Untitled - Rebel Studies Library

108 PLANET OF SLUMS
renaming, rebuilding, and relocating of familiar landmarks and the
heavy presence of the army and weaponry, the military council
imposes a new spatial configuration on Rangoon ... suppressIng
potential democratic neighborhoods, demolishing the inner city, and
creating new urban centers that immortalize the principle of authoritarianism."
In place of traditional neighborhoods and historic
buildings, laundered drug money finances glass-and-concrete highrises
("narco-architecture"), hard-currency tourist hotels, and garish pagoda
complexes. Rangoon has become a nightmare combination of a
"Buddhist tourist wonderland," a giant barracks, and a graveyard: it is
"a landscape glorifying the control and authoritarian vision of its
leaders."44
Criminalizing the Slum
The urban cleansing strategy of the Burmese generals, of course, has
sinister precedents in the Western hemisphere. In the 1960s and 1970s,
for example, the Southern Cone military dictatorships declared war on
Javelas and campamientos which they perceived to be potential centers of
resistance, or simply obstacles to urban bourgeoisification. Thus,
writing about Brazil after 1964, Suzan a Taschner says: "the beginning
of the military period was characterized by an authoritarian attitude,
removing squatter settlements compulsorily and with the aid of the
public security forces." Evoking the threat of a tiny urban Joco of
Marxist guerrillas, the military razed 80 Jave/as and evicted almost
140,000 poor people from the hills overlooking Rio.45 With financial
support from USAID, other Jave/as were later demolished to clear the
way for industrial expansion or to "beautify" the borders of upperincome
areas. Although the authorities failed in their goal of
eliminating all "slums within Rio within a decade," the dictatorship
ignited conflicts between bourgeois neighborhoods and the Javelas, and
between the police and slum youth, which continue to rage three
decades later.46
44 Skidmore, Karaoke Fascism, pp. 84-85, 89, 159-60.
45 Taschner, "Squatter Settlements and Slums in Brazil," p. 205.
46 Michael Barke, Tony Escasany and Greg O'Hare, "Samba: A Metaphor for
Rio's Favelas," Cities 18:4 (2001), p. 263.
HAUSSMANN IN THE TROPICS 109
Meanwhile, in Santiago in 1973, one of the first acts of the
Pinochet dictatorship - after murdering the leadership of the popular
Left - was to reestablish middle-class hegemony in the central city by
expelling squatters (some 35,000 families) from the shanty poblaci6nes
and callampas that the Allende government had tolerated.47 "The
openly stated objective," says community-organization researcher
Hans Harms, "was to create 'homogeneous socio-economic areas in
the city.' ... A climate of isolation and fear was created with the disbanding
of all neighbourhood organizations under 30 years of
Pinochet's military dictatorship."48 Following a revival of political
activism in 1984, the regime again unleashed the wrecking crews
against the pob/adores in another round of "eradications"; the cumulative
result, as Cathy Schneider explains in her important history of
neighborhood resistance to the dictatorship, was to force evictees and
young families to double up with friends or relatives. "The percentage
of families living as allegados (with more than three persons per
bedroom) grew from 25 percent in 1965 to 41 percent in 1985." 49
A counterinsurgency-driven strategy of slum removal was first
adopted in Argentina during the military junta of 1967-70. As Cecilia
Zanetta has emphasized, the government's "Plan de Erradicacion de
Villas de Emergencia" was targeted specifically at radicalized selfgovernment
in the shantytowns, and the evictees were forced to
undergo a phase of "social adjustment" before being resettled in the
periphery. However, this first military attempt to roll back informal settlement
was only partly successful, and with the restoration of civilian
rule in the early 1970s, the slums again became hotbeds of radical
Peronist and socialist agitation. When the generals came back into
power in March 1976, they were determined to destroy the villas miseri.as
once and for all; during the terrible years of el Promo, rent control was
repealed, 94 percent of the "illegal" settlements in Gran Buenos Aires
were razed, and 270,000 poor people were rendered homeless. Rankand-file
organizers, including lay Catholics as well as leftists, were
systematically "disappeared." As in Chile, the liquidation of slum-based
47 Alfredo Rodriguez and Ana Maria Icaza, "Chile," in Azuela, Duhau, and Ortiz,
Evictions and the Rightto Housing, p. 51.
48 Harms, "To Live in the City Centre," p. 198.
49 Cathy Schneider, Shantytown Protest in Pinochet Chile, Philadelphia 1995, p. 101.