I Was Sold to a Brothel As a Child - Confessions of Brazil's Most Notorius Female Drug Cartel Boss

She was sold to a brothel by her grandmother as a young girl, given her first gun at age 11 and murdered a man in cold blood by the time she was 15. Meet the woman who used to run one of the most powerful drug cartels in Brazil.

Raquel de Oliveira

Her name is Raquel de Oliveira and she managed to rise through the ranks to the top to run a bloodthirsty cocaine cartel in one of Brazil's toughest favelas where she buried enemies alive and shot dead rival gang members on her turf.

Raquel is now living a changed life but she is trying to tell the world her story.

In a new book, called "A Número Um (Number One)," which charts her life in the run down, crime-ridden Rocinha favela, she describes the brutal realities of a world, and events, which many struggle to believe could ever happen.

In the book, she reveals how the man, who she was meant to buy drugs from, ended up 'lying on the sofa with multiple stab wounds to his body'.  She shot him after he tried to rape her.

'He thought giving me marijuana would get me high and then he could do things with me,' she told Mail Online 'To kill a man aged 15 meant nothing. The guy wanted to rape me.'

A young Raquel

It would be another 10 years before the next man to change the course of her life would appear, in the form of Ednaldo de Souza, or 'Naldo', who worked beneath Denis of Rocinha, the boss of the whole favela

Raquel started dating him aged 25, when she was already a mother-of-two.

He was, it seems, the love of her life. Her one regret of all the things which she has done and seen in her life, is not dying alongside him when Naldo was killed in a gun battle with police three years later. 

Instead, she kept a bullet to take her own life if she ever came close to being arrested. That evening she fled the favela. When she returned, she was determined to restart her beloved Naldo's operation.

The body of Naldo after he was killed

She said: 'After I returned, then I set up a place to package it with some people who offered to help. At first, I went to the street to sell it myself. I sorted a place free from police, because the favela was full of officers.

It exploded. It was incredible. And I had these rules: no one could smoke nearby, no one could work high, no more than two people at a time and no way were any children allowed. I had an enormous list of things you couldn't do.'

From four people, Raquel's gang grew to six, then 10 and finally 19 traffickers were working under her. It was then that she herself turned to cocaine to survive working non-stop from Monday to Friday.

'I spent all day and all night creating strategies to not spin or lose anything. Wrapping, selling, wrapping, selling: that was it. Drug trafficking enslaves a person's life. It's like working in a hotel or hairdressers.

Your life is work. This was the routine, right? Doing the rounds at night, putting people to work, equipping weapons, cleaning the guns. Cocaine also helped with my libido. I had a few little affairs. It was interesting,' she smiled. 

But there were responsibilities, and in the favelas, it was the drug traffickers who maintained their own type of law and order, ruling through violence.

Naldo's funeral

Drug lords were both feared and respected, and footage from the time shows how hundreds turned out to mourn those killed in confrontations with police.

'Drug trafficking is made of death, of blood. Traffickers were seen as heroes of the community, those who resolved everything. From the pipe a neighbour put on his wall to cases of death, rape, violence with a minor. There was a lot of this. So, I had to keep standards.'

Raquel knew her so-called responsibilities: in one case, she ordered three boys to be buried alive as punishment for stealing car stereos within the favela.

'I ordered them to dig the hole and bury the guys alive. And one of them, who I liked a lot, I left him with his head uncovered. His aunt came to appeal for him. I ended up letting him go.

A little later, he carried on stealing; he robbed in the upper part of the favela and died with a blast on his back. He was on a bike. He and another died on the main road.'

But now, all that remains of her career as a cocaine boss is her memories and her addiction: she said she spent almost everything on her own drug habit.

Raquel as the young and tough drug dealer

She sold her four properties and her jewellery, and even carried out a robbery to blow $500 on cocaine.

'Everything I earned, I lost. My son's father taught me to drink and so I also became an alcoholic, and I taught him to use cocaine. We created a couple of monsters. I snorted through everything, and it was hell. And today, I just have enough to live off.'

Raquel's story is an amazing tale, but the recovering drug addict's story would have disappeared into the crowded streets of Rio's favelas were it not for Flupp, the International Literary Fair of the Periphery.

Julio Ludemir, organiser of Flupp, said Raquel's work was important for people to understand the reality of marginal communities like favelas.

He said subjects like drug trafficking, murder and crime were often dismissed as apologia when they are produced by the lower classes but were considered 'culture' when produced by the rich.