Culture Is Our Weapon: AfroReggae in the favelas of Rio Patrick Neate and Damian Platt Latin American Bureau, 162pp, £8.99 ISBN 1899365699

The name AfroReggae has travelled a long way from the anonymous streets of Rio's favelas. The group has been the subject of an award-winning film, Favela Rising, and in February performed to a sell-out crowd at the Barbican Theatre in London. In Brazil, it has attracted corporate financing and a major record deal. But for those who missed the hype, just what is AfroReggae? Established in 1993, it's a non-governmental organisation that works in Rio's slums, setting up youth projects and community centres in places still described by many as war zones. The band and the music are the tip of the organisation, pulling in publicity and funding while encouraging young people to join. For many, the alternative is life in a drug faction.

The endemic violence in Brazil's favelas is no secret, but its scale is hard to grasp. According to the UN, Brazil has the highest number of gun deaths per year of any country in the world. Consider this comparison: "Between 1948 and 1999, an estimated 13,000 people were killed in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Between 1979 and 2000, more than 48,000 died from firearm-related injuries in the city of Rio."

The novelist Patrick Neate cites these statistics in Culture Is Our Weapon, for which he teams up with Damian Platt, an Amnesty International campaigner who works with AfroReggae. Neate first wrote about the group in an earlier book, Where You're At: notes from the frontline of a hip-hop planet (2004), but here he looks in greater detail at the work it is doing.

For an outsider, it's tempting to view the favelas as one homogeneous sprawl. In fact, each favela is controlled by one of three drugs factions: Comando Vermelho (Red Command), Amigos dos Amigos (Friends of Friends) or Terceiro Comando (Third Command). Favela residents go to great lengths, zigzagging through the city, to avoid areas controlled by rival factions, and refer to those from other favelas as alemão ("German").

For this reason, AfroReggae has to tailor its approach to each community. In one favela, the focus is on percussion and dance classes; in another it is on computer training. "In trafficking there is only the present," comments one former tráfico. "All you get is women, guns, respect, jail and death." AfroReggae is trying to provide young people with an alternative path of which they can feel proud.

In describing the history of the drugs factions (the oldest has its roots in the resistance to Brazil's military dictatorship in the 1970s), Neate and Platt recount some outrageous stories: that of a 20-year war sparked when the goalie of a football team was shot dead as he dived to make the final save of a penalty shoot-out; that of a trafficker who quartered his girlfriend after dreaming she had slept with another man; and that of Junior, who abandoned his days as a Batman impersonator when one of the children he was entertaining pulled a loaded gun with the intention of seeing just how bulletproof the Caped Crusader actually was.

The authors also examine police corruption, pointing out that most military police are black favela residents who are paid a subsistence wage and forced to conceal their occupation or risk being murdered. Most interestingly, they touch on a persistent conundrum in Brazil's drug trade - that for all the attention they generate, the favela factions are not responsible for the transit of cocaine into or out of Brazil. Who is moving the big consignments? No answers are given, but the evidence certainly doesn't point to people from the slums.

In documenting the rise of a unique NGO, Neate and Platt provide the best and most accessible account of life in Rio's favelas. And for once, it isn't all bad news.

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