to the PA system. All the DJs in Rio, São Gonçalo, Niterói, Maricá, know me. I do a quick sermon on the mic, so I don’t ruin the party, then I preach from my stall to anyone who’ll hear me.
People go there to fill a void that baile funk won’t fill. They go there to drink but drink won’t fill that void. They go there to have an extramarital relationship, but that relationship doesn’t fill the void inside that person. So, when that person hears a message from God, it can impact them a little. And with the dealers, they know I’m a missionary because I share my sermons on Facebook and Instagram. They know I’m not an X9 and I can go to any slum with
no issues.
I don’t seek to please with the word, I’m straight talking. You’ve got to preach the truth: love the sinner, hate the sin. I love homosexuals, but the Bible condemns homosexuality. That is the original evangelicalism. It’s what Jesus did: he went to the needy, he preached the Scriptures, he spoke of Heaven and Hell and the fate of the soul. Today, many churches distort the Gospel, they focus on money, on the story of individual prosperity. They say that Jesus was rich but, if that is so, why did Peter tell the cripple in the temple: ‘Silver and gold have I none; but such as I have given thee: In the name of Jesus, rise up and walk’? The true Gospel is not about ostentation. I have been attacked for saying this, for denouncing false prophets, they’ve already ruined my Facebook page, threatened me in the comments, yet I keep talking.
Look around you, the country’s never been so evangelical, yet it’s never been so corrupt. There’s something wrong with the leaders of these churches! The root of all this is money. Having money is not a sin, but loving money above God, that is a sin. And there are lots of famous pastors, the heads of churches, who are always on TV, who live in sin, those false prophets.”
Open Wound
NP: “Lots of people say I should stand for election as a councillor. But I always say the same thing: I don’t believe in politics. Politics is like football, once I realised that even the games are rigged, I lost interest. Today I only cheer for my community’s team, because I know they play for love, without corruption.
About the government, I’ll say this, I don’t see the current one as legitimate, no sir. I preferred the one before because he talked about God and gave space to the Christian faith. This one now defends abortion, the liberalisation of drugs and censorship, he thinks only of power and money. But I’m inoculated against all of this; I didn’t even vote in the last election. My voting card has been cancelled since I was in prison and I’ll only get my papers in order if I need a more important document, like a passport, because my real dream is to see Israel, to set foot in the Holy Land, even though I know God is present everywhere.
Every day in Brazil we see things just getting worse. The debt keeps increasing. If it continues like this, we will end up worse than Venezuela. I’m not talking about right or left. I’m in favour of God’s law. Only yesterday, in Rio city centre, I was attending to some business and someone asked me who I voted for. I answered: ‘My party is the one that defends the law of God, the family, the worker, and is against crime.’ Simple. You see; if a youth of 16 can vote and have kids, he should also be able to answer to his crimes, but the punishments are so light! I learnt through pain, suffering, with an open wound, my body itching all over, rats biting me in prison.”
The survivors
Nilton recommends I listen to the podcast 01 Sobreviventes. He tells me that many of the interviewees on the programme are ex-dealers from his time, some of them friends and enemies from his crime days. I listen to stories that resemble those of the missionary—the close shaves, the violence endured and imposed, wounds, degrading living conditions in poor slums, prison, the burden on the families, worrying about their children’s fate, redemption through faith.
Many of these survivors are around 40 years old, just like Nilton and me. His old colleagues that he left along the way, killed by enemy fire, killed in internal disputes within their armed gangs, killed by police, killed by overdoses, would also be around 40. On this podcast, former dealers relate details of their life in crime. Conversion is always the portal between two moments in their lives—crime and salvation. Thus, the change in nickname is always emphasised: with the conversion, a new man must be born.
When these “survivors” were born, Catholics were 89% and evangelicals 6.6% of the population. Today, evangelicals total 27 percent of Brazilians and the proportion of Catholics is down to around 57 percent. Evangelicals from different denominations occupy ever greater space in politics, in culture, in public debate. In the streets of the country, there are now more evangelical churches than schools and hospitals combined.
Gospel singers are among the most played on the radio. Content made by evangelical influencers and celebrities combines messages about faith and tips on prosperity, work, and how to look after your family. Football players profess their faith after goals and cup victories. The evangelical bench is one of the most powerful in Congress, and the faithful have become the main popular base for far-right politicians—Bolsonaro, a Catholic given to decidedly un-Christian pleasures, went to the river Jordan in Israel in 2016 to be baptised by Pastor Everaldo, in a highly symbolic gesture for his future presidential candidacy. Leftwingpoliticians, meanwhile, say that “we must dialogue with the evangelicals”, a concern voiced whenever election time comes around—a misguided statement from people who still see the evangelicals as a group apart, a strange body in society. The verb “dialogue”, according to this reasoning, sounds a lot like someone saying we need to dialogue with kidnappers or an enemy country.
In parallel to these changes, another phenomenon: the deterioration in the cruellest aspect of our society, violent deaths. The murder rate in the early 1980s was around 12 people per 100 thousand inhabitants. More recently, when the “survivors” recorded their testimonies, they did so in a country in which the mortality rate had reached a record (31 per 100 thousand inhabitants in 2017). It came down again, but it’s still high at almost 22 per 100 thousand inhabitants, that is, almost double the rate compared to the year in which Nilton was born. A barbarous fact in the macabre drama playing out under the watch of the democracy of 1985 and the Citizens’ Constitution of 1988. These numbers, these hundreds of thousands of violent and premature deaths are also the material that this democracy is made from.
Nilton and these “survivors” embody both roads of radical transformation that Brazil has taken in recent decades: a country in which more people are finding faith through evangelicalism, and where, in parallel, they are killing each other twice as much.
Nilton Pereira continues: “Let me tell you something: I no longer fear death. I did when I was involved in crime; I believed that if an owl appeared, someone was going to die. I saw my comrades fall by my side, killed by bullets or drugs. And my greatest joy today is being free of addiction. Back when I was snorting ten capsules a day, I would tell my wife: ‘If I earn more, I’ll die of an overdose, because the problem isn’t a lack of money, it’s the addiction.’
My current house is nice, but every time I go out or come home I have to walk past the dealers. I want to sell it, put down some money in a quieter place and pay off the rest in instalments. I don’t want to be sitting with my granddaughters on my lap and get on the floor or run away because of crossfire.
What I really want is to leave the favela and find a safe place for my family. I’ll keep preaching in the slums, but I don’t want my granddaughters to go through what my son went through. He saw a body on the street at 6 and nearly stepped in the blood, he would have if I hadn’t picked him up. I tried to cover his eyes, but he had already seen it and he asked me: ‘What happened, Dad?’ I had to explain and that never left me. I don’t want this for my girls. I want another life for them and I want them to know that I am a survivor.”
This is an abridged version of a longer piece published in Revista Piauí in July 2025 under the title ‘A guerra e a fé’, part of a series of interview-articles entitled ‘Geração Democracia’
José Henrique Bortoluci is a Brazilian writer and sociologist, born in Jaú in 1984. In 2024, Bortoluci’s book, What is Mine, was published in English by Fitzcarraldo Editions, translated by Rahul Bery. Further books, articles (and films) are in the works.
