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biggest single consumer of cocaine in the world after the United States.
    The Colombian cartels have used all their marketing and sales ‘skills’ to make big inroads into Brazil over the past decade. These days, getting a gram of cocaine on the streets of Rio is as easy as catching a bus. But being a coke dealer on the streets of this steaming metropolis is riddled with danger.
    Trigger-happy cops and armed gangsters ensure that most young coke dealers cannot expect to live much beyond thirty. ‘The police are heavy-handed and always looking for bribes,’ says dealer Carlos, who’s worked with his partner Jose in Rio for more than two years. ‘The criminals will justslit your throat and steal your cocaine if you give them half a chance.’
    Often, police anti-drugs raids cause so much resentment in Rio that they lead to open street battles between police and cocaine gangsters armed with machine guns, assault rifles and grenades. One hot close Rio night in 2012 twelve families were reportedly forced from their homes by gang members who wanted to use them as hideouts when they were being pursued by the police.
    But it’s all water off a duck’s back for Jose and Carlos, who most of the time act like extras off some bling, Brazilian version of
TOWIE
. They work as a pair because they feel it’s safer that way but admit their biggest problems come from criminals in the
favelas
(slums) that border all sides of Rio. These chilling characters each run their own lucrative cocaine ‘turf’. Carlos says: ‘We really do work hard to earn our living. It ain’t as easy as people might think ’cos there are a lot of bad people out there wanting to take a shot us. We try to tread carefully but the cocaine gangsters in the
favelas
shoot first and ask questions later if you step onto their territory without an invitation.’
    Carlos comes from a background inside the murky world of Brazilian cage fighting and only began dealing coke because the injuries he sustained during one fight meant he was not able to do a ‘normal job’. Jose has been involved in numerous types of smuggling in the past but decided to set up a small cocaine supply chain in Rio after nurturing a group of mainlymiddle-class friends, all of whom complained about the poor quality of the cocaine available in their neighbourhood.
    â€˜I was fed up of being ripped off by dealers from the
favela
flogging me baking powder instead of the real thing,’ explained Jose. ‘So I set up my own cocaine business. That’s how I met Carlos.’ Both men are immensely proud that their product, they claim, is 90 per cent pure and insist that is why they’ve retained a vast customer base of more than 500 regulars, which earns each of them a salary of between £3,000 and £5,000 a week.
    I was introduced to these two likely lads of Rio’s cocaine game by an expat Brit called Johnny, who’s lived and played in Rio for more than thirty years. ‘These two are outrageous,’ Johnny told me. ‘They parade round town like gangsters off a rap video and don’t seem to care who knows what they’re up to. But then here in Rio most people break the law every day of their lives just to survive. Coke dealers are commonplace, so there are plenty more where these two came from.’
    My first meeting with Carlos and Jose was scheduled to be in a bar on the built-up city side of the phenomenally busy two-lane highway that separates the famous Ipanema Beach from Rio’s steaming metropolis. Johnny told me not to try and catch their eye as I watched everyone coming into the bar, the traffic screaming past just five yards away.
    â€˜Wait for them to come up to us,’ said Johnny. ‘That’s the rule with this sort of character.’
    Johnny then explained how drug dealers in tourist areasare extra careful not to be spotted because they fear arrest from greedy cops, who then