They start talking about the de Menezes boy 20 miles outside his home town. “Are you going to Gonzaga because of Jean Charles?” asks Terezinha Consuelita de Figueiredo, 26, a waitress in a dusty bakery on the empty highway. “He’s famous around here.” The young Brazilian, shot seven times at Stockwell Tube station two weeks after the July 7 bombings in 2005 by police who mistakenly believed that he was a terrorist, is the only reason foreigners visit this backwoods part of the Brazilian interior.

On Monday, more than three years after his killing, his inquest begins in London. But in his home town of Gonzaga, in the mountainous state of Minas Gerais, his memory is as vivid as ever.

A sign welcomes drivers into town. “Here we prize life,” it reads. “Land of Jean Charles. Victim of terrorism in London. 22/07/05.” In July Gonzaga was covered in white flowers to commemorate the anniversary of his death. A film is planned about his life.

The popular, friendly, 27-year-old electrician has become more famous in death than he could ever have imagined. The sleepy community of 5,000-odd inhabitants, where everybody knows everybody else, still cannot understand the death of one of its favourite sons. Police shootings happen in dangerous cities such as Rio de Janeiro, not in London — the city Jean Charles told his mother was safe and clean and where the police, he told her, were polite and respectful and did not even carry guns.

For locals, friends and relatives, rightly or wrongly, the key issue in the inquest seems to be about compensation for the family. His parents live on a basic pension of £240 a month between them, plus what they grow on their smallholding. Jean Charles was their main breadwinner.

In the sparse back office of his pharmacy, Walter Antero de Souza, 57, a cousin, opens out his hands. “Life has stopped, waiting for the decision of the judges. Physically, psychologically and financially, it’s affected them hugely. If you look in the eyes of his family, you can see,” he says. “It is a poor family and the Government there [in Britain] needs to find a solution.”

The town’s mayor, Julio Maria de Sousa, 46, is angry that it has taken three years for the inquest to begin. “It is absurd. It is a failure of humanity, of respect,” he says. “It is an injustice, this delay of the British Government.”

His secretary, Leide Menezes Figueiredo, 20, is another Menezes cousin. Her sister, Vivian, lived with Jean Charles in Tulse Hill. “I don’t believe the English system will do the right thing,” she says. “But I hope they show how they got it wrong — how it was a fatal error.”

Her cynicism is understandable in a country where police are rarely held to account. In Rio de Janeiro alone 694 people were killed by police in the first six months of last year. Human Rights Watch describes police violence as one of the country’s “most intractable human rights problems”, adding that “abusive police officers are rarely sanctioned”.

On the porch of his house on the edge of town, Jean Charles’s elder brother Giovani de Menezes, 36, keeps seven tiny birds in cages that swing from the veranda, and shouts greetings to neighbours wandering down the nearby dirt track. “Everybody knows our family here,” he says.

After his brother’s death he moved his wife and three children back from São Paulo, where he had worked in a bank for 15 years, to take care of his ageing parents. Now he is unemployed. “I believe everything is going to come out,” he says of the inquest. “I hope that justice is done.”

Giovani takes me to his parents’ smallholding — eight miles of steep, winding dirt tracks out of town, in what Brazilians call the roça — the outback. In the farmhouse his mother, Maria Otone de Menezes, 63, bustles around the immaculately clean kitchen, chasing chicks back out into the yard, serving hot sweet coffee and the rich, salty cheese they make themselves though the dry winter means the cattle they rear have not produced much milk recently.

As the family talk about the case, it is clear that the hurt and anger are as raw as ever. His mother keeps asking the same questions — ones she now hopes the police will answer: why didn’t they arrest Jean Charles? Or handcuff him? Why did they shoot her son?

“Nothing can cover the loss of this boy,” she says.

His father, Matosinhos, 69, is frustrated at the delay. “It’s already been three years, and it still isn’t resolved,” he says. However, he says that the family still believe in the British justice system. Although he will not be going to London, Jean Charles’s mother and brother Giovani will attend some of the proceedings.

In the Gonzaga region, where work for more than minimal wages is impossible to come by, up to 25 per cent of young adults are estimated to be working abroad. “Life out here in the roça is complicated, it’s not a game,” says Giovani. That was why Jean Charles went to England. His father, Matosinho, says: “It was his dream to go and work in London . . . because the salary is much better than here. To buy a farm, a nice car, to work for six, seven years and come back here.”

At the petrol station in nearby Sardoa, Arielino Ribeiro, 27, smiles as he remembers his friend Jean Charles. “He had a lot of friends,” he says. “He liked London. He had a nice job. He had good pay.”

Arielino spent 4½ years working 100 hours a week in a Dunkin’ Donuts in Connecticut. The he returned home, opened this petrol station and married his childhood sweetheart, Lilian.

He still works long hours, but is happy — his dream came true.

Jean Charles de Menezes was not so lucky.

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