L uis Gustavo started life like many others in Rio de Janeiro's notoriously violent shantytowns: He spent his early years trying to navigate the gun battles between police and drug traffickers or among rival gangs.

Because he was young, black and from the Vigario Geral slum, generally considered the worst of a bad lot, Gustavo said he was frequently arrested and beaten by the police who simply assumed he was a drug dealer.

As he entered his teens, scared, angry and desperate, he knew he had to choose sides in the war of survival. He wound up in a US$1,000-a-week (HK$7,800) job managing illegal drug sales.

"So many people were dying," Gustavo said. "I was disgusted by the violence we lived with daily, by the lack of opportunity for people like me. I couldn't see what else I could do but sell drugs."

That was before he found music. Nine years ago, AfroReggae, a slum- based cultural group with the aim of giving young people an alternative to crime, drew Gustavo away from the drug gangs. Now, one of two lead singers for the group's main band, he makes his living traveling the world, playing venues such as Carnegie Hall in New York.

The band will be opening for the Rolling Stones in Rio early next year and then flying to London a month later to play at the Barbican in London. Their second CD will be released by Universal next month.

A film about AfroReggae, Favela Rising, is winning festival prizes across the United States. Two others are slated for release shortly.

"Any one manner of describing AfroReggae would be incomplete," said Gilberto Gil, Brazil's minister of culture and also one of the country's most prominent singers. "The only way to truly experience them is to see them in action."

Gustavo, now 26, has already far exceeded the average life expectancy of a young black man born in a favela, as Brazil's slums are known in Portuguese. Endemic violence means that barely one in three people reaches the age of 19. Roving bands of drug traffickers, many of them teenagers, patrol the teeming streets armed with Uzis, AK-47s and hand grenades.

"The slum communities in Rio live with the constant battles between drug traffickers and the police," said Hermano Vianna, one of Brazil's foremost music commentators and the author of two books on the subject. "AfroReggae shows that another reality is possible, that art can be a path to peace."

In 1993, when police gunned down 21 bystanders in Vigario Geral in retaliation for the death of four police officers during a drug battle, the killings made headlines worldwide. Closely following the slaying by off-duty police officers of eight street children sleeping on the steps of a church in downtown Rio, the incidents shocked the country and earned the favelas a fearsome reputation.

More than 10 years later, Amnesty International and other human rights groups say the situation has not improved and hundreds of civilians die in slum violence every year.

At the time of the 1993 killings, Jose de Oliveira and two friends, all of them products of Rio's shantytowns, decided they'd had enough. The result was AfroReggae.

Vigario Geral, Oliveira said, had been abandoned by the local government and everyone else, in part because of a feud between rival drug gangs that has gone on for 22 years, making it the longest and deadliest of the many conflicts in the city.

"No one was doing any sort of social work there when we went in," he said. "People in Rio only heard about the slum in the crime pages of the newspapers. We decided we wanted it instead in the culture sections."

AfroReggae Cultural Group grew from a news-sheet that ran stories on about-town party happenings. It became a mouthpiece for public disgust and a rallying cry for the people of Vigario Geral.

From there, Oliveira and AfroReggae created community programs as an alternative to drug peddling. Soon, they offered workshops in music, dance and circus performance.

The non-governmental outfit now boasts an impressive 60 social projects in five Rio shantytowns. That includes nine music groups, two circus troupes and a dance ensemble, childcare and health awareness programs.

Funding comes from the local government and private US groups such as the Ford and Kellogg Foundations.

About 2,000 children and adolescents have passed through AfroReggae, Oliveira said. Currently, about 500 children spend their afternoons making music, perfecting circus tricks, or diving into other projects.

The goal of AfroReggae is to be self- sustaining, Oliveira said. The main band, also known simply as AfroReggae, has toured abroad to great acclaim several times, playing in France, Germany, Holland, Italy, the UK and Portugal, in addition to New York. Sales from the first CD, Nova Cara, have been strong.

The band's lyrics tell of the musicians' reality, of the lives of slum dwellers. They speak of violence and denounce drug crime and the divisions between rich and poor; they plead for hope and survival.

The opening track on Nova Cara is unflinching: "August 29, 1993, 21 people murdered by the hatred and brutality of vindictive police officers" is a translation of the opening line of Som de VG.

