Luiza, 15, was still playing with dolls in the narrow space of the two-room shack where she lived with her grandmother on the outskirts of Fortaleza. But instead of being among the debutantes of the year, she made another perversive list: decreed girls - girls who are put on a hit list by a criminal faction.
She was taken from her home, tortured for hours, and shot seven times. The granddaughter is the fourth person murdered in the family of Neide, 70. "She was a child, but she had friendships that are useless," said the slight grandmother, who only sees through one eye and has few teeth in her mouth.
The circumstances of her death are still unclear. According to the matriarch, it was a colleague who turned the girl over to the criminal group that controls the neighborhood, to overcome the accusation that she was an informant to the rival faction.
Luiza's story is not an isolated case. But it is part of a series of murders that ignited an alarm in Ceará: criminal factions are killing girls over local rivalries between the groups. Their murders are then exposed on social media, escalating the cruelty.
Although the risk of a male adolescent dying of homicide is still much higher, the deaths of young girls jumped from 2% to 14% of the total for this group in two years.
There were 114 girls aged 10-19 years murdered in the state in 2018, a 43% increase over the previous year. If the comparison is with 2016, when there were 27 murders, the variation is 322%. The numbers go against the reduction of homicides in general and boys in the state.
The data are from the Cearense Committee for the Prevention of Homicide in Adolescence, created by the Legislative Assembly to propose ways to increase violence in this age group.
Translated by Kiratiana Freelon