Dancing With the Devil in the City of God: Rio De Janeiro on the Brink

by Juliana Barbassa

  There was not an intact house left within view. Nearby, a line of men and women trudged uphill with their supplies in plastic sacks, heads bent earthward, without a glance for the soldier.

  I hiked miles each day, hoping to understand the extent of the destruction, but had seen only a few dozen slides. At the end of the week, when the rain eased into occasional showers, the mist lifted, and rescue personnel showed up in greater numbers, I begged a ride on a helicopter. Only then I did I understand the immensity of what had happened. There were thousands of shredded mountainsides. Rivers had changed course. Roads were destroyed, bridges washed out. Many of these slides were in isolated areas where families remained for days, rationing their food and praying for help.

  I probed those I interviewed for what I imagined was their shared indignation. Many of them had suffered losses I couldn’t fathom—their entire family, their home, their neighborhoods were gone. What I heard was bewildering: “We’re in the hands of God,” they said, shrugging, wrapping the handles of their wet plastic bags once more around their hands. “Deus dará.” God will provide.

  They talked about their dead with feeling, but my questions about expectations of help from the government were met with blank stares. I looked for revolt and found a forbearance I took for passivity.

  Only six months later, when I returned to the same neighborhoods and found everything virtually unchanged, the houses still ripped open, roads still obliterated, the mud now dried and cracking, and the mayors of the two most affected towns indicted for funneling away the recovery money, did I begin to grasp the reason for their equanimity.

  The people there had expected nothing, anticipated no help, and so were not disappointed when it didn’t come. They did what they could for their own and for their neighbors. Just as they’d rescued themselves, they now chipped away with pickaxes and shovels at the mud that held fast like cement, unearthing what was left of their homes one wheelbarrow at a time.

  Two years later, I visited again. None of the five thousand homes promised by the state’s governor and financed with federal money had been built. This was bewildering to me, but the residents shrugged it off. They had no time or energy to waste clamoring for help that wouldn’t come, at least not in this lifetime. They saved themselves. What they couldn’t do, “Deus dará.”

  I spent six days in Teresópolis during the rains. After the first day and a half, Rodrigues, the cameraman, and the photographer had taken off for the neighboring town, Nova Friburgo. Its downtown had been washed out. They’d left me with Bira, the driver who’d helped me during the Alemão siege.

  He was as broad and deep as a chest of drawers, raised in the working-class suburbs of Rio, evangelical, married with children. Their photos were framed next to the steering wheel. While I did my work he sat in the car, smoking. We didn’t talk about much other than logistics. That’s what we were doing late one evening at our hotel when he asked, between bites of a soggy white bread and ham sandwich, why I’d never married. I ignored the question and turned to the TV. I was too tired for a line of questioning I’d heard too often since my return. He pressed on: Did I have a boyfriend? Cleaned up, I’d look okay, he offered.

  I nodded and took another swig of Johnnie Walker, the hotel bar’s only offering other than a fiery cachaça. I saw myself through his eyes: disheveled, dirty, unmarried, so different from the women he knew. He meant well, but the last few days, and for that matter, the months since I’d returned to Brazil, had been bewildering enough without a reminder of how little I fit in. I knocked off the whiskey and went to my room.

  We left for Rio the following afternoon. The hour-and-a-half ride back to my apartment was silent. As he dropped me off, he looked for something to say: “Do something to your hair. You’ll feel better.”

  I ran the two floors up to my apartment, still in the muddy jeans, socks, and shoes I’d worn all week. It all reeked of death. Each morning in the mountains I had pulled these things on and tried not to think of all that was embedded in that dirt. As soon as I walked through my door I tore these off, stuffed them in a plastic bag, and tossed them down the trash chute. I wanted to leave that behind, clean myself, scrub off the grit under my nails, and wash the stench that lingered in my nose and on my skin.