The band's performances involve a fusion of exuberant percussion, electric guitar, keyboards, vocals and dance, as well as the Brazilian martial art known as capoeira.

The music itself mixes samba melodies with the forro music peculiar to northeastern Brazil and reggae tunes. Rap and funk are added to create an explosive act that includes synchronized moves from capoeira, sensual samba and hip-hop.

The band dons masks occasionally to emphasize the lyrics' social commentary.

"When you walk through Rio's slums, you hear different styles of music all at the same time," Vianna said. "AfroReggae's music is a product of this experience. It's a fusion of many styles that represents the musical life of the Rio shantytowns."

Several band members besides Gustavo are former drug dealers who have used AfroReggae to help them navigate away from crime. For others, AfroReggae came along in time, providing training at a critical juncture.

"Our programs can help transform the communities and the lives of their people," Oliveira said.

"The sound you heard in the favelas before was guns. Now you hear music."

One recent morning, a tense stroll through Vigario Geral with an AfroReggae chaperone brought a visitor past bare-chested pre-teens clutching fearsome looking machine guns as they watched the main entrance to the favela, a narrow bridge that curved across a highway. Other boys slouched nearby, their hands tucked firmly in their pockets, guns at the ready, eyes wary.

Two youngsters, all of nine years old, were playing playing on a concrete football pitch near the entrance, flying kites high above the community. Even this was not innocent. Drug traffickers use the young boys and their kites to warn of police or rival gang incursions. Kite- flying is considered an entry-level job in the drug trade for the children in a favela.

Residents, seemingly inured to the drug trade that has a stranglehold on their neighborhood, strolled calmly through the cramped and winding streets, hemmed in by hastily thrown- together homes of hollow brick and cement.

One of the few signs of hope in this grey and fearful slum world are the AfroReggae logos and graffiti that adorn walls throughout the shantytown, showing children holding microphones instead of weapons.

On the second floor of a small building deep inside the favela, children and parents gathered to hear a rehearsal of one of AfroReggae's sub-bands, known as AfroLata, or AfroRubbish.

The group, as the name suggests, uses drums and other instruments made out of found materials. They take the floor with breathtaking energy, joyous dance steps and a driving samba beat that must have been heard throughout the favela.

"We're building self-esteem and helping people see they have options," said favela resident Vitor Onofre, who runs AfroReggae projects in Vigario Geral. "There's a huge difference in the community as a whole.

"They're proud of what we've accomplished."

Part of the problem is that Brazil, the world's eighth-largest economy, also ranks among the most unequal in terms of distribution of wealth, coming second only to South Africa. One-fifth of its 173 million people account for only 2.2 percent of national income and according to the World Bank, more than one-quarter of the population live on less than US$2 a day.

Estimates are that 30 million children live in subhuman conditions.

Favelas cluster around Rio's periphery and scramble up the steep hillsides above wealthy neighborhoods that sit crab-like along the beaches. The slums have ballooned in recent years with the massive migration of rural people to urban centers in search of work. The government estimates that 82 percent of Brazilians now live in urban areas. The global average stands at around 50 percent.

In Rio alone, as much as one-third of the population, or 1.4 million people, inhabit shantytowns, which don't even appear on maps. They just sprawl across areas considered uninhabitable by the government.

These are the kingdoms of the drug traffickers who treat them as fiefdoms and run most aspects of slum life. Brazil has one of the world's highest murder rates, mainly due to drug-related violence.

The slums have become such dangerous places that local authorities and police are often afraid to enter them, allowing lawlessness to grow worse.

But despite AfroReggae's message that the drug trade is bad for Rio's favelas, Oliveira insisted the group maintains cordial relations with traffickers. Many have sent their own children to participate in AfroReggae programs.

"Between us there's very little difference," he explained. "They identify with what we're saying and they respect us. They don't want this awful life for their children."

Against all odds, those lucky enough to fall in with AfroReggae, it seems, can escape. For Gustavo and others, the benefits have not only meant jobs, clothes, food and housing, but a sense of self-esteem.

"We are young, black people from the favela who made it," Gustavo said.

For more information about AfroReggae: www.afroreggae.org/