by Zirin, Dave
Christopher Gaffney said to me, “It’s like a freefall into a neoliberal paradise. We are living in cities planned by PR firms and brought into existence by an authoritarian state in conjunction with their corporate partners.” There are, in fact, some favelas from which people want to be relocated. Generally this is because the area in question is affected by mudslides or the housing is just too precarious for people to continue living there. As Theresa Williamson said to me,
The city went through and made a list of people who wanted to be relocated because they were at risk of dying in a landslide. And [in 2011] there was a report in O Globo that only 15 percent of the families who had asked for relocation had actually been relocated. . . . And yet, all these families who have built all these houses that are consolidated or functional, or that simply help them meet their needs and progress along their paths, are the ones who are being relocated.
Perhaps reflecting the decentralized, heterodox nature of Brazil, perhaps reflecting conscious strategy, every favela that has faced expulsion has been treated differently. In some communities there is compensation. In other communities there is none. In some favelas, people are placed into public housing two hours away, far from jobs, family, community, and where they have lived and led their lives. In others, they are placed in makeshift projects at the bottom of the hill, their beautiful—and highly valued—vistas of the city expropriated. One resident, Marcelo, told me he was forced to keep his child out of school “for a year” because their World Cup eviction took place after the start of the school semester. Other families just set about keeping their children in school by commuting with them more than two hours each way. It’s the same with jobs: if you work seasonal, nonunionized, “flexible” jobs, as many working-class Brazilians do, the distance to work is a killer. Within every favela, there are jobs uniquely created and self-organized specifically for that community. There is one man from Favela do Metrô whose job was to pick up tin from the businesses around the stadium and take it in to get recycled. Now that he has been displaced, that work requires a two-hour trip on public transportation, which he cannot afford.
The real-estate and construction magnates’ dream of totally removing the favelas from Rio cannot be disconnected from the goals of hosting the Olympics and the finals of the World Cup: a full-scale effort by the city to rebrand itself as a global city. After decades of the world associating Rio de Janeiro with crime, kidnapping, and poor governance, Brazil thinks that the time is ripe to turn Rio into the kind of tourist site and foreign investment hub it has always dreamed of being. Destroying the favelas is a part of that, but there is little discussion of what would actually be lost if the favelas are uprooted. “The favelas are critical to the cultural and social life of Rio,” says Williamson:
Their proximity to the center of city life is very rare in any urban center in the world, even as urban planners around the world today charge themselves with the difficult task of creating centrally located, affordable housing. In Rio, the central nature of the favelas to the city’s history, its culture, its image, makes them a critical component of this city’s identity. . . . If we value these communities and create policies to support them and their development based on recognizing their qualities and participatory engagement to address their challenges, then there’s a legacy we could be proud of. But all trends point in the opposite direction. This is a human rights issue. We are currently at risk of losing a great deal of culture and history as we lose the favelas. There is memory embedded in every brick, and you can imagine how such a loss will impact people emotionally whose ancestors have invested so much.
If there is a kernel of hope for the favelas in the context of the World Cup and the Olympics, it is the number of foreign journalists who will make their way to Rio—which provides an opportunity to introduce them to a different perception of favelas than the stereotype of lurid places that require a bulletproof vest to enter. News organizations like the BBC and the Guardian will set up permanent base camps in Rio for the duration of both events. Given the stranglehold of the IOC and its exclusive broadcast partners over the actual content of the Olympics, all those journalists are going to have to cover something. Expect a great many special reports on these communities. As favela residents themselves have learned, their number-one tool in fighting expulsion has been the use of cell-phone cameras, the Internet, and social media to bring the demolitions and police incursions to the view of the world. They need to do this because the main media organization in Brazil, Globo, has no love for the favelas, even instructing its reporters to arrive only with an armored car and a bulletproof vest, regardless of the nature of the favela they are visiting.
Visibility is the favela residents’ greatest ally. It is for that reason above all others that I was welcomed so warmly when I entered the favelas to talk to people about the possibility of expulsion. This was particularly true in Vila Autódromo.
Struggling Against Eviction in Vila Autódromo
If you want to see what the 2016 Olympics are going to do to Rio de Janeiro, go to Vila Autódromo, a community named for the Formula 1 racetrack built next to it.
Vila Autódromo, located adjacent to the Olympic Park, was slated for a mass eviction. Ideas about what to do with the land ranged from luxury housing to a parking lot but in 2013 a movement of citizens fought back and prevented the eviction—though recent developments have once again rendered the favela’s future unclear. The Association of Residents, Fishermen, and Friends of Vila Autódromo (AMPAVA) declared in August 2013, “After years of resistance and struggle, Vila Autódromo achieved a commitment from the mayor: Vila Autódromo and its residents will not be removed.”8 Even more importantly, any efforts to demolish homes would now have to be approved by a residential assembly made up of people from Vila Autódromo. That being said, the mayor and the land developers have not given up and the situation remains uncertain.
