Diário de um Detento

On 2 October 1992, military police stormed a rebellion at Carandiru, then the largest prison in Latin America, in the north of São Paulo, and 111 inmates were killed. It became known as the Carandiru Massacre, the worst tragedy in the history of Brazil's prison system. Five years later Racionais MC's put it at the centre of their album Sobrevivendo no Inferno. The song grew out of a diary. Josemir Prado, known as Jocenir, had kept notes on daily life inside the prison and on the massacre, and he wrote the track together with Mano Brown. The result runs seven and a half minutes without repeating a single verse or chorus, a first-person account of the days leading up to the killings that turns into an indictment of police violence and the Brazilian state. The video, directed by Mauricio Eça, won two prizes at the 1998 MTV Video Music Brasil awards, and Folha de S.Paulo later ranked it the second best Brazilian music video of all time. Jocenir went on to publish his own book under the same title. The album is now regarded as one of the greatest records Brazil has produced and has even become required reading for university entrance exams. In 2023 the public defender's office in Paraná won recognition of the song as a literary work, which means prisoners there can count studying it toward a reduction of their sentences. A song about the men who died inside now helps others get out.