Diksha Sundriyal
Netflix’s ‘Outlaw’ (aka ‘Bandida: A Número Um’) tells the story of the rise and fall of a female drug kingpin in Rio de Janeiro’s favela, Rocinha. The Brazilian drama adapts Raquel De Oliveira’s book, which fictionalizes the aspects of her own life, to give us a riveting drama about Rebeca, who goes through a tumultuous journey that ends just as explosively as it begins. Narrated by the protagonist, the story takes us to her turbulent childhood, where she is sold by her gambling-addict grandmother to a local mafioso named Amoroso.
While most girls in his clutches are doomed to a life of sexual abuse, fate has something different in store for Rebeca. As she starts telling us about each twist and turn in her story, she also makes it clear that narration is her attempt to send the story out into the world because she faces certain death. She seems to have made peace with her impending doom, but does death really come for her?
Rebeca Exacts Revenge Before Submitting to Her Fate
Rebeca’s fate changed the first time when she was taken away by Amoroso and was saved by a spiritual woman who told the gangster that Rebeca was destined for greater things. The second time things changed for her radically was when she fell in love with Para, who later killed Amoroso. Even though she had been a close associate of Amoroso, she survives the downfall of his criminal empire and rises to the ranks of another to such a level that she ends up at the top. The fall comes again when Para makes some foolish moves and is betrayed by Vulture, who collaborates with the local police to have Para removed from the picture so that he can be the boss this time.
When Para is killed, Rebeca decides to exact revenge. She gets backing from Del Rey, the mafia boss who had been successfully running things from prison until Para messed it all up. Del Rey has faith in Rebeca and proves him right by getting their gang back in the cocaine business, essentially stealing all the clients from Vulture’s gang. She also knows that this will enrage the enemy, and he will try to attack her, so she is ready when he comes into her territory, guns blazing, only to be at the receiving end of the bullet. But this is not victory, and Rebeca knows it.
While she has had her revenge by killing the man responsible for her lover’s death, Rebeca knows that Vulture and his gang had made a pact with the corrupt local police. The cops were given their share of things to look the other way so Vulture’s gang could do their own thing. So, when Rebeca wiped away Vulture’s gang, the cops were threatened and decided to remove Rebeca from the equation. While she may have outsmarted the rival gang, she doesn’t have the resources to fight the police, which is why she surrenders to her fate, records her life story on a tape, and walks into the gunfire. She is shot in the chest, but before she can bleed to death, an old associate shows up, throws her in the back of the car, and drives away to safety.
Rebeca’s Track Record for Survival Works in Her Favor
For all intents and purposes, Rebeca believes she is not going to survive the fight with the cops. She is smart enough to know when she is involved in a losing battle, which is what prompts her to get her side of the story recorded on tape so that someday when someone finds it, they will know who she really was and what happened to her. She will not be reduced to the image that the authorities create of her for the world to see. Or at least, that is the thought behind it all.
While considering the bullet wound and the fact that the cops will not stop hunting for her, Rebeca’s chances of surviving this ordeal seem pretty low. However, considering that she has been in quite a lot of life-threatening situations before and has often been the only one to survive shows that her chances are much better than she imagines. One of the things that emphasises this theory is her meeting with the spiritual woman when she was still a child.
After she is taken away by Amoroso, who would have made her his sex slave or thrown her into involuntary sex work, Rebeca tries to run away from her captors and ends up in the hut of a woman who tells her that she is no ordinary child. The woman goes forward to tell the same thing to Amoroso, telling him that Rebeca is a form of their goddess, Oxum Apara, and to abuse her would be to abuse the goddess herself. She tells Amoroso that no one can touch her, and the gangster listens to her. Instead of treating her like other girls in his captivity, he sends Rebeca to school and has her involved in his business.
Things Don’t Tend to End Well for Rebeca’s Enemies
One thing to note here is that things go rather well for Amoroso as long as he treats Rebeca well. When she grows older and falls in love with Para, Amoroso tries to control her again by trying to forcefully wed her to a man of his choice. This man tries to rape Rebeca, and though she gets out of it by shooting him, the night coincides with Amoroso’s end. Was it a coincidence that the day Rebeca was touched badly, things immediately ended for Amoroso?
Following this, there are several times when Rebeca finds herself on the brink of death. She survives several shootouts and drug binges that would have surely killed anyone else. But each time, she comes out of these situations stronger. This convinces us that in the end, when she is shot and is being driven away in a car, she is yet to meet her end. She should have died in that shootout, and she knew as much. She was so sure that it was going to happen that she accepted her fate, so when rescue arrives out of the blue, even she is shocked by the sudden turn of events. This isn’t something she had factored in while considering the fallout of the shootout, which shows that perhaps she underestimated her luck.
What makes things more interesting here is that the real-life counterpart of Rebeca also survived her life in a drug mafia. Raquel De Oliveira had a similar journey to Rebeca’s. Interestingly, she wasn’t forced out of it but retired from the profession and cleaned herself up before writing a bestseller book about her experiences. Because Rebeca is based on her, it makes sense that she also survives the events and, instead of going back to the life of crime, decides to walk away from it and start anew somewhere else.
Read More: Outlaw True Story: Is Rebeca Based on a Real Outlaw?