  I put on a bathing suit and ran to the beach, looking for the Rio fix: the sun-flecked sea, warm breeze against the skin. But the hour-and-a-half ride had not put enough distance between what I’d seen in the mountains and the sparkle of Ipanema on a hot summer day. The beach was packed. The golden light, the free-floating libido of Rio in the months between New Year’s and Carnaval, all those bodies so juicy with life—it all struck me as grotesque.

  I headed back to my still-empty apartment. Curled up on the camping pad that served as my bed, I shut out the brightness of Rio’s summer and let the events of the last few days swell and take over my thoughts. This was not my tragedy and the pain wasn’t mine to feel, but some of that suffering had made its way in, like the mud that had become embedded in my clothes, my shoes, under my nails. I carried scraps of lives with me, bits that never made it into articles: there was the family that had saved for years to build a house and then had died in it; there was the mother mourning her little girl who had been so smart, so good in school, there was the nephew who took me along as he looked for the bodies of his aunt and uncle in the ravine below where their house had stood. For the next few hours, I gave myself over to grieving for these people, these names and faces that I knew only briefly but whose stories were now meshed with my own.

  Felipe, the photographer, had stayed behind in the mountains, working in the town of Nova Friburgo in increasingly appalling conditions for nearly three weeks. Later he told me that he couldn’t wash the smell away. He took several showers, scrubbing himself, but couldn’t get rid of the stink of death. Eventually he realized it had permeated the hair on his body. He had to shave himself entirely to get rid of it.

  “It was fucked-up, man. Fucked-up,” he said, shaking his head.

  In a bizarre coda to that week, Bira, the taxi driver, suffered a freak accident after dropping me off. He’d stopped at a gas station to refuel. His cab ran on natural gas, as many in Rio do. Something went horribly wrong; the car exploded in flames. He’d been inside. The cab’s doors and windows locked automatically. Bira was strong enough to break the window on his side and hoist much of his torso out through it, but he was left with severe burns over much of his body. I learned about it at the office on Monday. We took up a collection to help his family.

  I went home reeling from the news. I’d been in Brazil for two months. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. My daydreams of return had been suffused with feelings of belonging, of being surrounded by people who looked like me, who spoke the language of my grandparents. I knew there would be surprises, but this homecoming was tougher than I’d anticipated.

  There was no welcoming glint of recognition in anyone’s eye, no identification of the latent Brazilian under the rather American way I carried myself. I walked too fast and asked direct questions. At parties, I found myself awkwardly inching back, trying to keep an arm’s length between myself and some Carioca who would inevitably step in to close the gap. Even the cadence of my speech alerted others that there was something off. I wasn’t from around these parts.

  Instead of letting me feel finally at home, life in Rio was a series of reminders of the strange, hybrid creature I’d become. I’d come to expect that moment when whoever I was talking to looked at me askance and asked, “Where are you really from?” Taxi drivers who picked up on my foreignness ran me in loops around town; waiters added surcharges to the bill. I’d never felt so out of place as in those first few months back “home.”

  One of the aspects of Rio that I found most difficult was the violence that permeates life. This could be the violence inherent to very unequal societies, reflected in the neglect of people and the environment I’d seen in the
mountains; or the overt aggression represented by the shoot-outs in the hills and the police patrol cars that rolled by, their windows spiked with nozzles of semi-automatics. Cariocas lived with this and carried on with a resilience and calm that eluded me.

  Nearly one thousand people died in the mountains around Teresópolis; more than two hundred were never found. Over the next few years I returned dozens of times and would always look for scars in the mountains’ great sloping shoulders. I’d fall into distraction and find my eyes combing the landscape for particularly steep gradients, clear-cut hillsides, or poorly anchored homes where the land would give if there were another sustained storm. I saw potential tragedy everywhere.

  I wasn’t entirely wrong. After the destruction, the media had pointed to existing surveys done in all three of the most heavily damaged towns that outlined the risks. The rainfall had been heavy and targeted: at the peak of the storm, as much water came down in one day as was expected in two weeks. But this is not unusual for a tropical summer. Massive storms do happen and could happen again. There were people living in danger all around the state. Everyone knew this.

  Little has changed since then. Data from Rio’s geological services released in September 2013 showed there were more than 207,000 people living in areas of risk in Rio de Janeiro State, nearly all of them in favelas. About 100,000 of them are in the capital, followed by the same outlying cities that were struck in 2011: Nova Friburgo, Teresópolis, and Petrópolis.

  CHAPTER 9

  BEAUTIFUL AND BROKEN

  Rio is a stunner. Tom Jobim, the city’s eternal poet, sang this beauty in his “Samba do Avião”: Cristo’s arms open wide over Guanabara Bay, sheer boulders dropping into the sea, Copacabana hemmed in white. “Este samba é só porque, Rio eu gosto de você . . .”

  Cariocas are proud of their cidade maravilhosa. Beachgoers in Ipanema clap every summer afternoon as the sun sets behind the Dois Irmãos peaks, grateful for another day in their Marvelous City. The natural setting is also Rio’s biggest selling point: the 2016 Olympic bid videos lingered on it, and the United Nations declared the city’s landscape a World Heritage Site.

  But the truth is that up close, Rio stinks.

  Zoom in on the postcard and you will see trash clotting the waterfront and sewage percolating from broken pipes, blooming into fetid puddles on the sidewalks. Centuries of ill treatment have devastated much of this landscape: lakes curdle with dead fish when pollution brings down oxygen levels, and the waves that lap the shore are often too tainted with fecal bacteria for swimming. Stretches of marshland and Atlantic rain forest are being cleared for new development with little regard for ecosystems, and hours-long traffic jams cast an acrid haze over the horizon.

  That week in the mountains confronted me with one of Rio de Janeiro’s greatest paradoxes: the environment that made this city and this state exceptional has been abused to an extreme.

  In the Serra dos Órgãos, I’d seen the horrific consequence of clear-cutting forest on slopes and riverbeds. In that case, the cost of environmental neglect was measured in lives. As a journalist, I went back to work after the mudslides with new questions. What were the effects of negligence in other areas? What were its costs, and who was made to bear them?

  If there ever was a moment to turn this around, it was in these years before the Olympics. The city’s bid had included promises to clean up the bay and plant 24 million trees. There were also new laws, such as a 2010 federal measure that required the elimination of unregulated dumps in four years.

  I also hoped this moment would go beyond the old para inglês ver—efforts made for the sake of foreign eyes—and would awaken greater awareness among Cariocas of the long-term consequences of continuing to disregard their greatest gift. My concerns weren’t only journalistic. I had come back to reclaim Rio and find my place in it. A year into my stay, I felt its crenellated mountains and scalloped beaches were as much a part of me as the sounds of Portuguese and the nationality named on my passport. They were my home and my heritage, too.

  I started by looking at Rio’s trash—my own trash.

  Surveys told me that much of it, just like most of Brazil’s garbage, ended up in unregulated, open-air dumps. This included my own waste, which wasn’t separated out in recyclables and compost, as it had been in San Francisco, but all went into the same plastic bag and down my building’s chute. That was the last I saw of it. So, I wondered, what happened to that bag?

  It wasn’t hard to trace. My waste and that of Greater Rio’s 13 million people all went to one place: Gramacho, a mountain of garbage so vast it weighed over 60 million tons and covered an area the size of 262 football fields.

  Its scale was overwhelming. I went with Rodrigues, the driver, and the AP video and photo crew. As we approached, the taxi joined a line of eighteen-wheelers that rumbled outside the front gates, waiting their turn. I watched as each truck was allowed in and started to climb a steep mountain. The flank that faced the entrance had been layered again and again with clay, creating a smooth dome zigzagged with roads. Underneath, there were decades’ worth of trash. Crawling up its slope in single file, trucks that stood nearly thirteen feet tall looked like a parade of children’s toys. This was where my garbage ended up—somewhere on this monumental mound.

  The real work took place on the other side, where Gramacho faced Guanabara Bay. There the waste was uncovered and slouched in rolling heaps toward the water. I stepped outside the cab and tried to find my footing among the slippery, uneven jumble. The rancid smell clogged up my nose and mouth as if it were some thick, gummy substance that would choke me if I sucked in too much at once. Fat black flies dive-bombed like tiny twin-engine planes, the hum of their wings making my skin crawl even before I felt their touch.

  Trucks climbed up and onto the piles, sending well-fed vultures hop-flying to safety, then poured out their loads. Men and women reached into the cascade and whisked away what they could, working fast, trying to beat the other hands grabbing into the same stream. Once the trucks backed away, the trash pickers bent over what remained, combing through it for any valuables they might have missed. The vultures circled, impatient, then swooped back in for the scraps of food.

  Guanabara Bay spread from the foot of the mound like a dark, oily stain. Cristo, serene and blind, kept watch from across the water.

  Gramacho was one of the continent’s largest dumps, and jutted out of the western shore of the bay like a rotten tooth. The landfill had operated for much of my life, springing up on the marshy shore sometime in the late 1970s. For most of that time, it ran with little oversight, contaminating the air, ground, and water around it. At its busiest, it never closed; around 900 trucks disgorged 9,000 tons of trash onto it every day.

  The toxic juice produced by its fermenting organic matter had flowed into the bay and seared all vegetation it touched, opening a ring of devastation. The methane gas it exuded had polluted the atmosphere and created the danger of occasional explosions. The heap even posed a risk for the airplanes heading to the international airport less than three miles away: the resident vultures collided with airplanes 286 times between 2008 and 2011.

  The situation was no different for most cities in the state. In 2010, only 10 percent of the 20,000 or so daily tons of garbage produced by Rio state went to planned waste management sites. The rest went into open-air heaps. The 1 percent of refuse that was recycled was culled by catadores, the men and women who sifted through the waste in search of material to sell.

  In Gramacho, they made up a ragged army of five thousand. On that February day in 2011, I found them in an uproar. After decades of anonymity, the catadores and the landfill itself had been propelled into something like fame.

  It started when a Brazilian artist, Vik Muniz, visited back in 2007. Muniz worked with unusual materials like dust, diamonds, or sugar, and often wove social issues into the work. From his connection to the workers came a three-year project
that incorporated their particular skills and the materials they rescued from Gramacho.

  Muniz had photographed them in poses drawn from classic works of art: Jacques-Louis David’s The Death of Marat, or Pablo Picasso’s Woman Ironing. Then he’d blown up the image until it was large enough to fill the footprint of a warehouse nearby. Recyclables sorted into colors were used to fill in the image, composing a mosaic of what had once been trash. These monumental portraits were then photographed from above.

  The work had changed Gramacho. Before this, some of the catadores had never seen a photo of themselves. Seeing their own image built out of the garbage that both stigmatized and fed their families was transformative. It also materially improved their circumstances. Money from the art sales had returned to the community, and they’d built a sorting center to make their jobs easier, with a kitchen and a place to rest.

  A documentary, Waste Land, had recorded this process, and it was up for an Oscar. The award ceremony would happen the week after my visit; if the documentary won, the people of Gramacho might see their own faces flash on the television screen, bringing them into Hollywood’s grandest party, even if remotely. Expectations in Gramacho had never been higher, and the life of the catadores had never been better.

  Amid all this came other news: Gramacho would be closed down.

  In spite of recent improvements, such as the clay layers that made the mound impermeable, and a system to capture the toxic liquid that had long leached into the bay, shutting down Gramacho was key because of what it represented, with its hordes of trash sorters, its size, and the degradation it wrought on its surroundings. A licensed landfill was already under construction in Seropédica, a town forty miles away.

  Environmentally, it was the only way to go. The move was expected to reduce carbonic gas emissions by 1.9 million tons per year, according to the city government. As I picked my way through the waste, I looked for someone who could tell me what this would mean for the catadores.