Salvador: The city where children fend for themselves on the streets

In 1937, Jorge Amado published Captains of the Sands, a novel about a gang of orphaned children living on the streets of Salvador, north-east Brazil. Eighty years on, little has changed - thousands of children and adolescents still roam the city and sleep rough. David Baker hears some of their stories.

Zeca (not his real name) isn't proud of his past. A tall, skinny, slightly shy black teenager, he mumbles and looks down at his feet when he speaks about the years he spent living on the streets of Salvador.

He's 17, though he has the weary, cracked voice of an old man who has seen too much of life, and he talks about his time in the city's drugs gangs with regret.

"I found many types of job [with the gangs]", he says, "trafficking, packing, stealing…" And then, after a long pause, he adds: "killing."

He won't be drawn on the details but he says gang life was a case of kill or be killed.

I have come to Salvador to meet people like Zeca because of a book published here 80 years ago that became a classic of Brazilian literature.

Jorge Amado's Captains of the Sands tells the story of a gang of orphaned children and adolescents living in an abandoned warehouse in Salvador's docks area who live by begging, stealing and hustling.

"Dressed in rags, dirty, half-starved, aggressive, cursing, and smoking cigarette butts, they were, in truth, the masters of the city," Amado wrote.

He wanted to show the freedom and fun these children could have looking after each other and having adventures through the city's streets.

But he also wanted to show the misery of their lives and to shame Brazil into doing something about the thousands of homeless children in the country that richer Brazilians at the time viewed as little more than pests.

That was then, but there are still gangs of children, like the Captains of the Sands, living on the city's streets.

I met Zeca in a government-run shelter that takes children and adolescents off Salvador's streets and helps them reintegrate into mainstream life.

Like him, many come from broken homes. And, almost the moment they arrive on the streets, they run the risk of being picked up by one of the many drugs gangs that run great swathes of this, Brazil's third-largest, city.