Rio: fighting for the favelas - IRIN

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Chapter 6 human insecurity rio: fighting for the favelas “The Brazilian government has made a big effort to say that Rio is a place of beaches, beautiful bottoms [and] physical beauty… [But] there are areas in Rio de Janeiro that are veritable war zones,” says Andre Dahmer, one of the creators of a new website called Rio Body Count. “I’m really scared of dying but what can I do?” one teenage drug trafficker, and father of one, asked recently during a visit to the Fumace favela in Realengo, on the western outskirts of Rio. “We’re not here because we like it. We’re here because we have families… I have a small child and there is no other work.” “When I arrived home they told me my wife was in the hospital and that she’d been shot while she sat in our bedroom,” said Ricardo Alexandre Santino da Silva, a 31-year-old supermarket worker and resident of the Chatuba slum in Rio de Janeiro. Like many residents of the shantytown, da Silva is an immigrant from Brazil’s impoverished northeast who came to Rio in search of work. The huge influx of migrants from other Brazilian states, principally since the 1950s, has contributed to a massive social and security crisis. “I remember the first night when we moved here [to Rio]. I sat at home watching the tracer bullets flying through the sky,” said da Silva, who was brought up in the rural town of Valenca, Pernambuco State. “I said, ‘Look, these bullets must be hitting someone’s house.’ I just never thought it would be mine.” The ‘favelas’, or shantytowns, of Rio de Janeiro began to spring up towards the end of the nineteenth century. Following the abolition of slavery in 1888, freed slaves began flocking to Brazil’s then-capital in search of work. They set up home in poorly constructed slums built on the only land that was available, usually hilltops or swamps on the city’s limits. It was not until the mid-1990s that the favelas were included on city maps. For the city’s wealthier inhabitants, the slums have long represented an abomination, a refuge for what Rio anthropologist Alba Zaluar calls the ’classes perigosas’ or dangerous classes. 1 Over the last r i o : f i g h t i n g f o r t h e f a v e l a s 57
century, governments have made numerous attempts to eradicate this “stain” from Rio’s landscape, including removal programmes and the construction of housing projects on the city’s outskirts. As yet, however, no adequate solution has been found for Rio’s slum problem, or indeed that of other large Brazilian cities such as Sao Paulo, Belo Horizonte, Recife or Belem. By 2001, according to that year’s census, more than one million Brazilians were living in Rio’s cramped favelas – or about 20 percent of the population. 2 ‘comunas’ have suffered a similar process to Rio’s favelas, with the problems associated with urbanisation bolstering the ranks of the ‘pandillo’ gangs, made up of disillusioned young men. In Africa, too, the impact of urbanisation on security levels has been dramatic. A recent police crackdown on gang activity in Nairobi, Kenya’s Mathare slum, in which at least 30 people were killed, underlined the problems the East African city is facing, many of which directly stem from issues of overcrowding and urbanisation. Overpopulation, the direct result of a 40-year trend of urbanisation and high birth rates, has caused an unprecedented social crisis affecting education, public health and public security. During the 1950s Brazil underwent a massive industrialisation drive under then-president Juscelino Kubitschek. The rate of urbanisation rocketed, as thousands flocked from rural Brazil into the cities. According to the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), Brazil was still a predominantly rural country until the 1960s. Since then the rate of urbanisation has climbed from 44.7 percent (1960) to 67.6 percent (1980). Between 1991 and 1996, more than 12 million Brazilians moved from rural to urban Brazil. 3 According to the IBGE’s 2000 census, over 80 percent of the population now live in urban Brazil. The Brazilian sociologist and former Rio security secretary Luiz Eduardo Soares traces a clear path between the process of urbanisation and the explosion of urban violence in Brazil’s southern metropolises. “In less than two decades [1960-1980] a country that had 70% of its population in rural areas, transferred itself, en masse, to the cities in a chaotic way and in extreme conditions of deprivation, exploitation and poverty,” he writes. 4 The result, Soares continues, was “social, economic, political and cultural crisis.” Across South America, perhaps most notably in Colombia, a similar situation is playing itself out. In Colombia thousands of displaced internal migrants – the ‘desplazados’ – and rural families have been forced into slum dwellings, compounding the urban crisis. Colombia’s The search for a better life The story of Ricardo da Silva, originally from the impoverished northeastern state of Pernambuco, is typical of this process. In Pernambuco, da Silva worked as a farm hand. In search of money, he came to Rio in 1992 and he found work in the Mundial supermarket chain. Like many others he moved into a small concrete shack in the Chatuba favela on the northern outskirts of the city, the only affordable accommodation he could find. In doing so he placed himself at the sharp end of Rio’s problem with urban violence. The sheer scale and chaotic construction of the favelas, which became home to hundreds of thousands of migrants, made them the ideal milieu for drug gangs to hide from the police and set up initially paternalistic, de-facto governments, albeit without any concrete political aims. Since the 1960s hundreds of thousands of Brazilians have made similar journeys south, to the peripheries of Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Today several bus companies offer special routes, which directly link small northeastern towns to the favelas of Rio. The continued arrival of so many internal migrants can be explained by the desperate conditions in Brazil’s barren, drought-ravaged northeast. The Complexo do Alemao is one of the most deprived and underdeveloped corners of Rio de Janeiro. According to statistics put together by Rio’s town hall, residents of the shantytown live, on average, 13 years less than people born in the 58 r i o : f i g h t i n g f o r t h e f a v e l a s
Page 1: In Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, more tha
Page 5 and 6: Denise Alves Tavares shows a photo
Page 7 and 8: Haitian children play on the remain
Page 10: Perpetrators and victims - and grie

Rio: fighting for the favelas - IRIN

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