Rio: fighting for the favelas - IRIN

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