Located on the banks of beautiful Lake Jacarepaguá, this community sits on land the city’s real-estate speculators have long lusted after. To understand why Vila Autódromo has become a target, you first need to travel there—and when you do that, it becomes increasingly obvious why Rio’s urban developers have spent twenty years pining for its destruction. Unlike Rio’s South Zone favelas, Vila Autódromo is not situated upon a hill above the city. Finding it means driving through an area that resembles the sprawling, sparkling, pricey end of Miami Beach. I had thought of Rio as an old city with character—but that’s not this area, known as Barra da Tijuca, one of the fastest-growing middle- and upper-income parts of the city. Although Barra represents only 4.7 percent of the city’s population and 13 percent of the total area of Rio, it is responsible for 30 percent of all taxes collected in the city. But its similarities to Miami lie not just in the bombastic, bright signage and the “newness” of it all. Just as South Beach was once wetlands and now represents some of the most expensive real estate on the planet, this part of Rio has also only been developed in the last thirty years. It has traversed the trajectory of real-estate speculators’ dreams: from swamp to beachfront property. I tell a Brazilian friend who has spent time in the United States about the Miami vibe. He says to me, “This is Miami. It looks like Miami. It smells like Miami. It has the real-estate speculation of Miami. People are on the beach. It is this car-dependent, closed-condominium, socially isolated, upper-middle-class landscape. And the mayor’s political base comes from here, from the real-estate speculators and large construction firms.”
I venture there by Rio bus, zooming down a central highway at a breakneck speed that makes me look around to see if Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock are hanging out somewhere in the back. It becomes evident how the highway itself, a relatively new construction project, has created a massive physical divide between the beachfront development and the rest of the city further inland. As we disembark and head toward Vila Autódromo, we walk by a large replica of the Statue of Liberty in a mall called New York City Center. As a New Yorker by birth, seeing
the city identified with a mall amid sprawl provides me no end of distress. Now I am reminded of the higher end parts of Northern Virginia, with strip malls and streets so wide you need to drive to get from one side of the street to the other. As one of my guides says to me, “People on the other side of the lagoon see Vila Autódromo and they see an eyesore. But people here, as well as sympathizers, look at the pollution, development, the high rises, and see a different kind of eyesore.”
Once we get past the Great Mall of New York, we finally arrive at Vila Autódromo. There is a large billboard right by the entrance of the favela that displays the city’s plans for the entire area. It takes some serious examination, but sure enough, the area currently occupied by Vila Autódromo appears to be designated as a future parking lot. At the top of the billboard, in blaring blue letters, is a simple phrase: País rico é país sem pobreza (“a rich country is a country without poverty”). A governmental commitment to “ending poverty” is something we haven’t seen in the United States since the Lyndon Johnson administration. The irony of such a slogan right next to an open plan to turn people’s homes—and all the wealth they’ve put into those homes—into parking lots speaks for itself.
When we arrive, our first impression is that Vila Autódromo is a peaceful, beautiful community, and that is exactly why it is in danger. It is too beautiful. The land on one side of Vila Autódromo faces the Formula 1 track, but the other side rests right on the aforementioned Lake Jacarepaguá, which looks like it was plucked from a postcard. According to many residents, developers and real-estate speculators drive through often, salivating at the thought of taking it over. The Olympics provide the pretext and the construction magnates provide the bulldozers. Like an army standing at the border, there are rows of luxury condominiums across the lake.
The residents of Vila Autódromo have fought judges, politicians, and developers for their survival for more than twenty years: the first mass eviction was ordered all the way back in 1992, when Rio hosted the Earth Summit. In 2007, Rio hosted the Pan Am Games and the bulldozers again came calling. In 2009, before the confetti had even completed its journey to the ground after Rio was awarded the 2016 Games, Rio mayor Eduardo Paes had announced that Vila Autódromo would be razed to the ground. In his estimation, the community was “too close to the security perimeter for the Olympics.”9 Yet while Mayor Paes was raising security fears (as if the tight-knit Vila Autódromo would become the site of a terror cell), real-estate developers were in the process of building high-rise apartment buildings even closer to the security perimeter. Apparently it never occurred to the mayor what message this was sending about who was considered a security threat and why.
The people of Vila Autódromo knew that they were in an “organize or die” situation. At the time of my visit their most pressing objective was, very simply, to avoid joining the twenty-six communities already wiped off the map—and get their story to as vast an audience as humanly possible. I saw a community desperate to have its voices heard. Not only did the residents organize conventional protests, they also engaged and worked with a range of volunteer partners to develop an alternative community development plan.They wanted to show that the Olympic Park could be built without their displacement and that their homes should not be flattened and paved just so the Olympic Park can, for two weeks, have adequate parking.
The entrance to Vila Autódromo stands awkwardly at the western edge of the dusty racetrack’s parking lot. Eight hundred to a thousand families live here, wedged into a sliver of land between the racetrack and the highway. We are there on a Sunday, so many people are at home. Families and groups of friends are out walking in the dusty road. Others are out working on their houses. People lounge in front of their homes as radios play. Kids play soccer with balls made from rolled-up socks.
There is a building with a corrugated roof, removed somewhat from the road, emblazoned with a large hand-painted sign that announces it as the Community Association. It resembles a ramshackle schoolhouse. The building is divided into two small rooms divided by sheets of plywood. There is a makeshift bookshelf, with an assortment of law books as well as classics like Don Quixote and King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. Inside is one of the Community Association’s directors, Jane Nascimento. Jane is not tall, but she conveys reservoirs of strength, with a presence that belies her size. Her curly hair is cropped close to her head. We chat with her in the entrance and she is casual and amicable, in jeans and a V-neck sweater, leaning against the doorframe. I ask her how the community feels about the coming Olympics, and she floors us by telling a story—in very straightforward, matter-of-fact language—about two elderly residents who died from worry that they would be evicted. “Everything was put into their homes. The thought of being moved and leaving it all behind was too much.”
At the back of the neighborhood association headquarters are a chalkboard and roughly twenty mismatched chairs. This was, remarkably, the planning area for the actions that brought Rio’s Olympic-industrial complex to its knees. The back of the room is stacked with maps and diagrams: plans and counterplans for Vila Autódromo. Theresa and Jane show us a diagram: the Plano Popular for the Olympic site. Jane tells us it was developed by residents, in conjunction with architecture and planning students and faculty from Federal Fluminense University and the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. This plan would maintain the community in its current location.
Then she turns the table on us and asks if she can film me as I ask her questions. This matters because part of how Vila Autódromo and many other favelas are saving themselves is by using social media. They are posting as much as they can online about the movement and their supporters, as well as publicly documenting every time they see the police, the military, or the developers sniffing around their homes. Jane describes herself as “a major social media person.” To lead a community movement in 2013, you have to be, since social media has become the favelas’ lifeline to the outside world. “We want people to know that we are alive,” she says. “We feel that our community should be known. We want to document it all somehow. We are trying, using videos, using photos, using the Internet, using social media.”
Then we walk the streets. The amount of care people put into their individual homes, as well as the homes of their neighbors and friends, is immediately visible. There are a number of small, narrow, slightly lopsided homes adorned with intricately constructed fences and decorations. A few families have self-paved driveways for cars, fences and gates for their driveways, and even second-floor balconies where people sit to look out onto the street. All of the homes in Vila Autódromo have electricity and running water, and there are old-fashioned lampposts with streetlights. There is even trash collection twice a week. At one corner, there is a striking red stucco house decked out with carefully tended plants. This is not every home—there is clearly a kind of economic diversity in Vila Autódromo. In its very cramped quarters, some narrow rowhouses are incredibly well kept, with small satellite dishes and fresh coats of paint, while others are in absolute disrepair.
What is also noticeable on this scorching hot Sunday is that soccer is being played around almost every corner. We see five young boys playing on a rutted dirt pitch. As we talk, the ball bounces around on the uneven ground and flies back and forth through the air. Interestingly, though there is also a small soccer field, it sits empty while children play in the streets. Later on this scorching day, the shirtless kids run to the front of the building to take deep drinks from a hose and splash each other with water. As we walk, Jane Nascimento keeps up a running commentary, in her soft voice, about everything we are seeing. It’s true: every brick has a story. Something about seeing the children, however, causes her voice to rise and her body language to become more visibly animated. She tells us,
What really hurt was that the mayor made it clear that impacting us was an open, stated objective of the plan. We were the target. He wanted to get rid of us. The disrespect—not even speaking to us, just stating i
t as an objective. But every day since, we have grown as individuals and as a community. This community has a history of fighting against evictions. This is nothing new for us. So we got together and we decided to organize and to fight. People in the favelas often don’t know that they have rights. We try to inform them of that. When they learn that they have housing rights, they get very excited. It creates a sense of indignation—especially among the youth. It is true that this long fight has pushed some people to want to give up. They are tired. They want to move. They are not happy. Our job in the Community Association is to make sure people know why we are fighting. No one can be forced to resist, but people also need to know that resistance is an option.
Jane says that their other job is to cut through the lies local officials spin about the “benefits” of taking the mayor’s deal and moving to government housing. “There’s a lot of uncertainty around the promised public housing,” she says. “Some people see it and say ‘this is better than what I have now,’ but there are a lot of hidden expenses that people don’t know about. There are service fees, taxes, and moving costs that they are not told about before they sign the deal. I think that people who move usually don’t understand this and won’t end up staying because of it. And the city doesn’t have a plan for what happens then.” Then she says something very stark, but true: “Only the social mobilization has prevented people from being removed at gunpoint.” She makes it very clear that any repression will be met with resistance. She is also sober about the fact that exposure, social media, and trying to shame the government into doing the right thing will only get them so far: